ZF7

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

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“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.

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Many young men are hobbled by a lack of guidance, a strain of anti-intellectualism and a growing belief that college degrees don’t pay off, said Ed Grocholski, a senior vice president at Junior Achievement USA, which works with about five million students every year to teach about career paths, financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00221465211041031

A central paradox in the mental health literature is the tendency for black Americans to report similar or better mental health than white Americans despite experiencing greater stress exposure. However, black Americans’ higher levels of certain coping resources may explain this finding. Using data from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (n = 1,186), we examine whether black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, social support, religious attendance, and divine control than white Americans and whether these resources, in turn, explain the black–white paradox in mental health. In adjusted models, the black–white paradox holds for depressive symptoms and any DSM-IV disorder. Findings indicate that black Americans have higher levels of self-esteem, family social support, and religiosity than white Americans.

https://www.ft.com/content/314a387b-4024-4855-9aad-d3d448dbc182

The largest declines in life expectancy were observed among males in the US, who experienced a decline of 2.2 years relative to 2019 levels, followed by Lithuanian males, with a decline of 1.7 years.

“For western European countries such as Spain, England and Wales, Italy, Belgium, among others, the last time such large magnitudes of declines in life expectancy at birth were observed in a single year was during world war two,” said José Manuel Aburto, the study’s co-lead author.

just imagining how crazy it would be to be to a female trying to date with a 1.5:1 ratio. not really sharing to be a white man apologist (though the WSJ optics point was interesting), but how brutal dating for women will become, or how much easier it will be to stand out as a guy.

NYTimes - The Scramble to Pluck 24 Billion Cherries in Eight Weeks

much like a good illusion cake, what starts off with a delicious detail of the high stakes game of of cultivating and delivering cherries zooms out into issues of essential workers, seasonal immigrant workers, and yet another thing to be thankful for and recognize how hard life can be out there.  that we can work from home safely and temperately and with stability and options is yet another thing that we should appreciate.

That could have been a disaster, because water likes to pool in the little divot by the stem. There it seeps into the flesh, making the cherry swell. Too much, and the cherry will burst through its own skin, causing splits; whole harvests can be lost this way. So dangerous is poorly timed water that cherry growers rely on fans, wind machines and even low-flying helicopters to dry ripe fruit before it is lost. Yet wind presents its own peril: It can knock cherries against one another or into branches, bruising them so that they’re rejected on the packing line, where fruit is sorted for size and quality with high-tech optical scanners. Rainiers, because of their color, are particularly prone to showing their past with telltale “wind marks,” tiny incursions of brownness on that golden skin. This cherry has just a few.

But it’s not to market yet. The window in which a sweet cherry can be picked for sale is excruciatingly narrow. Cherries don’t continue to ripen once they’re off the tree, the way a peach does, and once picked they don’t store for very long, even when refrigerated. If they’re too ripe, they won’t make it to the packing house, the truck or the airplane, the grocery-store display, your summery dessert. The sugar content must be Goldilocksian — neither too high nor too low. Wait even a couple of days too many, and it may be too late.

Paige Hake, the second generation of her family to farm this orchard, considered the cherry. Then she considered its neighbors, with their own wind marks, in the lambent heat of a June afternoon. She looked down the long green row of trees, lined with its strip of white plastic fabric, meant to reflect sunlight onto the undersides of the cherries, helping them color evenly. She consulted with her father, Orlin Knutson, who has been growing fruit on this stretch of dry sagebrush steppe near Mattawa, Wash., for 41 years, the last 31 of them organically. There was a refrigerated truck waiting by the gate, with a growing stack of full bins next to it. There was rain in the forecast, as well as more heat, and sugar levels in the cherries were rising as they spoke. They wanted to get these cherries harvested today; they were far enough along that it was probably now or never, a whole year of investment and work leading to this one afternoon. But it was getting late, and there were a lot of other cherries that needed to be picked, and today the crew of people available to pick them was smaller than they would have liked. She turned to me and pointed to the wind-marked cherry, still unsure whether it would be worth the cost of trying to get it to market. “Would you buy that at Whole Foods?” she asked.

