As the Ice Melts, Polar Bears Are Failing to Find Enough Food on Land

It’s not easy to swim 175 km (109 mi.) when you’re starving to death. It’s not easy either to try to survive when you’re shedding body weight at a rate of 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) a day. And it might be hardest—or at least most tragic—of all if you’re a nursing mom and your calorie intake has dropped so low that you can no longer produce the milk you need to care for your young. As a new paper in Nature Communications reveals, all of those challenges and more are facing the world’s polar bears, thanks to vanishing sea ice in our warming world, denying the animals a platform that they need to hunt for seals. If the trend isn’t reversed soon, the estimated 26,000 polar bears in the wild could start to lose their hold on survival before the middle of this century.

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The researchers were less interested in establishing the fact of the bears’ food plight; scientists are already aware of that problem. What they were more focused on learning was both how gravely the nutritional loss is affecting the animals’ health and the alternative food sources they’re scrounging for on land. To do their work, the scientists followed 20 different polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, from 2019 to 2022, fitting them with GPS trackers and video collars and periodically tranquilizing them and analyzing their blood, body mass, daily energy expenditure—basically a measure of calories coming in versus calories going out—and more.

“The polar bears in Hudson Bay [Canada] are probably at the edge of the range at which they can survive right now,” says Anthony Pagano, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead author of the paper. “Most of the modeling work suggests that around 2050, they are going to be on land and away from their primary habitat [on the ice].” The contraction in range of the Hudson Bay community is likely to be reflected in the ranges of the 18 other polar bear subpopulations scattered throughout the Arctic as well.

Read more: The Arctic is Heating Up, Disrupting the Planet and Local Communities

Across the arc of the study, the data Pagano and his colleagues gathered was troubling. Weight loss varied from bear to bear, with the daily loss of 1 kg representing just an average; some of the subject animals dropped up to 1.7 kg (3.75 lbs) every 24 hours. That may not seem like much when an adult male polar bear can tip the scales at 550 kg (1,200 lbs) and a female at 320 kg (700 lbs), but it can add up fast. And with less available to eat, the hungry bears have to travel farther and farther distances to find their next meal. The individual that swam 175 km—a young female—set the record among the bears studied, but another, older female also covered 120 km (75 mi). The endurance swims in search of food are energy-intensive and often fruitless for the bears. They are efficient hunters when they’ve got the purchase of ice beneath them, Pagano and his colleagues explain, but they are clumsy when they are going after seals and trying to swim at the same time.

That leaves them scavenging on land for foods they would not ordinarily eat—and getting little payoff for their efforts. “Polar bears are feeding on ducks and geese—catching them when they’re flightless and molting—as well as on their eggs,” Pagano says. Other foods on the desperate bears’ menus included berries and other vegetation, bones, antlers and, in one case, a beluga whale carcass. None of that fare is as calorie-rich as a steady diet of live, blubber-packed seals. Some of the bears vigorously sought out these alternative sources of nutrition; others opted for a different strategy: resting and conserving the energy contained in their body mass. The latter approach costs stored calories, but so does the former, as all of the plodding and searching burns through energy too.

“The amount of body tissue they were burning to try and find those terrestrial foods was basically the same as what they’d get from eating those terrestrial foods,” Pagano says. “So there’s no actual benefit.”

The researchers were surprised to find that the bears were going through not just fat stores to compensate for the poor rations, but lean muscle tissue too. Pagano is not certain why their metabolisms would adopt that strategy, but he has some ideas. “There’s some thought that burning lean body mass might be more energetically efficient in some respects relative to burning body fats,” he says. “Also, conserving their body fat might provide them better thermal regulation once the winter and the ice return.”

Read more: After Visiting Both Ends of the Earth, I Realized How Much Trouble We’re In

That seasonal freeze-over is shorter than it used to be—though not by a lot. In the 1980s, polar bears were on land for about 110 days out of the year, with no need to eat terrestrial foods since the fat deposits they’d accumulate thanks to wintertime seal-hunting was enough to carry them the rest of the year. Now they’re off the ice for 130 days on average. It’s a measure of the nutritional knife’s-edge on which the bears operate that just 20 days can make the difference between whether they live and thrive or starve and die.

The individuals most likely to perish when food supplies are poor are young adults—due to their less-developed hunting skills—and cubs, whose principal source of nutrition, their mother’s milk, can vanish in lean times. “If females are fasting for extended periods, they will actually stop lactating,” says Pagano.

Full-grown bears are by no means immune to danger, however. The authors cite earlier research predicting that the adult male population could decrease by 24% if the ice-free summer season increases to 180 days. This is especially so given the enormous energy intake—about 22,500 calories per day—that the big males need to maintain their body weight.

Polar bears aren’t the only species menaced by these findings. Humans are in harm’s way too. The more time bears spend off the ice and on land, the greater the likelihood they will wander into cities and towns in search of something to eat—and residents could easily be hurt or attacked if they get in the way of the hungry animals. People might also even be seen as sources of prey.

“When polar bears are on land, they act like other bears and become omnivores,” says Pagano. “It does raise the potential for human-bear interactions.”

source https://time.com/6694426/climate-change-polar-bear-food-sources/

Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, received another accolade to add to his long list of awards on Sunday, when he was recognized with a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence.

Ahead of the award ceremony in Dubai, LeCun sat down with TIME to discuss the barriers to achieving “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), the merits of Meta’s open-source approach, and what he sees as the “preposterous” claim that AI could pose an existential risk to the human race.

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TIME spoke with LeCun on Jan. 26. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Many people in the tech world today believe that training large language models (LLMs) on more computing power and more data will lead to artificial general intelligence. Do you agree?

