Latest news with #Furman
Time of India
6 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
Stanford longevity expert reverses his age by 10 years with one radical lifestyle shift
What would you do if your body was ageing faster than your birth certificate suggested? For Stanford University 's Dr. David Furman , a leading voice in the science of longevity , the answer lay not in pharmaceuticals or high-tech gadgets, but in nature — and a radical family experiment that turned their lives upside down. According to a report from The Mirror; in 2016, Furman found himself battling chronic migraines and the creeping toll of a stressful lifestyle in urban California. A pioneer of the 1000 Immunomes Project and an associate professor at Stanford, Furman decided to take a cellular deep dive into his own health. The revelations were troubling: though he was chronologically 39, his inflammatory age — a biomarker linked to disease and degeneration — clocked in at 42. As a scientist, he knew what that meant: a heightened risk of early ageing, cognitive decline, and chronic illnesses. As a father, he knew something had to change. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Buy Brass Idols - Handmade Brass Statues for Home & Gifting Luxeartisanship Buy Now Undo Life in the Woods: From Headaches to Healing Furman packed up his life, wife, and two children and moved into a minimalist two-bedroom cabin nestled in Northern California's wilderness. Chairs were banned, industrial cleaners were out, and electricity usage was pared back to the bare minimum. By 7:30 every evening, all overhead lights were turned off and the family lived by candlelight, eschewing screens and devices in favour of analog living. Their daily routine included foraging, organic eating , and fitness rooted in nature. Furman, for instance, began each day with 10 to 15 pull-ups, caught fresh fish from a nearby creek, and snacked on hand-picked berries. Meals featured nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods — raspberries, broccoli, and wild greens became the norm. The lifestyle wasn't just a retreat — it was a rigorous biological experiment, and Furman was both subject and scientist. The Stunning Results: Turning Back the Clock Three years later, Furman ran the same cellular test that once gave him a wake-up call. The results were staggering: his inflammatory age had dropped to 32. In other words, he had turned back the clock by a full decade. Gone were the migraines, replaced by sharper focus, sustained energy, and what Furman describes as 'a lot of productivity.' His academic output surged — he published three research papers in a single year, and felt, in his own words, 'better than ever.' Science Says: Nature Really Does Heal Furman's forest-bound lifestyle wasn't just a personal success story; it echoed a growing body of global research. A 2019 study on 'forest bathing' revealed that time spent in green spaces significantly improves health outcomes and mental wellbeing — even for those with chronic diseases or disabilities. The magic number? Just two hours a week in nature, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. These sessions didn't need to be in remote woodlands — urban parks and beaches had similar effects. What mattered was immersion and consistency. Dr. Mathew White, a wellness researcher at Exeter, underscored the findings: 'It didn't matter where in nature you went... 60 or 90 minutes didn't seem to have the same benefits. It really needed to be at least two hours a week.' Furman's journey is both inspiring and instructive — a testament to the power of nature, simplicity, and conscious living. While not everyone can relocate to the woods, his story invites us to rethink the architecture of our daily routines. Could reversing ageing be as simple as switching off your phone, walking in a park, and eating what the earth gives you? For Dr. David Furman, it wasn't a theory — it was his life. And it changed everything.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Simple Formula That Explains Why the Debt Matters
In 2019, Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, two of America's most influential economists, published an essay titled 'Who's Afraid of Budget Deficits?' In it, they argued that Washington's long-standing worries about the national debt had been overblown. Other prominent experts, including the former head economist of the International Monetary Fund, an institution known for imposing harsh fiscal austerity on developing countries, came to similar conclusions. The reason: Deficit hawks had been fixated on the wrong number. The debt, according to these economists, still mattered. But whether it would become a serious problem, they observed, depended not on how big and scary the number was (about $28 trillion at the time, and today closer to $36 trillion), but instead on a simple formula involving the variables r and g. As long as a country's economic growth rate (g) is higher than the interest rate (r) it pays on its national debt, then the cost of servicing that debt will remain stable, allowing the government to roll it over indefinitely without much worry. Given that interest rates had been close to zero for a decade, Furman and Summers concluded that the 'economics of deficits have changed' and called on Washington to 'put away its debt obsession and focus on bigger things.' [Annie Lowrey: The Republican's budget makes no sense] But what was true then is true no longer. The combination of Donald Trump's growth-inhibiting tariff crusade and the GOP's deficit-exploding tax bill is likely to push the relationship between r and g into extremely dangerous territory. 