Pete Buttigieg’s Foreign-Language Count Is Only Going Up

Peter Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Democratic presidential candidate, has become famous for speaking lots of languages. Depending on the day and the media outlet, the number rises and falls. He’s been granted six languages, seven languages, and eight languages. After the fire at Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, he dipped into French to answer questions from French media. He fielded questions from Norwegian journalists in Norwegian, which he’s said to have taught himself in order to read novels in the language.

While speaking so many languages may be rare in American public, Buttigieg’s ascent is a textbook polyglot path to fame. An aura tends to grow around multilinguists—and often beyond their control. Their fame can be immediately disqualifying if the stories seem too fantastic to be true. It can also set polyglots up for failure and embarrassment if they rely on their myths for attention and livelihood. Either way, the embellishment of their abilities says more about the era in which they live and the culture that surrounds them than the possibility of speaking a lot of languages in any objective sense.

Hyperpolyglots—the world’s best language-learners—can perform some prodigious linguistic feats. Early in the 20th century, a German diplomat named Emil Krebs, stationed in Beijing, was a favored interlocutor of the Empress Dowager Cixi and could translate 32 languages into and out of German. In 1990, the Scotsman Derick Herning was crowned the most multilingual person in Europe for having 10-minute conversations in 22 languages in a row with native speakers. Hyperpolyglots like these two men must put in tremendous amounts of time and effort. But even in cases of genuine talent, there are recurrent factors that contribute to things getting exaggerated.

One important key to the myth that tends to be built up around polyglots is the vaporous quality of numbers of languages. How many languages can Buttigieg actually speak? His campaign confirmed eight when I reached out: English, Norwegian, Spanish, French, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, and Dari. A specific count of languages, though, can also be an unreliable credential for any polyglot, because a language isn’t a defined unit of measure.

[Read: For a better brain, learn another language]

At a certain point, it’s pegged more to people’s fascination than to actual language abilities. In my 2012 book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, one hyperpolyglot I profiled wouldn’t tell me how many languages he had because he knew he’d lose control. “I would walk in the party and say I spoke nine languages,” he said, “and by the end of the night I would hear that I spoke 24.”

In the media glare, this fraught metric becomes even more unstable. Buttigieg’s linguistic repertoire could continue to swell or diversify, not because he claims more languages but because others do it for him. As soon as Buttigieg popped up on political media, anecdotes poured in about his swooping out of nowhere with his exotic languages. Last month, the writer Anand Giridharadas tweeted that Buttigieg’s Norwegian appeared “like a magic trick.” A South Bend emergency-room doctor sent a message on Twitter to the BuzzFeed writer Ashley C. Ford about the time the mayor materialized in a local hospital and translated in Arabic for a patient. According to the message, Buttigieg had been listening to the police scanner and had heard that an Arabic translator was needed.

The Onion has already joked that Buttigieg “stunned a campaign crowd Wednesday by speaking to manufacturing robots in fluent binary.” (This seems to be an allusion to the most famous movie hyperpolyglot, C-3PO, who is “fluent in over six million forms of communication”—or so he claims.)

No matter the historical period, polyglot mythmaking has thrived on anecdotes of isolated encounters and mini-spectacles. In 1820, a Hungarian named Baron Franz Xaver von Zach visited an Italian cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who by that point was a world-famous hyperpolyglot. Von Zach reported that Mezzofanti first addressed him in Hungarian, next in several dialects of German, and then spoke English to an Englishman and Russian and Polish to a visiting Russian prince. Mezzofanti’s reputation as “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott,” as Lord Byron enthused about him, was a litany of such instances.

Modern academic linguists have traded similar stories about Ken Hale, an MIT professor who was said to speak 50 languages. They retell how a clerk at an Irish embassy once begged Hale to switch to English because his Irish was better than hers, and how Hale showed up in an Australian aboriginal village at 10 a.m. to begin fieldwork and was conversing fluently by lunchtime. (Hale died in 2001.)