It’s astonishing how [LLMs] work, if you train them at scale, but it’s very limited. We see today that those systems hallucinate, they don’t really understand the real world. They require enormous amounts of data to reach a level of intelligence that is not that great in the end. And they can’t really reason. They can’t plan anything other than things they’ve been trained on. So they’re not a road towards what people call “AGI.” I hate the term. They’re useful, there’s no question. But they are not a path towards human-level intelligence.

You mentioned you hate the acronym “AGI.” It’s a term that Mark Zuckerberg used in January, when he announced that Meta is pivoting towards building artificial general intelligence as one of its central goals as an organization.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding there. So the mission of FAIR [Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team] is human-level intelligence. This ship has sailed, it’s a battle I’ve lost, but I don’t like to call it AGI because human intelligence is not general at all. There are characteristics that intelligent beings have that no AI systems have today, like understanding the physical world; planning a sequence of actions to reach a goal; reasoning in ways that can take you a long time. Humans, animals, have a special piece of our brain that we use as working memory. LLMs don’t have that.

A baby learns how the world works in the first few months of life. We don’t know how to do this [with AI]. Once we have techniques to learn “world models” by just watching the world go by, and combine this with planning techniques, and perhaps combine this with short-term memory systems, then we might have a path towards, not general intelligence, but let’s say cat-level intelligence. Before we get to human level, we’re going to have to go through simpler forms of intelligence. And we’re still very far from that.

Read More: AI Learns to Speak Like a Baby

In some ways that metaphor makes sense, because a cat can look out into the world and learn things that a state-of-the-art LLM simply can’t. But then, the entire summarized history of human knowledge isn’t available to a cat. To what extent is that metaphor limited?

So here’s a very simple calculation. A large language model is trained on the entire text available in the public internet, more or less. Typically, that’s 10 trillion tokens. Each token is about two bytes. So that’s two times 10 to the [power of] 13 bytes for training data. And you say, Oh my God, that’s incredible, it will take a human 170,000 years to read through this. It’s just an insane amount of data. But then you talk to developmental psychologists, and what they tell you is that a 4-year-old has been awake for 16,000 hours in its life. And then you can try to quantify how much information got into its visual cortex in the space of four years. And the optical nerve is about 20 megabytes per second. So 20 megabytes per second, times 60,000 hours, times 3,600 seconds per hour. And that’s 10 to the [power of] 15 bytes, which is 50 times more than 170,000 years worth of text.

Right, but the text encodes the entire history of human knowledge, whereas the visual information that a 4-year-old is getting only encodes basic 3D information about the world, basic language, and stuff like that.

But what you say is wrong. The vast majority of human knowledge is not expressed in text. It’s in the subconscious part of your mind, that you learned in the first year of life before you could speak. Most knowledge really has to do with our experience of the world and how it works. That’s what we call common sense. LLMs do not have that, because they don’t have access to it. And so they can make really stupid mistakes. That’s where hallucinations come from. Things that we completely take for granted turn out to be extremely complicated for computers to reproduce. So AGI, or human-level AI, is not just around the corner, it’s going to require some pretty deep perceptual changes.

Let’s talk about open source. You have been a big advocate of open research in your career, and Meta has adopted a policy of effectively open-sourcing its most powerful large language models, most recently Llama 2. This strategy sets Meta apart from Google and Microsoft, which do not release the so-called weights of their most powerful systems. Do you think that Meta’s approach will continue to be appropriate as its AIs become more and more powerful, even approaching human-level intelligence?

The first-order answer is yes. And the reason for it is, in the future, everyone’s interaction with the digital world, and the world of knowledge more generally, is going to be mediated by AI systems. They’re going to be basically playing the role of human assistants who will be with us at all times. We’re not going to be using search engines. We’re just going to be asking questions to our assistants, and it’s going to help us in our daily life. So our entire information diet is going to be mediated by these systems. They will constitute the repository of all human knowledge. And you cannot have this kind of dependency on a proprietary, closed system, particularly given the diversity of languages, cultures, values, centers of interest across the world. It’s as if you said, can you have a commercial entity, somewhere on the West Coast of the U.S., produce Wikipedia? No. Wikipedia is crowdsourced because it works. So it’s going to be the same for AI systems, they’re going to have to be trained, or at least fine-tuned, with the help of everyone around the world. And people will only do this if they can contribute to a widely-available open platform. They’re not going to do this for a proprietary system. So the future has to be open source, if nothing else, for reasons of cultural diversity, democracy, diversity. We need a diverse AI assistant for the same reason we need a diverse press. 

One criticism you hear a lot is that open sourcing can allow very powerful tools to fall into the hands of people who would misuse them. And that if there is a degree of asymmetry in the power of attack versus the power of defense, then that could be very dangerous for society at large. What makes you sure that’s not going to happen?

There’s a lot of things that are said about this that are basically complete fantasy. There’s actually a report that was just published by the RAND Corporation where they studied, with current systems, how much easier does it make [it] for badly-intentioned people to come up with recipes for bioweapons? And the answer is: it doesn’t. The reason is because current systems are really not that smart. They’re trained on public data. So basically, they can’t invent new things. They’re going to regurgitate approximately whatever they were trained on from public data, which means you can get it from Google. People have been saying, “Oh my God, we need to regulate LLMs because they’re gonna be so dangerous.” That is just not true. 

Now, future systems are a different story. So maybe once we get a powerful system that is super-smart, they’re going to help science, they’re going to help medicine, they’re going to help business, they’re going to erase cultural barriers by allowing simultaneous translation. So there’s a lot of benefits. So there’s a risk-benefit analysis, which is: is it productive to try to keep the technology under wraps, in the hope that the bad guys won’t get their hands on it? Or is the strategy to, on the contrary, open it up as widely as possible, so that progress is as fast as possible, so that the bad guys always trail behind? And I’m very much of the second category of thinking. What needs to be done is for society in general, the good guys, to stay ahead by progressing. And then it’s my good AI against your bad AI.