'In a short amount of time, the fiscal picture has gone from comfortably in the green-light region to the red-light region,' Summers recently told me. In other words, now would be a very good time for Washington to bring back its debt obsession. The 'debt doesn't matter' consensus had a strong start. During the coronavirus pandemic, Congress spent trillions of dollars to keep the economy on life support without worrying about paying for it. The U.S. debt load reached new heights, but interest rates continued to fall. No bond vigilantes or debt spirals were to be seen. In the years to follow, however, the Fed raised interest rates dramatically in an effort to tame inflation. As a result, government payments on debt interest soared to $881 billion in 2024, more than the United States spent on either Medicaid or national defense. The same economists who had helped usher in the new debt consensus, including Summers and Furman, began warning that America's fiscal picture had become concerning. Even so, the situation was far from a crisis. A post-pandemic economic boom had kept the relationship between g and r on a stable trajectory, and in the fall of 2024, with inflation waning, the Fed began to lower interest rates. Then Donald Trump took office and threw the world economy into chaos. The interest rate on government debt is ultimately determined by investors' confidence that the U.S. will eventually pay it back. (When fewer people want to buy your debt because they view it as excessively risky, you have to offer a higher return.) The mere possibility of a global trade war and a huge, unpaid-for tax cut has shaken that confidence. Last week, Moody's, one of the world's major credit agencies, downgraded America's credit rating from its premium Triple-A status, causing interest rates on long-term government bonds to rise to near their highest point in two decades (above even the 'yippy' level that prompted Trump to recall his 'Liberation Day' tariffs). Rates surged again yesterday morning, when House Republicans narrowly passed a version of their tax bill that would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. If Trump signs that bill into law while expanding his global trade war, then investors may choose to dump their U.S. Treasury holdings en masse, causing interest rates to spike even higher. 'For years, we lived in a world where there was basically zero risk premium on U.S. debt,' Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers, told me. 'In four short months, Team Trump has squandered that advantage.' [David A. Graham: Congressional Republicans vs. reality] Rising interest rates might not be such a big issue if Trump's policies were simultaneously supercharging America's economic growth, so that g stayed ahead of r. Instead, almost every credible growth forecast this year has fallen significantly in response to those policies. With Trump proposing new tariffs seemingly at random—including, just this morning, a 50 percent tariff on the European Union and a 25 percent tariff on all imported Apple products—businesses face paralyzing levels of uncertainty, a fact will likely drag down growth even further. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans claim that the massive tax cuts promised in their budget reconciliation bill will spur an economic boom, but several independent analyses have found that they will hardly affect growth at all, let alone enough to overcome the negative impact of tariffs. In fact, many economists warn that the U.S. economy could be headed for something akin to 1970s-style stagflation. In normal times, the Federal Reserve could step in and mitigate both of these problems by cutting interest rates to boost growth or buying up Treasuries to quell financial-market panic. That is highly unlikely, however, when the central bank is also worried about the possibility that both the tax bill and Trump's tariffs could set off an inflationary spiral. In the past week, multiple members of the Federal Reserve's rate-setting body have signaled that it is unlikely to lower interest rates for the time being. This confluence of rising interest rates and slowing growth is the exact set of circumstances capable of turning America's national debt into a genuine crisis. When r remains higher than g for a sustained period of time, a vicious cycle emerges. Rising debt-servicing costs force the government to borrow more money to make its payments; investors, in turn, demand even higher interest rates, which pushes debt-servicing costs even higher, and so on. In the best-case scenario, this process unfolds gradually, and the consequences are painful but not catastrophic. As more and more of the government budget is diverted to finance ever-growing debt-servicing costs, less room will be left to fund key social programs and productive investments; higher interest rates will mean less business investment and slower growth; and the government will be less capable of responding to a future economic crisis that requires heavy spending. If, however, the debt snowball were to gather momentum quickly, the damage could be far worse. Investors might conclude that U.S. debt is no longer a safe investment, causing the equivalent of a bank run on the Treasury market as investors rush to sell their bonds for cash. Once that kind of psychological panic sets in, anything can happen. 