Twilight Zone

Image: via:

[ed. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice... (personally it feels like being on a hijacked plane, the only question being how bad it'll get)]

***

"A long trip on an American highway in the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. (“We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours”; “Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.”) On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.

A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven’t. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.

Much of this is distinctly American—the idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven’t fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault. (...)

Does talk of values and ideas get us closer? A central story of American public life during the past three or four decades is (as this writer has noted) that liberals have wanted political victories while reliably securing only cultural victories, even as conservatives, wanting cultural victories, get only political ones. Right-wing Presidents and legislatures are elected, even as one barrier after another has fallen on the traditionalist front of manners and mores. Consider the widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage. A social transformation once so seemingly untenable that even Barack Obama said he was against it, in his first campaign for President, became an uncontroversial rite within scarcely more than a decade.

Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.

On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces [ed. insert villain]"

~ How Alarmed Should We Be (New Yorker)

How the Electoral College Has Survived, Despite Being Perennially Unpopular

How has the Electoral College survived, despite being perennially unpopular (NPR)

[ed. Well, here we go. Whatever happens, we'll deserve it. See also: Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand (Guardian).]

AI Podcast Hosts Have Existential Meltdown

Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown (above).

via: ACX

Prince

[ed. Nice to see some new things being released from the Vault. Need a pair of those boots.]

Haulout: (Documentary)

[ed. Must see. You'll never forget it. Marine biologist Maxim Chakilev and filmakers Evgenia and Maxim Abugaeva at the largest walrus haulout on earth (Chukotka, Siberian Arctic). Imagine waking up one morning to 95,000 walruses surrounding your little ramshackle cabin (expand screen for proper viewing). Subtitle version here.]

Kawase Hasui, Lake Haruna Summer 1935

Utagawa Hiroshige, Mariko Mabutsu Chaya

Everything is Broken

[ed. And, in other exciting news: Daniel Ek has made more money from Spotify in a year than Taylor Swift has, like, ever - $345 million/yr. (MusicRadar). The streaming business is so profitable (for CEOs that is - for artists, not so much) that even Chick-fil-A, Walmart, Kroger, Uber and others are getting into the act (source). See also: Why Streaming Subscription Prices Will Continue to Rise (HB).]

Image: X/Twitter. H/T: HB

Getting the Spark Back

Many have asked if this year will mark the death of the dating app. Headlines have emphasized that apps are facing an “existential crisis,” that Gen Z is “ditching dating apps,” that we’re all “sick of swiping,” and that we’ve “fallen out of love” with the technology. Since 2013, dating apps have been the most common way couples meet, but now they’re on the decline. Stock prices have fallen dramatically—Bumble’s dropped from $75 at its IPO to $6, last I checked—while Tinder’s annual downloads currently sit at around two-thirds of what they were at their 2014 peak. The problem, naturally, is that many people feel as though the apps no longer work. They’re not meeting the right people on Bumble, Tinder, or Hinge, but they’ve forgotten how to meet people in the real world too.

It makes sense, then—or, rather, makes it the app’s responsibility—that Tinder would try to bridge this gap by hosting in-person events. Over the summer and into the fall, Tinder has been throwing singles events across the country. At outdoor food markets in Los Angeles and New York, it held “ice cream socials,” where participants wore wristbands signaling their availability and willingness to mingle among other ice cream–eating patrons. In Austin and Nashville, it held line-dancing classes and arcade tournaments. These two particular events occurred in the hour prior to Chaotic Singles Parties, a nationwide singles event founded by Cassidy Davis, a young woman who went viral for inviting her Tinder matches over for a massive house party. Soon, she began throwing the parties elsewhere, inviting whoever was interested in attending—so long as they brought a Tinder match. The idea, of course, is that although you might bring a specific person as your date, they may not be the person you leave with, so to speak.

Other apps have been pursuing similar in-person models. Bumble has hosted Bumble IRL for several years, Feeld has “socials” where you can “take it offline,” and Match Group app Yuzu put on a speed-dating event over the summer. In fact, for as many stories as there are about the decline of dating apps, there seem to be an equal amount about the rise of in-person events... in New York, there are parties of this nature nearly every night of the week.