You’ve called the idea of AI posing an existential risk to humanity “preposterous.” Why?

There’s a number of fallacies there. The first fallacy is that because a system is intelligent, it wants to take control. That’s just completely false. It’s even false within the human species. The smartest among us do not want to dominate the others. We have examples on the international political scene these days–it’s not the smartest among us who are the chiefs.

Sure. But it’s the people with the urge to dominate who do end up in power.

I’m sure you know a lot of incredibly smart humans who are really good at solving problems. They have no desire to be anyone’s boss. I’m one of those. The desire to dominate is not correlated with intelligence at all.

But it is correlated with domination.

Okay, but the drive that some humans have for domination, or at least influence, has been hardwired into us by evolution, because we are a social species with a hierarchical organization. Look at orangutans. They are not social animals. They do not have this drive to dominate, because it’s completely useless to them.

That’s why humans are the dominant species, not orangutans. 

The point is, AI systems, as smart as they might be, will be subservient to us. We set their goals, and they don’t have any intrinsic goal that we would build into them to dominate. It would be really stupid to build that. It would also be useless. Nobody would buy it anyway.

What if a human, who has the urge to dominate, programs that goal into the AI?

Then, again, it’s my good AI against your bad AI. If you have badly-behaved AI, either by bad design or deliberately, you’ll have smarter, good AIs taking them down. The same way we have police or armies.

But police and armies have a monopoly on the use of force, which in a world of open source AI, you wouldn’t have.

What do you mean? In the U.S., you can buy a gun anywhere. Even in most of the U.S., the police have a legal monopoly on the use of force. But a lot of people have access to insanely powerful weapons. 

And that’s going well?

I find that’s a much bigger danger to life of residents of the North American landmass than AI. But no, I mean, we can imagine all kinds of catastrophe scenarios. There are millions of ways to build AI that would be bad, dangerous, useless. But the question is not whether there are ways it could go bad. The question is whether there is a way that it will go right. 

It’s going to be a long, arduous process of designing systems that are more and more powerful with safety guardrails so that they are reliable, and safe, and useful. It’s not going to happen in one day. It’s not like one day, we’re going to build some gigantic computer and turn it on, and then the next minute it is going to take over the world. That’s the preposterous scenario.

One final question. What should we expect from Llama 3?

Well, better performance, most likely. Video multimodality, and things like that. But it’s still being trained. 

source https://time.com/6694432/yann-lecun-meta-ai-interview/

In My Marriage Money Was a Trap. After My Divorce It Was My Freedom

Four months after my divorce, I went to a party in New York City where a wine-drunk woman grilled me about my split. How did I manage? Did I get the house?

 This line of questioning was not unfamiliar. In the aftermath of my divorce, a lot of women asked me how I’d done it, and at this party, flushed from wine myself, I told her honestly that I was broke. But, I added, I was happy. She looked at me skeptically and said, “Money is important.” I’d think of her two years later when I finally dug myself out of divorce debt.

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When I married my husband at 22, I barely knew how to balance a checkbook (we still did that then), and I had no idea what a 401(k) was. Before we got married, when my father-in-law wanted to talk to us about money, I was a compliant pupil. He’d mapped out my husband’s annual salary for his new job as an engineer in Excel, walking us through how much we could spend. It was immediately clear to me that the two of them had already worked on this together. In the box marked “rent” was the correct figure for the apartment my husband was living in, the one I’d move into after the wedding. The spreadsheet also factored in payments for my college loans.

Read More: I Got Divorce. But My Family Is Still Whole

The power dynamic was clear – I had nothing; I knew nothing. And I would adhere to the rules of the budget because I was the one bringing in debt and no assets. The concepts my husband’s father talked us through were a blur: high-yield savings account, 401(k) matching, Roth IRAs. But other things came into sharp focus. He said my debt would have to be paid down immediately. Debt was shameful; you could tell by the way my husband and his father looked at each other. We’d use every penny of my job (and I was still unemployed) to pay it down and live entirely off my husband’s income until it was gone.

Here was how we were going to do that:

$10 a month for haircuts

$200 a month for groceries

$10 for personal items.

“How does that even work?” I said, too embarrassed to tell them tampons would cost more than $10 a month.

“Even cheap shampoo costs $5, and…” I was also thinking about makeup. Even the cheap stuff, which was all I had, could set you back $50, and I needed that if I was going to find a job to pay off my loans.

“The $10 a month accumulates,” my husband explained like I was a toddler. “So, in five months, when you need to restock, you’ll have $50.” Five months to make a bottle of Suave 2-in-1 last. This was the start of a pattern that would continue throughout our marriage: even when I made money, I didn’t have control of how it was spent.

Marriage has always been about money. The first marriages were alliances between families to strengthen economic ties. A woman exchanged for gifts to ally the two families, to ensure the continuity of inheritance and of course purity of blood. As Western culture evolved, marriage, still a contract, became about mutual understanding and affection. But laws governing the economic freedom of women were slow to catch up. Women couldn’t apply for mortgages or open credit cards in their own names until the 1970s.

Read More: Why I Stayed in a Marriage That Was Making Me Miserable

There is an enduring narrative that marriage is about love. That the guiding light of our unions is the sweep-me-off-my-feet romance depicted in movies. And we convince ourselves that what underpins our unions isn’t economic. But the reality is different than the fairy tales. People rarely date or marry outside their socioeconomic status, which reinforces privilege and class boundaries. Wealth inequality between married partners overwhelmingly favors the husband in a heterosexual relationship, which can leave the wife with little financial freedom and stuck in a relationship that can be uncomfortable or even dangerous. And while more and more women are out-earning their husbands, they are still in the minority. Women in the U.S. still earn only 82 cents to the male dollar, and mothers earn 74 cents on average to a father’s dollar. Even if a woman comes into a marriage earning the same as her husband, that equality drops off as women age. And while wives still manage the day-to-day expenses of grocery shopping, it’s men who retain the majority of financial control.

