via:

Return of Anthony Kim

Golf’s great prodigy turned mysterious recluse is returning to the sport after 12 years. Anthony Kim joined LIV Golf and will play in the league’s event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this week as a wild card.

“After stepping away from the game years ago due to injury, I’m happy to officially announce my return to the world of professional golf,” Kim said in a news release Wednesday. “It’s been a long time coming, and I’m very grateful for all the highs, lows and lessons learned from the first part of my career.

“I want to compete with the best players in the world, and I’m on a mission to prove to myself that I can win again. The next step on that journey starts now, and I’m excited to give everything I’ve got this season on the LIV Golf League.”

Kim will compete in all remaining 2024 LIV Golf regular-season tournaments as a wild-card player aiming to accrue points in the league’s individual standings and earn a team place in 2025.

LIV commissioner Greg Norman teased Kim’s return in a video on social media Monday, and Kim’s presence on the driving range did not go unnoticed Tuesday. Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter snapped a photo of a placard featuring Kim’s name, and then YouTube golfer Andy Carter posted a video of Kim’s range session on Instagram.

Kim, now 38, was once one of golf’s biggest rising stars who won two PGA Tour events and made a Ryder Cup team by 23 behind exciting talent and a big personality that reached sections of fans golf often struggled to reach before. Injuries then led to Kim stepping away from professional golf at 26 and never returning.

Kim has become a cult-like figure in the time since, in part because he was such a popular player with enormous potential, but also because of the mystery that has shrouded his absence. During his playing days, Kim was known as a partier who had a complicated relationship with how much he loved golf. So when his injuries led to him stepping away and reports surfaced of him living off an insurance policy worth somewhere between $10 and $20 million, it meant only more fascination with whether or not he actually couldn’t play anymore.

So when Golf.com reported in January that Kim was eyeing a return and was in negotiations with both the PGA Tour and LIV, the intrigue only skyrocketed. Now, Kim is finally returning and playing with LIV, a league backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia which can likely afford to give Kim a signing bonus to help with the insurance policy, in addition to massive purses at events. Kim is expected to play as a single this week and not part of LIV’s 13 teams.

The complicated element is what Kim’s return means and what to expect. Before Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, Kim was golf’s great young prodigy, expected to take some portion of Tiger Woods’ place in golf’s limelight. The Los Angeles native played college golf at Oklahoma and played on a winning Walker Cup team before turning pro at 22. Kim won two PGA Tour events at Quail Hollow and TPC Potomac by his second full pro season and became the first golfer under 25 to win two tour events in the same season since Woods in 2000. By the end of that 2008 season, Kim was 23, No. 6 in the world and the top rising star in the sport.

With an extremely aggressive style of play and an outgoing personality, Kim immediately became a star in demographics golf didn’t always reach. He made the 2008 Ryder Cup team at 23 years old — young for a spot on that team at that time — and he famously dominated Sergio Garcia with a 5&4 drubbing as the U.S. won for the first time in nine years. That next spring, Kim went to the 2009 Masters and broke the tournament record with 11 birdies in the second round. That may have turned out to be his peak. (...)

But while his absence meant Kim didn’t get to become the star some hoped for, it also meant he didn’t have to go through the normal peaks and valleys of a career. The shine eventually comes off all young players, but being away meant being frozen in time as a beacon of potential.

by Brody Miller and Jenna West, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Jon Ferrey/LIV Golf

Noksu: The Best of Tasting-Menu Culture Meets the Worst

At Noksu, dinner is served below the street, a few yards from the subway turnstiles. But the room and the food seem unmoored from any particular place.

I can’t remember the last New York restaurant that frustrated me as much as Noksu.

My frustration won’t be widely shared, given how few people can afford to eat there. Dinner is $225 for about 12 courses, before tax, tip or drinks. Drinks can be paired with each course for another $175 (with alcohol) or $100 (without).

It would be easier to dismiss Noksu if it weren’t for the cooking of its chef, Dae Kim. This is the first kitchen he has run and he’s full of talent, a star in the making. But his ideas need to be shaped and formed, and the setting he’s working in is so generic that it distracts from what’s distinctive in his cooking.

Most of what holds Noksu back are things it shares with, and may have copied from, other expensive tasting-menu restaurants. It tries so hard to fit in with Atomix, Kono, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and other places that it forgets to assert any identity of its own.

Noksu got some press early on because of its location, one flight below ground inside the 34th Street-Herald Square subway station. Apparently, the concept of $400 dinners a few yards from the turnstiles and tracks struck a lot of people as novel. I’m not sure why. Another generation would have called it slumming.

A few minutes before each of the two nightly services, a rolling gate clatters up to reveal a locked door with a keypad. To get inside, I punched in a six-digit code that had been texted to me several hours before. Behind the door was a heavy, floor-to-ceiling curtain. By this point, I was prepared to see anything behind it. A private sex club? Agent Cooper?

But there was nothing like that, just the usual tasting-menu layout, a counter of banded marble facing a stainless steel kitchen where half a dozen cooks in white jackets stood intently over rows of white porcelain bowls, heads bowed like monks.

They stayed in that position, making tiny adjustments to whatever was in those bowls, for about 10 minutes. I had time to settle in, ask for a drink and look around. Time to wonder whether Noksu’s secret door inside a subway station was supposed to remind me of the secret door at Brooklyn Fare (inside a supermarket near the jams and jellies) or the one at Frevo (behind one of the artworks hanging in a storefront gallery) or the one at the Office of Mr. Moto (opened by a code embedded in a cipher).

And I had time to ask why so many tasting-menu restaurants, no matter how they disguise their entrance, look the same inside: the long counter of polished stone or wood or steel; the upholstered stools so tall and heavy that servers need to help you get into and out of them, as if you were a small child getting into a highchair; the blank, windowless walls.

There are restaurants like this in almost every major city now, imitation pearls on a string that circles the world. Once the door closes, you could be anywhere, or nowhere. How did chefs who prize both originality and a sense of place decide that the most appropriate backdrop for their food would be copycat rooms done in a blank-faced global style?

Noksu’s design doesn’t do Mr. Kim any favors. Neither does the playlist, which runs through the most obvious megahits of the ’80s by Toto, Don Henley, even Huey Lewis and the News. It’s as if you’d accepted a dinner invitation from Patrick Bateman.

Mr. Kim has a collection of gifts that any young cook might covet: an eye for arranging dishes that invite you in by holding back a few secrets; an affinity for seafood, which is at the center of nearly every course; an impressive technical control that allows him to spherify truffle juice and spin fragile rye tuiles in Spirograph lattices.