The polyglot myth can further expand based on how commentators, journalists, and bystanders loosely apply terms like “fluency,” “proficient,” “speaks,” or “knows.” Heavy.com, for instance, claimed that Buttigieg “is proficient in seven languages other than English: Norwegian, French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, and Dari.” But what does “proficiency” mean? Is it the same as “mastery”? (When I asked Buttigieg’s campaign about his languages, I received his list with no verb like “speaks” or “knows”; I asked about his criteria for grouping them but have not heard anything back.) Corporations, universities, and governments have developed fine-grained scales of people’s abilities to read, write, speak, listen, and translate in languages because they need objective measures of those abilities. In the vernacular, those distinctions get flattened.

[Read: The bitter fight over the benefits of bilingualism]

MIT’s Hale tried to counter this by distinguishing between “speaking” a language and “talking in” one, in order to combat the myth he felt forming around him. He could speak only three languages, English, Warlpiri, and Spanish, he would say, but could talk in the rest. His admirers weren’t always convinced. In an interview, he once tried to explain that he doesn’t deserve his reputation as a gifted language learner. It didn’t work. “That is not true,” the interviewer told him.

None of this is meant to cast doubt on or give credence to Buttigieg’s actual language abilities. But the contours of polyglot mythmaking underscore a deep, tenacious belief in language as a form of magic. Somehow, words do things. They reveal, and they hide. Witnessing a conversation in a language you don’t understand confirms words esoteric power. In that light, someone who speaks lots of languages can’t avoid being regarded as a prodigious magician.

Monolinguals aren’t the only ones with this belief. Even in communities where being multilingual is completely ordinary, individuals who know many unusual languages or know them at a very young age are often regarded with awe. So Americans could be forgiven for their fascination with Mayor Pete’s languages, whether his viral moments are embellished sleights of hand or true magic.

Article source here:The Atlantic

The Hack That Created an Underground Market for Old Medical Devices

This Gym Prides Itself on Being Size Inclusive

We chatted about size inclusivity in gyms and what fitness professionals can do to better support body neutrality and positivity in this recent podcast episode. That chat got so much buzz that we wanted to keep the convo going. Because if there’s one thing we’d like to do in this world, we’d like let everyone know that fit bottoms come in all shapes and sizes. So, when Blink Fitness told us about its body positivity and inclusivity movement at numerous locations across the U.S. and its 2019 campaign,”Every body is different, your gym should be too,” we were like, yep,…

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Measles and the Limits of Facts

Students are currently being quarantined in Los Angeles. Mandatory-vaccination policies have been implemented in Brooklyn. Even President Donald Trump, contrary to prior assertions, today urged people to get children vaccinated.

All for a disease that was declared eliminated in the United States two decades ago.

This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that measles outbreaks have led to the highest number of cases reported in the country since that declaration in 2000.

The overall number of cases—695 so far—is not a significant portion of the millions annually around the world. But it’s the pattern and direction that are striking to global officials, as well as America’s unpreparedness to address the actual source. Among wealthy countries, the United States has, by far, the highest number of children who did not receive the first two measles vaccination doses over the past several years. The American outbreaks are described by officials as multiple and “unrelated,” stretched across 22 states, meaning that each has potential to spread further. But the unifying forces behind them are clear.

[Read: Measles outbreaks are a sign of bigger problems]

As the number of cases has risen in the United States—which has historically been at the fore of global-health campaigns—it has also risen around the world. By 2017, the disease that killed half a million people annually at the turn of the century was down to 110,000. Now, the first three months of the year saw a 300 percent increase from the same period a year ago, according to a report from UNICEF.

The Global Vaccine Alliance ties the issue together, citing a storm of seemingly disparate factors: disinformation campaigns in Europe, a collapsing health system in Venezuela, and pockets of low immunization in Africa. In South Sudan, where hundreds of measles cases have been reported in recent months, efforts to vaccinate people after the country’s civil war appear to have been thwarted because of the difficulty of keeping vaccines cool—not because people are refusing them.

Though the United States’ own outbreaks are unrelated in a physical sense, they are linked to a growing online disinformation movement. In a statement on Thursday, the CDC said the outbreak in New York is significant in part due to “misinformation in the communities about the safety of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine. Some organizations are deliberately targeting these communities with inaccurate and misleading information about vaccines.”