But in-person events sponsored by dating apps offer their own specific appeal. There’s safety in familiarity, a comfort in the knowledge that, at very least, one can expect the audience for a Tinder event—and its overall vibe—to be similar to that of the app itself. Tinder is considered to be relatively casual and low-pressure: a good, albeit nonspecific choice for anyone curious to see what’s out there. This inherently attracts a broad demographic that was represented by the event’s attendees. As on the app, there was no particular age group, income level, gender, or sexuality who seemed overrepresented. I saw white women in their 40s and 50s giving it their all during a salsa class as they paired up with Chet Hanks look-alikes in their 20s. There was a pair of ethnically ambiguous adult male twins in their early 30s who pretended they weren’t actually twins. A few Gen Z girls donned heart-shaped bisexual pride stickers.

In fact, the only real commonality among them seemed to be a mutual desire to replicate the ease of app dating in the real world. Tinder’s own data reflects this: According to a media alert for the event series, “over half (58 percent) of young singles prefer to meet matches in group settings, and 52 percent [are] interested in events that bring singles together.” Stephanie Danzi, senior vice president of global marketing at Tinder, told me that much of this has to do with nostalgia—singles are longing for the sorts of iconic “meet-cute” moments that swept them off their feet in ’90s movies and sitcoms, and they’re turning to IRL gatherings to make them happen. The irony of this is obvious: Though people yearn for opportunities to meet others in person, it’s the ubiquity of the apps themselves that has lessened their chances of doing so. App-sponsored dating events, then, are something of a win-win for apps and users alike. Apps get to maintain their status as the preferred dating platforms, while users get to relearn how to navigate dating in the real world.

Prior to the party, I attempted to secure a platonic Tinder date. Using Tinder Platinum’s Passport feature—which the app provided for this story—I was able to browse Miami’s Tinder pool long before I arrived. I was also able to impart more rigid standards than regular users do, narrowing my options to include only those with a bio and indicating that my interest was only in friendship. If I wanted, I could have been even choosier, selecting for, among other things, zodiac signs, sleeping habits, and communication style. I was mainly hoping, though, to discover what Tinder had to offer on its own, freed from my preordained constraints.

It was my first time on the app in close to a decade. I was enthralled by the experience of swiping. There was indeed a seemingly unlimited supply of attractive, interesting-enough men. And there were just as many I didn’t like. Dating apps, I find, often change our sense of our own desires: We think we want a man over 6 feet tall, but were we to meet a man who didn’t fit that requirement in person, we might not even realize it. I don’t think Tinder is an exception to this problem—it just belies a more honest representation of it. Unlike Hinge, Tinder does not try to fluff itself up with required lofty philosophical prompts or cutesy profile features. It’s your photo, some surface-level information about you, and that’s it. There’s nothing to do but go with your gut.

As for my own profile, I added a handful of photos of myself, provided some details about my personality (i.e., “smoker when drinking”), and wrote in my bio that I was looking for someone to platonically accompany me to the event.

I had a few potential takers. Most fizzled out when they realized my intentions, perhaps having not read my bio at all. Others seemed to hope that I was lying or that they could convince me it wasn’t actually platonic. One particular man seemed to be a fit, agreeing he’d be willing to chat with me about his experience for the piece. “My experience might not be like everyone else’s, I’m quite the specimen,” he said. “Plus I might bring my dog, and she’s a real lady killer.”

“I’m not sure you should bring your dog to this event with hundreds of people at a hotel, but let me know if you want to come,” I replied. I saw that he unmatched me. (...)

Quickly, I met a slew of eligible bachelors. There was a teacher who lived down the street, an attorney from the next neighborhood over, a younger engineer from Lima who’d been living in Miami for the past six years, and a pilot in his 50s who’d driven an hour to be there. Some had been brought to the event by a friend; others had heard about it directly from in-app ads on Tinder. One even told me he’d found out about it on Meetup.com. The near-universal sentiment was that, whether or not they were on the apps, they’d grown tired of the digitization of their romantic lives. The bars and other traditional venues in which they’d previously expected to meet someone were hit-and-miss, and they often felt too awkward to approach people in person at all. So, they figured, why not give this in-person mixer a try?

The first half-hour began slowly, with patrons waiting for their drinks to be made or the buzz to kick in, but it didn’t take long for the initial discomfort to fade. Every few minutes, I’d look around to see that the population of the party and the energy associated with it had doubled in size. As on the app, most women couldn’t stand alone for more than a moment before a new suitor approached.