'This scenario is more serious than 2008,' Adam Tooze, an economic historian who wrote the definitive history of the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession, argued recently on his Substack. 'At some point, everything just goes parabolic,' Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told me. 'That's when parts of the financial system might start to break.' A version of this happened in the United Kingdom in 2022, when then–Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled a tax-cut proposal that would have blown up the country's budget deficit. Bond markets freaked out, long-term interest rates soared, the pound plunged, and the entire British financial system appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The crisis ended only when the budget was scrapped and Truss was removed to restore confidence. Until recently, the prospect of something so dramatic happening in the United States seemed exceedingly remote. Then, on April 9, Trump's Liberation Day tariffs went into effect and the American bond market nearly melted down, stabilizing only after Trump paused most of the tariffs. If something similar happened again—say, in response to the final passage of the Republican tax bill—averting a sustained panic might not be so easy. The U.S. would be left with terrible choices: Impose painful austerity measures to reassure the market, default on the debt (which would likely trigger a severe, possibly global economic crisis), or print money to pay it off (which would trigger rampant inflation). None of these possibilities appears to concern Trump and his allies in Congress, who are barreling forward with their agenda, warnings be damned. Perhaps they are betting that economists, who for so long predicted debt crises that never materialized, will be wrong one more time. That is a very high-stakes gamble indeed. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Simple Formula That Explains Why the Debt Matters
In 2019, Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, two of America's most influential economists, published an essay titled 'Who's Afraid of Budget Deficits?' In it, they argued that Washington's long-standing worries about the national debt had been overblown. Other prominent experts, including the former head economist of the International Monetary Fund, an institution known for imposing harsh fiscal austerity on developing countries, came to similar conclusions. The reason: Deficit hawks had been fixated on the wrong number. The debt, according to these economists, still mattered. But whether it would become a serious problem, they observed, depended not on how big and scary the number was (about $28 trillion at the time, and today closer to $36 trillion), but instead on a simple formula involving the variables r and g. As long as a country's economic growth rate (g) is higher than the interest rate (r) it pays on its national debt, then the cost of servicing that debt will remain stable, allowing the government to roll it over indefinitely without much worry. Given that interest rates had been close to zero for a decade, Furman and Summers concluded that the 'economics of deficits have changed' and called on Washington to 'put away its debt obsession and focus on bigger things.' Annie Lowrey: The Republican's budget makes no sense But what was true then is true no longer. The combination of Donald Trump's growth-inhibiting tariff crusade and the GOP's deficit-exploding tax bill is likely to push the relationship between r and g into extremely dangerous territory. 'In a short amount of time, the fiscal picture has gone from comfortably in the green-light region to the red-light region,' Summers recently told me. In other words, now would be a very good time for Washington to bring back its debt obsession. The 'debt doesn't matter' consensus had a strong start. During the coronavirus pandemic, Congress spent trillions of dollars to keep the economy on life support without worrying about paying for it. The U.S. debt load reached new heights, but interest rates continued to fall. No bond vigilantes or debt spirals were to be seen. In the years to follow, however, the Fed raised interest rates dramatically in an effort to tame inflation. As a result, government payments on debt interest soared to $881 billion in 2024, more than the United States spent on either Medicaid or national defense. The same economists who had helped usher in the new debt consensus, including Summers and Furman, began warning that America's fiscal picture had become concerning. Even so, the situation was far from a crisis. A post-pandemic economic boom had kept the relationship between g and r on a stable trajectory, and in the fall of 2024, with inflation waning, the Fed began to lower interest rates. Then Donald Trump took office and threw the world economy into chaos. The interest rate on government debt is ultimately determined by investors' confidence that the U.S. will eventually pay it back. (When fewer people want to buy your debt because they view it as excessively risky, you have to offer a higher return.) The mere possibility of a global trade war and a huge, unpaid-for tax cut has shaken that confidence. Last week, Moody's, one of the world's major credit agencies, downgraded America's credit rating from its premium Triple-A status, causing interest rates on long-term government bonds to rise to near their highest point in two decades (above even the 'yippy' level that prompted Trump to recall his 'Liberation Day' tariffs). Rates surged again yesterday morning, when House Republicans narrowly passed a version of their tax bill that would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. If Trump signs that bill into law while expanding his global trade war, then investors may choose to dump their U.S. Treasury holdings en masse, causing interest rates to spike even higher. 