The yellow cherry was one of a great many across the orchards of Washington State that were just beginning to ripen. Karen Lewis, who works with growers as a tree-fruit specialist for the agricultural extension service of Washington State University, has tried to calculate exactly how many individual cherries need to be picked during a whirlwind season that Jon DeVaney, the president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, calls “eight weeks of craziness.” Multiplying all the millions of boxes by the number of cherries they can hold, Lewis determined that as many as 24 billion individual cherries must be plucked, separately, from their trees and placed carefully into bags and buckets and bins, each and every one of them by human hands.

Lewis thinks that people who aren’t used to thinking much about the source of their food, or who assume that the food system is as mechanized and smoothly calibrated as a factory, spitting out produce like so many sticks of gum, ought to spend some time contemplating that figure and what it means. “I’m here to tell you that people do not think we harvest everything by hand,” she says. But hands, belonging to highly skilled workers, are needed for every last cherry. During the harvest, many thousands of people are out picking by dawn, nearly every day, their fingers flying as they watch out for rattlesnakes under dark trees. (Compounding the labor crunch, this is also the time when workers in the region must hand-thin more than 100 million apple trees, so that the remaining fruit can grow larger.) Later in the season, many of the same hands will pick and place each peach and plum and apricot, every single apple — five and a half billion pounds, just of apples, just in Washington, just last year. “I think those numbers are staggering,” Lewis said.

The Miracle Sudoku

How We Build This Podcast Every Day — Snacks Daily

I HAVE A NEW PODCAST OBSESSION (well other than joel kim booster’s urgent care, which i am also obsessed with).  but snacks daily is a daily podcast that covers market news for consumer products companies (generally). 

i mean the content is decent but HOLY MOLE the chemistry of these hosts.  it makes me happy.  like, jovial, woke bros.  (honestly sort of like JOEY FROM THE CIRCLE who is also lovable) (oh--my one sentence review of the circle: sort of a fun social experiment, it has its moments but generally peaks at episodes 3-10; love joey and sammie and the casting/editing is incredible)

CAN YOU IMAGINE TALKING LIKE THEY DO ON A CASUAL BASIS.  omg.  <3

if you ever wanted to read a 2000 word piece about Michael Bar-bar-o’s voice (of the NYT The Daily podcast), click this link!!  some excerpts:

In person, he is owlishly handsome (the little round glasses he used to wear amplified the effect, though he has lately swapped them for more rectangular frames), of roughly average height, and indifferently dressed, with a corona of salt-and-pepper curls and a scruffy, too-busy-to-shave beard. In 2017, People magazine named him one of the 15 sexiest newsmen.

But most of Barbaro’s admirers don’t see him. They hear him. The appeal is the voice and the peculiar prosody that gives The Daily its pulse. (“I think I like the way @mikiebarb says ‘natalie’ more than the way my girlfriend says it?,” Times reporter and sometime Daily guest host Natalie Kitroeff wrote on Twitter. “Help.”) His delivery sits between the clipped authority of NPR and the pirate-radio shagginess of the archetypal podcaster; it is remarkably free of filler (a beloved grandfather, his story goes, trained the ums and likes out of him) with deliberative pauses that never hit exactly where you expect. These gaps are practical (they make it easy to edit tape), but they’re also stylistic, a soothing, if syncopated, snare-drum beat.

That voice is a development of the show, which is not to say an affectation. Barbaro (BAR-BAR-O; he says each syllable is stressed equally, though on-air it sounds like he’s giving the O short shrift) cops to having undergone “a second pubescence” finding his voice on tape.