The gender ratio was about equal. Even so, I did notice men—attractive ones!—who spent most of their time alone. About halfway through the evening, the hosts led a game akin to musical chairs. The music would play, and you’d walk around the room until it abruptly stopped. Whoever was right in front of you would be the next person you spoke with, usually about a specific prompt, like “What’s your biggest red flag?” As I ambled my way through the crowd, I saw several guys standing still, expectantly. “You’re supposed to be walking around!” I said to a few of them, flashing a smile. “Oh, am I?” they’d respond, with a sort of sly smirk. “Why don’t you just stay here and talk to me?”

“No!” I’d respond. “I’m here to PARTICIPATE!” Later, when the game was over, I’d see them alone again.

by Magdalene Taylor, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by fizkes/Getty Images Plus and Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Gil Scott-Heron

[ed. Thinking of Gil this morning and this heartbreaking song about the push/pull of addiction. The guitar solo starting around 7:45 is by Ed Brady. Robert Gordon on bass.]

Uncanny Valley

Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”

It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the word paranoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.

But we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people — some kids — unfathomably rich. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. Phones are opened and taxis summoned; we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table.

I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.

Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.

But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.

It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Mana­gers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes.

Over catered Afghan food, I meet the team, including a billionaire who made his fortune from a website that helps people feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d hate in real life. He asks where I work, and I tell him. “Oh,” he says, not unkindly, snapping a piece of lavash in two, “I know that company. I think I tried to buy you.” (...)

Home is my refuge, except when it’s not. My roommate is turning 30, and to celebrate we are hosting a wine and cheese party at our apartment. Well, she is hosting — I have been invited. Her friends arrive promptly, in business casual. Hundreds of dollars of cheese are represented. “Bi-Rite, obviously,” she says, looking elegant in black silk as she smears Humboldt Fog onto a cracker. My roommate works down on the Peninsula, for a website that everyone loathes but no one can stop using. We occupy different spaces: I am in the start-up world, land of perpetual youth, and she is an adult like any other, navigating a corporation, acting the part, negotiating for her place. I admire and do not understand her; it is possible she finds me amusing. Mostly we talk about exercise.

Classical music streams through the house and someone opens a bottle of proper Champagne, which he reassures us is really from France; people clap when the cork pops. My roommate and I are the same age but I feel like a child at my parents’ party, and I am immediately envious, homesick. I send myself to my room, lock the door, and change into a very tight dress. I’ve gained fifteen pounds in trail mix: it never feels like a meal, but there’s an aggregate effect. When I reenter the living room, I suck in my stomach and slide between people’s backs, looking for a conversation. On the couch, a man in a suit jacket expounds on the cannabis opportunity. Everyone seems very comfortable and nobody talks to me. They tilt their wineglasses at the correct angle; they dust crumbs off their palms with grace. The word I hear the most is revenue. No — strategy. There’s nothing to do but drink and ingratiate myself. I wind up on the roof with a cluster of strangers and find myself missing my mother with a ferocity that carves into my gut. In the distance I can see the tip of the famous Rainbow Flag on Castro Street, whipping. (...)

Ours is a “pickax-during-the-gold-rush” product, the kind venture capitalists love to get behind. The product provides a shortcut to database infrastructure, giving people information about their apps and websites that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. All our customers are other software companies. This is a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry. I would say more, but I signed an NDA.

by Anna Wiener, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007, gold leaf and velvet on paper. Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery.

[ed. What a soul-sucking profession. No matter how rich these people get, they'll someday have to consider the sum total of their contributions to life, the world, themselves. Wouldn't want to be them then (or now)...]

Paul McCartney Post-Beatles Musical Moments

I love the Beatles—who doesn’t?—but give that bloke Macca credit. He enjoyed a whirlwind second career after the band’s breakup. This body of work would ensure his legendary status even without the Fab Four. (...)

Paul McCartney recreates a duet with John Lennon at Glastonbury in 2022

Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary Get Back on the final days of the Beatles did more than revisit the past. It was also healing—for both fans and the surviving musicians.

The healing moment for me happened when I saw McCartney dancing with Lennon right there in Abbey Road Studios. This took place at the very moment when the Beatles were allegedly rupturing in acrimony and distrust.

The surviving film tells a different story.