Over and over, he pulled off complex dishes that would be tricky in a kitchen twice as big as Noksu’s. There was a miniature tart not much larger than a bottle cap, filled with firm raw fluke, maitake mushrooms glazed with Madeira, and crunchy threads of leek. Marinated rock shrimp were folded inside a slice of raw bluefin, scored for tenderness; this all-seafood wrap was surrounded by a dark and quietly spicy liquid that tasted of long-caramelized onions and carrots. (It would be delicious over prime rib, too, if this were that kind of restaurant.)

Sardines cured in plum vinegar were garnished with individual potato chips and wisps of radicchio in an uncannily smooth Caesar dressing. Many courses made my eyes go wide with something like wonder. There were filigrees of wildflowers, mysterious little tuna-belly creatures with mustard-seed eyes and microgreen antennae, and something that looked like a slice of black truffle but melted like butter.

I never doubted Mr. Kim’s skill, or patience, or readiness to spend a huge amount of labor on dishes that take less than a minute to eat. But what he is trying to say, I’m not quite sure. (...)

There were dishes so uncannily good they made me suspect Mr. Kim was receiving secret transmissions from another world, like the medium-rare slice of wild coho salmon with a pistachio-celery sauce on one side and a fluffy swoosh of yuzu hollandaise on the other. And I would not want to have missed the moment when, after the gentle Impressionist brushwork of the seafood courses, he suddenly goes Damien Hirst, serving a delicious and completely unadorned squab, its crisp skin lacquered with red vinegar and malt sugar like a duck in a Chinatown window and its deep-fried head cradled in the curled toes of its foot.

The boldness of that squab represented tasting-menu cuisine at its best. One night, though, it was followed by a venison dish served at room temperature; I could only pick at it.

Lukewarm food is so common in this style of cooking that somebody in the movie “The Menu” tells the autocratic chef, “Even your hot dishes are cold.” Some of the film’s dialogue turns up at Noksu almost verbatim, as when a server volunteered that one dish is “so beautiful I can’t eat it.” Each course was served with precise instructions on how to transport it from plate to mouth. Not that I blame the servers. When diners at restaurants like this aren’t given any instructions, they become so confused they’ll ask what “chef recommends.” Seeing a restaurant full of grown adults waiting for permission to eat with a spoon really makes you wonder how it is that humans haven’t died out yet.

How can the people behind Noksu not see what was obvious to the makers of “The Menu” — that the conventions of tasting menus have become laughable clichés? 

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

Mel Parsons

[ed. Good news, my computer's fixed. Bad news, my Roku and TV aren't talking to each other now. Some bad little cloud hanging around lately [update: fixed!... just a broken cable]. See also: Slow Burn LIVE at LOHO.]

[ed. Uh, oh. Dead computer. Posts might be sporadic for a while. Sorry.]

via:

My Comments are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack

Thanks for sending this along. I left my comments in the Google Doc.

You don’t see my comments? You’re looking at the old document. I copied your Google Doc and made a new Google Doc called “Proposal v2 – Comments.” Once you have my comments, put everything together in “Proposal v3 FINAL.” Then, if you don’t mind copy-pasting your new document link into the spreadsheet where we keep track of all the document links, that would be perfect. And, of course, make sure you’re in the most current spreadsheet (Copy of Spreadsheet COPY_01).

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what everyone had for lunch yesterday. Here I’ll send it to you again. I just replied to an email to Jeff with the link and asked him to forward it to you. The subject line is “Email.”

The document won’t open? I’m not sure how I could make this any easier. Okay, I reset the document permissions, but you’ll need to sign into the email document_view@busycompany.org via the password I texted you via iMessage. Once you sign into the email, it’ll ask you to create a Microsoft Teams account. You’ll find the link to the document in the Teams channel called “NO DOCUMENTS LINKS!!!” From there, you’ll find a link to a couple of WeTransfers of the current .docs. Every WeTransfer link is expired. To find the non-expired link, you’ll have to look through the email thread I forwarded you saying, “FYI.” It should be 110-120 emails deep in the thread.

Once you find a link, you’ll download the 17 GB PowerPoint file, which is password-protected. You’ll need the password from our company password document. This should be in the shared Z:// drive that was set up in 2002, and to open the Excel sheet, you’ll need to make sure your computer is running on Windows 98. From there, you’ll use the password to open the company’s orientation PowerPoint and find the link to the main Dropbox folder. The Dropbox contains all the links to the Box folders, which contain all the links to the Google Drive folders, which nobody can see, hear, or touch. This is where things get tricky. The Google Drive folder is, admittedly, a tad disorganized, so you’ll need to click on thirty-seven different documents with names that have nothing to do with what’s in the document. You’ll need to read most of the document to infer who wrote it and what year. You’re looking for the document I wrote yesterday. The comments should be right in there.

Jesus. Do you just want me to fax these things to you?! Look, to make things easier, I started a thirty-day free trial of Asana. I also set up trials of Monday, Airtable, Jira, Workday, Loom, Boom, Flunt, Pringo, Viver, Blabby, Tired, Burbble, Ü, and Bungle apps, and signed you up for each. Then I posted the document in the comments section of the posting for your job on Indeed.com. Just kidding, you’re not fired. But please do reapply by sending a résumé and cover letter to gain access to Google Drive.

You know what? Should I just walk over to your desk, and we can go through them out loud?

by Gwynna Forgham-Thrift, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: WikiHow/Fair Use

Shigeo Sekito

Nicola Jane Stratton Tyler, Pelargonium oil study

Eddie Martin

The Quest For a DNA Data Drive

How much thought do you give to where you keep your bits? Every day we produce more data, including emails, texts, photos, and social media posts. Though much of this content is forgettable, every day we implicitly decide not to get rid of that data. We keep it somewhere, be it in on a phone, on a computer’s hard drive, or in the cloud, where it is eventually archived, in most cases on magnetic tape. Consider further the many varied devices and sensors now streaming data onto the Web, and the cars, airplanes, and other vehicles that store trip data for later use. All those billions of things on the Internet of Things produce data, and all that information also needs to be stored somewhere.

Data is piling up exponentially, and the rate of information production is increasing faster than the storage density of tape, which will only be able to keep up with the deluge of data for a few more years. The research firm Gartner predicts that by 2030, the shortfall in enterprise storage capacity alone could amount to nearly two-thirds of demand, or about 20 million petabytes. If we continue down our current path, in coming decades we would need not only exponentially more magnetic tape, disk drives, and flash memory, but exponentially more factories to produce these storage media, and exponentially more data centers and warehouses to store them. Even if this is technically feasible, it’s economically implausible.

Fortunately, we have access to an information storage technology that is cheap, readily available, and stable at room temperature for millennia: DNA, the material of genes. In a few years your hard drive may be full of such squishy stuff.

Storing information in DNA is not a complicated concept. Decades ago, humans learned to sequence and synthesize DNA—that is, to read and write it. Each position in a single strand of DNA consists of one of four nucleic acids, known as bases and represented as A, T, G, and C. In principle, each position in the DNA strand could be used to store two bits (A could represent 00, T could be 01, and so on), but in practice, information is generally stored at an effective one bit—a 0 or a 1—per base.