[Read: How misinfodemics spread disease]

The overall effect is a single, global dilemma. There is no opting out. The death toll will go up or down; the choice is between doing what’s possible to contain the virus and enabling its spread. Media ecosystems have evolved and siloed people in ways familiar to political discourse, but they remain poorly addressed in public health.

In a statement this week, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar reiterated a tactic that has proven ineffective at reaching skeptical populations in recent years: telling them what to do. “Vaccines are a safe, highly effective public-health solution that can prevent this disease,” he said. “The measles vaccines are among the most extensively studied medical products we have, and their safety has been firmly established over many years in some of the largest vaccine studies ever undertaken.”

Earlier this month, CNN asked 10 current and former liaison members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice about the agency’s plans for countering anti-vaccination disinformation online. The response of the senior director of infection control at the Minnesota Children’s Hospital, Patricia Stanfield, was emblematic: “I feel like on social media, the anti-vaxxers are very sophisticated and active and way ahead of us.” Another official, who declined an interview, issued a statement that included: “It is critical that parents and anyone seeking information about vaccines have access to credible information.”

Research suggests that the reason informed people fall into conspiracy-theory mind-sets often has less to do with a lack of information than with social and emotional alignment. Facts are necessary, but not at all sufficient. Websites and YouTube videos where a federal employee in a suit states various statistics are unlikely to be effective against targeted disinformation campaigns that only need to plant the seed of doubt in the minds of people already skeptical of the medical establishment. The work of global inoculation requires first rebuilding a social contract, which means meeting people on the platforms where they now get their information, in the ways they now consume it.

Article source here:The Atlantic

AirPods Are the New Cubicles

Once upon a time, offices had walls inside them. They weren’t glass, like the conference rooms of 2019, but made of drywall and usually painted a neutral color, like many of the walls you know and love. Over time, office walls gave way to cubicles. Now, for many office workers, the cubicles are also gone. There are only desks.

If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers.

Now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were. But something as expensive and logistically complicated as an office design is difficult to walk back, so as Jeff Goldblum wisely intones in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. In offices where there are no walls, millions of workers have embraced a workaround to reclaim a little bit of privacy: wireless headphones.

The arrival of these now-ubiquitous devices has ushered in a new era of office etiquette—and created a whole new set of problems.

Beyond their tethered forebears, Bluetooth wireless headphones are convenient because they allow workers to forget they’re wearing a device and leave their desks without yanking their laptops onto the floor. In open offices, people commonly wander around with their headphones on all day, into bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes listen to nothing at all in order to avoid the constant distraction of compulsory social interaction.

We have Apple to thank for wireless headphones’ proliferation. The tech giant launched its tiny, white AirPods in late 2016 to accompany new iPhones that lacked a traditional headphone jack. Despite initial concern that having two plastic sticks poking out of your ears might look insurmountably lame, AirPods have avoided the demise of other wearable tech like Google Glass by being immediately useful. Industry analysts estimate that tens of millions of pairs of AirPods have been sold already, accounting for as much as 85 percent of the wireless-headphone market. The earbuds even star in ultra-viral videos and TikTok memes as a joke-y symbol of wealth among teens.

For Americans who have already joined the office workforce, AirPods serve a different purpose: tuning out your coworkers without looking excessively hostile. In that capacity, they’ve become indispensable to lots of people, because the hard surfaces, high ceilings, and empty spaces common in open offices help sounds carry. There’s rarely any soft surfaces to dampen them. Jerrick Haddad, a 35-year-old social media strategist in Brooklyn, won’t go to his open office without them. “We moved from offices to an open plan two years ago, and wireless headphones are why I haven’t quit,” he says. “One day I forgot them, and I got up and walked straight to the Apple store to buy a pair of AirPods.”

The same is true for Antigua Samuelson, a 29-year-old Los Angeles resident who works for a medical-marijuana wholesaler. She watches Netflix or Hulu at her desk during slow periods, and without her AirPods, she’d have to find another way to fill significant amounts of idle time. “If I forget to bring them with me, I will go back home and get them,” she says.

According to Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies organizational behavior, it makes sense that this subtle tactic for avoiding constant interaction has seeped into office environments. “People are very good at creating spaces for themselves, and these days you look at everybody, and almost without exception, they’re on their phones with headphones in their ears,” he says. In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interactions among coworkers by as much as 70 percent, in stark contrast to designers’ stated goals of collaborative teamwork.