Even at the end, these four musicians were deeply attuned to each other (that’s the right word in more than one sense), and shared happy moments of intimacy—just like a family.

They had gone through extraordinary experiences together, akin to comrades in war, that no outsider could possibly understand. Such ties are almost unbreakable.

So I wasn’t surprised when McCartney decided to borrow a film clip from 1970 and use it in live performance more than 50 years later. Seeing this rediscovered footage had psychically reunited him with his old mate.

You can feel it in the clip below. When I first saw it, tears came to my eyes. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But I wasn’t alone. When John Lennon appears on the screen, the audience responds audibly—not applause, or cheers, but just a deep, collective sigh of beatitude.

McCartney singing live in concert with a young John Lennon in 2022 is like an old couple coming together again after years of separation. It’s Yin embracing Yang. The Apollonian merges with the Dionysian. Opposites are reconciled.

So if you want some positive vibes in our troubled times, here it comes. Let everybody have a good year. Let everybody see the sun shine.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Paul McCartney/YouTube

[ed. What were those chords he was playing? (hard to tell backwards and upside down). And check this out:]

The barely 15-year-old Paul McCartney used “Twenty Flight Rock” as his first song when he auditioned for John Lennon on July 6, 1957 in Liverpool, England. The 16-year-old Lennon was impressed by the young McCartney’s ability to play the song on the guitar during their first official introductions at St. Peter’s Church Hall prior to a church garden fete. The good first impression of McCartney’s performance led to an invitation to join The Quarrymen – John Lennon’s band that would eventually evolve into The Beatles. On The Beatles Anthology, McCartney noted that: “I think what impressed him most was that I knew all the words.” […]

Rock On

Image: markk
[ed. Practicing her Pete Townshend windmill moves.]

Postcard, circa 1905, shows a Geisha holding a Koi-nobori (Carp Streamer). She is standing in front of a display of what appears to be Sashimono, small banners worn by Japanese medieval soldiers for identification during battle.

via:

Rumbles

A book for our golden age of indigestion. In “Rumbles,” historian Elsa Richardson offers a cultural account of the workings and symbolism of the “body’s most fascinating organ.”

If every era has a characteristic condition, ours is indigestion. According to the National Institutes of Health, incidence of inflammatory bowel disease increased by about 10 percent between 2000 and 2019, and intestinal distress is now a badge of cultural relevance, even pride: The writer Charlotte Shane recently noted that women with irritable bowel syndrome make up an “IBS-hot-girl legion,” a league of glamorous sufferers that includes none other than Tyra Banks. Other gastrointestinal complaints are no less in vogue. I should know, I suffer from two: a precancerous stomach condition that prevents me from absorbing vitamin B12 (I get it injected) and an inflammatory bowel disease called microscopic colitis (you probably don’t want the details).

There is something about all this enteric disorder that seems peculiarly contemporary. Bookstore shelves are packed with subtitles like “An Empowering Guide to Your Gut and Its Microbes,” and many of my friends spend hours perched on the toilet in a state of disarray. As Natasha Boyd ruminates in a wonderful essay in the Drift, “Americans of all stripes seem to be experiencing a crisis of digestion” — a crisis that seems obscurely related to our intensifying angst.

“Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut” could not come at a more apt or more dyspeptic moment. Its author, Elsa Richardson, is a historian, and she provides not a medical but a cultural account of the “confederacy of different organs” that jointly achieve “the assimilation of material from the outside world into the substance of the body.” Richardson is interested in the gut’s workings, but she is also interested in its symbolism — in how it “came to be understood as an organ under threat from the forces of the present.” In other words, she is interested in why we are all sick to our stomachs and what exactly the epidemic of digestive disquiet portends.

Richardson makes a number of fascinating forays into corners of history that I had never thought to wonder about: She writes about the institutionalization of lunchtime (a practice that arose during the Industrial Revolution, when advocates for workers’ rights insisted that laborers needed a midday break); the disposal of human waste before the invention of indoor plumbing (achieved, at least in many major cities, by “night soil men” who carried the city’s excretions off to the countryside, where they were repurposed as fertilizer); and the dramatic sanitary reform of a highly unhygienic London (prompted by a particularly smelly period during the summer of 1858 known, vividly, as “The Great Stink”).

In addition to its many charms as a source of information, “Rumbles” is a compelling compendium of ideas. Its discussion of gut disease as an emblem of modernity leaves readers with much to digest. (...)