Moreover, DNA exceeds by many times the storage density of magnetic tape or solid-state media. It has been calculated that all the information on the Internet—which one estimate puts at about 120 zettabytes—could be stored in a volume of DNA about the size of a sugar cube, or approximately a cubic centimeter. Achieving that density is theoretically possible, but we could get by with a much lower storage density. An effective storage density of “one Internet per 1,000 cubic meters” would still result in something considerably smaller than a single data center housing tape today.

Most examples of DNA data storage to date rely on chemically synthesizing short stretches of DNA, up to 200 or so bases. Standard chemical synthesis methods are adequate for demonstration projects, and perhaps early commercial efforts, that store modest amounts of music, images, text, and video, up to perhaps hundreds of gigabytes. However, as the technology matures, we will need to switch from chemical synthesis to a much more elegant, scalable, and sustainable solution: a semiconductor chip that uses enzymes to write these sequences.

After the data has been written into the DNA, the molecule must be kept safe somewhere. Published examples include drying small spots of DNA on glass or paper, encasing the DNA in sugar or silica particles, or just putting it in a test tube. Reading can be accomplished with any number of commercial sequencing technologies.

Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data. I’ve participated in this effort via a collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. We’ve made considerable progress already, and we can see the way forward.

How bad is the data storage problem?

First, let’s look at the current state of storage. As mentioned, magnetic tape storage has a scaling problem. Making matters worse, tape degrades quickly compared to the time scale on which we want to store information. To last longer than a decade, tape must be carefully stored at cool temperatures and low humidity, which typically means the continuous use of energy for air conditioning. And even when stored carefully, tape needs to be replaced periodically, so we need more tape not just for all the new data but to replace the tape storing the old data.

To be sure, the storage density of magnetic tape has been increasing for decades, a trend that will help keep our heads above the data flood for a while longer. But current practices are building fragility into the storage ecosystem. Backward compatibility is often guaranteed for only a generation or two of the hardware used to read that media, which could be just a few years, requiring the active maintenance of aging hardware or ongoing data migration. So all the data we have already stored digitally is at risk of being lost to technological obsolescence.

How DNA data storage works

The discussion thus far has assumed that we’ll want to keep all the data we produce, and that we’ll pay to do so. We should entertain the counterhypothesis: that we will instead engage in systematic forgetting on a global scale. This voluntary amnesia might be accomplished by not collecting as much data about the world or by not saving all the data we collect, perhaps only keeping derivative calculations and conclusions. Or maybe not every person or organization will have the same access to storage. If it becomes a limited resource, data storage could become a strategic technology that enables a company, or a country, to capture and process all the data it desires, while competitors suffer a storage deficit. But as yet, there’s no sign that producers of data are willing to lose any of it.

If we are to avoid either accidental or intentional forgetting, we need to come up with a fundamentally different solution for storing data, one with the potential for exponential improvements far beyond those expected for tape. DNA is by far the most sophisticated, stable, and dense information-storage technology humans have ever come across or invented. Readable genomic DNA has been recovered after having been frozen in the tundra for 2 million years. DNA is an intrinsic part of life on this planet. As best we can tell, nucleic acid–based genetic information storage has persisted on Earth for at least 3 billion years, giving it an unassailable advantage as a backward- and forward-compatible data storage medium. (...)

There is global interest in creating a DNA drive. The members of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, founded in 2020, come from universities, companies of all sizes, and government labs from around the world. Funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices. Potential customers as diverse as film studios, the U.S. National Archives, and Boeing have expressed interest in long-term data storage in DNA.

Archival storage might be the first market to emerge, given that it involves writing once with only infrequent reading, and yet also demands stability over many decades, if not centuries. Storing information in DNA for that time span is easily achievable. The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way. (...)

The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device. Using our high-density chip, we successfully demonstrated electrochemical control of single-base enzymatic additions. The project is now paused while the team evaluates possible next steps. Nevertheless, even if this effort is not resumed, someone will make the technology work. The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money.

by Rob Carlson, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Images: Edmon De Haro; Chris Philpot

[ed. In other emerging and probably not too distant tech, see also: Smartphone Screens Are About to Become Speakers (IEEE).]

When Forgetting is Normal, and When It's Not

When is forgetting normal — and when is it worrisome? A neuroscientist weighs in (NPR)

Image:Bulat Silvia/iStock / Getty Images Plus
[ed. See also: I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way (NYT):]
"Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than the Berkshire Hathaway C.E.O., Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about the person’s cognitive status or where it will head in the near future."

100-year old TB Vaccine Could Be a New Weapon Against Alzheimer’s

Scientific discoveries can emerge from the strangest places. In early 1900s France, the doctor Albert Calmette and the veterinarian Camille Guérin aimed to discover how bovine tuberculosis was transmitted. To do so, they first had to find a way of cultivating the bacteria. Sliced potatoes – cooked with ox bile and glycerine – proved to be the perfect medium.

As the bacteria grew, however, Calmette and Guérin were surprised to find that each generation lost some of its virulence. Animals infected with the microbe (grown through many generations of their culture) no longer became sick but were protected from wild TB. In 1921, the pair tested this potential vaccine on their first human patient – a baby whose mother had just died of the disease. It worked, and the result was the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine that has saved millions of lives.

Calmette and Guérin could have never imagined that their research would inspire scientists investigating an entirely different kind of disease more than a century later. Yet that is exactly what is happening, with a string of intriguing studies suggesting that BCG can protect people from developing Alzheimer’s disease.

If these preliminary results bear out in clinical trials, it could be one of the cheapest and most effective weapons in our fight against dementia. (...)

The idea may sound far-fetched, but decades of research show that BCG can have surprising and wide-ranging benefits that go way beyond its original purpose. Besides protecting people from TB, it seems to reduce the risk of many other infections, for instance. In a recent clinical trial, BCG halved the odds of developing a respiratory infection over the following 12 months, compared with the people receiving a placebo.

BCG is also used as a standard treatment for forms of bladder cancer. Once the attenuated bacteria have been delivered to the organ, they trigger the immune system to remove the tumours, where previously they had passed below the radar. “It can result in remarkable disease-free recoveries,” says Prof Richard Lathe, a molecular biologist at Edinburgh University.

These remarkable effects are thought to emerge from a process called “trained immunity”. After an individual has received BCG, you can see changes in the expression of genes associated with the production of cytokines – small molecules that can kick our other defences, including white blood cells, into action. As a result, the body can respond more efficiently to a threat – be it a virus or bacteria entering the body, or a mutant cell that threatens to grow uncontrollably. “It can be likened to upgrading the security system of a building to be more responsive and efficient, not just against known threats but against any potential intruders,” says Weinberg.

