The Casual Blog

January 30, 2011

So long, Krispy Kreme, and hello health

It was bittersweet to learn last week that the Krispy Kreme store in downtown Raleigh was closing due to lack of business. When a business fails, individuals suffer hardships. As a downtown Raleigh resident, I’m particularly eager to see businesses here succeed.

And Krispy Kreme and I go way back. As a boy I was a patron of the first Krispy Kreme store, in Winston-Salem. There you could sit at the counter and eat hot glazed doughnuts while watching more fresh ones coming off the conveyer belt. It was one of the few places in town open 24 hours. After finishing my paper route at 5:30 a.m., I’d sometimes stop in there for a delicious sugary treat. It was also a favorite late night spot for teenage munchie runs. Good times.

But in recent years I’ve come to associate Krispy Kreme doughnuts and similar sweet products with less cheerful things, like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and death. The products are more like cigarettes than food. The nutritional content is minimal, and the high sugar and fat content are unhealthy. This is not exactly big news. In a sense, everyone knows that too much fat and sugar are bad for you. But it continues to be a difficult fact for people to face and do something about. That much is obvious from our obesity epidemic.

We’ve made slow but meaningful progress in the last 50 years addressing the deadly public health effects of smoking. We’ve substantially reduced smoking rates, and therefore smoking deaths. The basic facts about smoking and cancer are now common knowledge, as a result of government requirements for warnings on cigarette labeling and restrictions on cigarette advertising. We have not done anything like this with risky sweet food products that kill people.

If anything, we’ve headed in the opposite direction. Information about nutrition is obscured by industry and federal agencies. Our government transfers our tax dollars to agribusinesses as large subsidies for production of excess corn, which is processed into high fructose corn syrup and added to many common food items. Thus healthy unprocessed food seems unusual and, by comparison, expensive. Thousands of advertisements have convinced us that sweet, fatty food products produce good feelings of love and fun.

Sure, it’s possible to get sound nutrition information and it’s possible to eat in a healthy way, but our culture makes it quite challenging. People who make a point of trying to avoid unhealthy food are viewed with puzzlement and sometimes anger. It’s no fun being ridiculed as a food nut. It’s easier to go along with the crowd.

Lifetime Fitness gym recently published an article by Pilar Gerasimo titled “Being Healthy is a Revolutionary Act,” That’s putting it too strongly, but it is certainly an act that defies settled conventions. The related web site does a good job of putting in bumper-sticker form some home truths about health and nutrition. http://revolutionaryact.com/ The first home truth gets down to business: “The Way We are Live Is Crazy,” based on our rates of obesity and chronic illness. But, it says, we can change.

Maybe so. If Krispy Kreme is doing less business, it probably isn’t because their doughnuts don’t taste good. They taste too good! It’s possible that more people are facing the fact that we can’t go on eating like this.

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January 29, 2011

Integrity and the financial crisis

What good is integrity? Why shouldn’t you, or me, or anybody always act according to what feels good at the moment? Our brains are wired to seek pleasure, so it’s not surprising when people act selfishly. The interesting thing is that we usually act with a view to other values and concerns, like the welfare of others. What would happen if that were not true?

We now know what happens to a financial system: the financial crisis of 2008 to the present. And we need to understand more about the crisis to prevent a recurrence. The new report this week of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is not a bad place to start. From the sections I’ve had a chance to read, the report is highly readable, and available for free at http://www.fcic.gov/report.

Tens of millions have lost their jobs, and millions more have lost their homes. Still more millions have lost billions of their life savings. It’s hard to comprehend the scope of the financial crisis, but it was and is, in human terms, a disaster. The stock market just this week got back to the pre-crisis level, and economic confidence is increasing. Maybe the worst is behind us, but unemployment is still high. But we haven’t made much progress in understanding the reasons for the crisis, which we need to do if we want a systematic fix.

The problem is, it’s complicated. I’ve read a fair bit on the subject, and know a lot more about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps than I did before the crisis (which was close to nothing). Two books I found particularly interesting and helpful were The Big Short by Michael Lewis and 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak.

But at the end of the day, there are so many facets that it’s extremely hard to grasp. The connections between the housing market, interests rates, mortgage lending, household debt, securitization, bank policies, over-the-counter derivatives, and financial regulation are complex. Those best positioned to understand the complexity as it arose (such as investment professionals and financial regulators) were those most responsible for causing it. For the most part, they didn’t didn’t grasp the big picture any better than the rest of us.