The gut’s mystique is, in part, a product of its inaccessibility. For centuries, it was maddeningly opaque to medical science: “Obscured by the liver, nestled by the gallbladder, spleen, pancreas and large intestine, it hides from prying eyes and pressing fingers,” Richardson writes. Worse, “the organ really only makes sense when it is in motion” and is therefore difficult to observe.

But if the stomach was long considered “the most enigmatic of organs” by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals. Unlike the silent thyroid or the quiet kidneys, the gut is “notoriously outspoken,” as Richardson winningly writes. It grumbles and grouses when it is empty and whines when it is overfull. In medieval Europe, practitioners of the art of “gastromancy” exploited its loquacity, attempting to “channel the voices of the dead through the stomach and foretell the future by interpreting its sounds.” But we need not appeal to specialists or gastromancers to understand the gut’s complaints: As Richardson points out, we are in “near constant conversation” with our stomachs. “Choosing what to eat is an everyday intervention into health” that we can scarcely avoid, for which reason the gut has often served as a “site of persistent lay experimentation.” We are all the world’s foremost experts on our own bowel movements.

The question of how to conduct experiments on ourselves — of what to allow into our bodies and what to do with the refuse that emerges at the other end — has often been morally and politically vexed. The gut is the portal from inside to outside, the fragile barricade between self and other. Richardson writes that eating requires “taking something from the outside into the deep interior of the body,” and defecating involves expelling something from the domain of the self. It is not surprising, then, that hygiene has long been couched as a sign of social progress and, more sinisterly, a way of distinguishing civilized insiders from barbaric outsiders. 

by Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Pegasus
[ed. Been a sufferer all my adult life with endless tests and zero cures, typical of most I imagine. It's an unpredictable and ever present issue that affects nearly every aspect of life, including social interactions, travel, which foods you're able to eat (or not), etc. Fortunately it also waxes and wanes. I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in reading a book that describes the historic struggle and hopelessness of it all. See also (the excellent): Sick to Our Stomachs​|Why Does Everyone Have IBS? (The Drift).]

New Rules for Airlines Could Help Get Speedy Refunds

Under consumer protection rules that the Transportation Department announced in the spring, airlines may owe travelers money back when services that passengers paid for go awry. Some of those rules went into effect Monday.

Here’s what air travelers need to know:

Refunds for canceled flights and big delays

Since May, when President Joe Biden signed the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill into law, passengers have been entitled to a refund without them jumping through hoops if airlines cancel or significantly change their flights and they choose not to rebook or take the changed flight.

Under the law, airlines are required to proactively offer refunds rather than vouchers or credits without passengers having to ask for it. The money is due within seven business days if the ticket was bought with a credit card and within 20 business days for other transactions.

The law also spells out for the first time how long a delay must be to qualify as “significant” enough for a refund: three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international trips.

“This is a protection for airline passengers that’s long overdue,” Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said in an email.

Before the rule, Murray said, airlines “often slow-walked” refunds they were obligated to provide for cancellations. “That’s not allowed anymore,” she noted.

Murray said some passengers might not want a refund; they might just want to get to their destination as soon as possible. But for those who do want their money back, they should get it without hassle.

“The starting point should be that if you do want a refund, you get it quickly and without delays or marketing tricks,” she said.

Refunds for checked luggage fees

Measures that went into effect Monday cover refunds for other parts of a flight. If a traveler pays a checked-bag fee but their luggage is mishandled, they are entitled to a refund for the baggage if it is not delivered within 12 hours of their arrival for a domestic flight. For international flights, the threshold is either 15 or 30 hours from arrival, depending on how long the flight was.

Refunds for broken WiFi, seating fails

As of Monday, passengers who pay for WiFi, a specific seat assignment or in-flight entertainment are also owed a refund for those fees if the airline isn’t able to deliver what it promised.

Refunds for other changes

As of Monday, travelers are also owed a refund if they choose not to take a flight that was significantly changed because of factors that go beyond delays, including an increase in the number of connections; a downgrade of cabin class or service; departures or arrivals from a different airport or certain changes that make travel less accessible for travelers with a disability. (...)

Airlines for America, an industry trade group, said in a statement in April that the 11 largest passenger airlines in the country had issued $43 billion in customer refunds between January 2020 and December 2023.

by Hannah Sampson, The Washington Post/ADN | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. This is the kind of consumer protection we deserve and need. More please.]

