Breathalyzers of the Future Today

The "Drunkometer," 1950, and FLOOME, 2013 [Carl Nesensohn/AP, 2045Tech]

Even though it was invented in 1953, the breathalyzer still seems like something out of science fiction. Think about it: A stranger can appear at any point during an evening, have you blow into an electronic wand, and then can tell you exactly how much you've had to drink.

Robert F. Borkenstein invented the first blood alcohol detector with Dr. R. N. Harger, which they dubbed the Drunkometer. This led to his 1953 invention of the breathalyzer, the device we know today. When Borkenstein died in 2002, he would have still recognized the devices in use.

In the years since his passing, though, technology has advanced by degrees. From analyzers that fit on a keychain, to "stylish" inserts powered by smartphones, to those that detect other drugs, the concept has seen more than a few changes.

Most of the devices listed below are made and priced for the everyday user, which might not be a terrible thing considering the National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation to lower the legal driving blood alcohol limit from .08 to .05. (grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood).

How Does a Breathalyzer Work?
Breathalyzer is a specific band name that's become commonly used like a generic (like Band-Aid and Xerox) to refer to any number of breath analyzers that detect alcohol (and now drugs) from the breath.

There are three different basic types of breathalyzers, each operating at a different level and targeted at a different market. This differentiation lies in the sensor each uses to detect alcohol in the breath. The cheapest type, which generally appears in the type you might find in a drug store, uses a semi-conductor sensor. More accurate and used in police hand-held devices and high-end consumer ones are those that sense alcohol using fuel cells. Finally, the kind housed in police stations for official readings generally use infrared spectrophotometer technology, which is astoundingly accurate.

You have to pretty invested in discovering your blood alcohol content to spend a few thousand on an infrared sensor, but the first two are available for the common consumer.

Keith Nothacker, CEO of BACtrack, a company that specializes in both semi-conductor and fuel cell breathalyzers as well as the mobile one described below, offered a crash-course on breathalyzers.

"In the deepest part of your lungs there are membranes where there's an interchange between the blood in your blood stream and the air in your lungs," Nothacker said via telephone from California. "When you use an accurate, professional-grade breath alcohol tester, it's actually not measuring your breath sample until the end of the breath." That air, which has been in contact with your blood stream, can carry ethanol (i.e. alcohol) particles, which the sensors then register. This is why the legal-grade breathalyzers make "you feel like you're about to collapse you're blowing for so long."

During the user's final few moments of expulsion, the breathalyzer's sensors began to monitor the air rushing over them. The difference between the semi-conductor and the fuel cell sensor is what each records. "The fuel cell is ethanol-specific, so it's specific only to the alcohol ethanol," says Nothacker. Meanwhile, the semi-conductor sensor is a lot broader. For example, it will register ketones as alcohol, even though ketones are a wide variety of organic compounds with a particular structure. Ketones, which include both sugars and acetone, often appear on the breath of diabetics, which can lead a semi-conductor breath analyzer to mistake a diabetic person for a drunk.

They work slightly differently, too. A basic way of thinking of it is that the semi-conductor is heated at first and then registers any change in resistance to this process. Unfortunately, non-ethanol particles can cause this change in resistance. The fuel cell, meanwhile, works by measuring the current moving across the membrane of the sensors. As ethanol particles hit the membrane, the current changes.

To create more futuristic devices, this technology simply had to be repackaged.

In the Palm of Your Hand 

Take the BreathKey, for example. It's a breathalyzer that's about the size of your car fob and fits just as easily on a keychain. Its manufacturer, OmegaPoint Systems, claims it's the smallest breathalyzer on the market.

Ed Gollar, owner of OmegaPoint Systems, began working in the breathalyzer business in 1989. At the time, his work consisted of helping create interlock devices -- the large breathalyzers installed in cars that can prevent said car from starting -- and he thought, "Why not stop the problem before it begins?" So he began creating handheld breathalyzers for the layman. One problem kept popping up, though: they were huge, clunky, and ugly.

"In a professional setting, no one really cares what it looks like or how big it is, so long as it's accurate," Gollar says. But "a [regular] person doesn't want to carry around a big ugly square thing." So he began shrinking them with the end goal of creating one that could fit on a keychain. "A keychain is something people don't have to think about."

To do that, he needed a fuel cell sensor that was simultaneously small enough, accurate enough, and cheap enough for your everyday consumer. Semi-conductor sensors require an outside power source. Fuel cell sensors, on the other hand, work like car batteries by creating their own power so long as they're continuously used.

Rather than use anything on the market, Gollar built his own fuel cell, small enough to fit your pocket but powerful enough to give an accurate reading. It comes with longevity, too. If you use it every day, it'll last for five years.

Creating the sensor wasn't difficult, but creating software to allow the breathalyzer to operate without a sampling system was. That system is a "pump of some kind" that measures the rate of breath, so the device knows when to make a reading. It could never fit on a keychain, so he created software that interprets a person's blowing patterns and tells the sensor when to make a reading.

By next year, Gollar hopes to revolutionize the interlock system as well, by creating a discreet, detachable version.

