STUDY FINDS
Concerning number of unqualified health influencers discovered on TikTok

Photo by Solen Feyissa from Unsplash

by Shyla Cadogan, RD

CHICAGO — Today, social media platforms like TikTok are a big part of life for millions of people. Social media not only provides a few laughs, but it also gives users information on just about anything they can think of. Health information is at the top of this list, but is that a good or bad thing?

Hashtags like #celiactok and #diabetestok have garnered millions of views, with each tag taking you to numerous videos about each health issue.

“Every type of ‘Tok’ exists – that’s just how the internet works,” says Rose Dimitroyannis, a third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, in a media release. “Little tiny segments of the population find one another and make waves.”

This has been a really positive thing in some ways. As a dietitian who engages with the media, I can reach a much wider audience and provide helpful information on a global scale, reaching just about anyone instantly.

It’s been a great way for other healthcare professionals like doctors to do the same. People who struggle with certain health conditions can also find community support online. At the same time, this type of accessibility opens people up to easily finding misinformation. People who pretend to be experts and misrepresent their educational background or just speak with authority despite not having any medical background can deceive the public and further fuel the spread of false narratives.

A lot of people who start new health trends or share their latest hack aren’t doing it with ill intent. Carrot salads for “hormone balance” and “sleepy girl mocktails” with magnesium aren’t really the bad guys. It’s just that a few clicks away, you can find someone else telling people to drink borax daily, which comes with more serious health risks.

“There is high-quality and factual information out there on social media platforms such as TikTok, but it may be very difficult to distinguish this from information disseminated by influencers that can actually be harmful,” says Christopher Roxbury, MD, a surgeon and rhinology expert at UChicago Medicine.

People on social media who speak with authority despite not having any medical credentials can deceive the public and further fuel the spread of misinformation.

 (Photo by cottonbro from Pexels)

Dimitroyannis, Roxbury, and other researchers from the University of Chicago systematically analyzed health information on TikTok to see if they could determine how much misinformation is out there and if it comes from certain types of content creators. Their findings show that almost half of the videos analyzed contained non-factual information, with a significant amount of incorrect content coming from nonmedical creators.

To get a deeper understanding, the team narrowed their focus to a specific health condition and performed their search during a single 24-hour period in order to limit the effects of TikTok’s changing algorithm. They searched TikTok using certain hashtags related to sinusitis, including #sinusitis, #sinus, and #sinusinfection, organized the videos based on uploader types, content categories, and content types, and assessed the quality of the videos using various metrics, including understandability, actionability and reliability.

These assessments utilized both the knowledge of the researchers but also validated empirical tools like the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool for Audiovisual Material.

Nearly 44 percent of the videos contained misinformation. Videos from “nonmedical influencers,” which are categorized as content creators with over 10,000 followers who did not self-identify as medical professionals, accounted for nearly half of all videos.

They were also more likely to spread misinformation and have lower quality scores. More typical videos from the average person were about daily life and comedy rather than trying to provide medical advice. The team found that medical professionals, by and large, produced educational content and received better scores for video quality, factual information, and harm/benefit comparisons.

The findings show that almost half of the health-related videos analyzed contained non-factual information. 

(Photo by Amanda Vick on Unsplash)

This isn’t to say that the medical professionals were always perfect.

“Medical professionals are people; they can still say wrong things,” Dimitroyannis points out. “But overall, health experts are posting more beneficial content.”

In the study data, only 15 percent of videos from medical professionals contained non-factual information, compared to nearly 60 percent of videos from nonmedical influencers.

“I frequently have patients in the clinic asking me questions about things they saw online or on social media, and I have found that many times the information has steered patients in the wrong direction,” says Roxbury, the study’s senior author. “In some cases, I see patients who have already sought out and undergone such treatment without any benefit; in rarer cases, they’ve been harmed.”

“As a clinician, you can’t deny that anyone who comes into your office has probably looked something up — which is well within their rights to try to understand their health,” adds Dimitroyannis, the lead author of the paper. “At the end of the day, patients and physicians alike should understand the power of this tool, recognizing the downsides while acknowledging that there can be good quality information available as well.”

The researchers are using their findings to drive home the point that critical thinking and discernment are key when it comes to receiving health information online. If there’s any confusion about how something could apply to your situation, ask your own professional.

As a registered dietitian, I see first-hand how people are constantly looking for the quick-fix diet or supplements. They are willing to try almost any trend they see online. This can actually set them back from reaching their health goals in a sustainable way. I always encourage people not to take anything online at face value, not even the things that I say, even though I always do my best to post accurate, up-to-date information.

Healthcare professionals can use the Internet for a lot of good. They can use platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enlighten people and make them think twice before hopping on a trend that likely won’t even benefit them or maybe even hurt them.

The findings are published in the journal Otolaryngology.

Middle-of-the-Road Mountains Form the Best Carbon Sinks

Silicate rock weathering has a sweet spot: erosion that isn’t too fast or too slow.

By Martin J. Kernan

26 April 2024

Some mountains in Taiwan have just the right erosion rate to pull significant amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. 

Credit: Robert Emberson

As humans turn up the heat on Earth, geoscientist Aaron Bufe and other researchers are figuring out how our planet has stayed so cool in the past. Throughout Earth’s history, volcanoes have belched out varying amounts of atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide, but the runaway greenhouse effect that should have boiled our oceans away eons ago never came to fruition, and temperatures have been relatively stable.

“Over 500 million years and probably longer, Earth’s temperature has mostly varied between about 10°C and 30°C. Somehow, Earth has always sort of managed to get back to a temperature that makes life possible,” Bufe said.

Bufe, of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and his colleagues found that mountains with moderate uplift rates have been sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, outpacing young, fast-eroding ranges once thought to be carbon drawdown champs. Their recent work, published in Science, weighs in on an ongoing debate over whether mountains act as sinks or sources of atmospheric carbon.

Mountains Rise, Carbon Falls

Since the late 1970s, many scientists have thought that the rapid rise of mountains such as the Himalayas, Rockies, and parts of the Andes removes naturally emitted carbon, thus keeping the greenhouse effect in check.

Warmer climates produce more rain, and carbonic acid in raindrops dissolves silicate minerals brought to the surface within the uplifting mountains. Carbon, calcium, and other molecules then flow into the ocean, where they form compounds used by marine organisms to build shells and skeletons. Earth has sequestered carbon through this silicate weathering process for hundreds of thousands of years.