'For years, we lived in a world where there was basically zero risk premium on U.S. debt,' Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers, told me. 'In four short months, Team Trump has squandered that advantage.' David A. Graham: Congressional Republicans vs. reality Rising interest rates might not be such a big issue if Trump's policies were simultaneously supercharging America's economic growth, so that g stayed ahead of r. Instead, almost every credible growth forecast this year has fallen significantly in response to those policies. With Trump proposing new tariffs seemingly at random—including, just this morning, a 50 percent tariff on the European Union and a 25 percent tariff on all imported Apple products—businesses face paralyzing levels of uncertainty, a fact will likely drag down growth even further. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans claim that the massive tax cuts promised in their budget reconciliation bill will spur an economic boom, but several independent analyses have found that they will hardly affect growth at all, let alone enough to overcome the negative impact of tariffs. In fact, many economists warn that the U.S. economy could be headed for something akin to 1970s-style stagflation. In normal times, the Federal Reserve could step in and mitigate both of these problems by cutting interest rates to boost growth or buying up Treasuries to quell financial-market panic. That is highly unlikely, however, when the central bank is also worried about the possibility that both the tax bill and Trump's tariffs could set off an inflationary spiral. In the past week, multiple members of the Federal Reserve's rate-setting body have signaled that it is unlikely to lower interest rates for the time being. This confluence of rising interest rates and slowing growth is the exact set of circumstances capable of turning America's national debt into a genuine crisis. When r remains higher than g for a sustained period of time, a vicious cycle emerges. Rising debt-servicing costs force the government to borrow more money to make its payments; investors, in turn, demand even higher interest rates, which pushes debt-servicing costs even higher, and so on. In the best-case scenario, this process unfolds gradually, and the consequences are painful but not catastrophic. As more and more of the government budget is diverted to finance ever-growing debt-servicing costs, less room will be left to fund key social programs and productive investments; higher interest rates will mean less business investment and slower growth; and the government will be less capable of responding to a future economic crisis that requires heavy spending. If, however, the debt snowball were to gather momentum quickly, the damage could be far worse. Investors might conclude that U.S. debt is no longer a safe investment, causing the equivalent of a bank run on the Treasury market as investors rush to sell their bonds for cash. Once that kind of psychological panic sets in, anything can happen. 'This scenario is more serious than 2008,' Adam Tooze, an economic historian who wrote the definitive history of the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession, argued recently on his Substack. 'At some point, everything just goes parabolic,' Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told me. 'That's when parts of the financial system might start to break.' A version of this happened in the United Kingdom in 2022, when then–Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled a tax-cut proposal that would have blown up the country's budget deficit. Bond markets freaked out, long-term interest rates soared, the pound plunged, and the entire British financial system appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The crisis ended only when the budget was scrapped and Truss was removed to restore confidence. Until recently, the prospect of something so dramatic happening in the United States seemed exceedingly remote. Then, on April 9, Trump's Liberation Day tariffs went into effect and the American bond market nearly melted down, stabilizing only after Trump paused most of the tariffs. If something similar happened again—say, in response to the final passage of the Republican tax bill—averting a sustained panic might not be so easy. The U.S. would be left with terrible choices: Impose painful austerity measures to reassure the market, default on the debt (which would likely trigger a severe, possibly global economic crisis), or print money to pay it off (which would trigger rampant inflation). None of these possibilities appears to concern Trump and his allies in Congress, who are barreling forward with their agenda, warnings be damned. Perhaps they are betting that economists, who for so long predicted debt crises that never materialized, will be wrong one more time. That is a very high-stakes gamble indeed.