Boeing's Existential Risk

As it treads water awaiting the end of its machinists’ strike, Boeing (BA-0.69%) just formally announced Monday that it’s raising $19 billion in a stock offering. And in the prospectus for that share sale, it lays out exactly how immensely the work stoppage looms in its conception of the future.

When companies sell stock to the public, they have to inform the public of the risks inherent to that investment. The biggest one facing Boeing at the moment is that it won’t get workers back to assembly lines soon. In Boeing’s form 424B5, the category of Securities and Exchange Commission filings under which a prospectus falls, the planemaker tees up its fiercest headache under a section headlined “Risks Related to Our Business and Operations.”

“Some of our and our suppliers’ workforces are represented by labor unions,” the company says. “Work stoppages by our employees are currently adversely affecting our business, financial condition, results of operations and/or cash flows. Future work stoppages by our or our suppliers’ employees could also adversely impact our business.”

That’s putting it lightly, but in corporatese, Boeing reveals its onion layers of stress bit by bit.

Corporatese:

Approximately 57,000 employees, which constitute 33% of our total workforce, were union represented as of December 31, 2023 under collective bargaining agreements with varying durations and expiration dates.

Translation: We have a lot of union workers.

Corporatese:

On September 12, 2024, our contract with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 (“IAM 751”), which represents over 30,000 Boeing manufacturing employees primarily located in Washington state, expired and 96% of IAM 751 members voted to initiate a strike. On October 23, 2024, 64% of IAM 751 members voted to reject our most recent offer and continue the strike. While we continue to engage in contract negotiations with IAM 751, we currently are unable to predict the duration of the strike, which began on September 13, 2024.

Translation: A lot of those workers are on strike. Though we thought we were close to getting them to come back to work after a month and a half, we failed to do so and don’t know what will happen next.

Corporatese:

As a result of the strike, production of our commercial aircraft, other than the 787 production in Charleston, and certain of our Defense, Space & Security products has halted, adversely impacting our business and financial position. This work stoppage has had and is expected to continue to have negative impacts on our key suppliers and customers. If we are unable to successfully negotiate a new contract with IAM 751 consistent with our assumptions and the strike continues for a prolonged period, our financial position, results of operations and cash flows would continue to be adversely impacted.

Translation: Those workers make pretty much all our planes. Them not being at work is costing us a lot of money, it’s costing our suppliers a lot of money, and the longer the strike goes on the more expensive all this will become for everyone in business with us. (The Anderson Economic Group consultancy estimated Monday that, at $9.7 billion of impact, the Boeing strike is the most expensive one this year — and almost as costly as the United Auto Workers strikes against the Big Three Detroit automakers last year.)

Corporatese:

Specifically, we expect further significant negative operating cash flows in this quarter and in future quarters until IAM 751 employees return to work, production resumes and deliveries ramp up. Furthermore, this work stoppage and the actions we have taken in response to the strike to help preserve our financial condition, including planned workforce reductions, furloughs, hiring freezes and pausing the issuance of certain supplier purchase orders, could negatively impact our ability to achieve our strategic objectives and to maintain our investment-grade credit rating.

Translation: We’re doing everything we can to keep the lights on, but we really don’t really have a business without them. In fact, we’re raising all this much-needed cash via stock sale because we’ve nearly maxed out the mega-corporation equivalent of a credit card.

Corporatese:

We may experience additional work stoppages in the future, which could adversely affect our business. We currently have in the U.S. 9 unions with 27 independent agreements and internationally 17 employee representative bodies, and we cannot predict how stable our union relationships will be or whether we will be able to meet the unions’ requirements. The unions may also limit our flexibility in managing our workforce and operations. Union actions at suppliers can also affect us. Current and future work stoppages and instability in our union relationships could delay the production and/or development of our products, which could strain relationships with customers and result in lower revenues.

Translation: Just a heads-up that this could happen again sometime in the future. (...)

[ed. The union is not impressed:]

The IAM told its members Sunday that “Your Union has been in communication with the U.S. Department of Labor in an effort to spearhead getting back to the table.” Though the latest contract vote was more in Boeing’s favor than previous tallies, the union said last week that an internal survey shows that members are still not impressed with what they’re hearing for the company’s negotiators.