A 2021 YouGov poll found that 35% of women are completely or somewhat financially dependent on their partner, compared to 11% of men. And a Glamour survey found that one in three women have stayed in a relationship because they didn’t have the money to leave. A culture that underpays women is a culture that forces them into economic codependence and traps them when they want out. But no one wants to think about that when they are walking into a relationship – love is supposed to be bigger than all of that.

I knew money would be tight when I left. I didn’t have access to our joint account and had to set up a secret account to save money for a lawyer. I wrote marketing copy for extra money and would deposit the checks there. Despite this, I was poor during the divorce. Friends loaned me money for groceries. I ghost-wrote op-eds and wrote even more marketing copy. My parents bought my kids their Christmas gifts. Even then, my life mostly ran on nearly maxed-out credit cards.

Still, a few months after I moved out, I went to buy new mascara and realized how free I felt. If I wanted the $30 mascara, there would be no disapproval. No argument. No silent treatment until I relented and admitted I’d screwed up. It felt like a small thing, just mascara, but it was everything. While most women who divorce find themselves financially struggling, the majority don’t regret their decision. According to one study, 73% of divorced women are happier than they were when they were married, even if they were poorer.

A recent spate of books and articles argue for marriage as a solution for our financial woes, as women outside the heterosexual family structure do not do as well economically as those who are married, but what is often excluded from that conversation is the unpaid labor that allows a man to work all day. If marriage is a means of keeping and preserving wealth, it’s at least in part because often one partner performs the functions of cook, house cleaner, chauffeur, shopper, all without compensation. Even women who outearn their husbands still perform this unpaid labor at higher rates than male partners.

When my friend was divorcing his stay-at-home wife, his lawyer told him he should have paid her a salary. Paying her would have been a way to value her work and give her an income. And it would have amounted to less in alimony. When my friend told me this, I was stunned. Imagine: Paying a woman for her work would have benefited everyone in the end. It was certainly a far cry from my husband’s request during our divorce that I compensate him $10,000 for his contributions to my brain. I laughed and the joke became a punchline I employed in my group chats and on my lady dates. Until once, my friend Serena said, “You should have replied, ‘I wonder what my other body parts cost? My virginity?’ You should have charged him for damage to your uterus for having children.” I was sitting in her kitchen, watching her cook, and hearing her say a thing that cut me to my core because it was true. Is that all I was? Just a calculation?

Three years after my divorce, I sat down with a financial consultant named Stephanie, because I refused to talk to men about money. I was terrified, remembering the shame that the budget talks with my husband had given me.

I’d been recently fired from my job at a newspaper, the one I’d taken to level out my finances, and I knew my income would be inconsistent. I wanted a plan. I wanted to be able to feed my kids, but also still afford more than $10 a month for toiletries. I sat for two hours, explaining my business, my haphazard income and spending habits, feeling sick and a little ashamed. But eventually Stephanie began to smile.

“This is so exciting,” she said. “You are making twice as much as you did three years ago, and next year, you’ll be making four times as much! You got this!” She was impressed by the fact I’d sold and written an original audiobook, while also freelancing, working full-time for the newspaper, and taking care of two kids. It was a lot of work that I was suddenly able to do because with 50/50 custody after the divorce, I was no longer the primary caretaker of our children. And without a spouse, I was no longer performing the unpaid mental and emotional labor I’d been doing for years. Free from the mental load, I had a lot of time to earn money and it was beginning to pay off.

“Girl, you know how to work hard,” she said. She was the kind of blonde woman who called you “girlfriend” and said “you go, girl” unironically. The kind of woman I just loved with my whole heart because I knew she meant every word of it. She told me I had this. And I did.

When we were done, I was relieved and angry. Angry that for so long money had been a cudgel used against me. Angry that I’d been told everything I was doing was wrong. Angry that I’d looked to someone else for my stability, to provide for me, when I could have done it for myself all along. And I was angry that I was made to believe my labor wasn’t enough—when the reality was it just wasn’t valued.

In my relationship, money had been a trap, but when I had the support and the equality I needed, I finally could earn enough that money became my freedom.

source https://time.com/6588974/money-marriage-trap-lyz-lenz-essay/

The Risk of America Abandoning Ukraine

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a $95.3 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan after a rare all-night session. While the bill’s passage marks a win for the Biden Administration after months of GOP resistance to the $60 billion intended for Ukraine, the bill faces a steep hurdle clearing the Republican-controlled House. That resistance is threatening to undermine what has defined America’s role in the world—and our national identity—since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared us the “great arsenal of democracy” in 1940.

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A Ukrainian friend and classmate recently asked me why any American joins the military when they’re surrounded by Mexico and Canada, two countries that pose no threat of invasion. As a U.S. Army veteran, I found this question funny at first; the likelihood of our neighbors attacking never crossed my mind, let alone factored into my decision.

It then got me thinking. Why isn’t that something I ever considered? Why do so many Americans decide to put their lives at risk by joining the military when there hasn’t been a war fought on U.S. territory in over a century? There are practical explanations like pay, healthcare, and tuition benefits, but when service members are asked why they joined, “patriotism” and a “sense of duty” rank at the top.

This sense of duty is tied to serving abroad. Members of the military aren’t alone in their motivation for international service. Private citizens in America donate more money overseas per capita than any other nation. The very identity of the U.S. is rooted in the belief that when we perceive a global injustice, it’s our responsibility to intervene, and crucially, that we’re capable of succeeding when we do.