Using Smartphones  

While the breathalyzer's function might be basic, its possibilities become endless when you hook one up to a smartphone.

Two companies are taking advantage of this opportunity by creating breathalyzers that plug into phones: the Italian-based startup 2045Tech and the San Francisco-based BACTrack.

2045Tech boasts its version, FLOOME, as the most accurate smartphone breathalyzer on the market. It already had its preliminary FDA application approved and has filed for a patent for its "vortex whistle," the innovation that turned this breathalyzer into a fashion statement.

"We are Italian. We love design," co-founder Matteo Petrani told me over Skype from his offices in Italy. But he also saw a severe problem with people not knowing how drunk they were. "The drunk driving problem ... is an overlooked problem. [People think] 'It won't happen to me, because I drive slowly and carefully.'" He paused, then followed with what sounds like a joke but is anything but: "The drunk walking problem somehow is even more dangerous than drunk driving."

In France, it's mandatory to have a breathalyzer in the car. In America it isn't. Either way, there is nothing hip about having one, but Petrani noticed something that is hip: "nowadays there is a huge trend of wearable technology," such as pedometers.

But making the breathalyzer look sleek while retaining accuracy presented a simple logistical problem, the same one Gollar faced with his keychain breathalyzer: how to create a flow meter. Thus the "vortex whistle" was born.

Blow into the tiny device, and it creates a whistling frequency in the alto tone, which is proportional to the flow rate of your blow. That is then picked up by a microphone that sends the frequency to a microprocessor, which calculates a flow rate. Then, it knows when you've blown enough, and the fuel cell takes a measurement.

The device certainly is slick, but even slicker is what it can do. At the moment, it utilizes smartphone technology to learn your metabolism so it can accurately judge how long before you're safe to drive. It saves all your results and compares them to previous ones. The more you use it, the better it gets to know you.

While FLOOME wins the crown for design, the fuel cell-powered BACtrack Mobile takes more advantage of the smartphone. It connects via Bluetooth, and it offers a veritable boatload of features, from personal tracking to national stat-gathering.

The BACtrack Mobile and its accompanying app allow you to be as private or public with your BAC information as you like. If you want to use the device on a one-off basis, never recording your information, you can. If you want to track your BAC over a long period of time -- perhaps to see how much you've been drinking lately or so it will learn your body and offer more accurate sobering times (via what it calls ZeroLine) -- go for it. Finally, if you want to participate in BACtrack WorldView, that's completely up to you.

And it's kind of amazing. The WorldView offers an option to completely anonymously upload your BAC to a database that displays real-time BACs from across the globe.

Says Nothacker: "Think of what the charts could do." If you want to see how the BACs of the people of New Orleans rise during a Saints game, you can. If you want to know if people drink more on New Year's Eve or Christmas Eve, you can. If you want to compare cities, you can. From there, you can implement measures to increase public safety.

"This is something that can be as private or as social as you want to it to be," Nothacker said. After all, his aim is simple: reducing drinking and driving. "We know when people have the product, there's more awareness," Nothacker said. "People are less likely to drink and drive when they have this."

Crowd-sourced BACs on BACTrack WorldView

Measuring drugs via breath 

This one feels a bit like cheating, because the device itself doesn't actually record anything. In fact, it probably seems like the simplest idea since the ice-cube tray. That's not far off. It's so simple, scientists thought it couldn't be done. In fact, the SensAbues, a handheld device that could change drug testing forever, was created off of a bet.

SensAbues CEO Bo Hammarlund tells the story from his office in Swenden: We've all seen the classic cartoon shtick in which a character yells something into a jar, which is later opened by a different character. At that point, the words come screaming out. A friend of Professor Olof Beck bet that you could do the same thing with drug testing: have someone breathe into a container, then later test that air. Beck, a professor of analytical toxicology and pharmacology at the Karolinska Institutet, was convinced the idea was ridiculous and set out to prove this. Thus the SensAbues was born.

The device is "actually a collective device," said Hammarlund. "When you breathe, every time you expand your lungs, tons of small water particles -- aerosols -- are freed from the walls of the lungs." The device, equipped with an electrostatic filter, collects these aerosols. Then, simply seal the device and send it to a lab housing a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer, which most modern labs should have.

The breathalyzers listed above offer readings on the spot, but that's simply not possible at this point with regards to drugs. But this does open a door that's been closed for some time. Previously, we had urine, hair, and blood tests. Each was easy enough to cheat to some degree, not to mention they generally couldn't be administered on-site, giving the drugs a chance to exit one's system.

Consider this example: someone is pulled over, suspected of driving under the influence. He isn't drunk, but drug use is suspected. The options at this point are limited, and they take time. Many drugs leave the body fairy quickly. Many people know how to cheat drug tests.

But the breath test has been proven just as effective as the blood test, and it can be done on the spot. When it comes to blood tests, cocaine will leave the system in about two hours; marijuana will in about twelve to twenty-four hours. The ability to measure these things on the spot is a game-changer. Which is why in April SenAbues began seeing use in workplace drug testing, school drug testing, prisons, and rehab clinics. According to Hammarlund, the Swedish police force is evaluating the device. Currently, it is also in the process of getting FDA registrations.