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Still, making The Daily is a huge effort. The days can be punishingly long, and the show eventually instituted a four-day workweek for producers, acknowledging that those staying late into the night to close an episode effectively work two days in one. Technically, Lisa Chow, a Daily editor, explained to me, the show should be finished by 3 a.m., when a sound engineer in London takes over to put on the finishing touches and get it delivered to your phone by 6 a.m. New York time. But on one day that I observed The Daily, during the Sondland hearings, the recording and editing began around 9:30 a.m., and Balcomb didn’t leave until 4:30 a.m. Alex Halpern Levy, a speechwriter and political strategist and one of Barbaro’s best friends, told me Barbaro carries a microphone around with him to rerecord the “what else you need to know today” segments that end every episode, in case of news developments. In order to get clean sound, he has been known to burrow beneath bedcovers.

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The day you’re on The Daily, you hear from your friends from elementary school, your college buddies. My mom’s best friend’s daughter gets in touch,” says Dana Goldstein, the education reporter who was on the show in December to discuss America’s anxiety over its high-schoolers’ stagnating standardized-test scores. “My friends don’t typically congratulate me when I have an A1 story” — a Timesism for the front page.

She pulled up a text message from a friend in London whose interest borders on the obsessive. “She said, quote, ‘I noticed the pause between “This” and “is The Daily” is getting longer,’ ” she read. “ ‘I am so fascinated. Tell us everything.’ ”

Jordan vs. Josh 💪 End of the Rope Elimination | The Challenge: War of The Worlds 2

top 5 moments of TV of 2019

hmm others....

ARE YOU THE ONE RAIN SCENE WITH JENNA/KAI (and jax reveal)

succession board room scene / succession finale (fine, technically s1)

fleabag s2 finale ending

RPDR - first lip sync between evie / brooklynn

it’s maybe a little unclear to me why this podcast exists, i mean, do we really need a 15-year time-delayed podcast about a tv show?

YES

jenna fischer and angela have a super fun chemistry

i love me a good BTS and is this AN INCREDIBLE BTS or what

i waver back and forth on whether the office is THE BEST SITCOM OF ALL TIME (i generally think the answer is yes, on most dimensions and rubrics) (fwiw i think P&R is incredibly overrated imho and doesn’t age well; and while i do love community especially from a META standpoint and how bold it is, it doesn’t quite have the consistency and volume of the office) BUT I AM BACK ON BOARD THE OFFICE TRAIN and YES IT IS THE BEST SITCOM OF ALL TIME

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though concerns with the format:

given that the office had 201 episodes over 9 seasons and this podcast certainly will NOT last 201 episodes, it makes me sad because i actually am famously a huge fan of the final season, 

and, even if they DID last 201 episodes, could they possibly have office related content to make it that far??

what about shitty episodes???

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fwiw my rubric for “best sitcom” would be:

humor level

consistency

how well it’s aged

volume (number of seasons)

other elements (e.g., heart/emotion)

brooklyn 99 i am really happy with and particularly impressed by the sheer density of jokes but has gotten a little one-note and ultimately nothing will ever beat the jim/pam trump card.

superstore - i was so bullish on this show but the last two seasons have been v weak.  but a really strong ensemble comedy that i was hoping would take over the throne of the office.

he title is a bit of a misdirect though it does start with this fun image:

Peter Rahal, the 33-year-old energy bar impresario who sold RxBar to Kellogg for $600 million and became something of a consumer products legend in the process, stands in the gigantic, spotless kitchen of his new Miami Beach mansion. Behind him, floor-to-ceiling windows revealed his pool, his outdoor bar, and Sunset Harbour. Throughout the house are expensive-looking modernist metal chandeliers. The kitchen drawers are filled with gold utensils.

And for dinner, Rahal is eating a can of beans.

Correction: He isn’t even eating the beans. He’s just showing the dinner for one — chickpeas, eggs, avocado — that he makes most nights.