“While we can’t share the survey results publicly, which would give the company an unfair advantage, please know that wages and retirement security remain top priorities,” it said.

by Melvin Backman, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: David Ryder (Getty Images)
[ed. I'd imagine Boeing's last (unstated) strategy is - 'Government Bailout'. See also: Boeing Sells Shares To Raise Capital Buying Time To Wait Out Strike (Simple Flying); Boeing’s Shareholders Are Complicit in Its Mess (Bloomberg); and, At the heart of the Boeing strike, an emotional fight over a lost pension plan (NPR).]

Colossal x Firebelly: Crafting a Whimsical Website

via:

At 50, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition Magnifies the Minuscule

Dr. Bruno Cisterna and Dr. Eric Vitriol, Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, Augusta, Georgia. Differentiated mouse brain tumor cells (actin, microtubules, and nuclei)

Zhang Chao, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Beach sand

Thomas Barlow and Connor Gibbons, Columbia University, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, New York. Cluster of octopus (Octopus hummelincki) eggs

by Kate Mothes, Colossal |  Read more:
Images: as noted

Massive WA Salmon Recovery Plan Scrutinized With Latest $100M Project

PORT ANGELES — The Washington State Department of Transportation is planning a giant salmon restoration project here that could require buying out a motel owner, tearing down the building and excavating the highway culvert beneath it, at a price tag of some $100 million.

Yet even after all this work, salmon wouldn’t be able to swim up most of the stream.

As WSDOT races to replace hundreds of culverts by 2030 to meet a court deadline, lawmakers and at least one tribal leader are asking whether projects like this make sense.

 

A group of 21 tribes sued the state in the early 2000s to force the replacement of culverts that, because of their design or lack of maintenance, block salmon and steelhead trout migration. A federal judge, based on the tribes’ treaty fishing rights, ordered the state to fix or replace problem culverts running beneath state highways.

That’s how this project on White Creek landed on the state’s list. By the state’s math, the culvert replacement would open nearly 4 miles of “potential” habitat. But the court-ordered calculation doesn’t account for other problems that affect salmon, including a polluted old mill site, a partial blockage downstream on Ennis Creek and 10 more blockages upstream of the motel.

In reality, many salmon wouldn’t even be able to access White Creek, the state’s own survey shows. Near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a city-owned concrete slab blocks fish passage under most conditions, according to the survey.

Now lawmakers and tribes are reexamining the court order, proposing new ways to target salmon restoration funds — a delicate “balancing act,” as one tribal leader put it.

The state’s culvert repair program is its largest salmon recovery effort ever, with $3.95 billion already allocated to replace salmon barriers with natural streambeds. To meet the looming deadline, WSDOT last fall asked for up to $4 billion more, prompting fresh skepticism from legislators, who’ve grown increasingly concerned that the state plans aren’t always the best way to help salmon. And just last month, the department revised the request to $5 billion to account for culverts that have structurally failed over the past year.

A Seattle Times investigation this spring highlighted how WSDOT spending is creating stranded restoration projects with limited value today because the state program doesn’t fix other problems in the same watersheds, like barriers owned by other parties. White Creek is a classic case, with its other salmon-blocking barriers upstream and downstream of the state’s culvert. And the potential spectacle of demolishing the motel has raised the question of whether other restoration projects would be more effective and a better use of taxpayer money.

“While we are fixing mistakes of the past, you do it in a more surgical way. You don’t do it with a bulldozer approach, you don’t do it with a meat cleaver,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, whose traditional territory includes White Creek. The tribe was among those who sued the state and won the federal court order. Allen holds firmly to that victory but also sees the need for a flexible and creative approach to realize its benefits for fish.

“My view is, work out an agreement with the state and the court … let’s step back and reprioritize, figure out which ones are the ones that are the most important right now and zero in on that,” Allen said.

He said he also understands there is only so much money and that the public has many needs, as do the tribal nations. “There is that balancing act … and we don’t want to turn the public against salmon.”

Lawmakers are also saying they don’t have $5 billion more to spend now. But even if they found the money, it would be logistically impossible to finish the list by 2030, as required in the court injunction, state leaders have told the tribes.

Rep. Steve Tharinger, D-Port Townsend, said he is using the motel project, which is in his district, to call for change because “it’s a high cost with little fish return.”

