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Obama Dances the Tango During a State Dinner in Argentina

by ChandaThibeault Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Obama danced the tango during a state dinner in Argentina on Wednesday, after receiving a friendly invitation from a professional to join her on the dance floor. The president, who initially tried to decline the dance, nailed the impromptu performance, which was both wonderfully awkward and a delight to watch for everyone else.

Well, almost everyone. By morning light, political pundits jumped at the opportunity to chastise the president. That buzzkill brought to you by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

However, the advance person who let him do the tango, that person ought to be looking for work on somebody’s—in somebody’s campaign very far away. That was a tremendous mistake. It’s fine to go to Argentina, you want to do the work, but you’ve got to be careful of these little photo ops and optics. Baseball games and tango, that’s inconsistent with the seriousness of the day.

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Obama Dances the Tango During a State Dinner in Argentina

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6 Reasons Why You Should Never Use VOC Paint Again

by FaustoLWHK Posted on March 21, 2016

You’re probably used to buying paint either by the brand name or by the color, like Benjamin Moore, or blue.

But when it comes to covering your walls and ceiling, there’s a much more important decision you should be making, and that has to do with the chemicals actually used to make the paint itself.

One of the most toxic is actually a group collectively referred to as “volatile organic compounds,” or VOCs.

VOCs are a large group of carbon-based chemicals that easily evaporate at room temperature, which makes them easy to inhale. One of the most common sources of VOCs in our homes is household paint. VOCs are used as solvents, or thinners, that work together with the resins that bind together all the ingredients of the paint and gets them to stick on the wall. In other words, they may improve performance and durability, explains DunnEdwards.com here.

However, the VOCs “off gas”into the air as the paint dries. Most people can smell high levels of some VOCS, though other VOCs have no odor. Odor does not indicate how dangerous the chemicals are, says the Minnesota Department of Health. Regardless of how badly they smell,many VOCs,which can include formaldehyde, acetone, benzene and perchloroethylene, canmake you sick in a variety of ways.

That’s why I’ve pulled together this list of 6 reasons why you should never use paint that contains VOCs again.

1) Worsen symptoms of asthma. If you already suffer from asthma, inhaling air contaminated with VOCs could trigger an asthmatic reaction. Scientists studied 400 toddlers and preschoolers and discovered that children who breathed in fumes from water-based paints and solvents are two to four times more likely to suffer allergies or asthma.

2) Create flu-like symptoms. Even if you don’t get asthma from breathing in paint fumes, you could experience runny nose, itchy eyes, joint pain and other symptoms that strongly resemble the flu.Solvents that evaporate into the air from the paint are inhaled, absorbed into the lungs and then into the blood stream. They can irritate the eyes, nose and throat and make you feel like you’ve contracted the flu.

3) Potentially cause cancer. Many chemicals in the VOC family are considered carcinogenic by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Professional painters have a 20 percent increased risk of contracting a range of cancers, especially lung cancer, says the World Health Organization.

4) Get dizzy and black out. Sometimes the chemicals that off-gas in VOC-laden paint are so overpowering, they cause people to get very dizzy and in extreme cases, black out. This could be particularly dangerous if you were at the top of a ladder, perhaps painting a ceiling, where you were inhaling paint fumes very close to the source.

5) Suffer infertility problems – A study from Sheffield and Manchester University suggested that men regularly exposed to chemicals in paint may be more prone to fertility problems. Painters and decorators are the primary victims. However, the researchers found a 250 percent increase in “risk of sperm motility” among men exposed to the chemicals widely used as solvents in water-based paints, which could give any guy pause about using paints that contain VOCs.

6) Get “painter’s dementia” – In addition to increased likelihood of getting lung cancer, painters can develop a neurological condition brought on by long-term exposure to paint solvents called “painter’s dementia.”

What You Can Use Instead

You could decide to forego paints that contain VOCs because it’s the right thing to do for your painter!

Increasingly, you can buy paint that contains no VOCs online and from stores that specialize in healthy green building supplies. Consumer Reports offers this helpful guide to VOC content to look for when you shop; if you’re a subscriber, you can see how they rate various no- or low-VOC paints that are available in the marketplace.

Most major brands, including Home Depot, Benjamin Moore and Pittsburgh Paints, make a no-VOC option. Just be careful when the paint is mixed, as the base paint could be no-VOC but the color pigment could contain VOCs. You want the entire mixture to be no-VOC.

Water-based paints will have less VOCs in them than oil-based paints. However, there’s no guarantee that just because a paint is water-based that it will be VOC-free. You must explicitly ask for no-VOC paint before you buy.

Regardless of the paint you use, make sure the room or house is well-ventilated while it is being painted. Turn on fans and open windows and doors. If possible, do not sleep in a room that has been freshly painted; especially don’t sleep in or use a room if the paint on the walls isn’t completely dry. If you wake up with a headache or discomfort, do not sleep in the room for a couple of days, until you’re sure it’s fragrance-free.

Related
Feng Shui Paint Color Guide
Heavy Metal Toxicity and Your Health

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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6 Reasons Why You Should Never Use VOC Paint Again

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Non-Stick Cookware Alternatives That Won’t Give You Cancer

by GarnetTca476 Posted on February 5, 2016

Research has shown that cooking with Teflon-type cookware could expose you to toxic chemicals that might cause cancer.

What can you cook with instead? Here’s a list of your best options, all of which are available in kitchen stores as well as big box and department stores or online.

Cast Iron – For decades I’ve been using cast iron for five reasons: it’s indestructible, it’s inexpensive, it’s easy to clean, it’s versatile and it works! Once cast iron is properly seasoned, you can cook absolutely anything in it, though you wouldn’t really need to use it for dishes that require boiling water. But it’s great for sauteeing, frying, braising, stewing and cooking something as simple as scrambled eggs. Plus, it works as well on the stovetop as it does in the oven. In fact, if you’re cooking a dish that needs to be browned on the top, you can easily move your cast iron skillet or casserole from the range to the oven broiler without missing a beat.

Clean it with a simple scrub brush or Brillo-type pad and hot soapy water, then either dry it with a towel, or just put it back on the range for a minute and let the heat evaporate whatever water remains. One downside is that cast iron is heavy. But I personally like the exercise I get using it and find that other than a 10-qt Dutch oven, it’s never too much to handle.

Stainless Steel – Stainless steel is excellent for boiling potatoes, rice and pasta, or for browning and sauteeing foods. Stainless steel can tolerate high heats, reports TwoKitchenJunkies.com in The Ultimate Guide to Healthy Cookware, unlike nonstick pans, which are unsafe when exposed to high heats. And as long as the stainless cookware (or any cookware, for that matter) doesn’t have plastic handles, it can go from the range to the oven. The downside of stainless is that food can quickly burn if the heat gets too high or the pan gets too dry. Then, the pan can be difficult to scrub clean. The denser or heavier the pan is, the better it will be at conducting heat and the easier it will be to clean.

Aluminum – Aluminum cooks a lot like stainless steel, but is a bit lighter. Cooking at high heat won’t emit toxic fumes, like Teflon-type pots and pans. But there is some concern that aluminum can leach into food and potentially have human health problems. I have aluminum 9×13 baking pans that I used to also bake lasagna in. However, I noticed that the lasagna would sometimes pick up an aluminum taste, because the acidic tomato sauce in the lasagna reacted with the aluminum in a corrosive way.

TheKitchn.com recommends using non-reactive cookware like stainless steel whenever your dish contains acidic or alkaline ingredients. Aluminum is good for boiling water, sauteeing vegetables and searing meatthough don’t deglaze the pan with an acid-based liquid! That said, you can buy anodized aluminum, which creates a leach-resistant, non-stick surface. The price will be similar to stainless steel.

Stoneware & Ceramics – Stoneware and ceramics can make good casserole dishes. However, beware of those glazed inside with materials that could contain lead or other toxic chemicals. Contra Costa (CA) Health Services warns against using traditional glazed terra cotta (clay) dishware from Mexico and other Latin American countries, as it is likely contaminated with lead. Similarly, the Department of the Environment in Australia warns against using highly decorated traditional dishes from some Asian countries,and antique pots and pans that are heavily decorated.

Glass – Glass is terrific for cookware, though it’s primarily available as a pot, rather than a skillet, and as baking pans, pie pans and casserole dishes. It’s non reactive, affordable and can go from the oven to the table, as long as you set it on a potholder or non-metal trivet until it cools down. One downside is that if you put hot glass on a cool metal surface, like the top of a stove range or a metal trivet, it could shatter into a thousand pieces. So use glassbut use it carefully, and pay attention to extreme temperature shifts.

If you currently use non-stick cookware and want to get rid of it, don’t donate it to someone else. Either send it back to the manufacturer, or just throw it away. If you must continue cooking with it, use it on very low heat and only for boiling water or other tasks that have little chance of burning. Do not use metal utensils, like spatulas or stirring spoons, as those could scratch the nonstick coating off and into the food you’re cooking.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Non-Stick Cookware Alternatives That Won’t Give You Cancer

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Is Man-Made Noise Messing Up the Oceans?

by KatrinaSandover Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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We may imagine the bottom of the deep blue sea as a peaceful, quiet place—certainly compared with the blaring horns and chit-chattering radios of rush-hour traffic. But the ocean is filled with the sounds of undulating waves, marine animals calling out to one another, and, increasingly, the ceaseless din of human commercial activity. Over the past 60 years, our contribution to the undersea cacophony has doubled every decade, and much of that noise is generated close to the shore. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers—or 62 miles—of the coast.

A new study in the journal Nature finds that all the racket from our ships and construction activities penetrates deep beneath the surface, not merely messing with the communications of undersea mammals but changing the very nature of life at the bottom. The researchers found that bottom-dwellers such as small clams and lobsters, which are crucial to the underwater ecosystem, alter their behavior when exposed to man-made noise. To put it simply, they don’t move around as much.

Here’s why it matters: These creatures are responsible for churning up sediment when they burrow into the seabed, thus increasing oxygen levels and distributing nutrients. Their waning activity, the study’s authors say, may impact seabed productivity, sediment biodiversity, and even fisheries production. “There has been much discussion over the last decade of the extent to which whales, dolphins and fish stocks, might be disturbed by the sounds from shipping, wind farms, and their construction,” co-author Tim Leighton, an expert in underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton in England, noted in a statement accompanying the paper. “However, one set of ocean denizens has until now been ignored…These are the bottom feeders, such as crabs, shellfish and invertebrates similar to the ones in our study, which are crucial to healthy and commercially successful oceans because they form the bottom of the food chain.”

And these kinds of creatures, unlike fish and dolphins, can’t simply relocate to escape the noise. To maintain healthy oceans, we humans might simply have to keep it down.

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Is Man-Made Noise Messing Up the Oceans?

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New Paper Suggests More Smog = More Crime

by FloySiebenhaar0 Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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A reader draws my attention to some “@kdrum bait” by Chris Mooney in the Washington Post today. Mooney writes about a new study that investigates violent crime upwind and downwind of interstate highways in Chicago. The study’s conclusion: higher rates of tailpipe pollution (measured via carbon monoxide levels) lead to higher violent crime rates:

Moving from the median CO day to the 90th percentile (0.5 ppb increase) is associated with nearly 5% more violent crime. The analogous effect on property crime is statistically insignificant and small. This discrepancy across crime types may suggest that the primary mechanism is physiological; that is, the pollution might make people more irritable and impulsive, thus leading to more violent crime. As a point of comparison, the 5% increase in violent crime from a high-CO day is comparable to the estimated effect of moving from the 25-30°C (77-86°F) maximum temperature bin to the 30-35°C (86-95°F) bin (7% increase in violent crime). That is, the increase in violent crime when moving from a typical CO day to a high-CO day is comparable to the increase associated with moving from a warm day to a hot day.

….We estimate that the downwind side of interstates experience 2.2 percent more violent crimes than when the wind is blowing in the opposite direction. Although we estimate that the effect of pollution on crime is modest in magnitude, our conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the cost of mobile pollution-induced crime in the United States is on the order of $100-200 million annually.

Of course, this isn’t really Kevin bait. Needless to say, I would expect higher crime rates downwind of urban highways because of lead emissions. However, this is an effect over the very long term. If you were born in a high-emission area during the era between 1950-1980 or so, you’re likely to suffer from lead poisoning that leads to a greater propensity for crime when you grow up. This explains the long-term rise and fall of violent crime over the past five or six decades.

However, this paper literally looks at violent crime rates from day to day. The authors conclude that, just as crime goes up during hot weather, it also goes up when pollution levels are higher. If this is true, it suggests that exposure to tailpipe pollutants has some kind of immediate, transient effect.

Why? The authors suggest several mechanisms. Pollution may have a direct effect on brain chemistry. Or it may simply be unpleasant and annoying, which can trigger aggressive behavior. Or it may have an effect on how many people are outdoors, which might indirectly affect the crime rate in some way. Since this is a brand new finding, it’s hard to say. Obviously it needs to be confirmed, and more research is needed before we understand the causal mechanism.

But interesting nonetheless.

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New Paper Suggests More Smog = More Crime

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Obamacare’s Growing Pains Are About What You’d Expect in a Newly Competitive Market

by Mamie2869mu Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday United Healthcare announced that they would be exiting the Obamacare exchanges after 2016. They were losing too much money and figured it was time to call it quits.

What does this mean? Here are a few bullet points:

UH is a relatively small part of Obamacare, accounting for about 5 percent of exchange members.
However, its presence is bigger in some states than others.
Overall, then, this is only moderately bad news for Obamacare as a program. In some places, however, it’s very bad news. And obviously, for the people affected who have to switch plans in 2017, it’s a huge pain in the ass.

Beyond this, the news depends on why UH is doing so badly:

It could be that UH simply isn’t competitive. If that’s the case, it’s nothing more than the expected result of marketplace competition. If other companies are more efficient or offer better products, you’re in trouble.
However, it’s also possible that UH’s exit exposes some fundamental problems with Obamacare. UH claims—without offering any real evidence—that people are signing up when they get sick and then dropping out. This is unsustainable in any insurance market, and if people really have found loopholes that allow this on a large scale, it’s bad news for Obamacare. It would be especially bad news since Republicans are rooting for Obamacare to fail and will refuse to allow any changes that might make it work better.

Generally speaking, I think that what we’ve been seeing recently is a fairly predictable consequence of setting up a competitive market: there’s going to be a lot of churn at the beginning, as companies figure out what works best. Some, like UH and the ill-fated co-ops, will drop out. Others will discover they were too optimistic and will raise rates. Others will gain market share at their expense because they’re better run or made better actuarial projections. In a few years, this will all settle down and we’ll finally have a pretty good idea of just how well Obamacare works and how much it costs.

We could have avoided this kind of thing by creating a simpler, more universal program, but that just wasn’t politically possible. Creating a competitive marketplace was the only way to get Obamacare passed. Unfortunately, competition has both pluses and minuses. In theory, it should provide lower prices and better value in the long run. But it might take a while to get there.

More detail is available from John Cohn and Megan McArdle.

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Obamacare’s Growing Pains Are About What You’d Expect in a Newly Competitive Market

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Jeb’s Health Care Plan: More Detail, But It Probably Wouldn’t Accomplish Much

by MinnaChowne Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The standard-issue conservative “replacement” for Obamacare is a familiar hodgepodge of tax credits, health savings accounts, high-risk pools, block granting of Medicaid, tort reform, and interstate purchase of health plans. Today, Jeb Bush has broken the rules and offered up a plan that only includes the first four.

If you’re grading on a curve, that’s a promising start, and Jeb makes things even more interesting by actually offering up a fairly detailed set of alternatives to Obamacare. I’m not sure any Republican candidate has gone anywhere near as far as he has. A few highlights:

He wants to “promote innovation” by speeding up FDA approvals, increasing funding for the NIH, establishing national standards for electronic health records (but, oddly, removing any incentive to abide by them), and conducting a “regulatory spring cleaning.” Some of this is standard conservative stuff, but not all of it.
His plan provides a tax credit that can be used to buy private health insurance for anyone who doesn’t get health insurance through their employer. However, it sounds like the credit would be pretty small, probably on the order of a few thousand dollars.
He wants to broaden the use of health savings accounts.
He wants to get rid of Obamacare’s “Cadillac tax,” but he would replace it with something that sounds to me like it’s basically identical. Maybe I’m missing something here.
“States would be held accountable to ensure access for individuals with pre-existing conditions.” There’s a fair amount of gibberish here, and even Jeb doesn’t seem especially confident that it will work. However, it’s meaningless anyway since insurance companies wouldn’t be required to offer policies at the same rate to everyone (aka “community rating”). “States would report on access to care,” but that’s it. It appears that there’s nothing in Jeb’s plan that prevents insurance companies from simply charging sky-high prices to anyone with a pre-existing condition.
There is, of course, no mandate to buy insurance. This would be catastrophic for insurance companies, except for the fact that Jeb’s plan doesn’t require them to cover patients with pre-existing conditions in the first place.
Jeb almost fooled me by not mentioning block-granting of Medicaid. But of course that’s in there. He calls it “capped allotments” and pairs it up with a proposal to essentially deregulate state Medicaid plans completely but still “hold states accountable for outcomes”—though there’s not a single word about exactly what this means. Jeb’s allotment would grow at the rate of inflation, which means they’d get smaller every year since medical costs typically grow faster than inflation.