“Then how do you explain the long-term decline in atmospheric CO2, growth of polar ice sheets, and cooling over millions of years?”

But about a decade ago, scientists discovered that sulfide minerals such as pyrite add carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere in amounts that could negate silicate weathering storage. That’s because sulfides (and carbonates) break down very fast in places where there’s lots of erosion, such as in the Himalayas.

The finding puzzled researchers. “Then how do you explain the long-term decline in atmospheric CO2, growth of polar ice sheets, and cooling over millions of years?” said Jeremy Rugenstein, a paleoclimatologist at Colorado State University and a coauthor of the new study.

The Link Between Erosion and Weathering

A few years ago, Bufe and Rugenstein and their colleagues set out to solve that mystery and began by asking, “Can we actually measure the sensitivity of CO2 drawdown and release to erosion?”

Erosion (the removal of rocks and minerals from an outcrop) influences weathering (the breakdown of rocks and minerals) because it exposes fresh minerals to the elements. But existing studies disagree about the relationship between these processes. Some say silicate weathering tracks with erosion, whereas others show that the amount of silicate in rivers doesn’t change regardless of erosion rate.

“This optimum emerged that you couldn’t really see from the data alone.”

In 2021, the researchers got a hint that the answer may lie somewhere in the middle, when data Bufe collected in southern Taiwan, where erosion varies wildly, revealed that as erosion rates increased, silicate weathering eventually leveled off. Quickly dissolving sulfides and carbonates, meanwhile, kept up with the flow of sediments from mountain to river, turning the topography from a sink to a source of atmospheric CO2.

In expanding the scope of the study to include mountain ranges in New Zealand and Sichuan, China—places where erosion rates also vary—the researchers saw a pattern. “This optimum emerged that you couldn’t really see from the data alone,” Bufe said.

Maximum CO2 consumption in all three locations occurred where erosion was about 0.07 millimeter per year. Slower than that, there aren’t enough silicate rocks exposed to weather; faster, and silicate doesn’t have time to completely dissolve.

Bufe pointed to medium-sized mountains such as the Juras in Europe and those in the Black Forest in Germany and along the Oregon coast as prime examples in this Goldilocks range, where the erosion rate is just right. There, most carbon-sourcing sulfides and carbonates weathered away long ago.

The fact that all three data sets end up supporting each other is “incredibly powerful.”

“They’ve taken a bit of a risk by looking at these three quite different mountain locations. But the results are really cool and worth it,” said Bob Hilton, a sedimentologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study. The fact that all three data sets end up supporting each other is “incredibly powerful,” he said.

More research is needed to get a complete picture of how landscapes process carbon, Bufe said. In floodplains downriver from where he took samples, silicate rock may continue to weather. And organic carbon isn’t accounted for in these results, nor is the common sedimentary type: basalt.

This “more nuanced way of thinking about the Earth system over long timescales” is what’s needed to puzzle out how minerals, erosion, and rain control climate, said Pennsylvania State University aqueous geochemist Susan Brantley, who wasn’t involved in the research.

—Martin J. Kernan, Science Writer

Citation: Kernan, M. J. (2024), Middle-of-the-road mountains form the best carbon sinks, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240187. Published on 26 April 2024.

Latin America approves plan for protecting environmental defenders

YANINE QUIROZ

26.04.2024 | 

Latin American and Caribbean countries approved a new action plan to protect environmental defenders this week.

This occurred at the third Conference of the Parties (COP3) to the Escazú Agreement, held in Santiago, Chile, from 22 to 24 April.

The Escazú Agreement, in force since 22 April 2021, is a legally binding regional treaty that aims to protect environmental defenders and promote public participation and access to information on environmental matters.

The conference brought together more than 700 people, from state parties and civil-society organisations to youth activists and Indigenous environmental defenders.

Latin America and the Caribbean is considered by campaign groups to be the “most dangerous place in the world for activists”.

The regional action plan sets out priority areas and strategic measures for countries to enact article 9 of the Escazú Agreement, which urges states to recognise and protect the rights of environmental defenders and prevent and punish attacks against them.

Graciela Martínez, regional campaigner for the Americas at Amnesty International, tells Carbon Brief that the action plan is an “important step towards implementing the Escazú Agreement”.
Action plan

Between 2012 and 2022, Latin America and the Caribbean saw 1,910 killings of environmental and land defenders, according to a 2023 report from campaign group Global Witness. This accounted for 88% of such killings around the world during that decade, the report notes.

The Escazú Agreement came out of the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development and seeks to guarantee the right to a healthy environment and sustainable development for current and future generations. Part of this is achieved, the agreement says, by recognising the important role that environmental and human-rights defenders play in this regard.

Currently, 16 countries have ratified the Escazú Agreement, including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, and several Caribbean countries, such as Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis. A recent statement by Amnesty International points out that some of the countries that have not yet ratified the agreement are among the most dangerous for environmental defenders, such as Brazil, Colombia and Guatemala.

The action plan agreed upon at COP3 will be implemented from 2024 to 2030 and comprises four priority areas, each accompanied by strategic measures to comply with objectives: Knowledge creation.
Recognition.
Capacity-building and cooperation for national implementation.
Evaluation of the action plan.

Knowledge creation refers to understanding the situation of defenders and identifying mechanisms to prevent and punish violations of defenders’ rights. Recognition measures require publicly acknowledging the work of defenders.

Within national implementation, the action plan mandates parties to create and strengthen institutions to provide free legal assistance to environmental defenders and training for judges and prosecutors.Objective of the priority area on capacity-building and cooperation for national implementation. Source: Action plan to protect environmental defenders.

Jesús Maya, a Mexican human-rights defender and youth representative at COP3, tells Carbon Brief:


“This is more than necessary for us to be able to talk about environmental justice and justice for people.”

Maya adds that the consultancy he manages, Eheco, is working to ensure that the Escazú processes “takes into account alternative justice” such as “collective justice” – as violence can also be directed at entire groups, not just individuals – and policies to preserve the “collective memory” of killed defenders, “so as not to repeat the issue”.

There are other examples of alternative justice, Maya says. One is Colombia’s special jurisdiction for peace – which seeks to deliver transitional justice to victims of the decades-long armed conflict by providing the right to justice, truth and restoration of damages. Another comes in the form of the truth commissions in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, which were created to uncover the truth about human rights violations committed by military dictatorships, authoritarian regimes or internal armed conflicts.
Indigenous demands

Teresita Antazú López, an Indigenous environmental defender of the Yanesha people of the central Peruvian rainforest, tells Carbon Brief that Indigenous peoples had a number of demands at this COP.