But they didn’t really want to understand. Their value system was corrupted. Some were blinded by greed, and others were made complacent by ideology. Those who were making unbelievable amounts of money had no motive to question the viability of sub-prime mortgages backed securities, not to mention synthetic derivatives and related credit default swaps. Those in charge of regulating markets abdicated their authority and justified themselves with the half-baked theory that markets required no regulation. Many borrowed more than they could afford without thinking through the possible consequences. The rest of us happily tagged along as our retirement accounts grew and housing prices increased. There was a culture of heedlessness. This was a massive failure of integrity.

So what is to be done? We can start by recognizing that there was a massive ethical failure, and that ethical conduct is vital to the health of our economic system. I was pleasantly surprised that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s report seems to have done just that, among other things. The report is 500-some pages, but if that’s too much of a good thing (very possible), it’s worthwhile to read the 14-page conclusion, which does a good job of summing up the issues.

I quote: “The integrity of our financial markets and the public’s trust in those markets are essential to the economic well-being of our nation. The soundness and the sustained prosperity of the financial system and our economy rely on the notions of fair dealing, responsibility, and transparency. In our economy, we expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits, at the same time that they produce products and services of quality and conduct themselves well. Unfortunately . . . we witnessed an erosion of standards and ethics that exacerbated the financial crisis.”

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January 20, 2011

Your brain on music

Why do we love music? The question has always bothered me. There’s no doubt that music is a powerful force, but how does it work? It seems like a fundamental human activity, practiced in every society now and as far back as we have knowledge. As a thoroughgoing Darwinist, I assume musical activity must confer some evolutionary advantage, like being able to throw a spear well or make a fire. But it’s by no means obvious what music contributes to survival, or even what it does to make us happier.

For a philosophically inclined musician, that’s troubling. The question has a moral aspect. We can use our limited energy in various ways, with various positive or negative outputs. We can, for example, help feed the poor, ignore the poor, or rob the poor, and the choice partially defines us. If we’re making music, and not feeding the poor or doing some equally valuable thing, how can we justify it?

Last week I learned of a study that gave a new perspective on these questions. Neurologists at McGill University did brain imaging using PET and fMRI techniques that established that the music can cause the neurotransmitter dopamine to be released in the brian. http://tiny.cc/38ko7 Dopamine is part of the deep reward system involving the limbic system. It makes it pleasurable for individuals to do things that are good for the species, like eating and having sex. In other words, dopamine is connected to key behaviors, and drives those behaviors.

So in some sense, music is as significant as eating and sex. We can do without any of those things, at least for a while, but they are fundamental to human animals as a whole. This doesn’t answer the basic why questions of music, but it suggests the possibility of an answer. At any rate, it shows that music can be something powerful.

The McGill researchers found that dopamine release levels vary with different kinds of music, and related those variations to the what they called “chills,” and I call goosebumps. So not all music is created equal. I’ve developed as my own test for when music is most effective the monitor of when it makes a lot of goosebumps. Thanks to the neurologists for a new way of thinking about this amazing thing.

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January 15, 2011

Mayhem in Tucson, and the politics of evil

The killing spree by a mentally ill young man in Tucson last week was shocking and sad, as senseless mayhem always is. But there’s something about this attack that’s especially worrisome. The main target (who miraculously survived) was a moderate Democratic congresswoman. A number of right wing pundits have made careers of demonizing such politicians and fanning ignorance into raging anger. Palin, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Beck and others have persuaded millions that non-right-wingers are not merely misguided, but essentially and utterly evil. It isn’t hard to imagine that their intense, emotional rhetoric would lead unbalanced minds to violent action.

We usually think of political differences as less important than, say, differences in moral values, but lately the two kinds of differences have converged and made it hard to address real social problems. Paul Krugman in the NY Times was insightful and eloquent on this issue. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html?em&exprod=myyahoo

Krugman points out that the right wing has developed a view of government as opposed to their natural rights. They regard “taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.” Thus they view health reform (and lots of other government programs) as a moral outrage, and most of what government does as illegitimate. It follows from this that those who believe government has an important role to play in addressing serious social problems are evil enemies.

