Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy. “It’s a breakthrough,” Heather Van Mater, a pediatric rheumatologist at Duke who has cared for Sasha, told me. She and her colleagues treat people who, just 10 years ago, might have been given up for lost and locked away. “We can make them better,” Van Mater said. “It’s unbelievably rewarding.”
While each of these autoimmune conditions is rare, the field of autoimmune neurology is expanding, and may force a reexamination of mental illness generally. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system.
Imagine a transit system where there are no turnstiles, where the police presence is minimal because cops aren’t lurking around to enforce fares. Picture a subway and bus network that is free, open and functional because those who profit most from it pay for it.
Lawmakers in Kansas City, Missouri took a step in just this direction earlier in December, passing a bill that directed the city’s manager to set aside $8 million a year to cover the fare of $1.50 for every rider. It is expected to save frequent bus users in the city of 490,000 people about $1,000 a year.
Tweeting his admiration, New York City Councilmember Brad Lander (D-Park Slope) called the step “visionary,” adding in parentheses that it “might take NYC a while, but this really is where we all need to aim.”
The push for free mass transit is part of a large democratic socialist (or social-democratic) resurgence — Medicare for All, free public college, a Green New Deal — in which demands for free, universally available public goods are rising and finding receptive ears.
Here in New York, we already have an example of free public transit: the Staten Island Ferry. In 1997, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani lifted the ferry’s already minimal 50-cent charge as a gesture of gratitude to the city’s only majority-white borough, whose voters had helped nudge him to a narrow victory four years earlier.
I think there is even a better case for making transit free in upstate cities -- they collect so little revenue from it -- it's almost a moot point. If you could have faster boarding and exiting from the buses, the savings of not collecting and processing fare payments would mean the whole system would actually be cheaper for taxpayers to operate.
Do you order different sizes of clothing online, knowing you can return the one that doesn't fit?
Did you know the ones you return are sometimes sent straight to landfill?
Online shopping has created a boom in perfectly good products ending up in dumpsters and landfills, according to Adria Vasil, an environmental journalist and managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine.
During the spring and summer of this year, Shafer and his fellow researchers looked at 37 rainwater samples taken over a week from 30 different sites predominantly near the east coast, though as far afield as Alabama and Washington. They found that each sample contained at least one of the 36 different compounds being studied.
While total PFAS concentrations were generally less than 1 nanogram per liter (ng/l), the highest total concentration was nearly 5.5 ng/l in a single sample from Massachusetts. Several samples contained total PFAS levels at or about 4 ng/l.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established a health advisory level of 70 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA in drinking water. But many states have either proposed or already set significantly lower drinking water standards. Wisconsin, for example, has proposed a preventative action limit of 2 ng/l for combined PFOS and PFOA.
Shafer says he suspects PFAS chemicals are entering rainwater through a variety of avenues, like direct industrial emissions and evaporation from PFAS-laden fire-fighting foams. Still, “there’s a dearth of knowledge about what’s supporting the atmospheric concentrations and ultimately deposition of PFAS”, he says.
Two connected railroad corridors, long mired in uncertainty, inched closer to a potentially recreational future in the past two months.
In October, New York State reached an agreement with Saratoga & North Creek Railway (owned by Iowa Pacific Holdings of Chicago) seeking a “voluntary abandonment” designation of the line that runs from North Creek to the old Tahawus mine in Newcomb. Then in November, the Warren County Public Works Committee voted 9-2 to begin the abandonment process for the 40-mile stretch of tracks the county owns from North Creek south to Hadley. Warren County also owns the land beneath the tracks. The voluntary abandonment, which has to be approved by the federal Surface Transportation Board (a process that takes about six months), frees the state, counties and municipalities involved to explore other uses for the corridor besides freight and passenger rail.
I think it would be really neat if they converted the Vanderwhacker Railroad line into a bicycle and snowmobile trail. While they can't undo the rail-bed permanently laid, they can take advantage of it to make it easier for people to hike back or bicycle and explore the wilderness during all seasons. Moreover, climate change, leading to less snow, it's increasingly difficult to have snowmobile trails with tracks under the snow. Maybe eventually they could also open it up to seasonal ATV or UTV use, although that's probably a bit of stretch for New York. Plus I think it would be nice if the Vanderwhacker Rail Bridge over the Hudson River could be safely crossed by foot.
A little ways back, following the old road west from the gravel pit on Irish Hill Road, there is a campsite. It is a nice little campsite, on a westerly slope, about a 1/4 mile from the road.