According to López, who attended the COP3 as a member of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle, the highest priority was to ensure their effective participation in the negotiations going forward. This includes having an Indigenous caucus to represent them and an Indigenous peoples rapporteur to report on violations in their territories.Indigenous and young representatives in the Escazú negotiations at COP3. Credit: ECLAC / Flickr

Alice Piva, a Brazilian climate activist and young ambassador of the Escazú Agreement, tells Carbon Brief that young activists and defenders are asking for the recognition of their leadership and participation in the Escazú processes. She explains that environmental justice includes intergenerational justice, adding:


“It is up to the younger generations to push [the Escazú Agreement] forward to achieve this vision of a Latin America with a strong environmental democracy.”

Piva also criticises accessibility of the COP for Brazilian organisations, noting that negotiations are often held in Spanish and English and less frequently in Portuguese.
Information access

COP3 also addressed transparency and access to environmental information.

During a side event organised by Article 19 Mexico and Central America – an organisation that promotes freedom of expression and access to information, Maribel Ek, guardian of the cenotes – or deep natural wells – of Homún, in the south-eastern Mexican state of Yucatán, told the audience that her community, which is home to 360 cenotes, managed to shut down a 49,000-pig mega-farm on its territory after investigating the farm’s permits and receiving support from lawyers. Ek said:


“To defend nature, we just need information. We need to know the steps to follow, the places to touch and how to do it.”

Article 6 of the Escazú Agreement states that “each party shall ensure the right of public access to environmental information in its possession, control or custody, in accordance with the principle of maximum disclosure”.

However, during the event, speakers said the Latin America and the Caribbean region still has shortcomings when it comes to disclosure. For example, panellists pointed out, Peru lacks training for officials and the budget for disclosures.

Speaking at the side event, Lourdes Medina, a lawyer specialising in environmental and Indigenous rights, said that if the right to access environmental information is not protected and guaranteed, other rights are at risk. Medina said:


“Citizens’ participation in resistance cannot be guaranteed. There is no adequate mechanism for access to justice, and this produces different forms of violence against defenders.”

Current implementation

During COP3, seven countries presented their national plans – either approved or in progress – to implement the Escazú Agreement. According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Ecuador, Argentina, Santa Lucía, Belize, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile all presented their plans at the summit. The COP also welcomed Dominica as the 16th party to the agreement.

Maya tells Carbon Brief that Mexico’s plan for implementing the Escazú Agreement is on hold due to the country’s upcoming national elections.

Piva says she is working with civil society organisations to get Brazil to ratify the agreement. She said that given Brazil’s size and its leadership in economic issues and regional networks such as Mercosur, the Escazú Agreement also needs Brazil. She tells Carbon Brief:


“If Brazil does not ratify or takes too long to ratify, the agreement will lose strength because it needs the country as a strong negotiator.”

According to the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA), this COP succeeded regarding the inclusion of public participation, including Indigenous peoples, in implementing national plans.

Defenders and civil society organisations consulted by Carbon Brief highlight the need for the COPs on Escazú to be annual rather than biannual since protecting defenders is an urgent matter. Piva says:


“I don’t think it’s fair that defenders already threatened or at risk [wait] more than two years to have [a tool] to demand that their countries protect them.”

Single dose of LSD highly effective at treating anxiety

THE CONVERSATION

April 26, 2024 

LSD was accidentally discovered by Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland in 1938. It was apparently useless, but from 1947 it was marketed as “a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, ‘sexual perversions’, and alcoholism”. It failed to find its niche.

Now, over 80 years later, it may finally have found one – other than expanding consciousness, that is. A new study shows that it is highly effective at treating generalised anxiety disorder for up to 12 weeks with just a single dose. And it is fast acting.

General anxiety disorder (hereafter referred to simply as “anxiety”) is a mental health condition characterised by excessive worry, fear and anxiety about everyday situations. It affects about 6% of adults during their life. Treatments include psychotherapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, as well as medications, such as antidepressants and benzodiazepines.

Psychotherapy is expensive and takes weeks or months, while drugs need to be taken daily for weeks, months or even years. And these can have side-effects. Benzodiazepines are very addictive, while SSRIs (the latest generation of antidepressants) have a variety of side-effects including sexual dysfunction.

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In addition, there are many anxious patients for whom none of the established drugs work. Clearly, new drugs for anxiety are needed.

A clinical trial in the US by the biopharmaceutical company MindMed has shown that a form of LSD (lysergide d-tartrate), given at a relatively low dose, can effectively treat people with anxiety.

Patients were given the drug at 25µg, 50µg, 100µg or 200µg. This was a phase 2b clinical trial, which is where different doses of a drug are tested in a group of people with the illness in question. The purpose is to find a dose that works while having acceptable side-effects. It was found that the 100µg dose was very effective while having only relatively minor side-effects.

The study used the Hamilton anxiety scale to measure anxiety levels. Researchers found improvements in anxiety levels within only two days of administration of their drug.

Further improvements were seen four and 12 weeks into the study. At 12 weeks, 65% of the patients were less anxious, with 48% of patients no longer meeting the clinical criteria for anxiety.

The results were so remarkable that the Food and Drug Administration (the organisation that approves new drugs in the US) has designated this a “breakthrough” drug. This means the FDA will work closely with MindMed during the next phase of testing in humans (called “phase 3”). This is where a larger group, usually up to 3,000 patients, is tested.

In phase 3, LSD may also be tested against established drugs for anxiety to determine if it works as well or possibly even better than those already in clinical use.
Psychedelics shown to treat a range of disorders

Previous studies have examined certain illicit drugs, usually hallucinogens or psychedelics, as treatments for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and addiction. LSD, ecstasy (MDMA), ketamine, ayahuasca and psilocybin all seem useful in various mental health conditions.

A single dose of ketamine can alleviate depressive symptoms for up to a week. The current study by MindMed is the first positive single-dose study, with no psychotherapy, of LSD for anxiety.

THE WAR ON DRUGS WAS CREATED 

BY THIS CROOK

Richard Nixon’s war on drugs set psychedelics research back decades. 

Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

It is incredible to think that the US war on drugs which started with Richard Nixon in 1970, and the consequent difficulties in scientifically examining these illicit drugs, has lasted this long.