Read More: The U.S. Navy Is Sinking in the Sand

This belief is anchored to World War II, when America first emerged as the world’s premier superpower. We established our global position by declaring it our moral imperative to prevent fascism from consuming the world and using our unparalleled resources to make that happen. It’s the era we proudly return to most frequently in pop-culture, films, and television. We’ve affectionately named those who lived through the period the “greatest generation.” This is the American ideal we’ve clung to ever since, built on three foundational pillars: a clear moral cause, the hubris to believe it’s our responsibility to act, and the unmatched resources needed to realize our vision.

Many of our geopolitical efforts since have maintained the same facade—superior resources and the cross-continental exertion of our will—but have lacked the clearcut moral raison d’être behind them. Our misguided nation-building efforts in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and our invasion of Iraq based on the false pretense of WMDs, all underscore a lacking sense of purpose. The war in Ukraine is different. An outright evil Russian conquest has killed tens of thousands as Moscow seeks to dismantle democracy and reassume hegemonic control of its neighbor. Ukraine isn’t asking for manpower, just the means to fully repel an invasion that has captured nearly 20% of its land.

While traveling across Ukraine last summer with a nonprofit aid group, the sight of a small town in eastern Ukraine hammered into me the indiscriminate nature of Russia’s onslaught. Two kids rode bikes in the decimated town center. One boy told our group of volunteers what each surrounding building once was—apartments, a hospital, a town administrative office—and where he was when Russian artillery rained down. His family survived. Many of his neighbors did not. European nations are providing crucial assistance to hold Russia at bay and avoid their own similar fate, but to stop Russia’s advance and maintain its sovereignty, Ukraine needs military resources only the U.S. can provide.

But we are at risk of abandoning Ukraine, and with it, our NATO partners. Donald Trump’s “America First” ideology permeates the far-right argument that supporting Ukraine puts “America last.” Matt Gaetz’s “Ukraine Fatigue Resolution” claims aid packages are “weakening United States readiness.” Rand Paul asserts that there is “no end in sight” to the war and that we can’t afford to support Ukraine in an ”endless quagmire.” JD Vance concedes we must “accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians.” If these lawmakers want to make America great again, could their fatalistic rhetoric stray further from what defined the “greatest generation”?

Read More: America Must Choose Honor in Ukraine

The rationalizations for opposing further aid have been refuted time and again; we’ve provided less than 2% of our massive federal budget, and a majority of the money designated for Ukraine in fact stays in the U.S. Our support has helped Ukraine deplete a significant portion of our longest standing foe’s materiel and personnel, without the loss of one American soldier. What’s most alarming about Republicans’ resistance to Ukraine aid is not the tired financial arguments, it’s the defeatist resignation that the U.S. is no longer willing and able to step up when we’re needed. 

As the world approaches a boiling point and U.S. interests become increasingly threatened in the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, demonstrating unwavering commitment to our allies should be a no-brainer. Yet Republican lawmakers have played political games to block aid packages, and nearly half of their voters now feel we’re giving Ukraine too much support. Russia appears content to suffer casualties, biding its time until Ukraine exhausts the means to defend itself.

Much of the world still believes the U.S. is a force for global peace and stability. In the hospital recovering after Russian artillery shells landed near his trench, Yurii, a Ukrainian soldier and newly minted grandfather, told me last August that American backing matters “because we feel that we are not alone, that truth is on our side.” Ceasing support for Ukraine would not just spell a moral and geopolitical failure, it would serve as the final straw, officially pronouncing the death of the American mythos we have clung to for generations.

source https://time.com/6694379/ukraine-american-defeatism/

How Therapists Would Change ‘Love Is Blind’

Since premiering on Netflix four years ago, Love Is Blind has produced eight marriages, two soon-to-be babies, a couple of divorces, too many messy breakups to tally, and dozens of hours of entertaining—occasionally appalling—reality television.

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On Feb. 14, the show’s sixth season starts streaming, this time set in Charlotte, N.C. Hosts Nick and Vanessa Lachey will once again guide a group of people eager to find love—and/or social-media followers—through a dating scenario designed to determine if love really is blind. After getting to know each other through a wall in small isolation rooms called pods for about 10 days, participants get engaged without ever having seen each other, and then spend a month living together before meeting at the altar to commit or break it off.

If you already know all this because you can’t look away, you’re in good company: Relationship therapists also love Love Is Blind, and not because they’re scouting for future clients. “It’s just fascinating to see how people connect and relate when they don’t know the external context around financial status and looks and all the things that factor into how you judge a person,” says Julia Baum, a therapist based in New York who’s watched every episode. “It’s really neat, especially when you see people who you wouldn’t expect to connect in the pods.”

That said, there are plenty of ways the show could improve. We asked therapists what they would change about Love Is Blind if they were showrunners for a day.

The casting should branch out

Contestants on Love Is Blind don’t know what the people they’re dating look like—but they can reasonably guess that they’ll like what they see. The show has notoriously cast conventionally attractive people with little body diversity.

Ideally, casting would diversify in numerous ways, says Nicole Hind, a couples therapist based in Australia. For one thing, age: Many people on the show are in their 20s or early 30s. What about a season featuring singles 40 and older?

She also urges producers to bring on contestants who don’t fit into a certain appearance mold, including those who have a disability or a heavier body weight. And it would make things more interesting if various sexualities were featured. What if Love Is Blind featured openly bisexual, asexual, or pansexual people? Hind suspects it would be a hit: “This is one of the reasons people watch reality TV,” she says. “To see a window into others”—or to have their own identities reflected back at them in some way.