The proliferation of small, wireless headphones may exacerbate that effect. Since you don’t have to remove AirPods to wander around the office, it can be hard for your coworkers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out. For Samuelson, sometimes that’s the point. “Once in a while, I’ll pretend to have them on just so I can eavesdrop on what people are saying,” she admits. And for people who find music as distracting as they find their coworkers, putting on their quiet headphones can be as much of a visual signal as it is an attempt to dampen ambient noise.

It’s not a perfect system. David Grilli, a 33-year-old IT professional, uses his headphones to signal that he wants to be left alone, but the message doesn’t always translate. His coworkers “stand in your field of vision until you take notice and ask what they need, or they start talking immediately as if you're not wearing headphones,” he says. Grilli’s coworkers might just need his attention at inopportune moments, but could also be true that office workers are becoming so used to seeing each other in headphones that they barely register them.

For women, there’s often an extra wrinkle: Wireless earbuds are often so small that they’re entirely invisible under long hair. Bernstein suggests that to send a clearer do-not-disturb signal to colleagues, people might consider larger, over-ear models.

Employers can do some things to help with the confusion, like retrofitting a space with small, private phone booths to give employees somewhere to escape. That solves another headphone problem, too: Even when people can see your AirPods, they still don’t know what you’re doing with them. A person quietly sitting in on a conference call looks pretty similar to a person who’s focused on work while listening to soothing nature sounds or who’s checking Facebook while listening to nothing at all. This ambiguity has prompted a whole new visual language meant to mime the difference to unsuspecting desk-mates. To perform its most common gesture, which indicates that you are on a call, you dramatically motion to your ears while making a face that communicates a sense of semi-smug capitulation: You, too, are currently being inconvenienced by your own importance.

“I do a lot of strategic hair-tucking, gesturing at my ears, and phone-pointing,” says Lisa Derus, a 31-year-old publicist who frequently uses her AirPods for calls both on her long commute between Connecticut and New York City and in her open-plan office. “I learned the hard way that the same ear-tapping motion I'd historically used to signal ‘I'm on the phone’ is the exact same gesture that ends phone calls on my AirPods.”

According to the design psychologist Sally Augustin, all of this irritation has come about because open offices ignore some essential elements of human psychological development. “We get revved up just being around other people, so in a workplace you’ve always got that force energizing you,” she says. “When you’re doing intellectual work, you’ll do it better in an environment that’s generally less energizing.” Although headphones can help filter auditory interruptions, they can’t block visual ones, which Augustin says can be just as disruptive to performance and focus.

AirPods also can’t change the fact that you’re just sitting in the middle of an open room, which Augustin notes is stressful no matter what you’re doing. “When you can be approached from the rear, a little part of your brain is always vigilant,” she says. “It’s not about what you’re looking at on your screen or anything. It’s much more fundamental than that.”

The good news is that trends are already turning away from open offices in favor of designs that have a range of space types, including those that allow workers privacy and relief from constant stimulation. “This is how humans work,” Augustin explains. Evolutionarily, our open-plan stress response goes back to a time long before office politics. “We like to think we’ve come so far from our days on the savanna, but maybe not.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

Healthy Eating Made Easy With Daily Harvest

Healthy food subscription boxes are hot right now, and I recently had a chance to review one that I found to be extremely cool — Daily Harvest. Daily Harvest is a weekly or monthly plan that delivers frozen, plant-based and farm-fresh smoothies, soups, Harvest Bowls, oat bowls, chia bowls, and lattes to your door. Each item comes in its own cup with the (totally recognizable) ingredients and (super simple) instructions listed on the side. You simply keep them in your freezer until you’re ready to eat, then pull off the top, add the recommended liquid, and either blend, heat, or…

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Targeting Pancreatic Cancer with Radiation & Immunotherapy During the Branches

As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, your last two years of school are collectively referred to as the Branches. Essentially, it’s a flexible framework of elective time that allows you to pursue your unique interests. Although the prospect of customizing two years of scheduling might sound daunting to some medical students, […]

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