This guy.

🔗 Highline: "Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong"

Really enlightening article at Highline.

And, in a cruel twist, one effect of weight bias is that it actually makes you eat more. The stress hormone cortisol—the one evolution designed to kick in when you’re being chased by a tiger or, it turns out, rejected for your looks—increases appetite, reduces the will to exercise and even improves the taste of food. Sam, echoing so many of the other people I spoke with, says that he drove straight to Jack in the Box last year after someone yelled, “Eat less!” at him across a parking lot.

It’s hard to even really grasp just how much we have the deck stacked against the obese. It’s a systemic problem that it doesn’t seem like we, as a nation, have much interest in solving.

The problem is that in America, like everywhere else, our institutions of public health have become so obsessed with body weight that they have overlooked what is really killing us: our food supply. Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.

For more than a decade now, researchers have found that the quality of our food affects disease risk independently of its effect on weight. Fructose, for example, appears to damage insulin sensitivity and liver function more than other sweeteners with the same number of calories. People who eat nuts four times a week have 12 percent lower diabetes incidence and a 13 percent lower mortality rate regardless of their weight. All of our biological systems for regulating energy, hunger and satiety get thrown off by eating foods that are high in sugar, low in fiber and injected with additives. And which now, shockingly, make up 60 percent of the calories we eat.

🎧: “My Sweet Midwest” by Fruit Bats

💡: Jason Kottke: In Praise of Public Libraries

💿: Royal Blood by Royal Blood

Saturday vibes.

💡: Community colleges arise as the new tech incubators thanks to nuts tuition costs by Wes Schlagenhauf at The Hustle.

Wave of the future, Dude.

🎙: Caliphate

Certainly not for the faint of heart, but… wow.

📚: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Sparked by the Westworld tie-in. Curious to see how it ties together.

New Study Shows That Students Are Helped by Making College Better, Not Cheaper

Helping students succeed also involves a different intuition, however, one that every student unable to take required courses because of waiting lists or limited sections understands: Finishing college is less likely if the school isn’t very good and can’t afford quality academic programs.

This is absolutely true, but it might be overlooking a much simpler problem: how do we define “success” for students? Should it simply be whether they pass courses or graduate, or should it factor in how much the student has actually learned and how prepared the student is for life after college? Grades are, ultimately, arbitrary. And when the institution has a vested interest in seeing students succeed (by the limited definition used in basically all education-focused legislation), the likelihood that a student who has not mastered the material will pass anyway—still succeeding by the State and institutional standards—drastically increases while the likelihood of succeeding in life after college undoubtedly decreases. This problem is exacerbated by the funding issues mentioned in the piece. If colleges had the money to invest on a per student basis, I have no doubt they would like to invest that money in driving actual success — making sure that students understood the material and that the degree they received was earned rather than purchased. This is likely one of the things the authors mean by “quality academic programs.” But, as things are, cash-strapped colleges are more likely to pad numbers or water down expectations. These are more affordable solutions to an expensive problem.

Now 🎧: “Tupelo” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.

Defining Student Success

New Study Shows That Students Are Helped by Making College Better, Not Cheaper

Helping students succeed also involves a different intuition, however, one that every student unable to take required courses because of waiting lists or limited sections understands: Finishing college is less likely if the school isn’t very good and can’t afford quality academic programs.

This is absolutely true, but it might be overlooking a much simpler problem: how do we define “success” for students? Should it simply be whether they pass courses or graduate, or should it factor in how much the student has actually learned and how prepared the student is for life after college? Grades are, ultimately, arbitrary. And when the institution has a vested interest in seeing students succeed (by the limited definition used in basically all education-focused legislation), the likelihood that a student who has not mastered the material will pass anyway—still succeeding by the State and institutional standards—drastically increases while the likelihood of succeeding in life after college undoubtedly decreases. This problem is exacerbated by the funding issues mentioned in the piece. If colleges had the money to invest on a per student basis, I have no doubt they would like to invest that money in driving actual success — making sure that students understood the material and that the degree they received was earned rather than purchased. This is likely one of the things the authors mean by “quality academic programs.” But, as things are, cash-strapped colleges are more likely to pad numbers or water down expectations. These are more affordable solutions to an expensive problem.

Now 📖: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer