Latest news with #ArthurMiller
Atlantic
4 days ago
- Health
- Atlantic
Climate Change Is Doing a Number on People's Summertime Blues
Living in the heat is bleak. So is beating it. Ziyu Wang / Connected Archives July 26, 2025, 7:30 AM ET Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker , the author Arthur Miller described urbanites' Depression-era coping mechanisms: People caught the breeze on open-air trolleys, climbed onto the back of ice trucks, and flocked to the beach. In the evenings, they slept in parks or dragged their mattresses onto fire escapes. But since air conditioning went mainstream, in the 1960s, the easiest way to beat the heat has been by staying indoors—at home, the office, the mall—where cool air is a constant and blinds are often drawn to prevent homes from overheating (and electric bills from skyrocketing). For this convenience, Americans sacrifice the benefits of sunshine and the opportunities for fun it creates. As climate change turns up the temperature, summers in America are coming down to a choice between enduring the heat and avoiding it—both of which might, in their own ways, be making people sick. In cities across the country, summers are, on average, 2.6 degrees hotter than they were some 50 years ago. In Phoenix, where a 95-degree day is a relief, schedules are arranged around the darkness; Jeffrey Gibson, an accountant who works from home, takes his eight-month-old daughter out for walks before 6:30 a.m.; after that, it's so hot that she flushes bright red if they venture outside. He spends the rest of his day indoors unless leaving is absolutely necessary. It's like this from April to October. Gibson recently told his wife, 'Man, I think I'm a little depressed.' Josef A. Von Isser, a therapist in Tucson, Arizona, told me that feeling low in the summer comes up a lot with his clients. Some feel that the heat affects them directly; others struggle with its indirect effects, such as fewer opportunities to socialize and be somewhere other than home or the office. All of them, he suspects, might be experiencing seasonal affective disorder. The DSM-5 categorizes SAD as a type of major depression with a seasonal pattern, with symptoms such as sadness, feelings of worthlessness, and low energy. Usually, it presents in the winter, though scientists don't agree on why. Some suspect that it's because a lack of sun exposure may contribute to decreased levels of serotonin, a hormone that regulates mood, as well as vitamin D, which helps stimulate serotonin activity. Another theory links low exposure to sunlight with unusually high levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep. Read: The surprising truth about seasonal depression Summer SAD is generally accepted as a variety of the disorder, but it's much rarer than the winter form; one study from earlier this year puts its prevalence at about 0.6 percent. That makes summer SAD especially hard to study. 'It's clearly a different kind of illness,' Paul Desan, a psychiatry professor at Yale, told me, but 'it's not in their imagination.' Unlike the winter form, which comes with a tendency to overeat, oversleep, and withdraw from society, summer SAD involves reduced appetite, insomnia, and restlessness—all of which can also be effects of heat. The scientific literature shows that heat is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, aggression, and reduced cognitive abilities. Uncomfortably hot nights, longer periods of daylight, and extended stretches of time spent indoors all disrupt sleep, which can in turn fuel mood disorders, Amruta Nori-Sarma, an environmental-health professor at Harvard, told me. Extreme heat can also be an obstacle to exercising, spending time in nature, and socializing, all of which can make people feel good and also double as important coping mechanisms for emotional distress. Taking comfort in air conditioning when it's too hot out is a natural human response. But air-conditioned spaces can be stifling in their own way. Staying home where it's cool also means socializing less; some offices and homes hardly let in a wink of sunlight all day. It's plausible that in the summer, people experience SAD symptoms not only from excessive heat but also because they spend all of their time avoiding the sun, Kim Meidenbauer, a psychology professor at Washington State University, told me. 'It does make sense to me that you'd have, potentially, an analogous pattern of effects' to winter SAD, she said. The link between indoor time and summer SAD hasn't been studied, but plenty of Americans, even if they don't meet the DSM-5 criteria, are noticing that summer is starting to feel a lot like winter. Reddit abounds with users who lament that being forced indoors by the heat gives them 'summer depression.' America's summer quandary—suffer inside or out?—will become only more persistent as climate change intensifies. In the United States, heat waves have grown more frequent and intense every decade since the 1960s. During a single heat wave last month, people in 29 states were warned to stay inside to avoid dangerously high temperatures. All of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the impacts of escalating heat on mental health. 'I am not optimistic,' Ayman Fanous, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona, told me, noting that heat also has a well-established link with suicide risk and can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Many Americans don't have access to air conditioning, or they work jobs that require them to be outside in the heat. Those who can stay cool inside may avoid the most severe consequences but still end up miserable for half of the year. Read: Earth's new gilded era As long as summer SAD remains poorly understood, the options for addressing it will be limited. Treatment for winter SAD usually involves exposure to light boxes that mimic sunlight, but these aren't recommended for summer SAD, because it might have a different neurobiological basis, Fanous said. For now, the first-line treatments are SSRIs such as Prozac—which can make people even more sensitive to heat. For those with the means, the best strategy for beating summer SAD might be to move somewhere cooler. After eight years in Phoenix, Gibson has had enough of hiding from the heat for six months at a time and is ready to leave behind what he believes is his own summer SAD. Later this year, he plans to move his family to Colorado, where he hopes to be able to bring his daughter out during daylight hours. Yet Colorado summers, too, are becoming uncomfortably hot—and the same goes around the country. Last month, Alaska issued its first-ever heat advisory. As summer temperatures continue to rise, perhaps Americans will start to look back with envy on the ways our forebears beat the heat. The hotter summer nights get, the more sleeping on the fire escape starts to sound like a luxury.
Wall Street Journal
6 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
The Most-Taught Books in American Classrooms Have Barely Changed in 30 Years
Teenagers in English classrooms today in many ways seem a world apart from students decades ago. The books sitting on their desks, however, are remarkably similar. Classics including Shakespeare plays, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' and Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible' all appear in the top 10 books assigned by English teachers at public middle and high schools today, according to a new report. Six of the top 10—John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' and 'Hamlet' among them—overlap with the most-taught books reported in an influential 1989 study.
Washington Post
16-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
This job is an American symbol. It looks different now.
You're reading Shifts, an illustrated history of work. Sign up to get it in your inbox. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many men spent their lives traveling from town to town selling Bibles, encyclopedias and home goods. The job was so much a part of the U.S. economy that the door-to-door salesman became a cultural symbol, immortalized in the work of Arthur Miller, David Mamet and the Maysles brothers. Daryl Ching was not a career salesman. He was a Toronto teen knocking on doors and pushing products for a little extra cash in the '90s. But the lessons he learned from the experience — about value, failure and human connection — have stayed with him throughout his life. I would drag a cart to different businesses across town selling trinkets. No one wanted them. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Some buildings had 'No Soliciting' signs. Once, I made the mistake of asking for permission to go up to a higher floor and got escorted out of a business by security guards. My boss told me to ignore the signs, so I started going straight to the elevators and made plenty of sales. At the end of a nine-hour shift, I would bring home maybe $20. I wanted to quit. Back at the office, there were always lots of people in the waiting room for job interviews because there was so much employee turnover. None of us envisioned a life in door-to-door sales. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement We worked for the Toronto branch of a big franchise. Sometimes the owner will come and give us motivational speeches. We would all stand, around and listen. The top salespeople would get to ring the 'JUICE' bell. If you sold enough product, everyone would clap and yell as you rang it. I approached the top salespeople to ask how they did it. Their advice helped me change my entire approach. I turned on the charm. People put up defenses when you approach them. I loved to watch their face transform as they let their guard down. I made people laugh. I tried different tricks. Suddenly, I was selling $750 to $1,000 worth of products per shift and ringing the bell every single day. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement I still got rejected more often than not. But eventually the rejections just start to roll off you. You don't fear them anymore. Every 'no' just gets you closer to a 'yes.' By the end of the summer, I had learned that rejection teaches you never to be afraid of asking for what you want. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Now, I run an accounting business. I'm selling a service, not knickknacks, but I still use the lessons I learned as a door-to-door salesman. For example, if I have prospective customers in the same area, I'll call ahead and tell them I happen to be nearby and ask if we can meet in person. I expect that they might not all work out, but I know that in person I'll have a better shot. At the end of the day, people make decisions based on emotion and then justify it with logic. When you make a face-to-face connection, you become more than just an accountant or salesman. Those are opportunities you don't get from a phone call.
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood invites us to laugh at ourselves – I wanted my music to do the same
In October 1953, Dylan Thomas took part in a symposium on poetry and film in New York. A recording of the event captures the Welsh writer's speaking voice in what would be one of his last public appearances before his death 12 days later at the age of 39. Amid the pops, ticks and crackles of the tape, we hear Thomas on sparkling form, telling the audience about an experimental play he had been to see 'in a cellar or a sewer or somewhere', accompanied by the US playwright Arthur Miller. In the middle of the performance, he recounts, Miller turned to him and remarked, 'Good god, this is avant garde. In a moment the hero's going to take his clothes off.' Roars of laughter follow this anecdote, before questions turn to Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood, which had enjoyed a number of public readings in New York City that year, billed as a 'new comedy'. Under Milk Wood is quite a different sort of play to the avant garde production Miller and Thomas had attended. Set in the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub ('Bugger all' backwards), it documents the dreams, digressions and foibles of the town's inhabitants in a blaze of poetic beauty and vibrant satire. It is a 'play for voices', borne out of the world of the mid-20th-century BBC radio feature – a fluid, experimental genre in which narration, acting, song, verse, music and sound effects were mixed together often without the constraint of a dramatic plot. Thomas himself was a gifted radio actor and had taken part in a number of BBC radio features, including The Dark Tower by Louis MacNiece and In Parenthesis by David Jones. When Milk Wood was first broadcast in 1954 on the BBC's Third Programme, the cast was led by his friend and acting companion, Richard Burton. I was only dimly aware of Thomas's radio play when I was first approached about adapting it. I knew that the script contained extensive passages of memorable narration and this, alone, was enough of a draw for me. The proposition – from Nova Music Opera, Presteigne festival and Spitalfields music festival – was to compose a music-theatre adaptation of Thomas's radio play in an abridged form combining narration, acting and singing, in the vein of Stravinsky's l'Histoire du Soldat. I was both curious and cautious. Since its first broadcast, Milk Wood has been through all sorts of transformations – from staged theatrical productions to feature films, an animated version, a ballet, a contemporary classical opera and even a jazz suite. The question of what it means to 'stage' a radio play has been debated vigorously. Then there is the challenge of setting Thomas's words to music, given that his language already possesses such a distinctive music, shape and rhythm of its own. Exploring relationships between words and music has marked much of my work to date. I have created musical settings of poetry, fragments of prose and private letters by figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Don Paterson, Joseph Roth and Aubrey Beardsley. Setting words to music can be a minefield for composers. As Virginia Woolf remarked in her 1937 broadcast On Craftsmanship: 'Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.' Words are living entities, but composers attempt to capture them, to fix them in a foreign structure as a jeweller would a precious stone in a metal setting. My first task was to cut 90 minutes of material down to just under an hour. I shrunk it by degrees until I arrived at a shortened version of Milk Wood that preserved Thomas's temporal arc stretching from dawn to dusk. Many of Llareggub's most notorious residents remain in my text: Captain Cat with his seafaring memories, Mr Pugh who studies a book titled Lives of the Great Poisoners as he prepares to murder his wife, Willy Nilly the postman who reads other people's letters, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and the ghosts of her two henpecked husbands, Polly Garter pursuing endless liaisons, Mr Waldo singing drunkenly in the pub, and the dead lovers who surface to haunt the living. Scenes from Under Milk Wood is written for a small mixed instrumental ensemble and a cast of one narrator, two singers and two actors who perform multiple roles. Like a fox in a hen house, I've enjoyed running riot with the music, devising a score that includes atmospheric underscoring for narration and spoken poetry, lyrical and declamatory operatic singing, and my attempt at a kind of modern folksong. The hybrid form of the piece connects back to the experimental radio feature world that first gave rise to Milk Wood, and the decision by our director Harvey Evans to return the production to a semi-staged radio studio is therefore fitting. Our cast turn up in the mid-1950s for a live recording session and endeavour, with scripts in hand, to bring Thomas's eccentric characters to life, just as the original broadcasting group did over 70 years ago. For today's audiences, the radio studio staging of Scenes from Under Milk Wood also provides an opportunity to be transported, in the same manner as the listeners of the 1954 broadcast, into what Evans describes as the 'living mosaic' of Llareggub. The music seeks to celebrate the comedic aspects of Thomas's loving and humorous portrait of human imperfection, bringing back into focus his subtle invitation to audiences to learn to laugh at themselves. For, as one famous jester in another age memorably put it, 'Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere'. The world premiere of Scenes from Under Milk Wood is at Spitalfields festival, London, on 2 July. More about Ninfea Cruttewell-Reader here.
Yahoo
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sabrina Carpenter releases a demure album cover she says has been 'approved by God'
Sabrina Carpenter has always been a triple threat. She can sing, she can dance, and she has a wicked sense of humour. So rather than be cowed by the outraged response to the original album art for her upcoming album Man's Best Friend, she's decided to troll the trolls right back. Puritanical Gen Z teens were horrified when the 26-year-old pop star released the first album cover, which features her on her knees with a man's hand loosely holding strands of her blonde hair like a leash. It was par for the course for Carpenter, who loves to subvert her carefully crafted image as a pint-sized pin-up by being a bit of a pervert. But you'd think she'd posed nude in a dog collar the way people reacted to the picture. In response, the singer is now offering an alternate cover for people who wish to enjoy Man's Best Friend in a God-honouring way. 'Here is a new alternate cover approved by God available now on my website ,' Carpenter posted on X, with two black-and-white images of herself in a ball gown on the arm of a man. i signed some copies of Man's Best Friend for you guys& here is a new alternate cover approved by God available now on my website 🤍 — Sabrina Carpenter (@SabrinaAnnLynn) June 25, 2025 The photos are almost a direct recreation of a 1957 photograph of Marilyn Monroe embracing her then-husband Arthur Miller. Monroe, of course, made the song Diamond's a Girl's Best Friend famous with her performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. With Man's Best Friend, Carpenter appears to be paying homage to another iconic blonde while exploring the troubled dynamics of heterosexual relationships. By now Carpenter is an old hand at weathering scandals over her being seen as 'too sexy'. In 2023, a priest came under fire for allowing Carpenter to film the music video for her song Feather at the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello was later investigated for financial misconduct and fired in 2024. There were reports over 800 complaints made to OFCOM earlier this year over her performance at the BRITS, where she included a cheeky pre-Watershed romp with a dancer dressed as a member of the King's Guard. And there is the regular hum of disapproval around her benignly raunchy stage shows that includes demonstrating sex positions in front of an audience that skews towards young girls and women. Carpenter is certainly having the last laugh, though. Her new single Manchild went straight to Number One, and Man's Best Friend is due out on 29 August 2025.