This is, of course, a radical view, with no more basis in our traditions than in reason. It’s probable that this approach in its strong form is a fringe phenomenon. But the Tucson mayhem brought home that such ideology may still seriously threaten our public life. The sophisticated right-wing PR machine makes unbalanced individuals even more unbalanced, and there will be a certain percentage of these who enjoy shooting assault weapons. Krugman is probably right that no amount of reasonable discussion will persuade the right wingers, and we can’t hope to prevent all mental illness. But Krugman thinks we may be able to agree that it’s wrong to incite violence. That seems little enough to ask.

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January 9, 2011

The Black Swan — a ballet fan’s take

On Saturday night Sally and I did dinner and a movie — Tom Yum Thai and The Black Swan. I had the tofu spicy noodles, which were tasty (medium spicy means spicy!). We were looking forward to and slightly dreading The Black Swan, but for ballet fans, it’s hard to avoid it. Hollywood makes about one big ballet movie a generation, so this may be it for a while.

There were several things about the movie I liked. Natalie Portman as the rising ballerina has a porcelain mixture of delicate fragility and surprising power. She is convincing as a normal, if unusually hardworking and talented, young woman. But little by little, the mask slips, and we realize she is laboring hard to portray normality, and she’s becoming deranged. She has a lot of close-ups, and her fleeting micro expressions and larger meltdowns convey an interior tempest. Watching her is at first just fun, and then, increasingly, excruciating, but never boring. It’s an impressive performance.

The movie got a lot of little things about ballet right or at least close, from the dancer’s preparation of toe shoes to costuming details. It’s not a bad introduction to what happens behind the curtain leading up to and during a production. It also conveyed the unusual combination of camaraderie and intense competition among dancers.

I also liked one of the central themes: that dancing is more than the steps. Ballet is full of paradoxes. To fulfill the basic demands of the form is tremendously difficult. Mastering the vocabulary of movements require tremendous physical ability plus years of training, and the enormous technical demands are complicated by the need to assimilate generations of custom and tradition. To be even adequate as a dancer requires an extraordinary human. But the technical achievement alone is not the real point. A true artist is not simply going through a predetermined set of movements. A great ballet performance explores and communicates difficult-to-reach emotions. This does not always happen, but when it does, it is sublime.

The Black Swan in effect said this, although it will probably not convince ballet skeptics that it really happens. The dancing in the movie does not look hokey, which is good. But it never seems transcendent. This is problematic for the story line, which concerns transcendence. But the failure of the dancing to catch fire didn’t disappoint me greatly. It is, after all, a movie. To see real ballet, you need to go to the ballet.

My bigger problem with the movie was that it organized itself around the stereotype that the quest for beauty is a dangerous obsession, and the artist is a sort of madman/woman. As with all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth in the mad artist story, but great art does not at all depend on sickness. It is fundamentally healthy and life affirming. Mental illnesses of an artist are real problems for the artist. Of course, a movie about a well-balanced young woman pursuing dancing greatness in a calm and well balanced manner would have had less kick. And probably zero box office.

But it’s disturbing to think that a lot of people will take away the idea that great ballerinas must be crazy or that there’s something basically sick about the art. It’s also unfortunate that there are a few scenes of gore in the movie that will disgust some audience members and overwhelm all their other impressions. For those with reasonably a reasonably strong tolerance for suspense and gore, though, The Black Swan is worth seeing. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about the movie as time goes by, but it certainly transported me out of my usual world and into another one.

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January 8, 2011

New Year’s skiing in Telluride

To ring out the old year, I flew to Telluride CO to see Gabe and Jocelyn and do some skiing. Sally could not be persuaded to go; she said it was too much travel for her after our Bonaire trip. It was in fact a tough journey, with multiple cancelled or delayed flights, and ended up taking 22 hours. I got my wish for heavy snow (so much so that I worried whether we’d make a landing in Colorado), and the mountains were well covered with a 49-inch base when I arrived. I slept for 3 hours, and then got up in hopes of getting first tracks with Gabe and his girlfriend Lindsey.

It was still snowing lightly that morning as I went out to find some rental skis. I found my way to Bob at the Boot Doctor, who seemed to know everything about skis and proposed several options. I wanted to try a hybrid rocker all mountain ski, and Bob set me up with K2 Aftershocks. I ended up liking them a lot. They turned easily and handled well in the heavy stuff.

