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Super Bowl Show And A Super Bored Frenchman

A metaphor
A metaphor
Bertrand Hauger

PARIS Twice a year (for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl), I renounce my 6-hour beauty sleep and fight timezones to tune in to a bit of live transatlantic spectacle.

Blame it on three reasons, ranked by order of importance: my americanophile wife; a chance to take the temperature of U.S. cultural hegemony; and my best efforts to keep up with the cool (Yankee) kids at Worldcrunch's Paris office.

The Oscars, I get, and get to share with my better half. But even for a fairly open-minded French-born 30-something, American football is one of the few staples of U.S. folklore that I am entirely hermetical to. The Brady Bunch? Why not. Beer pong? Sure. Dolly Parton? Yeah, alright. But football...? Americanah thank you. That's one of Uncle Sam's tricks this inheritor of the Revolution just won't abide by.

See, in my neck of the forêt, "football" means soccer. Good ol" straightforward and harmless soccer, as Donald Trump and his son Barron would agree — miles away from the seemingly brutal and very disruptive game of gridiron.

Still, every year, I give it a go (solo) — ultimately out of sheer curiosity, to see what this whole mind-blowing billion-dollar Super Bowl business is all about.

I had to rack my brains to remember the last time I was so little entertained by entertainment.

So there I was, comfy on my couch at silly o'clock, happy in the belief that my gradual understanding of the other side of the pond was worth the sleeping sacrifice. It was not to be.

CNN's Jeff Pearlman, in a Trump-tweet-like headline, summed it up beautifully this morning: This was "the worst Super Bowl ever." Fair enough, the fact that I haven't got a clue about the rules doesn't exactly play in my favor. But I wasn't the only one under the impression that, at times, the commentators themselves were sort of making it up as they went.

Let's face it, though: People don't watch the Super Bowl for the quality of the game. But from the play's low score to the marooned halftime show to the awkward ads and the generally uninspiring movie trailers, I had to rack my brains to remember the last time I was so little entertained by entertainment (Pokémon Go, summer of 2016). Pure consumerism and overabundance of pop culture in a grandiose show did nothing but keep me awake. Not to inflate a weirdly shaped ball out of proportions, but could it be that 3 A.M. me witnessed a flake of relevance come off of U.S. imperialism?

A thought not quite worth waking up my wife for, but let's see what the cool kids at the office have to say.

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Green

Forest Networks? Revisiting The Science Of Trees And Funghi "Reaching Out"

A compelling story about how forest fungal networks communicate has garnered much public interest. Is any of it true?

Thomas Brail films the roots of a cut tree with his smartphone.

Arborist and conservationist Thomas Brail at a clearcutting near his hometown of Mazamet in the Tarn, France.

Melanie Jones, Jason Hoeksema, & Justine Karst

Over the past few years, a fascinating narrative about forests and fungi has captured the public imagination. It holds that the roots of neighboring trees can be connected by fungal filaments, forming massive underground networks that can span entire forests — a so-called wood-wide web. Through this web, the story goes, trees share carbon, water, and other nutrients, and even send chemical warnings of dangers such as insect attacks. The narrative — recounted in books, podcasts, TV series, documentaries, and news articles — has prompted some experts to rethink not only forest management but the relationships between self-interest and altruism in human society.

But is any of it true?

The three of us have studied forest fungi for our whole careers, and even we were surprised by some of the more extraordinary claims surfacing in the media about the wood-wide web. Thinking we had missed something, we thoroughly reviewed 26 field studies, including several of our own, that looked at the role fungal networks play in resource transfer in forests. What we found shows how easily confirmation bias, unchecked claims, and credulous news reporting can, over time, distort research findings beyond recognition. It should serve as a cautionary tale for scientists and journalists alike.

First, let’s be clear: Fungi do grow inside and on tree roots, forming a symbiosis called a mycorrhiza, or fungus-root. Mycorrhizae are essential for the normal growth of trees. Among other things, the fungi can take up from the soil, and transfer to the tree, nutrients that roots could not otherwise access. In return, fungi receive from the roots sugars they need to grow.

As fungal filaments spread out through forest soil, they will often, at least temporarily, physically connect the roots of two neighboring trees. The resulting system of interconnected tree roots is called a common mycorrhizal network, or CMN.

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