Let the contestants touch each other

Love might be blind—but sight is only one of five senses. To spice things up, Michelle Herzog, a relationship therapist in Chicago, suggests tapping into a few of the others. Imagine if blindfolded contestants could hold hands with or otherwise touch the person they were considering marrying. “I think it would be really impactful in helping people decide between two people,” she says. “Physical touch releases a hormone called oxytocin, which is nicknamed the bonding hormone. It promotes closeness, connection, and intimacy, and can fuel feelings of attachment.”

And let’s not overlook smell: A freshly worn T-shirt could be waiting in the pods for someone’s potential match—providing a sense of their cologne or perfume, for example. Catching a whiff could help participants “learn more about this person, outside of words,” Herzog says.

Warn contestants of red flags

Johana Jimenez, a therapist based in Addison, Texas, wants contestants to know important details about who they’re dating through the wall. During the first three dates, each person should enter the pods to find a letter that reveals one green flag, or positive attribute, about the contestant they’re getting to know. “It could be education or income or an entrepreneurial spirit or that they love to sing”—some other tidbit that producers suspect the person’s potential fiancé would appreciate, she says.

After three dates, as the relationship became more serious, producers would start delivering red flags to the pods, but this time, the envelopes would disclose deal-breakers that the producers had discovered during the casting process. In season five, for example, Stacy Snyder might have been informed of Izzy Zapata’s bad credit score, which she was frustrated to learn about weeks after leaving the pods and ultimately contributed to their breakup. “Sometimes contestants don’t bring up things that are crucial for the other person to know,” Jimenez says. “And I know it makes for good drama, but people are getting their hearts broken.”

Let the games begin

Love Is Blind tends to skip the games and challenges that are core to other reality shows. But that’s a missed opportunity, says Amy Morin, a psychotherapist based in Marathon, Fla. Solving problems or tasks together, or competing against each other—like Love Island contestants do—could be insightful. “You would get to see somebody’s true character. Are they trying to cheat to get ahead? Are they super competitive? Do they not really care? It’s not just about what they say, but about what they do, and how they do it.”

Give them therapy (and let us watch)

Aside from the show’s celebrity hosts, contestants are essentially left to their own devices to figure out who to get engaged to, how to navigate the inevitable conflict that arises, and whether they should get married. Maybe she’s biased, but that sort of stress calls for an on-screen therapist, says Stephanie Yates-Anyabwile, a marriage and family therapist based in Decatur, Ga., who posts Love Is Blind reaction videos on YouTube.

Ideally, a therapist would hang out in the lounges where contestants gather with other participants of the same sex when they’re not on pod dates, helping them work through their emotions from the day. A cast member could say, “‘Hey, I’m having a hard time choosing between two people,’” Yates-Anyabwile notes. 

Therapists could also supply contestants with a list of questions to ask their potential spouse, says Luree Benjamin, a marriage and family therapist in Henderson, N.C. For example: What are their do’s and don’ts when it comes to anger? “Is shouting and slamming doors allowed? Is walking out?” she asks. “How long do you stay disconnected from one another?” It would also be smart to explore how the other person feels about social media—and the extent to which their post-show lives would be broadcast to new followers.

Let them phone home

The pod environment is “very much like a pressure cooker,” says Mickey Atkins, a therapist based in Tucson, Ariz., who posts YouTube videos about the show. “From a mental-health perspective, it’s disappointing to see people be isolated from their family and friends and normal support system,” she adds. Not being able to process their decision verbally with someone they trust, she believes, is one of the reasons many couples don’t last. To address that, the show could implement a phone booth in which contestants could call home. That way, instead of feeling cut off from comfort and familiarity, they could ground themselves by checking in with a loved one.

More women should propose

Women rarely propose on Love Is Blind, though the show’s creator has said in the past that it’s allowed. In an ideal world, women would account for at least half the proposals, says Baum, the New York therapist. “The assumption that women on the show are ‘ladies in waiting’ is toxic,” she says. “I think it would be better for viewers to have that normalized: a woman can take that initiative.” In addition to helping shatter archaic norms, Baum points out, imagine the insights that could be gleaned about a future partner. If a man is offended that his grand moment was stolen, maybe he’s not such a catch.

Bring a third-party advocate on set

Past Love Is Blind contestants have spoken out about the way cast members are treated during filming, and at least three have filed lawsuits for reasons including sexual harassment and even false imprisonment. To ensure future contestants aren’t exploited or harmed, psychotherapist Kirk Honda envisions a third-party advocate who’s always on set. This person, he says, would operate similar to the intimacy coordinators who have become standard in Hollywood. “These are hired individuals who have power and can step in and say no,” says Honda, who hosts the Psychology In Seattle podcast and YouTube channel, and often posts Love Is Blind reaction videos. “Or they’ll pull aside cast and say, ‘How are you? Does this feel OK?’” Such a change would also help viewers feel better about tuning into sometimes-unethical reality TV.

Limit the alcohol

The golden goblets featured on Love Is Blind get more screen time than some of the contestants. Alcohol appears to flow heavily—and past participants have alleged they were encouraged to drink. Atkins has an idea: moderation. Cast members could be limited to a certain number of drinks each day, or urged to abstain. “Sober people make better decisions about their lifelong legal and financial entanglements,” she says. With marriage on the line, in a highly unconventional situation, contestants would do well to be as clear-minded as possible.

Focus more on the love story

Reality TV doesn’t always reflect reality. If Honda were in charge of Love Is Blind, he’d be more truthful in the edit. In season four, for example, Jackie Bonds was portrayed as rekindling with former suitor Josh Demas before breaking things off with fiancé Marshall Glaze. The alleged infidelity prompted outrage among fans—but as the stars later confirmed, events were shown out of order. The two had already split. “When we learn that lies are occurring, it loses all of its power and appeal as a ‘reality’ TV show,” Honda says.

Yates-Anyabwile seconds that notion: She would rework the show by focusing more on the love stories, and less on manufactured drama. “I think we’ve come to believe that drama brings in numbers,” she says. “But it’s becoming too much—you start losing interest and engagement after a certain point.”

source https://time.com/6693347/how-9-therapists-would-change-love-is-blind/

What People Get Wrong About Wayne LaPierre’s Time at the NRA

Last month, after more than three decades as the figurehead of the modern gun lobby, longtime National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO and executive VP Wayne LaPierre stepped down. His departure comes amid a civil corruption lawsuit brought by the State of New York, which alleges that the NRA and its executives violated their non-profit status and various state and federal laws, as well as grossly mismanaging the group’s finances.

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LaPierre stands at the heart of a popular narrative about the recent emergence of the radical right. He has loomed large in the organization’s changing tactics and emphasis as it evolved into a political powerhouse and an uncompromising foe of all gun control. As the story goes, the NRA was a moderate group focused on sport and target shooting before the “Cincinnati Coup” in 1977. The revolt at the group’s annual convention ushered hardliners into power and drove the reshaping of gun politics in the U.S., including the rise of a new interpretation that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. LaPierre joined the organization shortly after the coup and became executive vice president in 1991.

Yet, while LaPierre epitomizes the post-1977 NRA, there is more continuity in the group’s history than is popularly known. Dating back to its 1871 founding, in fact, the NRA has had one consistent priority: protecting social order and control. LaPierre articulated this philosophy after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 when he declared that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The idea is that control of armed force should be deputized to and limited to certain populations—especially elite white men. That has always been the NRA’s driving force, and the only thing that changed after 1977 was the militarization of this organizing precept.

The NRA’s roots actually lie in the mid-19th century transatlantic transformation of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. The group is a copycat organization, directly inspired by a British group, the National Rifle Association of Great Britain (NRA-GB). In 1859, Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho, founded this British cousin to coordinate the empire’s nascent volunteer force, a popular social movement that was sanctioned by the War Office during its overhaul of the military in the wake of the 1857 Indian Rebellion.

The Crown was enthusiastic about the potential of the NRA-GB to serve as a low cost means of encouraging firearms use among white men across the British Empire. Gun clubs could serve as paramilitaries, which would enable the reallocation of the Regular Army to India, which had just experienced the largest uprising against British rule in the 19th century. Both the Crown and the NRA-GB were particularly interested in militarizing white settler colonies, encouraging Canadian, South African, and Australian rifle associations in the 1860s. In 1860, Queen Victoria fired the first shot at the opening annual meeting on Wimbledon Common, donated many of the first prizes, and sent emissaries to encourage rifle shooting across the Empire

Read More: How the NRA Weakened the Violence Against Women Act Update

The British shooting group was certainly never intended to protect rights or foster universal access to firearms, especially for non-whites. In fact, the British government specifically denied some groups the right to bear arms. In 1867 the Privy Council banned a white Bermudan rifle association, the St George Rifle Association, because of concerns that when Black Bermudans “found themselves excluded from the Corps,” they would look to form their own associations which would not be an “advisable measure to encourage.” 

In confidential correspondence, the Governor of Bermuda and the Secretary of State for the Colonies sought advice from other colonial administrators on potential solutions to prevent the formation of Black militia. One advised that in the West Indies, rifle associations had been used to ally whites with mixed race members to put down Black uprisings. The same advisor also suggested “making the expenses by the Volunteers such as to deter the Blacks generally” from forming rifle associations. Despite these suggestions, the government ultimately denied the white group’s request for ammunition and state support because the threat of armed Black groups was simply too great.

Seven years after the British founded their NRA, Union veterans William C. Church and George Wingate launched their version in New York. Like their British counterparts, Church and Wingate were unconcerned about the individual right to bear arms. And like their British counterparts, they wanted to arm and train forces for defense against specific threats. In the 1860s, that meant the Canadian militia and the Indigenous Empires throughout North America. In their address at the first annual NRA meeting, Church and Wingate drew a clear contrast between the “40 000 skilled shots” in Canada and the “raw recruits” in the U.S. sent to fight against “the Indian hunters of the plains.”

But the NRA wasn’t just worried about outside threats. During one of the group’s annual meetings during the depression decade of the 1870s, the group constructed a new form of target called a “tramp target”; the dehumanizing “tramp” trope was often applied to striking and transient workers. In the annual competition that year the target was “the figure of a tramp” and the prize winner would be the group who aimed “as many shots as possible by file firing within one minute.”

It was also linked to an insurgent anti-statist white movement, via the Crescent City Rifle Club of Louisiana, run by William J. Behan, an ex-Confederate. Behan had also run an earlier iteration of the club, the Crescent City White League, a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, which explicitly called for a “White man’s government” before overthrowing interracial Republican rule in New Orleans in 1874. The Crescent City Rifle Club was a dues-paying affiliate of the national NRA and hosted intraregional NRA events in the South.

Read More: Why a Weakened NRA May Still Block Joe Biden’s Moves on Guns

The fluidity and connection between violent extra-legal groups like the White League and the Ku Klux Klan, and associations like rifle clubs and militia, were commonly understood in the South. As the Weekly Louisianian quoted in 1879, Southern white control was maintained by “Ku-Klux Klans, its rifle-clubs, and its systematic assassination of Republicans.”

This history makes clear that, like their British counterparts, the American organizers of the NRA aimed to arm and train men so they could fight back against those who challenged the social order, who were often radical, working class and not white. So while the group focused on shooting competitions and training, as the standard story of its past recounts, that doesn’t mean it was an innocuous sporting group focused on competition for competition’s sake.