***

Whatever it is you want to track, whichever breathalyzer technology suits you, one thing is certain: this technology keeps us accountable.

"We know that by people using a breathalyzer, there is a vast reduction in driving while impaired," Nothacker says. "Not only is [this tech] changing people's perceptions about personal breathalyzers, we know it is changing their behaviors."

Then he puts it more simply. "This is a device that can save people's lives."

Read more

Study: Shocks to the Forehead Make Other People Appear More Attractive

twitchery/Flickr

PROBLEM: "It's not as bad as it sounds," wrote Richard Senelick of deep brain stimulation, a process that consists of "putting electrodes through a person's skull and into the most central parts of parts of their brain," and then controlling the brain's signaling via electric shocks. It's a viable treatment for Parkinson's and various neuropsychiatric disorders, like depression. And "the patient experiences little to no pain" (Senelick, again). Still, not drilling holes through the skull will always be preferable.

METHODOLOGY: At Caltech, researchers had 99 men and women rate a series of 70 computer-generated faces for attractiveness, on a scale from 0 to 7. They then applied electrodes to their foreheads and (for those who didn't end up in the control group) shocked them, mildly, for 15 minutes. Following the treatment, the participants were asked to evaluate 70 more faces, which the researchers made sure were just as attractive (or not) as the previous set.

RESULTS: The participants who received the electrical shocks found the second group of faces to be significantly more attractive than the first. fMRI scans taken before and after the stimulation showed increased activation of their prefrontal cortex, and also of the deeper midbrain region. They also experienced an increase in dopamine -- which suggests that their altered perception was caused by the activation of the midbrain's reward center.

An increase in midbrain activity was positively correlated with attractiveness ratings.

IMPLICATIONS: The treatment used here, known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDSC), is typically used to stimulate the prefrontal cortex, conveniently located right behind the forehead. The midbrain, nestled deeper back, is harder to reach -- hence the drilling. The researchers seem to have managed to activate a network wherein stimulating the prefrontal cortex indirectly caused neural activity further back, and did so strongly enough to cause behavioral changes. Today, it's thinking people are better looking than they actually are. Tomorrow, it could mean the non-invasive treatment of neurological diseases.

Read more

A Case for Regulating Sugar Like Alcohol

Shutterstock/librakv

Substances like alcohol are regulated according to four criteria. For a government to take that big step on behalf of its citizens, a substance must:

1. Be ubiquitous

2. Be toxic

3. Be addictive

4. Have a negative impact on society

There is, according to Robert Lustig, a substance that fits the bill times four -- save for the fact that it is not currently regulated. And that is sugar. Specifically,fructose. In a conversation with The Atlantic's Corby Kummer at the Aspen Ideas Festival today, Lustig -- a pediatric endocrinologist who doubles as a sugar detractor -- made the case. 

Sugar, Lustig noted, is obviously ubiquitous. It has an obvious negative impact on society, given the obesity and diabetes epidemics that have caused so much anxiety in the United States. Sugar is also, Lustig argued, toxic: the mitochondria in our bodies' cells, he said, are unable to convert the excess fructose we eat into energy, so they convert it instead into liver fat. That in turn starts a cascade, causing the insulin resistance that can lead to chronic metabolic disease -- which can lead in turn to diabetes, heart disease, and possibly cancer. A study that Lustig and his colleagues conducted, which was published in the journal PLoS this February, suggested that diabetes is caused not by obesity, as is sometimes thought, but by sugar itself. Even the scientist who won the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin warned that high sugar consumption could be linked to diabetes. As Lustig put it during the talk, "25 percent of all the [Type 2] diabetes in the world is explained by sugar and sugar alone."

Bolstering the case for regulation, Lustig says, is the fact that sugar is addictive. Fructose, Lustig claims, can dampen the suppression of the hormones that signal both hunger and satisfaction to the brain -- which means that the more we eat, the less likely we are to feel satiated. So the more likely we are to want more. (And more, and more, and ...)

Regulation, of course, is always fraught. Regulating something like sugar would be especially tricky. Of the four regulation criteria Lustig listed, the only one that isn't really open to argument is the first: sugar's utter ubiquity. There's also the sugar lobby. There's also the fact that sugar, for consumers, tends to be cheap. There's also the fact that sugar, in many of its forms, tends to be delicious.

Still, "everyone's looking for a nutritional villain," The Atlantic's Cummer noted; we're all looking for what he called "a kind unified field theory" about what causes childhood obesity and so many of the other health problems the U.S. is facing right now. The more we learn, the more it seems that sugar is at least a component of that unified theory. And if Lustig gets his way -- if people do come to see sugar as a substance that can be abused -- public awareness might offer its own kind of regulation. Sugar, Lustig put it, is "great for your wallet, but crappy for your health." The companies that profit from its sales might not, at the moment, have an incentive to change their ways; the more the public learns about sugar's effects, though, the more we might limit our intakes of the stuff. Voluntarily.