Gabe and Lindsey made the considerable sacrifice of missing a couple of early runs while I completed my preparations, and were of good cheer when we met at the gondola in Mountain Village. I had not met Lindsey before, and had a little trouble spotting Gabe, because he and most everyone else had covered up their faces against the brutal cold. The reported high for the day was 9, but I’d wager it never reached 0 on the mountain. Lindsey, who’d experienced plenty of cold days skiing in her native New Hampshire, got the shivers after the first couple of runs. We took a hot chocolate break at Giuseppe’s, and she decided to head home.

Plenty of others made the same reasonable decision — which left the mountain largely unpopulated for us diehards. I reminded Gabe that it was my first day going from 300 feet above sea level to 12,000 or so, and my first day of the season on skis. He acknowledged these challenges and proceeded to take me down some of the toughest double-black terrain on the mountain. I suspect he wanted to show off his new skiing prowess, and I was impressed with his accomplishments, as a proud parent should be. I held my own for a few runs, but leg fatigue eventually caught up with me. We skied the last part of the day mostly on groomers.

That evening to celebrate New Year’s, I took Gabe, Lindsey, and Jocelyn to Excelsior’s, an Italian restaurant. It turned out that Lindsey had worked there as a server and knew everyone. We got the royal treatment.

The next morning I felt like I’d gone 16 rounds with the champ — sore from top to bottom. I took a megadose of Advil and headed to my ski lesson with some doubts as to my ability to make it through. Once again, the cold was harsh. But my soreness somehow abated once I got to the top of the mountain. My teacher, Jim Schwartz, was an affable guy of roughly my vintage with a lot of teaching experience. He had some interesting ideas that were new to me, such as focusing on the little toe. We spent the last part of the lesson working on mogul technique. I skied by myself in the afternoon with new confidence and joy.

During one lift ride, Jim opined that people skied for 3 main reasons. Some are excitement junkies that are only happy if they can scare themselves on steep rugged terrain. Others love the alpine beauty. Still others love the kinetic fun of dodging and swooping at speed in a kind of dance. I thought he was generally right. However, I’d add that it’s possible to cross categories. For me, the pleasure is some of all three — excitement, beauty, and grace.

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December 29, 2010

A scuba Xmas in Bonaire

Bonaire is a small island is in the southern Caribbean about 60 miles north of Venezuela. It does not have pretty beaches or glitzy nightlife. It does, however, have a thing that make it world famous among scuba divers — fantastic coral reefs. Sally and I spent Xmas doing lots of diving there, and I can affirm, the coral is healthy and gorgeous.

This is no small thing. Coral all over the world is under stress from global warming with rising ocean temperatures and acidification, as well as pollution, industrial fishing, and various poorly understood diseases. At the same time, a significant percentage of creatures in the ocean life depend directly or indirectly on the reefs for food and shelter. They are the rainforests of the ocean. From a human perspective, they have an additional important attribute — incredible beauty.

It is hard to believe that simple, tiny animals do what coral do. Over long periods they form large structures of great complexity, with each new generation building on top of its predecessors, layer upon layer. The structures have many colors, textures, and shapes. They may resemble cacti, ferns, mushrooms, pillars, antlers, flowers, bowls, or giant brains. In Bonaire, there is a band of coral reefs around the entire island that starts in water about 20 feet deep and goes down below 100 feet.

The reefs of Bonaire are teeming with thousands upon thousands of tropical fish and other creatures. From time to time, we were engulfed in enormous schools. We brought along our copy of Reef Fish Identification, and identified a number of species new to us. Many of them are not at all shy, and some are actually interested in examining humans. On one of our night dives, there were five tarpon that followed us about like large, curious dogs, circling and gliding up from behind close enough to touch.

Close encounters with so much exuberant life was inspiring, though not without some drama. We did some dives from boats run by the operation at our hotel, Divi Flamingo, which generally were delightful. The water was a pleasant 81-82 degrees, and visibility around 60 feet. This visibility is not especially good by Bonaire standards, but we were not complaining.

We had more drama on the shore dives, for which Bonaire is famous in dive circles. Sally and I served as our own guides and safety checks for these, and generally there were no other divers nearby. I enjoyed the solitude, but it also increased the risk level. The reefs are generally only a short swim from shore. However, getting to the water over the uneven volcanic rock with heavy dive equipment can be difficult. At times the ocean surge makes entry and exit dangerous. We got stung by jellyfish and fire coral and sustained minor bruises, cuts, and scrapes from being tossed about on the shallow rocks. Once we made a navigation error because of a strong current, got lost, and I ran uncomfortably low on air. But it was all worth it for the amazing beauty.