Irish Independent
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Pain, suffering and losing control: it sounds bleak but Ezra Furman's new album has plenty of playful giddiness
Ten albums into a wildly eclectic career and Goodbye Small Head is an eclectic song collection. From the off, it pays scant regard to genre, but what's impressive is how comfortable Furman is across a range of styles and influences. The Chicago-born, Massachusetts-raised artist suffered a period of ill-health — a mystery illness in 2023 — and that time inspired her to explore pain, suffering and losing control. Such a description sounds bleak, but the songs are anything but. There's a playful giddiness to proceedings that pulls the listener in, and even though the sharp lyrics may speak of troubles, the jauntiness of the music engages. It helps, too, that the tracks flit from indie to art rock, with room for everything from gospel to bossa nova too. It takes a particular talent to hopscotch from one one genre to another like that and still deliver a cohesive album and it's to Furman's credit that she does that. Sudden Storm is an arresting look at a breakdown: 'The lord keeps calling and my body's not responding.' It's notable that despite the weighty subject matter, a commercial sensibility informs several of the songs. Jump Out is typical of the radio-friendly fare, while the funky Veil Song bewitches. In California, meanwhile, Tune-Yards offer their own brand of eclecticism. The musical project of husband-and-wife team Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, the pair were initially lumped in with the 'freak folk' movement, a loose collective of lo-fi troubadours. Such a moniker always seemed to do the band a disservice. For one, there was much more going on, sonically, than most of their peers but even more than that, Garbus, is in possession of a vocal with real depth and range. There's a soulfulness to her singing that really comes into its own on new album Better Dreaming. While the pop sensibilities belie some dark subject matter a celebration of family life and the pleasures of the everyday make their mark time and again. The wonderfully engaging Limelight is inspired by Garbus and Brenner dancing along with their daughter to George Clinton and the three-year-old's vocals are included. What sounds corny on paper, is beautifully rendered in reality. Heartbreak, the album's most enduring track, puts Garbus's vocal front and centre. It's an affecting and lyrically smart song that easily gets under the skin. Both Ezra Furman and Tune-Yards demand work from the listener. In today's instant gratification age, some will recoil from that idea, but if given a proper airing, their latest albums will leave quite a mark.
Atlantic
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
‘What If I Don't Keep Feeling Strident?'