Rahal bought the fully furnished house for about $19 million in May. He splits his time between his longtime Chicago apartment and this place; he chose Miami Beach in part because Florida has no personal income tax. A Ferrari 488 and a cream Vespa are parked in the driveway. A housekeeper, who comes daily, keeps the seven bedrooms spotless, though most are usually empty. Upstairs, there are his-and-hers dressing rooms; the “hers” — which has a Lucite-leg stool topped with pink tufts sitting forlornly at a vanity — is untouched. It’s as if when Rahal was sending wire instructions to get his RxBar money from Kellogg, he ticked a box requesting the “newly rich bachelor” package and this setup fell from the sky.

lol:

But things pretty quickly started changing for Rahal in unexpected ways. The $600 million figure bedazzled his employees, and he suddenly morphed from founder-boss into figurehead. “You used to be able to just think out loud. It would be like, ‘Hey, that tree’s really interesting,’” he says, indicating at a palm tree. But with his new status, whatever off-the-cuff thing Rahal said sent staff scurrying: “Oh, Peter wants extra trees like that there.”

it later touches into some more weighty stuff:

In spring 2018, Rahal read Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader turned essayist who argues that people must risk personal success and failure to work at their peak.

or

The can of beans sits unopened on the kitchen counter, and Rahal, who has a sore throat, makes himself some green tea with honey instead of eating dinner. He looks tired as he stirs the tea with one of the gold spoons that came with the house. The clinking of metal against the ceramic mug is the only sound to be heard: There’s no music playing, no TV on, no cats or dogs or neighbors or birds or even cars in the near distance.

That’s one of the problems Rahal seems to be grappling with: More money, generally, means less struggle, and if it’s struggle that made him, how does he find that going forward?

It’s weird being so rich, so quickly. Rahal’s now socializing with a group of youngish guys — and it is mostly guys, in his new Miami circle, at least — who have inherited or made a ton of money. He’s invited out to steakhouses with movie producers and music producers. He’s throwing an Art Basel party. He and his new friends talk about the relative tax rates of Florida versus Puerto Rico. He lives on an island with a guardhouse. If he wants to date someone, or if he meets a new potential friend, they tend to do a standard Google check of his name, and the top search results are about how much money he has.

Rahal has to rough up his life. He tries to do this daily, even with small things, like carrying his groceries from the store rather than taking a cab. He fasts for 18 hours at a time. He regularly alternates first-class flights with middle-seat coach tickets.

It also means that to trigger the sense of adversity that’s gotten him this far, Rahal has to rough up his life so he doesn’t get too comfortable. He tries to do this daily, even with small things, like carrying his groceries from the store rather than taking a cab. He fasts for 18 hours at a time. He regularly alternates first-class flights with middle-seat coach tickets. He forces himself to read, which, with dyslexia, he says, is painful.

“With some people, an event like this would change them,” says Shah, his Chicago friend. “And suddenly, Peter’s life has changed — he went through a divorce; in every way, Peter’s life has changed — but I feel like he is what he is.”

And though Rahal says he’s incredibly grateful for everything he has, he’s trying to figure out bigger ways to reintroduce struggle to his life — like starting another company where he stands to lose a lot.

the wework story has been fun to follow in its drama (and appreciating the relative stability in my life).  (also--i have gotten really into succession so corporate intrigue is very in rn.) the link has a fun narrative element as well as random bits like:

Neumann was eager to go public. “The numbers will speak for themselves,” he told me when I interviewed him in his office in April, just before his vacation... “I’m excited to show to people that when you do what I said, it also works financially. I think it’s good to have a report card.”