Out of the water, we saw flamingos, magnificent frigatebirds, parrots, and various warblers. There were also wild donkeys. The predominant European language of the island is Dutch, followed by Spanish and English. The vibe of the island residents had a strong dose of Dutch reserve along with the Caribbean relaxedness. We were sometimes surprised at the slowness of restaurant and hotel service, and equally surprised that the dive boats always left on schedule, or earlier. Among the tourists the Dutch were predominant. They seemed unusually handsome as a group, though unfortunately a surprising number of them smoked cigarettes.

Bonaire has character and charm, and, as I say, those incredible coral reefs. We’ll likely go back, but I hope next time we can find direct flights. Getting there went smoothly, but getting home ended up taking 31 hours, rather than 9 we’d expected. The customs process in Curacao was amazingly slow, and so we missed our flight to Miami. So, stuck on Curacao, we found a cheap hotel near the airport, took a cab into Willemstad for a walkabout, and ate a good meal. The next day we finally made it back to Raleigh to find snow on the ground.

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December 18, 2010

Lost and found

It is such a bummer to find after you’ve checked out of a hotel that you’ve left something significant behind. Earlier this week when I was in New York I left my copy of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart at the hotel. I liked his book Absurdistan, and I liked this one even better. It’s funny as well as sad. A fortyish hipster falls absurdly in love with a twentyish college grad in a not-far-in-the-future-world where corporations have pretty much taken over governmental functions, people are tightly tethered to their electronic devices, and reading literature is a sign of decrepitude.

I had about 60 pages of Shteyngart’s book left, which I’d planned to finish on the flight home. It doesn’t make sense to buy a new copy. I can live without the ending — I think. Still, after being deep in Shteyngart’s dystopia, I’ve got this sensation of interruptus.

I heard from Gabe that a lot of snow is falling in Telluride, which is vital news, since I’ll be skiing there in a couple of weeks. It will be my first chance to meet his girlfriend, who has gotten rave reviews. They recently decided to move in together, so things are moving along. It could be serious.

Relationships are always changing, though they do so at widely varying speeds. How they work is mostly invisible, which is one of the reasons we still need good fiction: it sometimes brings that hidden interpersonal world to light. I feel so lucky to have a really good marriage, but for a variety of reasons I am not inclined to delve into the details. I think the need for privacy is often exaggerated, but there are some things that lose their essential nature if they aren’t kept safely out of sight. And a strong, loving relationship is the most valuable thing in the world.

There was a really interesting essay last Sunday in the NY Times style section about what happens when one spouse cheats on another. http://tiny.cc/bquj8 The essay by Wendy Plump posits that misery will be created in a highly predictable way. The cheating spouse will be pulled back and forth between two worlds, of responsibility and pleasure, in a way that causes him or her extreme stress and discontentment in both worlds. The other spouse will eventually find out and feel traumatized. The cheating spouse will make true-but-hackneyed excuses (about needs not being met, losing the spark, and the like). The net is a destruction of trust and quite possibly the end of a relationship. The predictability of this course of events is hard to prove, but the essay gives personal examples that resonate.

The importance of honesty and commitment in relationships is something everybody knows, but the same may be said of the importance of eating healthy food. We all know a good deal about what’s healthy and not, but just knowing is not enough to affect our behavior. We need the ideas to become more concrete and vivid. I think I’d arrived at most of the ideas in Wendy Plump’s essay, but I’m glad she organized it in an interesting, touching way and made me keep thinking about them.

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December 12, 2010

A note on corporations and on a Porsche museum

Last week the Red Hat senior management team met for two days in Raleigh. We’re an international company with management that’s widely distributed, and so there were a few team members that I had not met before, and others I got to know better. They were for the most part lively and interesting.

So what is a corporation? In our meetings we spent some time discussing public ownership and shareholder value. But the profit motive is generic. Just as every human has to eat, every corporation has to make money. There are many ways to do those things. There are also many attitudes and activities that make a corporation, or a person, distinctive. The reason the workers get excited about coming to work (if they do) is something other than the excitement of enriching investors.