There are good reasons to believe that trained immunity could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. By bolstering the body’s defences, it could help keep pathogens at bay before they reach the brain. It could also prompt the brain’s own immune cells to clear away the amyloid beta proteins more effectively, without causing friendly fire to healthy neural tissue. (...)

To find out, Ofer Gofrit of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre in Jerusalem and his colleagues collected the data of 1,371 people who had or had not received BCG as part of their treatment for bladder cancer. They found that just 2.4% of the patients treated with BCG developed Alzheimer’s over the following eight years, compared with 8.9% of those not given the vaccine.

Since the results were published in 2019, other researchers have replicated the findings. Weinstein’s team, for instance, examined the records of about 6,500 bladder cancer patients in Massachusetts. Crucially, they ensured that the sample of those who had received BCG and those who hadn’t were carefully matched for age, gender, ethnicity and medical history. The people who had received the injection, it transpired, were considerably less likely to develop dementia.

The precise level of protection varies between studies, with a recent meta-analysis showing an average risk reduction of 45%. If this can be proven with further studies, the implications would be huge. “Simply delaying the development of Alzheimer’s by a couple of years would lead to tremendous savings – both in suffering and our money,” says Prof Charles Greenblatt of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was a co-author of Gofrit’s original paper. (...)

The clinching evidence would come from a randomised controlled trial in which patients are either assigned the active treatment or the placebo. Since dementia is very slow to develop, it will take years to collect enough data to prove that BCG – or any other vaccine – offers the expected protection from full-blown Alzheimer’s compared with a placebo.

In the meantime, scientists have started to examine certain biomarkers that show the early stages of disease. Until recently, this was extraordinarily difficult to do without expensive brain scans, but new experimental methods allow scientists to isolate and measure levels of amyloid beta proteins in blood plasma, which can predict a subsequent diagnosis with reasonable accuracy. (...)

Weinberg has his own grounds for optimism. Working with Dr Steven Arnold and Dr Denise Faustman, he has collected samples of the cerebrospinal fluid that washes around the central nervous system of people who have or have not received the vaccine. Their aim was to see whether the effects of trained immunity could reach the brain – and that is exactly what they found. “The response to pathogens is more robust in specific populations of these immune cells after BCG vaccination,” says Weinberg.

We can only hope that these early results will inspire further trials. For Weinberg, it’s simple. “The BCG vaccine is safe and globally accessible,” he says. It is also incredibly cheap compared with the other options, costing just a few pence a dose. Even if it confers just a tiny bit of protection, he says: “It wins the cost-effectiveness contest hands down.”

by David Robson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: French veterinarian Camille Guérin and physician Albert Calmett. Photograph: Musée Pasteur

[ed. This is where the regulatory process loses me. If BCG is already being prescribed as a standard treatment for TB and bladder cancer, has saved millions of lives, and now seems to have some other off-label benefits, why do we need years of further clinical trials (and inevitable price increases) before it becomes generally available? The only other option appears to be an antibody treatment, lecanemab, except:]

"Lecanemab has already sparked debate. Antibody drugs are so costly they are beyond the means of many countries. Lecanemab itself is not easy to administer, unlike pills and capsules: patients are required to attend clinic for an intravenous infusion twice a month. And the side-effects call for extensive monitoring: patients on the trial had regular scans for brain swelling and haemorrhages, a service many hospitals cannot provide at scale.

More importantly, lecanemab might not work very well. From the data released so far, it is unclear what difference it could make to the devastating burden inflicted by Alzheimer’s. Some doctors warn that the benefits of the drug seem so small, patients may not even notice. But others counter that any effect on Alzheimer’s deserves celebration: it proves the disease can be beaten, or at least slowed down. It’s a start, a concrete foundation to build on."

Do You Have ‘Bookshelf Wealth’?

When it comes to aesthetic trends, social media loves a catchy name.

Cottagecore. Dark academia. Eclectic grandpa. [ed. Links added for reader's benefit. There's also Coastal Grandma. God help us.]

Now there’s a new entry to the canon: bookshelf wealth.

On TikTok and other digital platforms, there has lately been much ado about people who own a great number of books and — this is critical — have managed to stage them in a pleasing manner.

If you’ve ever seen a Nancy Meyers movie, the look might ring a bell. Warm and welcoming. Polished, but not stuffy. A bronze lamp here. A vintage vase there (with fresh-cut flowers, of course). Perhaps there is a cozy seating area near the floor-to-ceiling display, with an overstuffed couch topped with tasteful throw pillows.

Kailee Blalock, an interior designer in San Diego, posted a video to TikTok last month that sought to define bookshelf wealth and school viewers in achieving the aesthetic in their own homes.

“These aren’t display books,” Ms. Blalock, 26, cautions in the video, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”

This literary look, she went on to say, goes well with pictures hung willy-nilly on the walls, sometimes even partly blocking the shelves, as well as mismatched fabric patterns and a bit of clutter.

A Quick Guide to Bookshelf Wealth
@houseofhive Bookshelf Wealth, what it is and how to achieve it #greenscreen #bookshelfwealth #interiordesign #designtok #2024designtrends ♬ original sound - House of Hive Design Co

In an interview, Ms. Blalock expanded on her advice. “I think to really achieve the look and the lifestyle, someone has to be an avid reader and has to appreciate the act of collecting things, especially art and sculpture,” she said.

Though Ms. Blalock did not originate the term “bookshelf wealth,” her video has spurred plenty of online discussion. “The day I ‘cultivate’ books instead of buying what I like to read is the day I’ll know I’ve truly failed as a human,” one user commented. Others remarked how bookshelf wealth was less about reading and more about regular old wealth.

Breana Newton, a legal coordinator in Princeton, N.J., who posts regularly about books on TikTok, was one of the people who responded to Ms. Blalock’s video. “I am going to show you bookshelf wealth,” Ms. Newton, 33, says in a video of her own. “Ready?”

She then gives viewers a brief tour of her home, showing books everywhere — on shelves, in overflow piles here and there, and strewed across the bed. Absent is the sense that the rooms have been staged, or that the books were bought with the consideration of how they would look on Instagram. (...)

Another critic of the trend, Keila Tirado-Leist, said in a reaction video: “Who does it benefit to constantly have to name and qualify and attach wealth to any kind of style or home-décor aesthetic?”

Ms. Tirado-Leist, a lifestyle content creator in Madison, Wis., likened bookshelf wealth to “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth,” styles that have recently made social media waves. (...)

Another TikTok user put it more bluntly in a response to Ms. Blalock’s video: “Bookshelf wealth does not mean you have books. It means you have built-ins.”

by Madison Malone Kircher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. These trends - fashion or otherwise - seem to have a shelf life of less than a couple months, or maybe that of a meme. Somebody notices something, imagines a descriptive term for it, posts their observation to a social network, and suddenly its a thing. See post below about Teen Subcultures fading. Just something for people to fantasize over/argue about, I guess.]