Read more

How Meditation Works

NicoleAbalde/Flickr

Mindfulness meditation. Chances are that you've either heard or seen (or rolled your eyes at) these words in recent months, as studies, celebrity endorsements, and even apps continue to make headlines. Based on Buddhist traditions and described as "the non-judgmental awareness of experiences in the present moment" -- a skill which claims to offer inner equanimity once purposefully honed -- mindfulness meditation is having a moment in the West.

Its lessons are those trite, self-righteous sayings we grow up hearing precisely when we don't want to: Things are only as good as you make them out to be. Face your fears. Be in the moment. Try looking at it another way. They are the aphoristic phrases we find inside fortune cookies or on the tags of Yogi tea bags that seem to have no feasible application when it comes to the mess of real life. As they say: Easier said than done.

And yet, people are doing it. Millions of them, whether as part of a medical treatment, in group classes, or alone in the privacy of their homes. But like with regular juicing or weekly acupuncture appointments, the question isn't whether beneficial physiological change is possible, but rather, how far can such change go to help us?

It goes without saying that some time to ourselves, quietly sitting and slowly breathing, will prove to calm us down after a stressful day, but when it comes to life's most mentally taxing episodes -- death, disaster, disease -- how much good can mindfulness meditation really do?

***

Gary is 42 and a recovered addict. He was raised a Jehovah's Witness until he left the religion at eighteen. Newly apostatized, Gary became reactionary. He thought, If I can't be one of them then I am going to be the worst me possible.He grew his hair long and covered his body in tattoos. He began drinking, and partying, and dosing himself with drugs. He was trying to fill what felt like agreat big hole in his chest, and he tried for nearly twenty years.

Gary eventually hit rock bottom as many addicts do. He hit it suddenly, driving a desert highway home to L.A. and his wife and children, after a substance-fueled weekend in Las Vegas. In those sober, vagrant hours he realized he had to stop -- only he didn't know how.

As an atheist he wanted nothing to do with Alcoholics Anonymous or any form of rehabilitation involving a higher power. What he needed was a way to depend on himself. He experimented with various secular groups, but he says it wasn't until he found a Buddhist meditation center and began "sitting" that "everything started coming together."

In a practical sense, "sitting" is really all there is to the meditation aspect of mindfulness meditation. For anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour (or more) each day, whether alone or with a group, you sit in a quiet place with your eyes closed, focusing on your breath as it moves in and out. Your mind will inevitably wander, which is where the mindfulness aspect comes in. Instead of growing frustrated with your lack of focus or getting caught up in the web of your thoughts, you train yourself to observe the thought or emotion with acceptance and curiosity, and to calmly bring your focus back to the breath.

Such an activity seems impossibly simple and non-invasive for its various purported benefits, but according to Dr. Katherine MacLean, a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (who both studies and practices mindfulness meditation), a neurological understanding can lend some clarity. In fact, if you strip it of its religio-historical context, mindfulness meditation is essentially cognitive fitness with a humanist face.

As Dr. MacLean understands it: "It's a way to become familiar with your own mind."

There are different forms of mediation practice -- among them Transcendental Meditation or "TM" (a Hollywood-approved technique heralded by David Lynch), Qigoing (a Chinese form of "energy healing"), and even yoga -- all of which carry their own array of benefits; however mindfulness meditation is one of the more widely used, and most heavily researched methods.

Two years ago researchers at Justus Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany and Harvard Medical School integrated decades of existing research into acomprehensive conjectural report, which explains the various neurological and conceptual processes through which mindfulness mediation works (and whichrecent studies have continued to affirm.)

The report suggests that mindfulness meditation operates through a combination of several distinct mechanisms: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and a change in perspective on the self. Each component is believed to assist us in various aspects of our lives, and when functioning together, the cumulative process claims to lend an enhanced capacity for "self-regulation" -- the ability to control our own "thought, affect, behavior, or attention" (The loss of which has been cited as the cause of much psychological distress and suffering).

In other words, the researchers suggest that the practice allows us to develop a stronger command over the machinery of the mind, a dexterity which, according to a study released this week, stays with you long after you finish meditating.

***

"Mindfulness meditation is not a nice little thing," Gary says adamantly. "It's not like frosting on a cupcake. This is a major major transformation."

Burly and tattooed from head to toe, Gary soon found himself sitting amongst a crowd of hippies and elderly people on a retreat in a remote area of California.

He had begun meditating daily, and through this, he says he was able to more closely observe the movements and patterns of his own thoughts. He realized that he was heavy with "trauma, and anger, and fear, and resentment," painful emotions his mind had tried its best to push away. With this, he began to see his addiction had only been a means of distraction, "a way to escape whatever emotion was arising that [he] absolutely could not handle." He realized that for the duration of his adult life, his own mind had been lying to him.

In meditation terms, he had become aware.

According to the Justus Liebig-Harvard report, awareness (the source of both attention regulation and body awareness) is the foundation of mindfulness practice. Commonly described as being "in the present" or "in the moment," these first two mechanisms consist of learning to focus on immediate internal (physiological, emotional) and external (environmental) stimuli.