Red Hat has a lot of people who are passionate about their work, in part because of the exciting technological challenges, and in part because of a set of widely shared values. Our open source products grow out of values and customs that include transparency and collaboration. This is one of the things about the company that I find distinctive and inspiring, but it also presents challenges. In acting as an attorney, there are obvious limits to transparency, because attorneys must take account of and honor competing values, including confidentiality. There’s a built in tension in the value sets that’s challenging.

A special treat of the meeting was dinner at the Ingram collection in downtown in Durham. It’s a semi-secret institution that turned out to be a proper museum devoted to my favorite automobile, the Porsche. It had some 35 vintage and rare Porsches along with a couple of stray but also gorgeous new Ferraris. The Porsches included several historic 356’s, many variations of the 911 (though they didn’t have anything to line up with my particular 911s (Clara)) a Carrera GT supercar and a recent GT3. Some of the examples took years to obtain. They were all lovingly restored and displayed. One could trace the stylistic touches through the years that connected the designs organically, like DNA.

The Ingram collection could be viewed as conspicuous consumption that takes the category to a whole new level of wretched excess. But it felt more like the Rodin sculptures at the NC Museum, or the Frick collection in NYC. Frick’s former house, a mansion facing Central Park, contains a collection of old master and Impressionist art that is pound for pound one of the best in the world. I presume, without having studied the issue, that Mr. Frick was a robber baron with the worst of them. But whatever his personal failings, his collecting became itself a creative act. And so has Mr. Ingram created a sort of collective work.

It was interesting that the collection not only discourages photographs, but goes so far as to impound cameras from its guests. I can understand the need to be security conscious, but I wondered if anything else was going on. It did occur to me that if class warfare ever breaks out, the mobs with pitchforks might show up in a state of dangerously high excitement. But they might settle for a Porsche.

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December 5, 2010

Winter’s Bone, a beautiful, powerful meth movie

Some years back I developed the view that the age of written fiction was almost over and being replaced by the age of cinema fiction. Would people continue to take on the hard work of reading a book if they could have same experience without so much effort? The experiences aren’t perfect substitutes, of course, but there’s overlap. I’m not so worried now about written fiction, which is diminished as a cultural force but still around. But it does worry me that cinema seems less vital and ambitious in recent times. Could the age of cinema be ending? What comes next? The age of YouTube? At any rate, I haven’t been tempted to go out to many movies this year, and haven’t seen many new ones that I really cared about on the small screen.

Winter’s Bone is a notable exception. We saw it on DVD Friday night, and it was great. The subject matter didn’t sound particularly promising — hardscrabble life in rural Missouri — but the movie manages to combine gritty realism with a dreamlike quality. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is an understated tour de force. She plays Ree, a 17-year-old whose father has disappeared, whose mother has advanced dementia, and whose younger brother and sister are completely dependent on her. Then she is informed that their cabin will be foreclosed on because her father jumped bail, and sets out to find him.

The land and culture reminded me of my own ancestral roots in southern Appalachia. Just as in southwestern Virginia, along with the poverty, there were aspects of the Ozarks countryside that were beautiful and touching. The scene where working people gathered in a home to make traditional music with guitars, fiddle and banjo reminded me of sounds I heard in bits and pieces as a child when we visited grandparents. The music reaffirmed that the possibility of community still exists.

But a central part of the story of Winter’s Bone is about the breakdown of community and the tragic social effects of methamphetamine. Ree’s father was a cooker, and everyone connected with him is also connected directly or indirectly to the meth business. Most of them are angry, paranoid, depressed, violent people. Their family lives are unhappy, and their communities are fractured. But they have not lost all dignity.

The depiction of meth culture seemed realistic and unsensational, and consistent with a book I read a few months back, Nick Reding’s Methland, a non-fiction account of the effects of meth in small town America. Reding makes the case that meth has devastated parts of rural and small town America. He does a good job tying together the sociology with the biology, history, and economics, and tells some good, and sad, stories. Although the successive waves of official and popular drug scare stories (such as the dangers of marijuana, which never killed anyone) might make one skeptical that meth is exceptionally dangerous, Reding has evidence that it is, both to individual addicts and to communities.

Winter’s Bone tends to confirm that view, but it isn’t making an argument. It’s like other great fiction, in that it reveals a side of life that we couldn’t learn about through any other medium, and one that changes, at least a little, how we look at the world around us.

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