Hsieh Tong-liang (Taiwanese b. 1949), Cannot Let Go, 2001, Bronze
via:

Teen Subcultures Are Fading (Pity the Poor Kids).

A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter showed me a video created by a Dallas clothing store called Dear Hannah Prep, depicting a girl’s first time visiting “the preppiest boutique in Texas.” “How excited are you?” an off-camera voice asks. “I’m so excited!” the girl says. Then she opens the door, gasps and declares, “It’s so preppy in here!”

That this moment had become a meme, spawning an array of other videos riffing on the original (we see the girl enter a derelict classroom or padded cell and swoon, each time, that it’s “so preppy in here”) was far less confusing to me than the fact that people were calling this store — an all-white box exploding with smiley-face sweatshirts, tie-dyed fuzzy bathrobes and a generally berserk neon beachiness — preppy.

“That,” I told my daughter, “is not preppy.” I did not have much hope of persuading her that millions of teenagers on TikTok were wrong and her 50-year-old mother — who does, in fact, own a copy of Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 “The Official Preppy Handbook” — was right, but it seemed worth trying. I looked around her room, and for lack of any stray loafers or rumpled chinos to use as examples, I touched the top of an antique oak dresser that was once her grandmother’s. “This is preppy,” I said. She rolled her eyes: “Mom, that dresser is super cottagecore, and that is not my aesthetic at all.”

My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style. Those meanings haven’t vanished; a great deal has been written about them lately, much of it connected to Avery Trufelman’s erudite series “American Ivy,” released on her podcast in 2022. But those iterations are now known, in the TikTok world, as “old preppy.” The new sort fills its Pinterest pages with something else: colorful Stanley mugs, tiered pink micro-minis, bulbed makeup mirrors and Brazilian Bum Bum Creams. Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines — pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom.

This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.

What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.

For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.

As with much of today’s popular culture (say, A.S.M.R. hair-brushing or pimple-popping videos), the level of specificity and intimate itch-scratching here feels a lot like porn — another extension of the internet’s ability to service niche desires. And in terms of their enhancement of human experience, many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.

Yet when I look at the younger people in my life — the teenagers crate-digging through these details, arguing about “dark academia” versus “light academia” or the differences between “goblincore” and “crowcore” — it doesn’t seem to me that they want to negate meaning. It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation, for the dignification of their taste. It’s just that they are being presented with these thin cultural planes that barely exist outside their devices.

To me, this is tragic, and I feel annoyed on their behalf. So I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got scooped up by whatever was happening. But at its deepest, a subculture could allow a given club kid, headbanger or punk to live in a communal container from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed. If you were, say, a suburban California skate rat in 1990, skating affected almost everything you did: how you spoke, the way you dressed, the people you hung out with, the places you went, the issues you cared about, the shape of your very body. And while that might not have seemed a promising plan for teenage well-being at the time, by today’s standards of diffuse loneliness and alienation among youth, it looks like a very good recipe indeed — precisely the kind of real-world cultural community that has been replaced by an algorithmic fluidity in which nothing hangs around long enough to grow roots.

by Mireille Silcoff, NY TImes Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Ricardo Santos

[ed. Yeah...not so sure about this. If you extract fashion from the equation there are in fact quite a few prominent subcultures at work, Swifties being only one example - and even there fashion seems like an adjacent aesthetic. Coachella. Gamers, Cosplayers, etc. Maybe I'm missing the point, but this feels like an overly feminized perspective focused on only one dimension of teenage culture.]

Eizin Suzuki - Waikiki Beach, 1988

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Petr Barna as Charlie Chaplin

Petr Barna at the 1992 Albertville Olypmics's Exhibition Gala.

Though as far as sport and competition go, for those not familiar with figure skating, exhibitions are done after the competition and the winners or runners up* get to perform. They are not for a prize nor are they scored; he wasn't competing for anything here. Exhibition skates are more relaxed rules-wise, so sillier choreography and costumes, weirder song choices, and props are more often seen in them.

*For those curious, Petr Barna won bronze in this Olympics!

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[ed. I keep coming back to this. What a great performance.]

Chaos, Straight to Your In-Box

The epistolary novel, a literary genre that has included, among its entries, works like Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” has recently welcomed a new classic to the category. The author of this chef-d’œuvre is none other than the former President Donald J. Trump, who has, in the past several months, been sending his supporters fund-raising missives over e-mail, multiple times a week, and, often, as if amid some kind of frenzy, multiple times a day.

Indeed, the e-mails arrive so frequently that it’s easy to grow numb to how bonkers they are. Alternating among alarming warnings, vaudevillian cracks, craven flattery, folksy insults, erratic typography and punctuation, and, of course, impassioned pleas for donations, all presented in a graphic-design language seemingly generated by MS Paint, they make for a rollicking and often frightening joyride. On February 2nd, for instance, Trump supporters around the world received an e-mail with the subject line “Sick F-Word.” (The preview text: “You won’t believe what Biden just called me.”) When they opened the e-mail, subscribers were greeted with an all-caps sentence, bolded and highlighted in yellow: “BIDEN JUST CALLED ME A SICK F-WORD!”

It might seem like a stretch to argue that this e-mail, along with the messages that preceded and followed it, amount to a novel, as opposed to a slew of worrying memoranda. But these dispatches, considered in toto, are a hectic, interwoven document that can take us, much like the best novels do, from tears to laughter and back in a single sitting. They can leave us feeling contemplative, wondering if there was ever such a thing as the American Dream. And they can also give us an opportunity to reflect on Trump’s state of mind in the run-up to the Republican nomination. The e-mails feel more diaristic than the former President’s tweets, which were written with a larger audience in mind (haters, the media). These pieces are more revealing of Trump’s inner, most unhinged self because, with them, he’s speaking directly to his adherents.

It bears acknowledging that political fund-raising e-mails are often touched by at least a tinge of hysteria. The desire to speak to the perceived supporter through her in-box—to grab her metaphorical lapels by any means necessary and tug extra hard on her heartstrings—is par for the course. After being a recipient of Nancy Pelosi’s e-mails for a while, I began to tire of the over-the-top language the Speaker tended to use in her missives, to convey the urgency of whatever matter she was writing about. (“This is absolutely critical, Naomi.” “This is your last chance.” “I can’t stop them alone, Naomi. . . . Will you chip in $19?”) “I love that every email from Nancy Pelosi begins with something like, ‘naomi, my heart is pounding and I can’t breathe,’ ” I tweeted, in 2022. “ ‘Can you pitch in.’ ” And yet Trump’s e-mails are still unique in this landscape, for their ability to offer a kind of D.J.T. greatest-hits package, wildly mixing and remixing favorite phrases and styles into a fevered Surrealist cut-up.