Most of these drugs were outlawed and scheduled as having “no accepted medical use”. Five decades later, we are finally finding clinical uses for these drugs.

The data from the MindMed study has been sent to a top science journal for peer review, so we should not get carried away just yet. A phase 3 trial is still needed. However, if a single dose of LSD does work for 12 weeks, then this is truly remarkable. We could be on the verge of a new era of treatments for mental health problems.

Correction: A previous version of this article gave the LSD doses in milligrams. They should have been in micrograms.

Author

Colin Davidson
Professor of Neuropharmacology, University of Central Lancashire
Disclosure statement
Colin Davidson has received funding from the NIH in the USA and from the EU on research projects related to drugs of abuse. He works as a consultant on novel psychoactive substances for the UK Defence Science and Technology Labs and is a member of a Working Group on synthetic cathinones for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, UK.

WAIT, WHAT?! 

Tessera Cuts Dozens of Jobs Following Positive Preclinical Results

Published: Apr 26, 2024 By Neil Versel

Pictured: Illustration depicting large layoffs/iStock, Andrii Yalanskyi

Despite positive results in preclinical studies, Tessera Therapeutics is cutting staff as it tries to move its therapeutic candidates to clinical stage.

The Somerville, Mass.–based company confirmed to BioSpace that it is reducing its workforce by 13%–14%, or fewer than 50 workers.

“As a result of positive data from our preclinical programs, we have reached an inflection point where we need to rebalance the resources of our organization to prioritize and grow our clinical development efforts in anticipation of advancing multiple candidates into the clinic,” a Tessera spokesperson told BioSpace in an email. “Consequently, we have made the decision to reduce our current staff in some areas while continuing to hire in others that will support our goals.”

The spokesperson did not specify where the cuts are targeted, but some recently dismissed employees announced their layoffs on LinkedIn. A senior biochemist involved in RNA structural prediction was let go, as was at least one scientist from the company’s synthetic biology group. Another former Tessera employee now looking for work was in talent acquisition.

Tessera was the top finisher among small companies in BioSpace’s 2024 Best Places to Work survey, and the LinkedIn posters all said positive things about their time there. “This role allowed me to work with some of the most brilliant scientists and I grew in many ways over my time here. I am so proud of what my team accomplished and how far we progressed the biochemical understanding of our technologies,” wrote Randi Kotlar, a former Tessara senior scientist in mobile genetic elements discovery and engineering.

The firm is scheduled to present preclinical data on six different assets at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) meeting May 7–11. The company also reported encouraging data at ASGCT 2023 based on a genomic engineering technique it calls “gene writing.”

Hidden Bacteria “Biosphere” Found Lurking 4 Meters Beneath Earth’s Driest Hot Desert

The newly discovered microbial communities have implications for the search for life on other planets.

MADDY CHAPMAN
Editor & Writer
Edited by Laura Simmons


Deep beneath Yungay Playa lies a surprisingly diverse microbial community.
Image credit: Lucas Horstmann, GFZ-Potsdam


An abundance of microbial life has been found in Chile’s Atacama Desert, lurking up to 4 meters (13 feet) below the surface of one of the most arid and inhospitable places on the planet.

The Atacama is the driest nonpolar desert – but not the driest place on Earth, that title belongs to somewhere you might not expect – receiving just 1 to 3 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) of precipitation per year in some places. But that hasn’t stopped life from thriving there.

While higher life forms are almost entirely absent, bacteria are known to inhabit the bone-dry, salty, and sulfate-rich soil – even at great depths. In a previously unexplored underground habitat in the Yungay region of the desert, researchers have found a surprisingly diverse community of microbes likely completely isolated from life at the surface.

Previous research has focused mostly on soil at the surface, meaning that, until now, what lies deep underground has been a bit of a mystery. “To our knowledge, this represents the deepest microbial survey and discovery of microbial life in Atacama soils to this day,” the team write in a new study describing their findings.

Digging down into the hyper-arid soil to a depth of 4.2 meters (13.8 feet), the researchers took regular soil samples before using a new method of molecular DNA analysis to isolate only DNA that originates from living organisms.

Doing so has enabled them to uncover a hidden biosphere that is helping to expand our understanding of biodiversity in the Atacama Desert and beyond.

The researchers dug down over 4 meters (13 feet) into the desert soil.
Image credit: L. Horstmann, GFZ


In the upper 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) of soil, the team found that communities were dominated by Firmicutes (or Bacillota) – a phylum of bacteria that includes Lactobacillus and Enterococcus. However, their numbers decreased as the depth and also salinity of the soil increased, resulting in a cessation of microbial life in the deepest samples between 80 and 200 centimeters (78.7 inches).

But below 200 centimeters, microbes reemerge. Here, a different microbial population was observed, dominated by Actinobacteria. The authors suggest that this community might have colonized the soil 19,000 years ago, before being buried by further soil deposits. They could, the team hypothesize, extend much deeper than 4.2 meters and may “represent the upper extent of a deep biosphere underneath hyperarid desert soils”.

The upper part of the soil profile.
Image credit: Dirk Wagner, GFZ-Pots


To survive at such depths, the bacteria may rely on the mineral gypsum as a water source, which could have important implications for – believe it or not – the search for extraterrestrial life.

“The exploration of gypsum-associated subsurface environments in the Atacama Desert has direct relevance to astrobiology, since gypsum deposits on Mars are [...] not only evidence of past liquid water but could also possibly serve as a source of water for present microbial life,” the team write in their conclusion.

“Thus, the data from this study is helping us to understand if and how life may exist in similar environments on other planets or moons across our Solar System.”

The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

 

Genetic hope in fight against devastating wheat disease

by Johnny von Einem, University of Adelaide

Credit: Cell Host & Microbe (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2024.04.002

Fungal disease Fusarium head blight (FHB) is on the rise due to increasingly humid conditions induced by climate change during the wheat growing season, but a fundamental discovery by University of Adelaide researchers could help reduce its economic harm.

While some types of wheat are resistant to FHB thanks to the action of the TaHRC gene at the Fhb1 locus, how this gene functions in wheat cells was unknown until now.

Collaborating with Nanjing Agriculture University, the University of Adelaide research team has shown TaHRC works in the nucleus of wheat cells, and it can either increase or decrease a plant's susceptibility to FHB.

"There are two variants of TaHRC that have opposing effects on the condensation of a specific protein complex within the nucleus," says Dr. Xiujuan Yang, from the University's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine.