Through attention regulation we can begin to "focus [our] attention for an extended period of time" and heighten our potential for "conflict monitoring," the ability to stay focused on the immediate experience, even as thoughts and judgments attempt to distract. This particular aspect of mindfulness training has been widely discussed in the media, after a study showed that the practice canboost student test scores.

Bodily awareness is then believed to build on this component, by teaching us to pay attention not only to our surroundings, but to the thoughts and bodily sensations (such as tension in the solar plexus) that occur in response. What develops is a keen sense of internal and external perception, which Dr. MacLean describes as a kind of clarity of consciousness: "You begin to see things for what they are rather than your virtual reality of what you want them to be."

With this understanding Gary found that he was able to directly address the issues at hand, rather than their symptoms. Instead of continuing to use "hedonism and decadence" to distract himself, he believes mindfulness practice gave him the strength and patience to simply sit with his suffering -- to feel its depth, to let all of hit him "like a ton of bricks."

Only then, he says, could he begin to let it go.

katerha/Flickr

For most of us, letting go isn't the mind's preferred way of processing. 

Deb was diagnosed at thirty-six. She is a mother of two. Her face is bright, her hair a happy blonde, her voice is soft and girlish. Three years ago Deb was healthy. She went to the dentist every six months because that is what healthy people do. Still, Deb got breast cancer. It was Stage III and scattered like a rainbow across her chest.

Upon hearing of her diagnosis, Deb was thrown into a flux of countermeasures and treatments, and she tried her best to maintain control. She entered her doctor's office with her hair pulled back and a notebook out and said, "I'm going to look at this like my full-time job. What do I need to do to cure this?"

As the mother of two young girls "filled with this maternal impulse that you have to protect them from everything," she desperately latched onto a delusion of control. What she got instead was panic and anxiety.

After being introduced to mindfulness meditation as part of her treatment at Duke Integrative Medicine, Deb soon began practicing regularly. She began observing the pitch of her pains and fears, and realized how much they exhausted her. She recognized that cancer wasn't just something to be cured, but it was also something she had to heal from, and that meant learning how to be at peace.

Any form of tranquility sounds like an impossible objective when you have an infant and a vivacious toddler running around the house, let alone a debilitating disease -- but Deb believes that this was the gift that mindfulness meditation gave her.

A change in perception, from a moment of panic to one of peace, is the achievement of what the Justus Liebig-Harvard report calls "emotion regulation." This component of the practice suggests that by building on our renewed strength of awareness, we are able to train ourselves to observe our thoughts forming during a particular event, to accept it without reactive judgment ("This is good" or "This is bad"), and to feel ourselves be affected by it, while refraining from our habitual response (i.e. terror, hyperventilating, anger, or throwing a punch).

As the leading Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield understands it, we learn to alter the relationship between our consciousness and our experience.

Or as Dr. Maclean characterizes it, we submit ourselves to a situation of "exposure," which we "prolong until the scary things aren't so scary anymore."

It's like Fear Factor for the mind, a contest few of us likely have any interest in entering upon first thought. The authors of the Justus Liebig-Harvard report recognize that "people who are new to meditation often initially find this process counterintuitive," but many find that the feelings of unpleasantness eventually dissipate, leading to either a situation of reappraisal (seeing something in a new light) or extinction (getting rid of our habitual response all together).

For Deb, "It meant taking a thought of anger or fear, and 'dropping it like a boulder.'" It meant learning how to stop living her life "in earnest and clawing for each day, but just to take it in."

It meant being able to sit back and be in a moment without the fear of losing it.

Three years cancer-free, the practice is still with her. "Ultimately what meditation has taught me is that my thoughts are not who I am. It's interesting to hold them up and to look at them, but I only have to hold onto those that serve me. I can let go of all the things that would put me right back on the hamster wheel. "

***

The disassociation between our thoughts and our identity is the final mechanism through which mindfulness meditation is said to function (one which is believed to become more apparent the deeper in practice we become). In a culture that continually emphasizes the cultivation of the self, this may be the most profound lesson that mindfulness meditation has to offer, and certainly the most bewildering.

According to the Justus Liebig-University and Harvard Medical School report, upon achieving a strong sense of internal awareness and the ability to "observe our mental processes with increasing clarity," we begin to see the self as something that is continually arising, rather than fixed. Dr. MacLean describes it as a continuum of the letting go process we experience while observing our emotional responses. "Eventually all you have to let go of is this sense of a fixed identity ... And then you can begin to deconstruct the self."

But why, exactly, would anyone want to do such a thing? It sounds abstract, overly existential, disorienting, and frankly terrifying. But, as Dr. MacLean stresses, it sounds more severe as a concept than it is in practice. Once understood, she says, it can eventually become remarkably useful, and in many cases, incredibly comforting.

By beginning to understand identity as impermanent, "there isn't this sense that you have to defend yourself anymore," she says. It's an act of "decentering," allowing us to expel the attachment and hostility that arises when we perceive our inner-selves to be static. This then "burns up the fuel which runs our repetitive habits," ultimately giving way to a more transitory understanding of existence. From there, she says, we can begin to develop a greater sense of compassion and a more genuine way of being.