About two years ago, Ezra Furman gave up—first in her mind, and then, it seemed, in her body. The 38-year-old singer was nearly two decades into a prolific rock-and-roll career. Her nervy, poetic sound had earned devoted fans and critical acclaim, plus a job soundtracking the Netflix TV show Sex Education. But her sixth solo album, 2022's All of Us Flames —an epic-scale protest album about surviving in a collapsing world—hadn't generated as much buzz as she'd hoped for, and she told me her label, Anti-, dropped her after its release. (Anti- did not respond to a request for comment.) She felt discouragement mounting, compounded by the stress of touring while raising a young son. Then one day in April 2023, a stranger on the street pointed at Furman and laughed in her face. She knew why: Furman, a transgender woman, hadn't shaved that day. The cruelty was 'comic,' Furman told me, like something that happens in a movie, but it also damaged what was left of her inner resolve. That afternoon, Furman wrote down a confession to herself: She wanted to end her music career. The next day, she collapsed and went to the hospital. She reported tiredness and pain in her body; the doctors ran tests but couldn't figure out what was wrong. She was discharged the same day, and experienced debilitating fatigue that persisted acutely for months, forcing her to cancel a tour. The illness, still unexplained, sometimes slows her to this day. Furman described these events to me while we were seated at the kitchen table in her Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment. Wearing jeans and a colorfully striped blouse, she spoke haltingly, often taking long pauses to stare into the distance and hum along with the record playing in the background (Portishead's Dummy). Despite the resignation she felt that day in April, new songs started pouring out of her after the hospital. The resulting album, Goodbye Small Head, came out last week. That album's existence might seem to suggest a success story, about an artist triumphing over adversity. But the tale Furman wanted to tell me—the theme that she kept returning to as we hung out in her house and then strolled around her neighborhood on a perfectly beautiful spring day—was mostly about feeling defeated. 'I'm in a time of over-admitting how much everything hurts,' she said. 'I'm leaning into every feeling, almost soaking it up.' Furman is one of a kind: a trans, devoutly Jewish former rabbinical student who's written a book about Lou Reed and sings folk-punk songs in a mercurial tremble. Over nearly two decades, her music has evolved from scrappy college rock to expertly orchestrated art-pop. It's maintained an idiosyncratic spirit all along, combining references from across rock history—a Bob Dylan harmonica line here, a Cars synth line there—with lyrics that unspool in unsteady, careening cadences. Her claims to fame have had a fluky quality to them ('Take Off Your Sunglasses,' a 2008 track about depression and skiing, was a No. 1 hit in Austria). But to her fans, who testify under her social-media posts about how her work has become embedded in their life, she is one of rock's best-kept secrets. Her trajectory has also, it's long seemed to me, been exemplary of a certain strain of Millennial idealism. When she founded her former band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons in 2006, as an undergraduate at Tufts University, her sound fit in with that era's boom for literary, openhearted indie acts in the vein of the Mountain Goats and Arcade Fire. She then publicly embraced queerness—identifying as bisexual, dressing femininely in public—around the same time that Laverne Cox featured on the cover of Time magazine and Target's sales racks started turning rainbow-themed during Pride month. 'It felt like pure, weird synchronicity,' she said when I suggested she was part of an LGBTQ cultural wave in the 2010s. 'Like I'm finally ready to start wearing these clothes in public and not just in my friends' bedrooms. And then it was like, trans people are in public. And I was like, What? ' When Donald Trump was elected for the first time, she doubled down on her long-standing penchant for socially conscientious lyricism, joining the burst of rock-and-roll #resistance that erupted in response to the president's agenda. She posted on social media about defending immigrants and women; onstage at Coachella in 2017, she called out Philip Anschutz, the businessman bankrolling that festival, for investing in oil exploration and donating to anti-LGBTQ causes. ('I support the rights of all people and oppose discrimination and intolerance against the LGBTQ community,' Anschutz said in a 2018 statement. 