Just about every serious health care plan that truly wants to expand coverage relies on a three-legged stool: mandates, community rating, and federal subsidies. Jeb’s plan doesn’t include the first two and offers only a stingy version of the third. It’s much more detailed than your average Republican plan, but in the end it would probably expand coverage hardly at all.

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Jeb’s Health Care Plan: More Detail, But It Probably Wouldn’t Accomplish Much

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The Most Comprehensive Overview Yet of the Kinks’ Glorious Youth

by VernonUJDD Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The Kinks
The Anthology—1964-1971
Sanctuary/BMG

The Kinks’ early years have been rehashed repeatedly over the last two decades, so don’t expect any major revelations from yet another archival dig. However, The Anthology—1964-1971 offers the most comprehensive overview yet of the London band’s glorious youth. With five discs and 140 tracks, this massive set is hardly for the casual listener. It includes demos, rehearsal snippets, alternate takes, and obscure mixes in the service of luring hardcore fans who think they’ve already heard it all. It traces the Kinks’ rapid evolution from a scrappy R&B band playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard covers to purveyors of furious rockers like “You Really Got Me” (arguably an inspiration for heavy metal and punk) to Ray Davies’ emergence as a singularly gifted writer who delivers wry social commentary on “A Well Respected Man,” attains magical beauty with “Waterloo Sunset,” and engages in subversive gender-bending in “Lola.” At their most elegant, the lads still displayed a strong rock and roll streak, thanks to brother Dave Davies’ wicked lead guitar and Mick Avory’s thrashing drums. And while the Kinks continued making strong music into the ’90, these amazing recordings are their best.

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The Most Comprehensive Overview Yet of the Kinks’ Glorious Youth

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Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

by Bernadine Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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After a remarkably quiet start, the US tornado season exploded into action over the weekend, as a battery of tornadoes in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma killed 16 people. The Arkansas towns of Mayflower and Vilona were particularly devastated. Based on preliminary assessments, some of the twisters may have reached EF-3 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning that they had wind gusts of more than 136 miles per hour.

It all amounts to quite the burst of weather whiplash. Just days ago, after all, USA Today could be found calling 2014 the “safest start to tornado season in a century.” April 2014 was certainly looking nothing like April 2011, which featured a staggering 753 tornadoes in the United States, a new all-time record. So what’s up with this sharp variation in the behavior of tornadoes, these extraordinarily powerful storms that afflict the US more than any other part of the world? And could global warming have something to do with the matter?

Until pretty recently, scientists really felt that they couldn’t say much about that question. “The issue of global warming and severe thunderstorms which often result in tornadoes has been an outstanding challenge for the scientific community,” explains Noah Diffenbaugh, an Earth scientist at Stanford University who has focused on the question. For instance, a recent consensus report on extreme storms and climate change, published early last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, found that there was “little confidence” of any trend in tornado occurrence, and also concluded that there were no clear changes in the environments in which these storms form.

In recent months, though, this consensus—that we really don’t know what’s happening with global warming and tornadoes—has been challenged by some interesting new research. To understand why, it helps to first grasp some basics on how tornadoes form, a crucial first step toward determining whether global warming may change them.

Tornadoes emerge in some, but not all, severe thunderstorms, powerful explosions of atmospheric energy that also frequently feature lightning, hail, strong winds, and intense rainfall. Scientific research has determined that while a variety of environmental and atmospheric conditions support severe thunderstorm development, two in particular are crucial. The first is that there have to be high levels of so-called “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, which denotes the instability of the atmosphere, and thus how friendly it is to thunderstorm updrafts. The second condition is that there must be strong wind shear, defined as the difference in speed or direction of winds as one ascends from the surface higher into the atmosphere.