Dr. MacLean started practicing mindfulness meditation nearly a decade ago as a neuroscience undergraduate at Dartmouth. When she continued her studies at UC Davis, she began working on the Shamatha Project, the largest and most extensive study of mindfulness meditation's effects on the brain. It was there that she went on her first retreat (a week-long period of intensive daily meditation) in order to more closely understand the experience her participants would go through. Soon after, she began practicing regularly at home.

Still, Dr. MacLean found one fear exceptionally difficult to get past.

She was afraid of death. She had panic attacks and premonitions on planes. If you were late or sick, she would assume the worst.

But, through her meditation, Dr. Maclean eventually began to understand the source of the problem. She realized that her deep-rooted anxiety had stemmed from something she had begun to feel during her practice: that her long-standing sense of self was only an illusion. "It felt like reality had been pulled out from under me," she says. But like Gary and Deb, she exposed herself to the fear until it gave way to a sense of "clarity, lightness, compassion, and security."

In time, Dr. MacLean's fear was put to the test. Her younger sister was admitted to the hospital with a metastatic form of cancer, and she was dying.

There are few things more horrifying in the scope of human life than the death sentence of a loved one, but Dr. MacLean believes that mindfulness meditation allowed her to build up a kind of mental armor that left her with a staggering level of equanimity. She had trained herself to "let go of this sense that you are at the center of the universe and that the world is something set up for you."

So as she sat at the bedside of her dying sister over the next few weeks, Dr. MacLean felt prepared. "I was able to be with her in space that for me felt very empty, and very clear, yet completely full of love," she says. "I didn't have much of my own baggage or my own expectations, so for the most part it kind of felt like this very natural, easy thing."

She recognizes that "it's hard not to sound new agey or paranormal" when talking about deconstructing the self, but she credits letting go of her fixed sense of identity and "artificial sense of the world" as the thing that got her through:

"I don't think I could have dealt with my sister dying if I had not gone through a kind of dying process myself."

This didn't mean she was immune from grieving, which she experienced "really quickly and intensely" without judgment or boundaries, but that she was able to understand her bereavement as an event that was happening to her in the present moment, which she could embrace fully, and then let go.

***

"We have a couple of tools that have been at our disposal for thousands of years," Dr. MacLean told me as we ended our interview. "One of them is meditation. And we will always have it. So if we can learn to harness that power, what happens around us doesn't matter. It's the one tool we have that is a refuge."

The practice may have great potential, but its advocates are quick to note that it will only do for people as much as they decide to put into it. As Gary, Deb, or Dr. MacLean will tell you, beating despair is no easy feat. Like fitness of any sort, seeing benefit from meditation takes time, discipline, and dedication.

Read more

A Pickup Artist's Guide to Seducing a Sandwich

crd!/flickr

You've already got the advantage here: you're an artist, and you're working with a sandwich artist. From one artist to another, game recognizes game. The key here is to remember that you are in charge. In charge of what goes in your sandwich, in charge of when you get your sandwich.

The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can't keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the "customer's" side of the partition. Are you a customer? Or are you a man?

If you want avocado, you'll get avocado. Avocado is a fruit; it cannot stand up to you. You are a human being, and a very powerful man. Avocado wants to be on your sandwich. It can't help itself. Your job is to make the avocado realize that you know where it belongs.

Remember, great pickup artists aren't outcome-dependent. You can't win every battle, and you won't get every sandwich you reach for. But if you try often enough, and learn from your mistakes, you will improve your SMM (Sandwich Mind Mastery). There are several different schools of thought about the best initial approach, but we won't go into the relative merits of neuro-rotator programming versus the Dark Jugglist's Method here. The most important factor is confidence. Make a connection.

You may find yourself feeling awkward or even reluctant to cross the customer/employee barrier; this is normal. Your mind has an evolutionary circuit that leads to this "approach anxiety" that stems from the cavemen days when men were stoned to death or eaten by mastodons if they failed in their approach to leap across the counter. One way to overcome this fear is to introduce seemingly innocuous observations that appear to be compliments on first blush but are in fact designed to bring the sandwich and its attendant components down to your levels.

Everyone wants to be liked; everyone wants approval. No one likes being ignored. This is as true for sandwiches as it is for you -- even more so. Their whole reality is based on having power, on being desirable. Take that away, and their whole reality crumbles.

This isn't a technique that works well on your average sandwich: your basic turkey sub, your standard veggies and cheese. They're used to being put down; you don't need to put them down through value zingers. This is for the special little princess, the daily special, the one that's used to being coddled and complimented and adored by everyone in line. Here are a few possible options:

"Hey, you're a goof. Yeah, you. Zesty? That's what you call yourself? Yeah, goof."

"I really like what you're doing, but I don't know...provolone seems kind of basic. You know you can get pepper jack, right?"

"You look like one of those newborns I saw on the Discovery Channel when they come out of the womb; all curled up."

"I hate you."