'I regret if any money given to a charity for other purposes may have indirectly worked against these values.') She also set about recording what she later called an 'anti-fascist trilogy' of albums. The final installment in that project was All of Us Flames —a record that, as she told The Guardian, she wanted to be a 'weapon of war,' striking against injustice and intolerance. Now Trump is back in office and flirting openly with authoritarianism —but the defiant energy that swept the arts during his first administration seems dissipated and tentative. After years of gaining visibility and public sympathy, trans people find themselves undergoing concerted political assault: repealing their access to medications, bathrooms, and passports that accord with their gender identity. Goodbye Small Head isn't responding to these developments by rallying the troops or offering reassurance. It's a sumptuous shrug of an album, the sound of a onetime warrior owning up to weakness and burnout. 'I'm really moving away from a sense of, like, There's things I want to be saying to the public and I want to carry certain flags,' Furman said. 'There's a lot of fists in the air in our culture, and I'm a little fatigued in the arm area.' Some of that fatigue can be traced back to an event in 2021 that, by all rights, was an occasion for pride. That's when Furman first posted on social media about being transgender—and revealed that she had a kid. Her coming-out wasn't a huge surprise to many of her followers, given that she'd long sung about the complexity of identity in ways that suggested she might be trans. (The title of her 2018 album was even titled Transangelic Exodus.) She finally made her transness explicit because, she told me, she figured that other queer people might be helped by her example. Certainly, she herself would have benefited from seeing a transgender mother in popular culture years earlier. But her announcement reached more than just trans people, and more than just her fans. CNN and Fox News, who had never covered her music before, ran stories about her transition in the anodyne tone of everyday celebrity gossip. (One line from Fox News: 'Furman's fans will also be pleased to know she signed off her Instagram post with a promise that new music is on the way.') This meant that she was suddenly an object of consideration for all sorts of people she'd never intended to reach. Under Furman's coming-out post on her own Facebook page, one commenter wrote, 'Why are you coming up on my timeline? I don't follow people with an agenda.' Others left harsher replies—accusing her of being a sinner, an attention whore, a mentally ill child abuser. Furman had, it seemed, walked into a trap. 'I didn't understand that I had created clickbait,' she told me. By the 2020s, visibility —that watchword of the movement for queer acceptance—was becoming freighted with new dangers. Backlash to trans rights had swollen into one of the animating causes of the Republican Party, whose leaders were evangelizing the notion that gender nonconformity was a social contagion that targeted children and threatened to undermine civilization itself. The news media and social-media algorithms seemed ready to capitalize on the way that the mere sight of a trans person in public life could incite controversy. Furman's post of self-expression wasn't just accidental clickbait; it was, to many onlookers, ragebait. Furman read every hateful comment she received online. Initially, she tried to wave them off: 'I'm like, Psh, okay, buddy. Wow, you're really out of touch, huh? ' she said. ' And actually, while I'm saying that, the poison is already sinking into me. And some child in me fully believes everything they just said.' The vitriol didn't harden her shell—it hurt her. The conventional wisdom to 'shake it off' isn't working for her, she said. 'I don't know what else to do except start crying.' Reflecting back on that episode, and the way that anti-trans sentiment has only continued to build in American culture since then, Furman said she's been thinking about the roots of the hostility against people like her. 'My life and my identity was known to all, including me, to be impossible or ridiculous,' she said. 'Just like: A boy becomes a girl? This is not something that happens. I like to think of trans people as people who were shown a wall and saw a doorway, made a doorway. They just did something impossible.' The impossible becoming possible is a hard thing to process—and easier to reject or mock than to understand. She mentioned the slogan 'Facts don't care about your feelings,' popularized by the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro. 'I think it's out of the same playbook of, like, Women's feelings are why they can't be serious, rational people.' (Which, she added, is ironic because 'they're so emotional over there on the right.') Furman described herself as a 'defender of the irrational' in multiple spheres of life. Whether as an artist, a religious person, or a trans person, she's going out of her way to honor the importance of her inner life—her beliefs, her feelings, her desires—even when it's socially inconvenient to do so. What she's realizing lately is how difficult that kind of life is to sustain. When the stranger on the street laughed at her in April 2023, it was a reminder that she couldn't just opt out of visibility. Every time Furman steps into public, she's opening herself up to judgment from society. If she stops putting care into her appearance—into passing as a cisgender woman, thereby avoiding drawing attention to her transness—she potentially becomes some 'illegible, laughable thing' to others. She doesn't know exactly why she collapsed. But she suspects that it had something to do with the fact that being trans requires constant assertiveness, which is an exhausting posture to maintain, day after day, year after year. 