Based on this knowledge, researchers have turned to global climate models in order to predict how global warming could change the relationship between CAPE and shear in the the future. And for a long time, the two factors were basically expected to offset each other. Or as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado researcher Harold Brooks put it in a 2013 paper summarizing the consensus: “Climate model simulations suggest that CAPE will increase in the future and the wind shear will decrease.” So even though higher overall heat might lead to the potential for more explosive storms, the expected decrease in shear meant that potential might not get realized. In other words, it was basically looking like a wash.

The environments in which tornadoes form are changing, according to the latest research. NOAA/Wikimedia Commons

That conclusion fell into question late last year, though, with a paper by Diffenbaugh and two colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a suite of the most state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found, once again, that wind shear decreases under global warming. However, they also found that that didn’t really matter, because the number of days with both high CAPE and high shear nonetheless increased. “We find that in fact, at the monthly or seasonal scale, that decrease in shear does occur over the US,” Diffenbaugh says, “but it’s concentrated in these days with very low CAPE.” That means that the net number of days with high CAPE and high shear was still projected to increase in the future.

That means more favorable environments for severe thunderstorms in general, but what about the subset of those storms that produce tornadoes? For tornado occurrence, Diffenbaugh explains, wind shear very close to the surface appears to be particularly important. In their new modeling study, Diffenbaugh and his colleagues looked at this parameter too, and they found an “increase in the fraction of severe thunderstorm environments that have high CAPE and high low-level shear,” as Diffenbaugh puts it. As the authors wrote, this result is suggestive “of a possible increase in the number of days supportive of tornadic storms.”

The paper by Diffenbaugh and his colleagues represents “the first significant evidence that we might expect to see a change in tornadoes,” says NOAA’s Brooks.

Meanwhile, Brooks thinks he might have found a trend in a different area: actual tornado statistics.

In general, the scientific consensus has been that our tornado data just isn’t good enough to support the idea of any clear, historic trend in tornadic activity. But in his latest research, Brooks thinks he has detected a “pretty strong signal that there’s been an increase in the variability of tornado occurrence on a national scale.” What does that mean? Basically, an increase in erratic behavior: periods with little or no activity, followed by intense bursts of activity.

There’s been “a decrease over the last 40 years in the number of days per year with at least one F1 tornado occurring somewhere in the US,” says Brooks. “At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of days with at least 30 F1 tornadoes.”

As noted above, recent tornado behavior has certainly seemed pretty up and down. According to Brooks, in recent years we’ve seen records for the most tornadoes ever in a 12-month period, as well as for the fewest in a 12-month period. And Brooks says we are also seeing increasing variability in terms of when the tornado season actually starts. (Note: The relationship between Diffenbaugh’s research, and Brooks’ new finding, isn’t clear at this point.)

In summary, then, it would be very premature to say that scientists know precisely what will happen to tornadoes as global warming progresses. However, they have come up with some interesting new results, which point to potentially alarming changes. More generally, the upshot of this research is that tornadoes must change as a result of climate change, because the environments in which they form are changing.

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Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

by EulahWhitten Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s take a break to discuss something important: Is it April Fools or Aprils Fools’? According to the AP style guide, it’s April Fools’. However, Google’s Ngram Viewer, which counts occurrences of phrases in books, tells a different, more nuanced story:

April Fools has been more common than April Fools’ for the entire past century.
However, April Fools’ Day has been far more common than April Fools Day.

So there you have it. Basically, you can probably punctuate it any way you want. Either way, though, I have some bad news for you: the usage of both terms has skyrocketed since 1960, increasing about 3x relative to everything else. This suggests, sadly, that we’ve all gotten way more obsessed with stupid April Fools jokes in recent years.

But there’s also some good news: usage peaked around 2000 and has gone down over the past decade. Unless this is an artifact of Google’s algorithm (which it might be), perhaps it means that we’re finally getting tired of the whole thing. That’s a nice thought, though I quail at the prospect of what’s probably replacing it in our collective id.

BY THE WAY: The increasing popularity of trying to outfox April Fools-savvy readers by playing jokes on March 31 is no longer clever. Knock it off. If you really think you have something good enough to fool people in an amusing way, it should be good enough to work on April 1.

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An Important Question About April Fools’ Day

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