Decide that you're going to place yourself in a position where you can touch your sandwich as it's being created. Physically pick it up and get the lettuce yourself. Touch the condiments with your own two hands -- not through the lids, the lids are a barrier designed to scare off lesser men -- touch the condiments.

Don't ask for permission. It's your sandwich. It's not the manager's sandwich. It's yours by all the laws of God and man and commerce. Stick your fists deeply into stacks of cold cuts and inhale their unique bouquet. Force the employees to push you out of their work station. They'll let you know if they're uncomfortable. If they say "PLEASE EXIT THE KITCHEN IMMEDIATELY, YOU'RE CREATING A PUBLIC HEALTH VIOLATION" or "SIR, STOP LICKING THE SPICY MAYO MISTER," you know they're not interested. It happens. Stop escalating immediately and say this:

"No problem. I don't want to do anything you aren't comfortable with." See how you're respecting their boundaries, but also being assertive (and covering yourself in delicious spicy mayo)? Don't let this "no" put you off permanently, however. They want you to want your sandwich. You should make sure that the store employees feel comfortable. If they're not comfortable, take a breather. Use the bathroom, or check out the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie display case.

All that really matters is that you continue to try to escalate things -- burying your hands in the banana peppers, really experiencing the cheese triangles in a physical, sensual way, whatever -- until they make it genuinely clear that it's not happening. They want you to be excited about your sandwich, but circumstances need to be right. You'll learn to distinguish between "No, you can't...the bacon slices are only for the Chicken and Ranch Bacon Melt, that's why they come prepackaged in groups of four..." and "We're calling the police." The important thing is that you're always learning and experimenting with boundaries.

Yes, right now the shift supervisor is saying "We will be fined and shut down by the health inspector if you don't stop licking the bread dough mixers," but maybe in half an hour he'll have warmed up to your enthusiasm. Take a break and come back later, preferably when a different shift supervisor is on duty.

Read more

The Summer Bicycles Took Control

Just ten days after deploying its first 6,000 bicycles at the end of May, the Citi Bike sharing program in New York City had logged more than 100,000 rides. (This is not one of those bikes.)(Moyan_Brenn / Flickr)

---

If in a few years we're talking about the summer that New York tried that thing with all the blue bicycles, we'll laugh. And then sigh. And then shudder. And then laugh!

It was supposed to be simple. People will have easy access to bikes; they'll drive less, and exercise more. We'll have less pollution and fewer heart attacks. It works in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hangzhou, Stockholm, Helsinki, Milan, and Copenhagen -- it has to work here, too.

Remember, though, this is New York. When something happens simply, you're not in New York. Drop 6,000 (soon to be 10,000) unsolicited bicycles into the heart of the most overpopulated, eccentric zip codes in the hemisphere, and what we get is a good old-fashioned bicycle freak-out.

It's like when you buy a new wheel for your hamsters, and you're excited to see how they use it, so you run home and drop it into their cage. But you didn't realize the wheel still had some strange animal scents on it from the pet store, and so instead of running to play on it, the hamsters panic and start eating their kids.

We fear change, and we don't like new things in our space. The bikes are eyesores. They take up valuable parking spaces. They're used by tourists who ride on sidewalks, don't know their way around, and try to take pictures and read maps and buy chachkes while riding. Some Hasidic Jews are upset that "biking clothes and lifestyles clash with [their] traditional values."

At this point someone is already writing a chapter in a health policy book about the unanticipated safety hazards, another in a city planning book about implementing massive bike programs into traffic flows unequipped to deal with them, and another in a sociology book about the cultural-economic disparities highlighted by the program. And probably something in a young adult novel, too. Which isn't really relevant, just inevitable because everyone is writing a young adult novel.

(Frank Franklin II / AP)

---

(Carol Allegri / Reuters)

When Citigroup signed on to privately fund New York's bike-share project, surely paying handsomely to put their brand on 10,000 searing-blue bikes, the multinational financial services corporation probably didn't anticipate that they would become objects of derision. ("Should we pay X million dollars to put our name on a thousand moving obstacles that will incur hatred from Manhattan's wealthy elite, our most valued clients? Yes? Okay. Who wants lunch? I'll have a panini.")

Pulitzer-Prize-winning Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz summed up the "majority of citizens'" position on the Citi bikes earlier this month, as James Fallows brought to our attention:

WSJ: Why would we want a program like this, anyway? Are we too fat? [Editor's note: Yes]

Rabinowitz: Do not ask me to enter the mind of the totalitarians running this government of the city. Look, I represent the majority of citizens. The majority of citizens of this city are appalled by what has happened. ... We now look at a city whose best neighborhoods are begrimed by these blazing blue Citi bikes. It is shocking to see how much they have snuck under the radar in the interest of the environment. ... The bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise. But even without it, the mayor's stamp on this city is permanent, unless an enterprising new mayor undertakes to re-dig all of the streets and preserve our traffic patterns.