"When condensed, the complex leads to susceptibility to FHB, whereas when diffused, it provides resistance against FHB.

"We are the first to reveal the function of protein complex condensation in response to a major crop fungal disease, providing insight into the mode of action of protein complexes in cereal defense responses."

Dr Xiujuan Yang examining the health state of wheat flowers. Credit: University of Adelaide

FHB has caused significant harm to Australia's wheat industry in recent years, with crops in the 2022 season suffering up to 100% yield losses.

The disease has been on the rise globally since the 1970s, but climate change has increased its prevalence.

"Australia's reputation for producing high-quality wheat has been built on fortuitous climate conditions during flowering and grain fill, typically coinciding with the dry season, which helps avoid many fungus-caused diseases that thrive in humid weather," says Dr. Yang.

"However, in the background of climate change, a wet spring in 2022 led to Fusarium head blight becoming widespread across eastern Australia."

Australian durum wheat varieties are all highly susceptible to FHB, but it is unclear what level of resistance exists in bread-wheat varieties.

Dr. Yang hopes this fundamental discovery, published in Cell Host & Microbe , will counteract the growing prevalence of FHB and provide assurance to Australian growers.

"Our findings offer exciting prospects for developing new and enhanced forms of Fusarium head blight resistance," Dr. Yang says. "By understanding the underlying mechanisms beyond Fhb1, we can innovate breeding strategies to diversify resistance sources.

"Our research opens the door to the development of more resilient and sustainable wheat varieties for future agriculture, and might shed light onto other Fusarium-caused diseases, such as crown rot."

More information: Yi He et al, A phase-separated protein hub modulates resistance to Fusarium head blight in wheat, Cell Host & Microbe (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2024.04.002

Journal information: Cell Host & Microbe 

Provided by University of Adelaide Breeding with 'wild relatives' to produce disease and climate resistant wheat

How a Vision of Suburban Utopia Shaped California’s Asian Immigrant Communities

MILAN VAISHNAV, JAMES ZARSADIAZ
APRIL 26, 2024

Summary: “Country living” became the way they pictured the ideal American life, but the reality was more complex.

In the second installment of a new collaboration between the University of California Press and Carnegie California, senior fellow Milan Vaishnav speaks with James Zarsadiaz about his book, Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Milan Vaishnav: In some ways, I think this book was a homecoming for you. You grew up in the East San Gabriel Valley, east of the city of Los Angeles. Tell us a little bit about the character of the East Valley.

James Zarsadiaz: The East San Gabriel Valley is in Los Angeles County, and all but one of the municipalities that I focus on in the book is in Los Angeles County. The region itself—in post–World War II history at least—was largely agricultural communities that had ties to the citrus belt that was shipping citrus around the world. Cattle were roaming around the area. This was very much a rural or semirural community.

By the 1950s and 1960s or so, you start to see pockets of suburbanization throughout the East San Gabriel Valley. But by the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, you had large swaths of suburban tracks emerging, largely because there was a lot of land available. A lot of that earlier settlement was mostly White, Euro-American families. By the 1980s and 1990s certain middle-class or affluent suburban tracts were attracting Asian immigrants—chiefly Chinese diasporic families from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Filipinos, Koreans, and smaller groups of South Asian immigrants, including Indians and some Southeast Asian refugees such as Vietnamese families. By the turn of the century, you have multiple Asian-majority suburbs in the East Valley and in surrounding regions.

Milan Vaishnav
Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program and the host of the Grand Tamasha podcast at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He also conducts research on the Indian diaspora.
@MILANV


Milan Vaishnav: One of the main concepts that you unpack in the book is called “country living.” It’s this nostalgic ideal that many Americans have had about the pastoral West, dotted by quaint hamlets and open spaces. But, as you point out in the book, the idea of country living isn’t just this gauzy vision of a suburban utopia—it’s a loaded term in many ways. Could you help us understand its multiple connotations?

James Zarsadiaz: The term “country living” did not just describe how residents saw the communities in which they live. It’s also used as a way to frame how Americans, immigrants, and refugees envision the ideal suburb, which in some ways has rural qualities that connote innocence, wholesomeness, and timelessness. Country living is a way to describe low-density communities, ones that are not associated with traffic congestion, tall buildings, and lots of people. In many ways, a lot of this is based on the imaginations or desires of a community to look and feel as if they’re living in the countryside.

James Zarsadiaz
James Zarsadiaz is an associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco and the author of Resisting Change in Suburbia.

This is not a new concept. The idea of living in the countryside, the romanticizing of the pastoral and the bucolic, goes back to the nineteenth century. And it’s not just immigrants who embrace this idea that the city is bad for your health, dangerous, and vice-ridden and that the countryside is the place to go when you need a feeling of being centered and whole. [The countryside was supposedly] removed from modernity. It was not engaged with the perils of globalization and a liberalizing society—even though that was not necessarily the case. These suburbs had immense global ties and transnational linkages, especially with business, trade, and actual migration.

Milan Vaishnav: Could you say a little bit about what those transnational connections were and how strongly they were felt?

James Zarsadiaz: When I talked to some of these Asian immigrants, many of whom moved to the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, [they talked about embracing] American popular culture. They watched American movies and television shows, listened to American music, and read American books. They already had an image of American life before they even thought about moving to the United States.

That idea of the American dream was also rooted in suburbia. It was not a condo. It was not a high-rise. It was not a tenement in the middle of the city. Their idea of a proper American life is a single-family home in the suburbs, and that’s what they should reach for as immigrants.

In the more material sense, the transnational linkages are especially with business and family ties. It is not uncommon for a Taiwanese import-export business owner to have offices in Taipei, but then they’re working out of the den or the office of their tri-level home 30 miles from L.A. [You see these] transnational connections in the day-to-day life of the suburbs, particularly as communications became more advanced with fax machines, affordable desktops and printers, then the internet. When I was growing up there, one of the things that I noticed is that a lot of businesses and restaurants are open until the wee hours of the morning, which is unusual for a suburb. But a lot of them are working on Asia time, so their bodies and clocks are adjusting, and they’re doing business during hours when [others in the region] are sleeping. And this was well before a more sophisticated internet landscape, where people can just hop on a Zoom.

Milan Vaishnav: What I find so interesting about the period of Asian American migration to the East Valley is that as you start to see the numbers swell, many of these migrants are consciously, or maybe subconsciously, adopting the “model minority standard” that has often been foisted on them as they sought to assimilate into these communities.

James Zarsadiaz: I think that’s one of the central challenges that a lot of Asian immigrants even today face. You have, on the one hand, a society that says, “You must assimilate. You must blend in to the American mainstream,” however you define that. But there’s also another set of thoughts: “This is America. It’s diverse. You can be whoever you are, speak your native tongue, eat the food that you want, and watch the television shows that you want to watch.” You have those freedoms, and that’s part of our rich cultural heritage, or at least the idea that America is open to that.



Asian Americans found themselves trying to straddle these ideas and worlds. I say they kind of take a third way. They weren’t just fully assimilating in the way that pre-1965 immigrants were forced to do. But at the same time, they wanted to engage with assimilation—this is around the civil rights movement, immigration reforms, and people are telling them, “Multiculturalism is great. Diversity is great.”

Particularly middle-class, upper-middle-class, and affluent immigrants who are generally made more aware of these different ideas around American racial politics, they kind of did both. They would teach their children that you must speak English and embrace hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and all of those things. But at the same time, behind closed doors, they are eating tofu and they’re speaking Tagalog, or Vietnamese, or Mandarin. They have cable subscriptions to a Hong Kong channel that they like or a Filipino channel provider.

That is also demonstrated in the physical landscape of suburbia. Their homes are these very conventional suburban homes that are of Southern California style—stucco, pseudo-Mediterranean. But inside, they might be [arranged] in accordance with feng shui. They’re shopping at a grocery store in the middle of a strip mall that looks like it’s supposed to be a plaza in Mexico, as is the Southern California style, but they’re buying live seafood at a Chinese supermarket or kimchi at one of the several Korean grocery stores.

The interesting thing—and this is partly why I wrote this book—is that this is also occurring in Northern California, in the suburbs of Houston and Atlanta, then Washington, DC; Chicago; and beyond. So, in many ways, California was the place where Asian American representation started to take off, and then in other parts of the country, as populations grew in terms of Asian immigrants, you started to see what you saw in [Southern California] in the 1980s occur in other parts of the United States in the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond.

The model minority myth comes into play here, because many of them felt that they had to embrace this idea of being the “good immigrant” and not a menace to society. Many of them downplayed their ethnic heritage to fit into that mold. But many of them embraced it, because it granted them access in ways that, for example, other communities of color did not have—particularly Black Americans and Latinx Americans.

Milan Vaishnav: I am glad that you brought up the nationalization of the story because I think part of what’s so brilliant about this book is that it is very deeply grounded in a particular geography in Southern California. You get the payoff from getting a 360-degree view of what it’s like to be on the ground. But at the same time, when you zoom out, you start to see all these linkages with these other suburban areas, where you see very similar patterns playing out.

You talk about Asian American residents as living “in between.” So, on the one hand, they were viewed as the model minority. On the other hand, non-Asian residents felt threatened that Asians would upend the norms of suburbia. Why did so many residents find this Asian influx to be so threatening?

James Zarsadiaz: Space and place matter. The concern from critics—many of whom were more conservative, older, White residents—[was a fear that] Asian immigrants and their families were going to upend the suburban idyll. They were afraid that the influx of Asians meant changing the cultural traditions of suburbia. For example, Asian immigrants and their families were not as active in historic American organizations like the Lions Club, Kiwanis, and things like that, which usually attracted generally Euro-American families, especially Euro-American men.

A second thing is the built environment itself. Among the concerns chiefly was the display of non-English-word signage in retail spaces, religious spaces, and what have you. We saw this in the early and mid-1980s in the West San Gabriel Valley, where there was an earlier settlement of Chinese immigrants, especially from Hong Kong and Taiwan, where racial politics got really nasty. It was covered widely in the news, because you had nativists coming out saying, “This is not how suburbia is supposed to look and feel.”

What you saw on the east side several years later was people saying, “You should not see Korean lettering on a strip mall. There shouldn’t be a Chinese megachurch for evangelicals with Chinese lettering.” In one case, some White resident said, “Oh, a Chinese parent-teacher association is self-segregating. How does that benefit anybody?” And they considered this a form of “reverse racism.”

I think some of them were so invested in the idea of the American dream and how that’s rooted in a particular place and lifestyle, that when confronted with diversity and change, they reacted negatively. They were not accustomed to seeing people of color in suburbia, which opened up another set of questions about, well, “What is suburbia, and who gets to control it?” And “Who gets to control the idea of what it means to live in the suburbs?” That’s why this story is so complicated. Racism, white supremacy, and nativism are definitely present in the book, but I think that it’s much more multilayered. I think, because immigrants themselves also bought into the idea of the American dream and what a suburb is supposed to look like, many of them also bought into the idea that it shouldn’t have Chinese lettering on strip malls or Buddhist temples that feature overtly Asian aesthetics.

Milan Vaishnav: To make it even more complicated, there’s a lot of coded language used by Asians and non-Asians alike about needing to protect their communities, their families, and their children from “city people.”

James Zarsadiaz: That’s right.

Milan Vaishnav: In the book you go into debates over school districting and zoning and show how quickly Asians and non-Asians became allies—allies over keeping other minorities out. Did that surprise you?

James Zarsadiaz: Yes and no. I think that this is, again, the importance of place and geography. . . .

The Asian Americans in the six communities I focus on are generally middle-class, upper-middle-class, or affluent. And for them, this was about protecting their economic privileges, their financial privileges, all the things that they felt were going to be threatened if you allow “city people,” which was the coded language for working-class people, working-class immigrants, Black families, Latinx families, and other groups. For them, this is also tied to the idea that they are wholesome Asian immigrants, and they are more conservative politically and culturally. That’s why you saw these alliances, even though some of these alliances were with people who at one point were saying, “You’re the reason why suburbia is falling apart.”

Milan Vaishnav: There’s a feeling of cognitive dissonance because it’s sometimes hard to square this behavior that you’re describing with the fact that Asians themselves were victims and targets of discriminatory behavior.

James Zarsadiaz: Exactly. And that’s why in the introduction of the book, I say, “There are a lot of inconsistencies here—incongruities, paradoxes, contradictions. But that’s also part of the story.”

One of the underlying themes in this book is how many Asian Americans are conservative. And I think we don’t talk about that as much as a society. Maybe not necessarily voting Republican in the sense of electoral, partisan politics, but at least culturally and politically, they have more right-leaning tendencies, particularly among certain generations or certain ethnic groups within Asian America. You see that especially in these suburban communities, where the defense of property, property values, all these ideas of an old-fashioned lifestyle, so to speak, are where the right-wing politics starts to come into the conversation.

