How Donald Trump was silenced | Emma Brockes

Despite living in the US in Trump end times, I’m not often shocked. Scandalised, depressed, outraged, yes; but not really shocked. But I was at the weekend, standing in the playground with another mother when she said something so outlandish I couldn’t believe what I’d heard: that she’d had a tough month, what with getting the city to exempt her kids from having vaccinations.

Now, getting into it with another parent about vaccinations is like bringing up the Middle East on a Guardian comment thread. People go insane. There’s a debate raging right now on one of the mummy blogs I read, in which a handful of women are losing their minds, having been mauled by other users for their decision to “space out” their kids’ vaccinations.

But this wasn’t spacing out. This was full-on exemption, which I didn’t even know was legal. “Oh yes,” she said, “the city of New York permits it on religious grounds, even for kids in the public school system.” She wasn’t doing it for religious reasons, as it happened, but because she believes vaccines are dangerous.

“That’s nuts!” I said, and she looked taken aback and told me that the Centers for Disease Control is suppressing evidence because it’s in the pay of the drug companies. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d said the moon landings were faked. “There’s no scientific evidence whatsoever,” I said and used the term “anti-vaxxer”, and she looked angry and things got more socially awkward from there. Honestly, it was thrilling.

“You know Trump’s on your side?” I said, which in New York should be enough to end any argument.

“Yes!” she said and gave me a dark look. “And he’s been silenced.”

Grief by algorithm

Sheryl Sandberg is everywhere this month with the release of her book, Option B, a chronicle of her grief after the death of her husband. Something about it struck me as curious.

A few caveats first. People are, of course, entitled to grieve any way they like. And Sandberg isn’t trying to be Joan Didion. Plus I like Sandberg. I think a lot of the criticism directed at her has been spiteful.

But when I read the interview with her in Time magazine last week, it gave me the creeps. Partly because it was full of horrible lines (“suddenly, Superwoman became very human”). And partly because, a few days earlier, I’d finished reading Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, a vicious takedown of Facebook.

Sandberg was talking about the mistakes she thinks she made while in the depths of her grief, labouring under the misapprehension of the three Ps: the idea that adversity is personal, pervasive and permanent. There was nothing wrong with this, except that it sounded like the application of a business rationale – a “scalable solution” – to personal experience. It had the bright ring of someone searching for an algorithm to manage human emotions. Given her power and position, it made my blood run a little cold.

First date soup

Then again, maybe we need it. A man and a woman at the soup bar in my local supermarket this week, on what was clearly a first date: “What are you having?” he said, solicitously.

“The chilli.”

“The chilli?”

“Yeah. What are you having?”

(Fraught pause.)

“The chicken.” (There was no chicken.)

“ … noodle soup?” she said.

“Um. The turkey!” (There was no turkey.)

“You’re having the turkey … chilli?”

(Dreadfully embarrassed.) “Ignore me, I’m loose change today.”

How Donald Trump was silenced | Emma Brockes

Toxic air is killing thousands of us – Theresa May must act fast | Emma Howard

The verdict is in and the government is guilty. In a landmark ruling, the high court has ruled that the plans to cut fatal air pollution are not only inadequate, but also illegal. To anyone who has seen these plans, the verdict is not surprising.

“If there was a toxin in our water system that we knew was killing thousands of people every year, the government would be coordinating Cobra meetings every day,” Matthew Pennycook, the Labour MP for Greenwich and chair of parliament’s cross-party group on air pollution, said after this morning’s ruling. But when it comes to the fatal toxins in our air, the government has not been coordinating any emergency meetings. It has been moving at a snail’s pace.

Air pollution is a known killer. The UK has been in breach of legal limits on nitrogen dioxide (NO2) for years. The government’s own reports show air pollution is causing 40-50,000 deaths every year, by exacerbating respiratory illnesses, heart disease and asthma. New evidence suggests it is not only finding its way into our lungs, but into our brains too, where it may bring about the premature onset of Alzheimer’s disease. In the words of MPs from all parties, we are facing a public health crisis.