While campaigning for the Republican nomination, which he will most likely clinch, Trump is concurrently in deep legal shit, fighting accusations of fraud, hush money, sexual assault, and election subversion. There are so many lawsuits that, as one commentator recently wrote, “merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.” Most recently, in late January, a Manhattan jury determined that Trump should pay the journalist E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her. Or, as my colleague Eric Lach put it, a jury told Trump “to shut up and pay up.” But Trump is hardly the type to shut up, and the e-mails have been one way for him to keep yapping. Invariably, they contain constant intimations of persecution (the term “witch hunt,” for instance, has appeared in campaign e-mails sent in January nearly ninety times), but also insistent professions of triumph, and the two often appear in quick succession. In an e-mail from January 9th—which begins, as do all of Trump’s e-mails, with the salutation “Patriot”—the ex-President writes:

They’ve wrongfully ARRESTED me four times, took a MUGSHOT of me, forced me off the campaign trail and into the courtroom for SHAM TRIALS, unlawfully REMOVED my name from the ballot, GAGGED and CENSORED me, are attempting to JAIL me for life as an innocent man, and are even seeking the ‘corporate death penalty’ against me and my family.

And despite all this, with YOU at my side, I’ve never been more confident that WE will prevail in our noble mission . . . just as we always have.

Where does one even begin? I guess we might as well start with the e-mail’s inexplicable ransom-note-style font decisions. Why is YOU capped but not italicized, whereas WE is capped and italicized? Why is the first paragraph bolded (and in red type), whereas the second is not? Why is “corporate death penalty” both scare-quoted and italicized? The typographical chaos mimics the legal, political, and psychic chaos in which Trump operates; and yet his relentless energy seems to emerge from this very chaos, as he paranoically and insistently narrates his woes in a kind of stream of consciousness, by turns slinging mud at the so-called haters, proclaiming his perseverance, and flattering and wheedling his supporters. He is Jesus on the cross, but he will survive! The strength of the words, too, depends on their ability to capture the ex-President’s oratorical cadence. The all-caps, tabloidesque feel of ARRESTED, MUGSHOT, SHAM TRIALS, and so on mirrors the rhythmic ebb and flow of Trump’s speech, apparently so intoxicating to his followers.

As I was reading the e-mails, I was reminded of the dénouement of Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” whose mobster protagonist, Henry Hill, haunted and coked-up and attempting to outrun the Feds on one frantic day’s journey into night, is certain that his every move is being surveilled by a helicopter. “No, I’m not nuts, this thing’s been following me all fucking morning, I’m telling you,” he says, sweaty and beleaguered. Why won’t they stop trying to take him down? During the scene, George Harrison’s “What Is Life” begins to play, and the lyrics of the song, too, are instructive. “Tell me, what is my life without your love? And tell me, who am I without you by my side?” Harrison sings. This, in fact, is the other half of the Trump formula. His enemies might try to muzzle him, but this means only that he needs to hold those who do support him even closer. An e-mail from January 23rd opens with these words:

This is President Trump, and I’ll never stop loving you.

Why? Because you’ve always loved me!

You stuck by me every single time the Radical Left tried to KICK ME DOWN.

Even when they took my mugshot at the Fulton County Jail.

I felt your love even when they RAIDED MY HOME.

Through all the HOAXES, WITCH HUNTS, and FAKE INDICTMENTS, you never left my side!

This is a bond that is based on persecution, and the harsher the torment the more ardently tender the bond becomes: it’s Romeo and Juliet, or even Bonnie and Clyde. (...)

The photographs that accompany the e-mails also alternate between good-guy Trump and bad-guy Trump, and the opposition between the personae is as blatant as that between smiley and frowny emojis. In an e-mail from January 13th, Trump suggests that “Crooked Joe” (more than eighty mentions of the term, by the way, within a single month’s messages) “charged Hollywood celebrities nearly $1 million to meet him.” The former President, however, considers each and every “Patriot” he is addressing in his e-mails as “the real star of our country,” and is raffling off a V.I.P. visit to Mar-a-Lago among those who contribute just one dollar to the campaign. In the appended picture, a technicolor Trump with his thumb up, grinning strenuously as if laughing at a gag just beyond frame, is crudely photoshopped onto an aerial image of the country club and the blindingly turquoise ocean beyond it. Not only will the winner “get to take a special photo with yours truly so that you can remember this amazing night forever!,” Trump writes, but they’ll also “get to enjoy drinks and hors d’œuvres on me,” and receive “an autographed hat from your favorite President. Sounds like a much better deal to me!”

by Naomi Fry, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Al Drago/Getty/Bloomberg

[ed. I hope supporters keep sending him money, they deserve it.]

Arranging Love

Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would live among his relatives. A traditional arranged marriage. But he had married my mother because they had “fallen in love.” Why was he telling me this? I remember feeling so sad and disappointed at his words. Had he been regretting his marriage all those years?

In India, in those days and even now, almost all marriages are arranged. Parents select potential mates for their children, taking great care to find someone from within their religious, socioeconomic, and cultural circles, so that there will be little cause for disharmony. Growing up in India, I remember always telling my friends with some pride that my parents instead had a “Love Marriage,” sickeningly enthusiastic that this would put all their parents’ “Arranged Marriages” to shame. All through my teenage years and beyond, I was fascinated by this idea of the love marriage. Seeing someone across a room, maybe even falling in love at first sight. And that is what my parents had done. They became smitten with each other in their College faculty room. And now he was telling me that perhaps he should have had an arranged marriage after all.

 

I sat with his words. I tried the instant replay button on my middle-aged memory, trying to recall everything my mother had told me about their initial meeting, their courtship, their marriage. I wanted to understand why he said those words to me. And perhaps I would better understand why I fell so easily, instantly, in love with a man named Jeff Sugar.

My parents were young lecturers at Andhra Christian College in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, when they met. My mother was a great beauty and my father spotted her amid other chatting faculty and made a beeline for her. They spent time together at work talking for hours, and sometimes he walked her home from the college. In those days, women were not supposed to spend any time alone with a man, even in full view of others. Most people had arranged marriages, and the couples did not even get to speak with each other before the wedding. So, their spending so much time together openly was considered scandalous, and everyone expected a wedding soon. Then one day, my father left Guntur suddenly and unexpectedly for a teaching job in another city, Nagpur.

When I was 12, I found a stack of letters tied up with thin satin blue ribbons hidden in the steel almirah in my parent’s bedroom. They were romantic messages to my dad from my mother, pleading, almost begging him to return from Nagpur. They always started, “My dearest Raji.” They were full of love and adoration but also with an edge of panic. She must have known that if they did not get married, there would be no marriage at all for her. No one would arrange nuptials for someone who’d been seen conversing with another man, hand-holding and maybe kissing (I am not sure).