Milan Vaishnav: One of the terms that you introduced me to in this book was the “slow growth movement.” Tell us a little bit about what that is and what role Asians played in it?

James Zarsadiaz: The slow growth movement, briefly, is something that emerged more or less in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s across the United States (although you had earlier versions of slow growth movements occurring even before that).

But that term is the idea that in the suburbs and exurbs, growth and development are controlled. There wouldn’t be mid-rises or high rises. Transportation would be developed regionally. The infrastructure would essentially deter or minimize traffic on the road and public transit. If there was going to be new housing development, there would be tight restrictions in terms of how many people would live in a building or how many homes are allowed to be constructed in a community.

In Southern California, slow growth politics was hot in the 1980s. It was especially hot in the San Gabriel Valley because this is where a lot of the newest homes were being built. You had White families and Asian American families who were in strong support of slow growth. And what’s interesting here is that they would say, “All these people are moving here, and they’re ruining the bucolic feel. They’re bringing traffic, and they’re bringing vice.” But at the same time, many of them would not acknowledge that they too are part of the “problem” that they are speaking out against. In other words, this is NIMBYism.

What was fascinating to see was that slow growth politics—historically associated with White activists—captured the interest of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans equally engaged in the politics of development. They were at city hall meetings and city council meetings. They were out protesting developments and fighting realtors and developers as much as their White counterparts.

I felt that was important to make note of, because there’s also a general understanding that Asian Americans are not as politically engaged, if not maybe apathetic and disconnected. But here’s this example of Asian Americans who were activated and engaged and where classist politics came into conversation again. For a lot of Asian American families who were more well-to-do or had more comfortable financial status, what often activated them in politics were matters that affected their pocketbooks and things that they felt they worked hard for—homeownership, especially.

Milan Vaishnav: When you get to the very end of the book, many residents came to recognize that country living was something that may have existed in name only, and maybe that was always the case. Was the idea of country living sort of this mirage, this kind of unattainable mountaintop that people were seeking to reach?

James Zarsadiaz: I think so. The idea of country living was constructed, built, and made by, one could argue, advertisers, developers, and people who were trying to make these communities fashionable. And this is something that developers, realtors, and politicians still do today, whether it’s a city or a suburb. They’re trying to generate interest and create intrigue for a place.

We talk about this in the urban context of renaming neighborhoods. For example, in San Francisco, you have the Financial District. Then suddenly there’s a swath of it called the East Cut, and people are losing their minds. They’re like, “Who decided this is the East Cut?”

In the 1960s and 1970s, people were not thinking about the San Gabriel Valley. People were thinking of the San Fernando Valley—the original “the Valley.” How do you get people to move to what people thought was the middle of nowhere—the so-called boonies? Oh, let’s call it “country living.” That idea caught on, and it wasn’t just developers—the residents themselves embraced it.

And so the myth was much more powerful than the reality of these communities. I think once you got to the 2000s and you saw traffic congestion and rows upon rows of houses, people realized, “Maybe this was never really true to begin with.”

And when that reality sets in for some of these residents, they move to find it somewhere else. They move deeper into greater metro L.A., into Riverside County. Many of them leave the state of California altogether. Many of them moved to Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, Wyoming, because they felt that that was what California [used to be]. If they can’t have that anymore in California, they have to move to other parts of the West that are not as racially diverse, not as populated, and not as built out in the way that much of California is today.

Milan Vaishnav: [This is] a bit of an unfair question for a historian, but as a political scientist, I can’t resist.

You mention time and time again the deeply held, conservative values that Asian immigrants had and exhibited throughout this period and that helped to shape their behavior and their patterns of assimilation. Yet we know, at least on a national level, that Asian Americans tend to vote for the Democratic Party. They tend not to vote for the Republican Party. Obviously, it’s a huge community, and you have to look at different ethnic origin groups rather than Asian Americans at large. You would find very different patterns, say, if you look at Vietnamese communities versus Indian communities and so forth. But tell us a little bit about this geography. Do you see this sort of paradox of conservative social values but politically expressed oppositely?

James Zarsadiaz: You have places like where I’m based in San Francisco, or [other] urban centers, where you have Asian Americans who, on paper, are registered Democrats but they’re out protesting a progressive district attorney or a school curriculum that is perceived to be embracing critical race theory. You have Asian Americans who might vote Democratic but are upset about affirmative action and what they perceive to be policies that discriminate against Asian Americans.
RELATED ANALYSIS FROM CARNEGIEWhy Climate Change Is Especially Dire for Islands

So that’s an unanswered question that I think even people are trying to figure out today. It’s an urban and suburban challenge. You have Asian immigrants who would say, “I’m voting for Joe Biden,” but then they say they don’t like critical race theory or adjacent ideas being taught to their children. Again, the cognitive dissonance, right? It’s interesting to see that.

And for some Asian Americans, they may not have been as engaged with national politics . . . but when it came to local politics, they were paying attention more. It just so happens that it was often more on conservative issues, or at least issues that were seen as aligned with conservative politics: resistance to development, urbanization, school district boundary policies, and so forth.

Milan Vaishnav: Congratulations on the book, which was fun to read. It is grounded in this very particular geography that you know very well, but I think has resonance way beyond it.

James Zarsadiaz: I know one of the reasons why I wrote this book is because I felt like so many people I knew who identify as Asian American would say that a lot of elements of their lives are tied to suburbia. I think this is a story that U.S. historians and people who are interested in history should engage with more. The Asian American experience is not centered in Chinatown or Koreatown. I would argue that for a lot of us, especially in the past thirty years, it’s grounded in Sugarland, San Gabriel Valley, Edison, Daly City, all these places that are outside of city limits.

Read the first installment in this series, on islands and climate change, here.

Kurt Cobain, Working-Class Hero

Class rage informs the anger found across Nirvana’s studio albums. Thirty years after Kurt Cobain’s death, we should remember his critique of the corporate mainstream — a political stance shaped by his working-class background.

Kurt Cobain of Nirvana during the taping of MTV Unpluggedat Sony Studios in New York City, November 18, 1993.