'Trans people just have to be strident personalities—we just all have to,' she said. 'What if I don't keep feeling strident?' After she got out of the hospital, Furman felt that she needed a reset. Though her previous two albums had been recorded in California, she booked a studio in her hometown of Chicago. She also called up Brian Deck, the producer who'd recorded two of the first Ezra and the Harpoons albums nearly 20 years ago. Deck is a veteran indie producer who has worked with the likes of Modest Mouse and Counting Crows, and he hadn't stayed in touch with Furman. He told me he was amazed to find that she was basically the same person she was as an undergrad: articulate, precise, 'slightly socially awkward,' and possessing a 'coarse blunt instrument' of a voice, rippling with vulnerability and angst. This time, Furman was using that instrument differently. Furman's past few albums have had a rollicking, anthemic sound channeling Bruce Springsteen and the Clash. But Goodbye Small Head is swirling and atmospheric, with dark, catchy melodies that recall '90s trip-hop and alternative rock. 'I think it's very beautiful,' Furman said, 'and I never really felt like we made beautiful music before this.' In one new song, called 'Submission,' a beep that resembles the sound of an EKG machine plays on loop. 'We're fucked,' Furman hisses. 'It's a relief to say / We'll see no victory day.' The track, she wrote in the album's press notes, is about realizing that 'long-suffering 'good guys' have no chance against 21st-century forces of evil.' In our interview, she told me she resisted finishing the song: 'I was like, This can't be what I'm writing. I don't want to. This isn't what anyone needs to hear.' But as she endured painful procedures for facial-hair removal—which meant lying on a table as electrified needles were stuck in her skin—the lyrics kept popping into her head, forcing the song into existence. In moments like those, Furman thought of the line 'No feeling is final,' by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. 'What if we feel really bad?' Furman said. 'What if it feels really, really bad and we just let it feel that bad? Or just for a moment, anyway. What's under there?' The final song of Goodbye Small Head, 'I Need the Angel,' is a garage-rock freak-out that sees Furman screaming for heavenly guidance. It's a cover of a song by Alex Walton, a 25-year-old trans musician who was once a fan of Furman's and struck up a friendship with her after the two exchanged messages online. When I spoke with Walton by videochat, she told me she was still processing the fact that her onetime role model—someone whose visibility as a trans person helped inspire her own career—had covered one of her songs. I asked her what Furman was like. 'There's this unerring optimism in her that's infectious,' Walton replied. This took me aback. In the four hours I'd spent with Furman, she'd been sardonically funny and a curious-minded conversationalist, but we'd mostly talked about the terrible state of the world and the music industry. Walton allowed that Furman could come off as pessimistic—her music conveys 'never-ending struggle.' But beneath that, Walton said, Furman is motivated by a simple idea: 'She wants to live.' Goodbye Small Head does have flashes of resilience. In its one overt protest song, 'A World of Love and Care,' Furman yowls, 'Who gets left out of your dream of a good society?' The chorus seems designed to ring out at rallies and marches: 'Dream better!' The track was a holdover from writing sessions during the first Trump administration, when Furman was working on that aforementioned anti-fascist trilogy. The original demo for the song was thrashing and punkish; the final version is built around pulsing cellos, making for a sound that's 'gentle and threatening' at the same time, as Furman put it. The rest of Goodbye Small Head, however, isn't serving up slogans or straightforwardly trying to change the world. The album mostly arose, she said, out of her dreamlike instincts. Furman compared songwriting to religious practices—such as the ones she herself keeps (saying blessings over a meal, observing strict rules of conduct on the Sabbath). 'Why do I do these rituals?' she said. 'Religious people do religious acts not for any utility. There's something sacred about behaving this particular way, and even if nobody knows I'm doing it.' And yet Furman still clearly feels like her work has a concrete, real-life purpose. She likened herself to professional mourners mentioned in the Bible: women who wailed because it was their duty to help their community express and move past emotions that would otherwise be paralyzing. 'We need the people who cry and clap their hands together and stomp their feet, because you need somebody to hold all that irrationality for you,' Furman said. 'I do think this is my job.'