Theresa May has pledged that she will fight the “burning injustices” that entrench social inequality and blight the life chances of children from working-class families. She says that many in Westminster “don’t know what it’s like to live like this and need to be told that what the government does isn’t a game”. But perhaps the prime minister is among them.

Children know that air pollution is not a game because they are substantially more vulnerable to toxins in the air, which permanently stunt the development of their lungs. So too are people from ethnic minority backgrounds, those living in areas of higher levels of deprivation, the elderly and those with chronic health conditions. In short, they are the most vulnerable people in our society.

Yet still, the apathy persists. It has now been more than a year since the Volkswagen scandal broke, when a major car manufacturer was revealed to have been covering up air pollution through criminal activity. In the US, VW has agreed to pay $ 15.3bn to compensate consumers and mitigate some of the damage it has done to the environment. In the UK the government has failed to take legal action or compensate consumers – all while lobbying at an EU level to water down regulations that would encourage the car industry to change. Indeed, the only reason the government has an air quality plan at all is because the supreme court ordered it to draw one up 18 months ago.

So what now? Speaking at prime minister’s questions today, May promised that the government did not “doubt the importance of the issue” and would look again at the proposals. She is right, it will – because it will have to. It now has one week to negotiate with the NGO ClientEarth, which emerged victorious from the high court this morning. It will be forced to scrap its current air quality plan, which called for clean air zones in just five cities, and backed the mayor’s plans in London, but did not mandate change in major cities such as Manchester and industrial hot spots such as Port Talbot.

Any new plan is likely to implement clean air zones in many more cities and could mean that diesel cars will face charges in many city centres. But the government should ensure local authorities have proper resources to implement the zones. It is also likely the government will have to redo the flawed modelling on which its current plans are based, which fail to properly take into account the vast discrepancy between tests in the laboratory and tests on the road.

But even this is likely to be inadequate. Road transport is the number one contributor to NO2 pollution and diesel is the main culprit. Yet we currently have a tax system that incentivises consumers to purchase diesel cars, which currently make up close to half of the nation’s fleet. Research published today suggests that for central London to become compliant, the proportion of diesel cars on the road would need to be as low as 5%. The sale of diesel cars must end and the government must reform a regulator that hauls in millions from the car industry itself.

But the car industry does not have to be the villain in this story. May has the opportunity to make it the hero and deliver a boost to the government’s shiny new industrial strategy to boot. Both Norway and the Netherlands understand this – they are striving for an emissions-free industry within the decade. China has announced a boost to its hybrid industry and even Germany, the nation that invented the car, is now mooting a federal proposal for a ban on petrol and diesel by 2030.

Electrics, hybrids and hydrogen are the future of the global car industry. If the UK doesn’t move fast by delivering the incentives and infrastructure required to clean it up, we will get left behind. If the prime minister realises this opportunity, perhaps then she might really start to play the game.

Toxic air is killing thousands of us – Theresa May must act fast | Emma Howard

Allow them eat cake for breakfast? The most recent fad in dieting | Emma Brockes

Cake for breakfast? Photograph: Alamy

Dieting is boring. Performing it, talking about it, calculating the maths. Hearing other people’s diet plan stories is rivalled only by hearing about their dreams for sheer conversational agony. Consume the muffin, don’t eat the muffin but although we stand right here in line at Starbucks, do we have to have a 3-act perform about whether or not or not you’re going to eat the muffin?

The psychodrama of whether or not to consume the muffin is not trivial to the dieter, of program, and it is in this area – amongst boredom and despair – that the diet regime industry lives and exploits us. Every 12 months, it dumps yet another January publication schedule of ridiculous titles on a pliant marketplace, depressed by obtaining “failed” at the earlier year’s regime.

It’s funny how absurd these factors appear on initial viewing, and how swiftly they get absorbed by the culture. Do you bear in mind how, in 2010, when the New York Instances Design Segment ran that first trend piece about the Paleo diet program, everybody mocked it for going so far beyond parody that it threatened to support one more trend piece by truly spelling the death of one thing?

