Behind the Cover Story: Bruce Grierson on Ellen Langer, Counter-Clockwise Studies and the Relationship Between Mind and Body

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Bruce Grierson

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age. Grierson’s last article for the magazine was about Olga Kotelko, a 91-year-old track star, which became the basis for his book “What Makes Olga Run?”

How did you first hear about Ellen Langer or grow interested in her research?

Ellen must have been hiding in my blind spot. She’s been doing her thing for almost four decades, but I didn’t stumble across her until I was researching my book, What Makes Olga Run? A chapter of that book deals with human limits and the role of the mind therein. I called Ellen up. She told me the story of her mother’s and grandmother’s afflictions. Then I learned she was contemplating this cancer study. It started to feel like a story.

Did she surprise you in any way?

About 20 seconds into a conversation with her, you know she’s different. She doesn’t sound like a scientist. She speaks in the rhythms of one of those old borscht-belt comics — punch, punch, punch, stop-me-if-you’ve-heard-this-before. There’s almost a narrative intelligence — if that’s a thing — that’s more obvious than her scientific intelligence. She’s an artist — literally (she paints) and also in sensibility. She’d surely agree with Einstein that not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. She’s fun to be around, but she kind of wore me out.

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The New York Times Magazine Photographs Exhibition at Aperture

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The New York Times Magazine Photographs exhibition opened last month at Aperture’s exhibition space in Chelsea. The pictures, culled from years’ worth of editorial assignments, will remain on display through Nov. 1. A few highlights can be seen in the slide show above.

State of Mind: What Makes Oligarchs Run?

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When I reported my article on the flood of private campaign money that is washing away the traditional party system, I focused on the what and the how. But the why is also fascinating. What drives billionaires, who could do anything with their money, to engage in the frustrating work of politics? Certainly you could argue — and many do — that the engagement is entirely a matter of personal gain. But if you listen to Tom Steyer, who has dedicated more than $50 million of his own money to electing Democrats this fall, or Charles and David Koch, whose Americans for Prosperity is expected to spend more than $125 million on Republican candidates and policies this fall, you will hear a more philosophical story. Here, in their own words, are the worldviews that motivate them. The Steyer quotes are from my own recent interviews. In the case of the Kochs, who did not agree to be interviewed, I have cited various public statements.

On the role of government

Tom Steyer: The reason you have a government is: A community decides that they are a community and they have common needs and they should be organized in order to solve those. And you have a democracy so that you get the answer that the most people agree with. That’s the theory; that is not bad. If you don’t believe in community, you don’t believe we have common interests with other people, then, you know, it’s fine to imagine that we’re really all living in caves, and when we go outside it’s completely fair to hit each other over the head with clubs and then, you know, cook us for dinner. [But] that’s not actually how American society has achieved the things that it has achieved.

Charles Koch: In many ways, our vision for Koch Industries reflects the genius of America’s founders, who took a very different course from what was normal in Western Europe 240 years ago. As they saw it, the job of government was not to protect people from themselves or control their lives; it was to establish freedom so people could live their lives as they thought best, reaping the rewards or suffering the negative consequences of their own actions. As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights that we already have, not something a government can presume to give us. Thus the founders did not propose a government to deliver or guarantee happiness (a hopeless cause, however well-intended), but one that would be limited enough to allow people to pursue happiness for themselves. (From Discovery, the Koch Industries newsletter, Jan. 31, 2014)

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Behind the Cover Story: Nicholas Confessore on the School Food Fight

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Nicholas Confessore, political correspondent for The New York Times, wrote this week’s cover story about the political battle over school lunches. He answered readers’ questions in a Facebook Q. & A. last week. We had a few more for him.

How did you first get interested in school lunches?