My mother came from a very distinguished family. Her father, Valaparla Chinna John, was the first Indian to be appointed as the head of a major college under the British Raj. He was awarded the Kaiser-I-Hind, the equivalent award to the Order of the British Empire, from King George VI, for excellence in education. And my mom was his favorite daughter. She had been raised in comfort with lots of servants in the house. She had received no instructions from her mother about how to run a household or how to cook. The expectation had always been that she would marry into a family with prestige and wealth. But then her parents died, and aunts and uncles — inattentive to her needs — did not step up and perform the duty.

My father, on the other hand, was raised rather frugally by a very strict mother. He was the only son of Packiam Masilamony, a young beauty from a poor family. My paternal grandfather had spotted my grandmother while he was riding by her village on horseback. He told his mother about her and his mother arranged their marriage. When my father told me this I thought it was the most romantic thing I had ever heard. He must have inherited his passionate streak from his father! My grandfather died shortly thereafter, leaving my father’s mother a widow with two very young children. She worked hard and saved all her money to send her son to college. So, my father grew up with no luxuries and he was expected to excel in school and college — which he did. His sister was married off in an arranged marriage right after high school.

Whether my mother’s letters had reminded him of their love for each other or his sense of duty toward her, my father did come back eventually from Nagpur and married my mother. He must have known the terrible blow that would have befallen my mother’s reputation. She had “kept company” with a man, been seen together, and most damning of all, been seen holding hands and walking alone through the paddy fields with no chaperone!

My parents had a church wedding with my mother’s relatives in attendance, but no one from my father’s family was there. He was too afraid to tell his mother and face her wrath. It was the right of an Indian mother to select her son’s bride. How could he tell her that after raising him singlehandedly since he was four, he had denied her this much-awaited pleasure!

In their wedding photograph, my father stood by himself, the only Tamilian in the wedding party among Andhras. My mother had all her sisters and extended family with her. Standing in her wedding attire, a radiant beauty, she is not smiling, as she is always self-conscious about the gap in her front teeth. Her beauty shows through anyway. My father looks very handsome in his dark suit. He is smiling, so I want to believe that he entered into the marriage happily.

An Indian mother expects her son and daughter-in-law to live with her after they get married, but when my father took his new bride to visit his mother in Nagercoil, she refused to open the door and screamed abuses from the other side. They had to leave and go stay with his married sister. After that reception from her mother-in-law, my mother never forgave her and would not consider allowing my father to invite his mother to live with them. This would have been unacceptable in an arranged marriage, but this was love — and my mother did not have her parents to guide her in this matter. For most Indian couples, their parents and extended families play a large supportive role in their lives, both emotionally, and at times financially, to help the couple through difficult times. This was completely absent in my parents’ lives.

Guilt about letting his mother down led to resentment. He would taunt my mother that his mother would never have picked her. Almost every day, I heard him say that he missed living in Nagercoil, missed hearing his language, Tamil spoken, and how living in the large city of Calcutta surrounded by people who did not accept him, was not what he would have chosen. He could not speak in Tamil to her as she spoke Telugu, her mother tongue — another casualty of a love marriage between two people from different States in India. So, they spoke to each other in English.

My father would talk about his mother with pride and throw her up as an example of the perfect Indian woman. How she had done the right thing and married a man her parents had presented to her, how she spurned her many suitors after she became a widow, how she devoted her life to raising her daughter and son. Did my father, deep down, not respect my mother for breaking all tradition and marrying him? Now I knew that he had always wanted a traditional woman as his wife, like his mother, someone from a similar socioeconomic background, not my highly educated mother who came from a more affluent family. Had he fallen for my mother’s charm and beauty and intelligence against all his better judgment?

During their marriage, I remember they had major arguments. It would always start with my father bringing up his mother not living with them. They would devolve into how my father grew up with a careful penny-pinching mother — no wastage of anything allowed in the house. If he berated her for “wasting” something in the house, it was hard for my mother to take as she was raised as a “princess” in a mansion! Would her parents have arranged her marriage with a struggling teacher? Definitely not. There were times when their fights would make my mother cry and hide in the bedroom. This was when I would wish that she would leave him. But nobody gets divorced in India, and deep down I did not really want them to split up.

As soon as I finished medical school at 21, my parents started bringing me “matches.” But I had conjured up such ideals in my head, long-fantasizing about a love marriage. I wanted that meet-cute, that rom-com, those flowers. How exciting would that be! As a teenager, I used to hide away in our apartment and devour books including a ton of romantic novels published by Mills and Boons, and the Regency Romances series by Georgette Heyer. I wanted a “love marriage” like my mother — wanted passion, the knight in shining armor, a man who would fall in love with me and stay in love. I wanted a love marriage even though I knew my parent’s love marriage was not ideal. Not someone picked by your parents, from your own community and background that you know so well.

As is the customary manner of the arranged marriage, my parents presented me with descriptions of young men from suitable families, sometimes with an accompanying photograph. I was allowed to meet them for a coffee — nothing more — and I was expected to pick one of them to marry. My classmates were getting married one by one, all arranged, and this was beginning to put a lot of pressure on me to do the same. When I was 25 years old, after rejecting all my parents’ attempts at coordinating a marriage for me, I left for America to further my career and to find true love. Before I left, my mother said to me, “Be very careful about who you choose to marry, for out of that comes everything in life.” I didn’t give her words much thought then.

by Usha Raj, The Smart Set |  Read more:

Image: Estelle Guillot

[ed. India is one of the world's largest economies and ancient cultures, yet still relatively unknown. Not for long, I think.]

Don't Ask Me Stupid Questions

[ed. Damn, is this Bjork? Would not want to fuck with her. Ever.]

Ed Freeman - Gem Theater, Pioche Nevada
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The Ancestral Tradition of Tequila in Jalisco, Mexico

Invisible to those around me, I could feel tiny tributaries of sweat beginning to creep down my backside. Standing outside under a blanket of blazing heat and looking ahead at a field filled with blue agave plants stretching towards an endless horizon, there was a certain peace here. Earlier that day, I’d traveled from my home in Atlanta to the state of Jalisco, Mexico, arriving in Guadalajara proper before journeying further and further away from those city limits, chiefly, to learn about tequila as a guest at the private, invite-only Hacienda Patrón located in Atotonilco El Alto.

Through the years, I’ve blithely joked that tequila makes me cry. Imbibing on the blue agave spirit does tend to inspire me to be more outwardly emotional than usual, and overall, the spirit isn’t my drink of choice. But being in the land of tequila and learning firsthand about the process, one could say I was inspired, and motivated to move past my perpetual tequila indifference.

A cacophony of sounds disrupted the serene silence as a jimador, someone practiced in the art of breaking down an agave plant for processing elsewhere, went to work. Wielding a hoe, he whacked the greenery over and over again with fervor until the bitter outward leaves began to peel away from the winter-white, pineapple-looking heart of the agave. His movements were so precise, his swings appeared to pare the plant like a hot knife sinking into butter.