This January, there are at least 4 straight-faced Paleo cookbooks in the diet part of the bookstore (Paleo for Newcomers, 40 Best Paleo Recipes, The Paleo Diet regime Revised and, leaving no stone unturned, Paleo Dessert Recipes), and the word has been practically fully stripped of its ridiculousness.

Its place in the lifestyle-cycle – as a repository for scorn that by some means props up the legitimacy of the whole technique – has been filled by one thing else that will, for a brief although, be considered even much more ludicrous, until finally it is itself replaced following January. There is a metaphor in right here about capitalism that I cannot quite fish out, but never thoughts. What a bumper yr for new diet plan books it is!

How we consume is a measure of our wider fears and securities and in the last couple of many years, well-known diet programs have centred close to re-workings of the classic model of cutting something out, the gimmick in this situation being entire meals groups, sometimes under the auspicious of allergy symptoms, with liberal use of the word “intolerance” and triggering fight-backs from these food industries most impacted – wheat and dairy in distinct.

This 12 months, recessionary diet program plans centering on denial appear, at a marketing and advertising level at least, to have given way to what may be named indulgence-primarily based programmes. If the Paleo diet program restricts you to items you could only find in the Stone Age, this year’s over-correction comes in the form of the deal with-by yourself diet program, wherein you place back all the things you’ve been informed to stay away from. (Spoiler alert! The trick is in portion control).

It is, as ever, Oprah’s way of life guru Deepak Chopra who lays the broad, cultural bones of this shift with a guide known as What Are You Hungry For? in which he suggests that we are asking ourselves the incorrect concerns. To wit: not what need to I eat, or how significantly of it, but “what are you hungry for? Foods? Adore? Self-esteem? Peace?” The suggestion, writes Chopra, is that “fat reduction based mostly on a deeper awareness of why individuals overeat” is a lot more successful than the metrics of calorie counting.

This is not insane. Bodyweight is usually a symptom not a lead to of unhappiness, and there are excellent wellness reasons for taking the holistic mind/physique technique.

There are also excellent marketing and advertising causes. Phase forward the Marie Antoinette Diet program, published this month, in which you are invited to be “inspired by Marie Antoinette’s eating routines,” in certain, “a recipe for the wellness-boosting ‘wonder’ soup that the queen ate for dinner every evening.”

It’s not about the soup, naturally. As the book blurb has it, “the French queen ate cake for breakfast and was fond of hot chocolate, but appears to have known instinctively what scientific scientific studies have just lately shown: for illustration, it is not what you consume, but when you consume it.” This is not, you’ll be stunned to hear, written by Andy Borowitz or Craig Brown but by Karen Wheeler, a trend and beauty journalist who lives in France and located herself, whilst reading a biography of the French queen, pondering just how far she could run with the let-them-consume-cake trope.

This is how far: “Why eating cake for breakfast promotes weight loss.”

It tends to make the claims of The No Excuses Diet program by Jonathan Roche, published last week and promising excess weight reduction “without dieting and with no lengthy workouts!” (by assisting you “determine what truly motivates you”) appear positively restrained.

There are very good philosophical underpinnings to some of this, and you could possibly create a lively university thesis entitled All Great Diets are Anti-Diet programs. Study suggests that it is the smaller, attainable goals that reward, rather than radial alterations that may prove unsustainable.

The problem is that a massive portion of the diet sector would like you to fail and come back following 12 months for far more. The very best-vendor lists know us too well – our lack of consideration span, our need to be teased and bullied into a regimen – and reward us with built-in obsolescence.

The cycle of excess weight reduction and acquire that characterizes most person diet plans, applies to the sector as a entire. You purchased Atkins, you failed at Atkins and now, right here it is, the title you’ve been waiting for, published this month and announcing a new chapter in the whole sorry cycle: Mirsad Hasic’s Atkins Diet program Problems You Want You Knew.

If that isn’t getting your cake and consuming it, I don’t know what is.

Allow them eat cake for breakfast? The most recent fad in dieting | Emma Brockes