 (Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)


BY CHRISTOPHER J. LEE
04.26.2024 

 JACOBIN

In 1991, Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who died thirty years ago this month, wrote a letter to Rolling Stone, expressing what he thought about the magazine’s audience and political pedigree. “At this point in our, uh, career, before hair loss treatment and bad credit, I’ve decided I have no desire to do an interview,” Cobain wrote. “We wouldn’t benefit from an interview because the average Rolling Stone reader is a middle-aged ex-hippie turned hippiecrite, who embraces the past as ‘the glory days’ and has a kinder, gentler, more adult approach toward the new liberal conservatism. The average Rolling Stone reader has always gathered moss.”

Cobain’s letter was never sent. He and the other members of Nirvana — Krist Novoselic (bass) and Dave Grohl (drums) — eventually agreed to appear in Rolling Stone, albeit with Cobain famously wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” on the cover. Nevertheless, this letter, which is excerpted in Charles R. Cross’s excellent biography of Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven (2001), captures the acerbic political sensibility of the singer-songwriter — a spirit that has often been minimized by critics and lost among listeners of his music.

Class rage is, fundamentally, the rage found across Nirvana’s studio albums. From their debut, Bleach (1989), to their swansong, In Utero (1993), the sound and attitude of Cobain’s music was deeply rooted in his working-class background, which centered on the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, where he lived for most of his abbreviated life. His lyrics rarely addressed this context directly. But his worldview and critical perspective were vitally shaped by the lumber economy, wealth inequality, and subsequent lack of middle-class opportunities he experienced growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest.
Steep Odds

Cobain was born in February 1967 to a twenty-one-year-old father, who worked as a mechanic at a Chevron station, and a mother who was only nineteen. As described by Cross, money was a constant issue, both for the Cobain family and for locals generally. Aberdeen’s timber economy had peaked by the early 1970s, and many of its nearly twenty thousand residents were opting to leave for employment elsewhere. Financial pressures overwhelmed Cobain’s parents, ultimately contributing to their divorce — an experience that damaged Cobain emotionally at a young age and from which he never entirely recovered.

Public schools, especially art classes, offered some reprieve, though he bounced around ten different homes, both foster and family, while in high school. Cobain also experienced homelessness, rejecting his parents in favor of being alone. He mythologized this period of approximately four months in the song “Something in the Way” from Nirvana’s breakthrough LP, Nevermind (1991), in which he mentions sleeping underneath a bridge in Aberdeen — a claim disputed by Novoselic, among others. Nonetheless, Cobain did sleep regularly in vacant buildings and even in the waiting room of Grays Harbor Community Hospital, at times charging food from the cafeteria to invented room numbers.


Cobain also reconnected with his childhood interest in music during this period. Notably, Buzz Osborne of the Melvins was a few years ahead of him in school and became a mentor, introducing him to punk rock. After another period of homelessness, during which Cobain received food stamps and worked as a janitor at the high school he had attended — a job he would later mock in the video for Nirvana’s hit song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — he committed himself more fully to music through the model provided by Osborne and by meeting Novoselic, who went to high school in Aberdeen. Though money remained a constant issue, Cobain had found a sense of purpose.

The years that followed from roughly 1987 to 1991 — the year Nevermind was released — were a mix of strident ambition and steep odds. Cobain and Novoselic paid their dues by living out various rock-band cliches, whether playing fraternity parties, rotating through drummers, or sleeping on floors while on regional tours. Sub Pop, Nirvana’s first label, provided validation for Cobain but also shortchanged the band due to its own financial difficulties: it paid for recording costs but also took the profits.

By this point, the Pacific Northwest was quickly establishing itself as a hub for the alternative music scene. Bands like Green River, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden had been defining the genre of grunge, while acts like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and 7 Year Bitch jump-started the riot grrrl scene. Cobain had gravitated toward Olympia, the home of Evergreen State College, and its role in fostering these trends through labels like K Records and Kill Rock Stars. He dated Tobi Vail, the drummer for Bikini Kill, at the time — a relationship that inspired “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from an offhand graffito by Kathleen Hanna, the lead vocalist of Bikini Kill. Grohl, who had joined Nirvana by then, was also dating Hanna. Yet, despite these close associations, Cobain felt a class insecurity hanging around with this college-educated crowd. He felt he had something to prove to them.

Nevermind, recorded in Los Angeles in the spring of 1991, was that proof. Nirvana had gained attention through its first album Bleach, constant touring, and the recognition of more senior acts like Sonic Youth. Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl signed with DGC, an imprint of Geffen Records, a major label. Despite this lucrative contract, Cobain returned to Olympia from a trip to Los Angeles in July only to discover that he had been evicted from his apartment. For several weeks, he lived in his car, as he had done before, just a few months before Nevermind would go platinum. Its success would seemingly solve Cobain’s life circumstances, financial and otherwise. But ultimately, it didn’t.
Expression, and Escape

There is no single explanation for Cobain’s suicide in April 1994. A key role was undoubtedly played by his serious heroin addiction, which friends, family, and his wife, Courtney Love, tried to end. But the pressures of sudden and extreme fame, and lingering emotional trauma from childhood, must also be accounted for. Lifelong anxieties, including class anxiety, likely shaped his sense of limitation as well.

In February 1991, prior to the recording sessions in Los Angeles, Cobain began an unfinished autobiographical essay, which is briefly excerpted in Cross’s book. “Hi, I’m 24 years old,” Cobain begins. “I was born a white, lower-middle-class male off the coast of Washington State. . . . My parents got a divorce so I moved in with my dad into a trailer park in an even smaller logging community. My dad’s friends talked him into joining the Columbia Record Club and soon records showed up at my trailer once a week, accumulating quite a large collection.”

Music provided an escape for Cobain, and like his heroes, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who came from similar working-class backgrounds, it provided a means of expression, including a class-driven anger. Cobain would voice an appreciation for hip-hop along the same lines, though he was critical of its misogyny, with rap artists like Jay-Z later paying respect in turn. Indeed, Cobain was outspoken against the sexism, homophobia, and racism he encountered on the rock scene, especially by other white male musicians, including esteemed figures like Eddie Van Halen.

In different ways, throughout his life, Cobain sought to work against a system — artistic, social, and economic — that had disadvantaged him from the start. He also sought to create a space for other voices, whether female-led bands like Shonen Knife or marginalized outsider artists like Daniel Johnston.

Thirty years later, it is important to remember Cobain not just for his music or for his tragic passing but for the progressive politics, based on his own experiences, that he attempted to articulate and bring into the foreground during his lifetime.

CONTRIBUTOR
Christopher J. Lee currently teaches in the Bard Prison Initiative. He is lead editor of the journal Safundi.