The expectations had some justification. In a frenzied effort to secure the roughly $100 million in fees for representing WeWork’s IPO, the world’s biggest banks had fallen over themselves to convince Neumann they understood the grandiosity of his vision. Morgan Stanley told WeWork its valuation could hit $104 billion, Goldman Sachs estimated the high end at $96 billion, while JPMorgan said it might reach a more modest $63 billion, according to the Financial Times.

matt levine (who also linked to the article in the best newsletter, money stuff) will be quick to point out that startups often pick banks that are most generous with their valuations, not the most accurate, which leads to weird incentives like these.  but maybe adam neumann just an oblivious visionary!

but man, this ending:

There remains at least one WeWorker who has done well by his shares. Well before the IPO process even began, Adam Neumann had already cashed out well over $700 million in WeWork stock through a combination of stock sales and loans, according to the Wall Street Journal. Neumann is no longer CEO, but he still has his role on WeWork’s board, the homes in Gramercy and the Hamptons, plus a townhouse in the Village, a 60-acre estate in Westchester County, and a $21-million residence in the Bay Area complete with room shaped like a guitar. Neumann had a spectacularly embarrassing summer, but setting aside whatever lawsuits or investigations that could emerge, he’s set for life. Really, no one played the post-recession economy as perfectly as Neumann did: fill acres of empty commercial real estate with armies of freelancers, tell everyone you’re raising global consciousness, and walk away a billionaire. In his final town hall as CEO, Neumann argued that WeWork had “played the private market game to perfection.” He was speaking about the company he would soon no longer run, but he might as well have been talking about himself.

...good for him?  scott galloway of original wework takedown fame is later interviewed on the same publication (he is dramatic and colorful):

At [a body temperature of] 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.

All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.

a long read about what it’s like to get hypothermia and die.  

ESPECIALLY RELEVANT IF YOU”VE SEEN ESCAPE ROOM (2019), which i finally watched and actually quite enjoyed (like a 7.5/10).  

omg.  apples (like ants) fall into the category of endlessly exciting. prepare for the rise of the COSMIC CRISP:

Barritt, then the head of the apple-breeding program at Washington State University, made the cross that led to Cosmic Crisp in 1997. (Because of how long it takes test trees to mature and produce fruit, 22 years from cross to launch is fairly quick when it comes to bringing a new product to market. “Biology is just a real problem here,” said Barritt.) Its parents were Enterprise, a robust, late-ripening, long-storing apple, and a relatively new player called Honeycrisp — much despised by growers, who found it finicky and frustrating, with at least a quarter of its fruit never making it into grocery stores. Still, the latter’s large cells gave it a texture, juicy and explosive, unlike any other apple on the market; before long, consumers’ demand, and the prices they were willing to pay, was so high that growers were planting the damn thing all over the place in spite of themselves — and also starting to think differently about apples in general. (McDougall called Honeycrisp “the 8-billion-pound gorilla in our industry.”) The experience of an apple is really five things, Barritt explained. Only two of them, sugar and acidity, are actually about flavor, and there’s a natural divide between people who like sweet and those who prefer tang. It’s the three measures of texture that unite us all: “Everyone likes crisp, everyone likes juicy, and nobody likes soft.”

a fun article combining apples, agriculture, branding, consumerism, economics, and ultimately, identity.

identity through food:

One wonders what he would think of today’s grocery stores. “Food has become such a dream world, really,” O’Rourke, the marketing economist, told me recently. He was ruminating on so-called superfoods and on the way food marketing tends to focus on “extrinsic qualities” — a brand, a logo, a story — more than the food itself. We want what we eat to save our lives; to reflect our worldliness, the uniqueness of our identities; to fulfill our desire for the new and interesting. One result is that some of the most staple of staples — things like bread or milk or apples — are having a hard time competing. Though DeVaney laughed that people will balk at a $5 price on a 10-pound bag of potatoes, but not on a pint of specialty ice cream, he knew which side of the divide he wanted apples to be on. “We really don’t want consumers buying their food the way they buy gasoline: assuming that everything is identical and they’re just buying on price,” he told me. “Apples need to offer the same kind of novelty within the apple category as consumers can get when they buy…” he trailed off, thinking. “Dragon fruit!”

lol: 

They all politely made clear that this was the sort of romantic but deeply dumb question that only an industry neophyte would ask.