Michael Bloomberg gets on a bicycle during a launch event May 27, 2013 (Carlo Allegri / Reuters)

---

Rabinowitz: The fact that a city is helpless before the driven personal and ideological passions of its leader in the interest, allegedly, of the good of the city. This can take many forms, but we have seen the most dramatic exposition of this in our city.

WSJ: With the latest example being the bike-share program.

Here's the full video of that exchange (click to play):

In an interview yesterday with New York Magazine over salmon roe, Rabinowitz described the subsequent reaction to her comments.

Excitedly, [Rabinowitz] reached into her purse and found a greeting card a woman had sent to her. "This sums up the general attitude -- this is the biker-fanatic sensibility." She handed it to me.
"You are still a cunt," it read. I gasped.
"This is nothing," she said, laughing.

So ... opinions are mixed.

Where do the anti-bike-share Villagers want bicycles? We've seen that, for an increasing number, the bicycle is most flawlessly conceived as a device with no wheels that sits in a hot windowless room next to lots of other bicycles and someone yelling at you over a microphone to pedal in a manner that "focuses on your glutes." Access to this room is exclusive.

If you're not familiar with SoulCycle, over the last six years, the New-York-based company has rebranded spinning classes as an expensive, transcendent experience ("It's mind, it's body, it's cardio"), basically by having people on spinning bikes also do upper body exercises. For example, pulling resistance bands that hang from the ceiling above them, and saying things about consciously breathing. Kelly Ripa called it "as good for your brain as it is for your body." It's just exercise, though, not like you're solving quadratic equations while you ride. A single 45-minute SoulCycle class costs $34, so almost a dollar per minute, to ride a stationary bike while someone physically superior to you barks about flattening your belly, sometimes by candlelight, then sells you a $44 tank-topthat says "Young, Wild, Free."

Last week comedian Fabrizio Goldstein repurposed the Citi bikes for SoulCycle-ish use to wide acclaim in his video "SoulCycle for the Homeless." Noticing that the parked Citi bikes basically work like stationary exercise bikes, without ever paying to unlock them, Goldstein staged a class:

The scene is sort of problematic in the same ways it was when that marketing agency at South by Southwest used homeless people as Wi-Fi hotspots. Maybe we could forget about the blue bikes altogether if Brooklyn could repurpose even half of its aspiring comedians as a viable transportation system. Still Goldstein makes a good point: "Indoor cycling is too expensive, and it's not available to everybody. It's just like, I want the homeless people of New York to have the opportunity to have sick bodies." He points to his fat belly in jest, but also the guys riding along seem to take it semi-seriously. ("My legs feel better!")

Plenty of us who can afford homes also can't or otherwise wouldn't pay for SoulCycle. Bike shares do get us closer to said sick bodies. Even if the practicality of free outdoor spinning classes ends with a laugh at a YouTube video, you can still count that among the unexpected positives that have come of Bloomberg's program.

It's admittedly unfortunate that these are the ugliest bikes imaginable, and that some people don't ride respectfully. When someone is riding on a sidewalk, you should absolutely be allowed to tip them over. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf noted, though, people have been complaining about sidewalk riderssince the nineteenth century. Even in Paris (where their share-bikes are much nicer looking than ours, but the sidewalks no less crowded) they've made it work.

Parisian bikes look better than New York's, but you get what you pay for. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe sits on a bicycle at the 2007 launch of "Velib." (Laurent Baheux / AP)

---

The bottom line is that one contentious month since the launch of New York's program -- with riders as bad as they'll ever be, and the blue paint without any sun-fading to tone down the gaudiness -- the actual majority of New Yorkers love the bikes. Numbers released yesterday from Quinnipiac University showed overwhelming approval.

If we made it through this first harried month and most people still don't hate the bikes, it's not likely they're going to start hating them once they're woven into the city's cultural identity. When London launched its bike-share program, which is probably the closest one to New York's, there were similarly vocal Hyde Park detractors. But years later, it's still alive. 

See also Copenhagenzine's graph of the typical timeline of "whining" around the launch of bike-share programs worldwide: a steady rise during the months preceding, followed by a precipitous drop to almost zero shortly after launch. The dissenting New Yorkers are not an original phenomenon. If precedent holds, they will fade.

A worker inspects new bikes at a storage facility in London before the launch of their public bicycle sharing program in 2010. (Suzanne Plunkett / Reuters)

---

With U.S. cities like Chicago poised to launch new bike programs (and ongoing programs in D.C. and Minneapolis, which have yet to reject them or descend into totalitarian states, in the utopian sense or otherwise), it's increasingly clear the bike sharing is here to stay.

June 11, 2013. Chicago's new bike-share program, Divvy, is about to roll out with about 750 bikes at 75 solar-powered docking stations. It will expand over the next year to at least 4,000 bikes at 400 stations. Users can get a $75 annual membership or a $7 day pass. (Scott Eisen / AP)

---

No transport system is perfect, but bike-sharing is promising, and among the best we have. Look forward to more stories from the grand New York experiment, to inform, amuse, and challenge the rest of the country. Young, wild, free: the SoulCycle of the people. On this eve of the 100th Tour de France, we finally celebrate the bicyclization of urban America.

Read more