Our guides had taken us on a tour of Patrón’s facilities and distilling process. It was only after I missed several cues that I realized it was my turn to get involved in the unearthing process. At the direction of the jimador, I shoved a metal tool that looked like a thermometer into the heart of one of the piñas he’d just finished cutting down. My guide quickly translated into English that the tool was used to measure the amount of sugar within the piña that had just been harvested.

Throughout the rest of my time in Jalisco, thought about what it took to make every tequila I drank. Beyond the labor itself, what stuck with me was how central ancestral tradition is to the making of tequila. But the one thing that stuck with me beyond the sightseeing and tasting of several tequilas within was how central tradition and ancestral practice is to the fruit of labor that is a bottle of tequila.

The practice of being a jimador is often generational; a father teaches the art to a son, nephew, or another family member, and when they are of age, they take the baton, making this trade their own. In areas that are otherwise unreachable — in valleys or on mountaintops — jimadores set out on a tequila quest in teams of up to seven people, filling trucks with piñas, that will be cooked, crushed, and fermented at distilleries before landing in a bottle for consumption and delight.

In a world where buzzy celebrity-backed tequila lines are on-trend, especially when viewed as another way of creating a lucrative income stream, there is importance in looking to the artisanal and indigenous practices that are the foundation of what it means to appreciate tequila.

What we drink and the food we eat are not merely touchstones of our tastes and preferences. They can also be a ritual of remembrance connecting us to those who came before us, those who studied a craft to become truly good at something. We eat, we taste, we drink in celebration of them and of ourselves. We honor them and ourselves in continuing to reach for our ancestral and cultural foods.

by Nneka M. Okona, Eater | Read more:
Image: Michelle K. Min
[ed. The links are key here, like this one (The Ultimate Guide to Tequila).]

Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).

These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.

[ed. See also: How Do You Tell If Your Tequila Has Additives? (Forbes).]

Tokenism

First of all, what is tokenism/tokenization?

We work from the below definition:

To recruit an individual or small number of people with marginalized identities in order to give the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the workplace while ignoring and/or continuing the root causes of inequity.
​
For context, the words token and tokenism date back into the Civil Rights Movement and have been referenced in academia many times since then. A few examples include:

The Case Against Tokenism by Dr. Martin Luther King (1962):

“But in the tradition of old guards, who would rather die than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism...Thus we have advanced in some places from all-out, unrestrained resistance to a sophisticated form of delaying tactics, embodied in tokenism.”

Malcolm X’s interview with Louis Lomax (1963):

“What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet.” (In response to Lomax's comment "But we have made some gains…")

Tokenism and Women in the Workplace by Lynn Zimmer (1988):

“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics’ (race, sex and ethnicity)... Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”

The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe by Yolanda Flores Niemann (1999):

“I was told, ‘Now that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority.’ This sentiment is an example of covert racism in academia, which also includes the 'one-minority-per-pot syndrome." (...)

Tokenism is a form of racial capitalism, or extracting value from the racialized identities of others.

Tokenism is often just as prevalent in organizations practicing DEI, where it is used to deflect accusations about lack of diversity or inclusion without actually threatening the status quo.

“Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color.

Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because they recruit and use PoC as racialized props.”

- Helen Kim Ho, 8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits

Where Tokenism Begins:

The Foundational Hierarchies in American Society

In order to understand tokenism, we must first accept the foundational hierarchies of our current society in the U.S.:

Systems of Oppression (including capitalism and white supremacy, see Glossary) work in concert to center the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of white people, wealthy people, straight people, men, and able-bodied people, while oppressing people with marginalized identities.

Mainstream progressive movements (e.g., feminism) often erase people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g., a Black queer non-binary person), while centering white identities (e.g. ,white women, white LGBTQ+ people), and people with proximities to whiteness (e.g., wealthy BIPOC).

Consequently, tokenism manifests when the success of the one token minority person who’s “made it” is seen as proof of society’s progress and equality (e.g., when President Obama supposedly ushered in a "post-racial society"). However, even as “the one Indigenous person” or “the one queer person” or “the one working class person” has gained social and economic capital, the same oppressive systems continue to operate. (...)

How Tokenism Works Within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

As an attempt to pave the way for BIPOC, we’ve seen waves of DEI training, seminars, departments spring up in the last few years. However, these DEI networks often rely on a quota system when it comes to “diversifying” their workforce, or by hiring a few tokens to “represent” diversity in their organization, which only serves to reduce individuals to only their marginalized identities. (...)

This act of tokenism, especially within a PR-friendly DEI campaign, is particularly insidious because it presumes the token will be able to “fix” pre-existing internal issues without challenging the toxic structures already in place. This is usually because the organization’s leadership fundamentally does not want to, see the need to, or is equipped to to alter their approach or processes pertaining to how marginalized identities are addressed within their workplace; although diversity is a goal, inclusion is not.

In the worst scenarios, it becomes frustrating to the organization that the token hire is not supporting this underlying initiative — to stay static but give the outward appearance of being “diverse” or “inclusive” — and often gives way to that token hire becoming seen as the problem, because they are easier to attack, diminish, and ultimately remove than addressing the true structural changes required.

by StudioATAO |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. We've barely reached institutional/societal acceptance of DEI, and the goalposts keep moving. Another couple of random perspectives: here and here. Also this one, about how Bon Appétit ended up in hot water:]

"On June 4, the Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet called out what she viewed as hypocrisy in Bon Appétit's solidarity effort, Insider's Anneta Konstantinides reported. Maisonet recalled that she pitched a story to the publication "about Afro-Boricuas that make regional rice fritters" — a pitch she said an editor rejected, reasoning it sounded like "a story that could have been told 5 years ago."

Bon Appétit went on to publish "another Euro-ingredient story," she wrote.
—illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat) June 4, 2020

In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a screenshot of her tweet, Maisonet elaborated on her concerns with Bon Appétit and its social-media activism.

"So, before we go praising them for patting themselves on the back for showing 'solidarity' during a time when it would be bad for business to NOT show solidarity… maybe we can get some full print issues of the regional foods of Puerto Rico," she wrote. "Oh, and Africa. Brazil. Basically, the entire f---ing Diaspora. BY people from the Diaspora." (...)

"I'm definitely certain listing your three POC staff token writers (two of which are white presenting) is helpful in ensuring I am aware of the 'diversity' BA HAS shown," Maisonet responded. "But I get that their avenues are less congested when it comes to getting ideas accepted, as they are staffers. That still doesn't deflect from the fact that you don't have any Puerto Rican stories or recipes."

The screenshots of the messages elicited a strong response on Twitter.

"He himself just listed BA's tokenization problem yet doesn't see it as a problem?" one commenter wrote."