The group’s emphasis on disarming “bad guys” and arming “good guys” continued into the 20^th century. At points that meant supporting some gun regulations, most notably the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. Who the NRA conceived of as “bad guys” was clearly evident when it supported the 1967 Mulford Act to repeal a California law allowing individuals to openly carry weapons, a move seen by many as an attempt to disarm the Black Panthers.

And when LaPierre joined the NRA, shortly after the coup in 1977, he doubled down on many of these long standing policies, which suggest a long-time commitment to preserving white social order first and foremost. Throughout the 1990s, as white militants squared off with federal agents in places like Ruby Ridge and Waco and carried out a terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, LaPierre railed against federal agents as “jackbooted government thugs” who “kill law-abiding citizens.” Even as LaPierre and the NRA expressed concern for these armed white, anti-government “victims,” it supported policies like weapons sentencing enhancements that had racially disparate effects. This made clear how it conceptualized good guys and bad guys. The group stoked fears of both criminals and of an overbearing government as the “bad guys” to promote the arming of those “good guys.”

When one understands this longer history, it’s clear that there was no moderate era in the NRA’s past. The Cincinnati coup wasn’t a seismic break between a reasonable past and an extreme present. The group has always supported policies that gave white vigilantes and white paramilitaries a role in preserving what many consider anti-democratic social order. The underlying notion of the modern gun rights movement, that guns are only “bad” when in the hands of “bad people,” and can be stopped only by arming “good people” is in keeping the NRA’s original mission. LaPierre’s tenure didn’t involve a reorientation of the NRA. He simply helped militarize its central precepts — indicating that little will change without him as the NRA moves forward.

Kate Birkbeck is a PhD candidate at Yale University writing a dissertation about the international arms trade, federal policy and local armed groups across the American Empire between the Civil War and the First World War.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6564789/nra-lapierre-history/

An Ode to the Bookstore, My First True Love

While driving between two of my local bookstores to pre-sign copies of my forthcoming memoir (in L.A., “local” meaning an hour apart), I was struck by the fact that while I’ve had many loves in my life (film, little league baseball, my wife), my oldest romance is with the smell of a new book.

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The first of the many notable bookstores that touched my life was the flagship Kroch’s & Brentano’s in downtown Chicago, where at six years old I’d let go of my mother’s hand and wander among the towering shelves. At eight, I would ride my bike 10 blocks to the little Bookstall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, two dollars in my pocket and hell-bent on finding the latest James Bond paperback. Once, I was so excited to dig in that I began reading on the way home and crashed my bike into a parked car.

Over four cold undergraduate winters, I spent more hours in the cozy Harvard Bookstore than I did in the stacks of the under-heated Widener Library. During a delirious spring break, after busking on the streets of San Francisco, I would collect the dimes and quarters from my top hat, stuff them into little paper rolls from the bank, and head for the legendary City Lights Booksellers to spend it all. As an intern at The New Republic, I spent my first summer after college enduring long, sticky D.C. nights taking refuge in the air-conditioned comfort of Politics & Prose, inevitably leaving with armloads of remaindered paperbacks that have followed me, browning and tattered, from house to house, where they continue to line my overflowing shelves.

I moved to L.A. in 1975, the same year that Book Soup opened. Conveniently located across the street from Tower Records (a magnet in its own right), it was Ground Zero for my twenties and the destination of choice for every aspiring screenwriter in search of inspiration and community. Even late at night, bleary-eyed from 12 hours in the editing room, or high after an overcrowded, pot-clouded party but not yet ready to go home, I could always count on running into someone I knew mingling with the nightcrawlers and UCLA co-eds lined four-deep at the tables.

Read more: The 25 Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Yet, it was only days ago that Book Soup’s owners announced they were putting the store up for sale, along with the venerable Vroman’s in Pasadena. Word is that Diesel, the charming book nook in the Brentwood Mart, might soon be closing, as was the fate of my beloved Duttons in Valley Village. It’s dawning on me that the outlook for authors can feel equally dire. How is it that in a country of 334 million people, selling five thousand books is likely to get you on that week’s New York Times bestseller list?

Even that level of success requires authors to fight tooth and nail and trade every possible favor as the marketing budgets at publishers, including the big ones, continue to dwindle. My friend, Mark Harris, author of three marvelous books with a fourth on the way, likes to say, “We are all Willy Loman; we sell books one at a time.” Book coverage in major media has all but disappeared, including at the L.A. Times. And the competition! Each year, up to one million traditionally published books are released, plus two to three million self-published ones. No wonder the profit margins for bookstores are so small.

All this might be enough to put me in a eulogizing spirit if I wasn’t so astonishingly proud to now call myself an author. Still, in my darker moments, I wonder: Is it possible I’ve arrived too late at the party? Even as I try to remind myself not to feel so grim, authors continue to write (though it’s increasingly rare for it to be their only job), and so many brick-and-mortar booksellers somehow find a way to survive–even as online book sales account for almost three out of every four books sold. My childhood friends and I all thought our pal Brad Graham had lost his moorings when he left an editorial desk at the Washington Post to buy Politics & Prose–yet by all accounts it is thriving, recently expanding the mother ship and adding two annexes. I sense that same optimism in the newly minted Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City. Even in the little town of Crested Butte, Colo. (pop. 2,000), where I’ve spent the past 30 summers, I’ve watched my son’s childhood friends, Arvin and Danica Ramgoolam, make a go of it at Townie Books (their motto, “Read Books, Drink Coffee, Fight Evil.”) These brave, reading-obsessed capitalists march on.

When I got out of my car, signing pen in hand, and entered Skylight Books—the fiercely independent, verdant Los Feliz shrine—I stood before the table of new releases, and indulged in a deep, reverential sniff. Nothing, and everything, has changed.

source https://time.com/6692402/edward-zwick-bookstores-essay/