One day this spring I was chatting with Sam Sifton, our dining editor, who noted that there were a lot of Times reporters writing about restaurants, cooking and nutrition, but not as many writing about the politics of food — the hidden battles in Washington that shape what ends up on our plate. This was a topic I found pretty intriguing. I spent some time talking to lobbyists, food activists and government officials, and it quickly became clear to me that the Obama administration’s school-lunch experiment was one of the biggest stories in food politics. I spend a lot of time writing about the intersection of influence, money and power, but it was fascinating to be able to tie those themes to food — something even politically apathetic people care about and have a stake in.

I remember lunch ladies fondly. What do officials call them in public?

There is a bit of a stigma around the term “lunch ladies,” a term some find faintly disparaging or dismissive, and others have tried to reclaim as a term of pride. The polite or safe term is “school nutrition professionals.” The Obama administration’s top food-policy adviser, Sam Kass, likes to call them “school chefs” — these are, after all, the people who have a very tough job feeding our kids, and most of them are working very hard to come up with creative, tasty, cost-effective meals.

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Under Cover: The Thinking Behind Our Food and Kids Issue

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Illustration by Christoph Niemann

Children are seen by all the world’s cultures as a blessing; food is universally recognized as the staff of life. Put them together, however, and you have the stuff of deepest conflict. In this Food Issue, we offer dispatches from the embattled family table, that contested terrain where our children take aim at us, and we at ourselves. Our survey includes photographs of breakfast around the world; an inside account of the Washington fight over the government’s role in school lunch; a look at snacktime, when a bag of candy can make us feel like a child again; and dinner, a.k.a. ground zero, the meal that can bring peace or madness. Consume it all in good health, but please take your dishes to the sink when you’re done.

Behind the Cover Story: Nathaniel Rich on the Legal Battle Over Louisiana’s Land Loss

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Nathaniel Rich Meredith Angelson

Nathaniel Rich, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week’s cover story about the largest environmental lawsuit in U.S. history. Rich is the author, most recently, of “Odds Against Tomorrow.”

You have lived in New Orleans for some time now. How did you first become aware of the massive land loss in Louisiana?

I was ignorant about coastal land loss before I moved to New Orleans four years ago, but that changed quickly. Louisianians have known about the loss of their wetlands for decades, but relatively few people outside the state seem to be aware of the problem or its scope. This is disturbing because it is a national crisis, endangering the existence of New Orleans as well as a large percentage of our energy infrastructure and shipping trade. It’s not just nature lovers who should be concerned. Anyone who cares about energy independence, trade or national security should be concerned.

Awareness of the issue is growing, however. Several excellent reports have been published in the last few weeks. One was published through a partnership between ProPublica and The Lens, a fantastic local investigative news site. Called “Losing Ground,” it’s a graphic representation of coastal land loss. Another is “Louisiana Loses Its Boot,” by Brett Anderson, published in Medium. Anderson makes the case for a new official state map that would reflect Louisiana’s changing shape.

How did you first hear about this lawsuit, and come to think that John Barry might be interesting to write about?

I learned about it when Barry announced the lawsuit at a press conference last July. I expected that a lawsuit taking on the entire oil and gas industry — perhaps the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the planet — might receive major national coverage, but it hasn’t come close to getting the attention of, say, the Keystone pipeline.

Barry is a true obsessive, and I’m drawn to writing about obsession. I was fascinated to see a writer abandon a successful writing career, at least temporarily, in order to devote himself to a cause. In my experience, writers are happiest when they are alone in a small room with their work, so Barry’s decision to sue 97 oil and gas companies seemed to me especially radical, and indicative of an unusual personal commitment.

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Under Cover: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast

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Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Louisiana is losing about a football field’s worth of land every hour. That’s just one striking way to sum up what’s at stake in an environmental lawsuit over the state’s disappearing wetlands, which Nathaniel Rich writes about for the Oct. 5 cover story. Another way is to get a photographer like Jeff Riedel to take aerial photographs of the state’s coastal region. One of those pictures appears on the cover. Riedel said he was shocked while up in the air. “You realize that this is actually happening,” he said. “It’s not any sort of hyperbole.”