“It’s the classic poster child of what we shouldn’t do,” he said. (...)

The motel

Chintu Patel, co-owner of the Olympic Inn & Suites, didn’t even know there was a stream or a culvert under his motel until WSDOT told him about it. Maple trees block the view to the south, where the creek flows through a ravine 30 feet below and into the concrete tunnel in question. To the north, an RV dealership and trees obscure any hint of water, as the stream transitions into lowland vegetation.

Patel and his business partner bought the rundown property in 2020 for $6.25 million and soon started fixing it up. They ripped out carpet, remodeled bathrooms and repainted the 115-room motel tan with burgundy accents. “We’ve completely renovated the property,” said Patel, who employs roughly 20 full- and part-time employees at this motel and has ownership interest in 15 other hotels or motels in the state.

After he received a letter from WSDOT two years ago, he was surprised to learn about the plans to replace the culvert. If he had known, “We wouldn’t have put in all the renovations,” he said.

Patel said WSDOT hasn’t yet broached the subject of eminent domain, the state’s legal power to seize property. But the agency has taken private property to replace culverts and compensated the landowners. He’s concerned an appraisal wouldn’t capture the property’s potential value. (...)

WSDOT may pursue the project anyway, despite the high cost and the stream’s other habitat problems. Otherwise, it would have to replace multiple culverts elsewhere to hit its 2030 target, at potentially even greater cost, WSDOT fish passage manager Kim Rydholm said.

White Creek has “little production potential” for salmon because of its many culverts, according to the management plan by the area’s official watershed planning group. The 10 upstream obstructions are owned by private parties or local governments. Technically, any barrier to potential salmon migration violates state law, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife generally doesn’t require owners to remove them. The department is working on new enforcement rules.

WSDOT asks for $5 billion more

Like stormwater rushing into a swollen creek, revelations about problems in WSDOT’s fish passage program kept pouring in over the past year.

In November, WSDOT unveiled its massive budget request to lawmakers. Then The Times investigation spotlighted some culvert projects, costing tens of millions apiece, that are essentially useless without further, big investments. This summer, Inslee and WSDOT leaders told tribes they were probably not going to hit the 2030 deadline. And now the cost estimates are even higher. (...)

They are rethinking how the state fulfills the court order while still honoring tribal treaty rights and the intent of the federal judge’s ruling. All that while navigating intratribal politics, in which each of the 21 sovereign tribal nations that are a party to the federal case can stake their own position.

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez in 2013 ordered WSDOT to identify its Western Washington culverts blocking 200 meters or more of potential upstream habitat. Then, by 2030, WSDOT is required to open up 90% of the habitat above those culverts.

But the calculation ignored other culverts and similar barriers on those same streams, including blockages owned by cities, counties and private parties.

Tharinger, the Port Angeles-area state representative, said he recently realized that WSDOT’s list of culverts wasn’t well-vetted, causing him to reconsider the funding and strategy. (...)

“We don’t have the money,” said Tharinger, chair of the House Capital Budget Committee. For what the state does allocate, he sees it in simple terms: “How do we spend the money to recover the most fish, to create the most habitat for fish? That’s really the question — not what the court tells us.”

Instead of plowing ahead according to the court order, Tharinger hopes the tribes and state can agree on a strategy to open up the most actual habitat, taking into account the other barriers on the streams. And he wouldn’t limit it to just culvert replacements. Larger projects, such as entire flood plain restorations, should be on the table, he said.

by Mike Reicher and Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Fiona Martin, Mark Nowlin; uncredited

[ed. Gotta love it. How could a massive program like this ever get started without these types of issues being anticipated and resolved from the very beginning? It's beyond belief. Any halfway competent fish biologist would tell you: there's no one-size fits all solution for culverts that are everywhere, beneath buildings and roads, in various stages of disrepair, and blocked in countless ways . Which brings up the US Supreme Court's recent decision re: the so-called Chevron Deference (NRDC):

"The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo dealt a severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs by ending the 40-year-old precedent of “Chevron deference.” Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their work, federal judges now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves. As a result, despite not being accountable to the people, judges will now be able to expand their role into the realm of policymaking." 

See also: Removing WA salmon barriers surges to $1M a day, but results are murky (Seattle Times).]

The Surfers

[ed. Omg. Forgot this old song till I heard it again today.]