Why Is the Best Vodka From Costco?

Tony Abou-Ganim is drinking vodka during our call, even though it’s 10 a.m. in Las Vegas, where he lives. The “modern mixologist,” as he calls himself, alternates sips from two custom-designed tasting glasses, one vodka, then the other vodka, swishing the liquors around in his mouth to really get a feel for them.

The two vodkas on the menu were of the same brand name but had different countries of origin, different makers, different base ingredients—and Abou-Ganim could tell. I hadn’t outright asked him to taste-test them, but I had been hoping he would. He much preferred the French-made vodka to the American-made one, and that’s not just snootiness. He’s a big fan of other American vodkas, like the now-ubiquitous Tito’s. (He knows Tito.)

The French vodka has notes of vanilla and caramel—dare he say, a crème brûlée taste? A nice acidity with notes of lemon, citrus, and white pepper on the back, he told me, evoking an instant “saliva drip.” Although the American didn’t cut it for him, the experts at the New York Times’ Wirecutter full-throatedly endorsed it. According to those taste-testers, it has subtle hints of citrus and rose and the texture is silky.

These careful, artful descriptions surprised me: Discussions of tasting notes, mouthfeel, and terroir are often deserved for fine wines and expensive whiskeys. Certainly not vodka, which, as many a college student has determined, is best when nearly invisible.

Also surprising? The humble point of purchase of these vodkas. To try them yourself, you’ll need to journey past the window selling $1.50 jumbo hot dogs, past the 83-inch 4K-resolution TVs, past the brilliant-cut diamond engagement rings, and past the 36-roll family packs of Scott toilet paper. These are Kirkland Signature vodkas, house spirits of the big-box superstore Costco.

What makes Kirkland’s vodkas so tantalizing is not merely that they’re a grocery store steal—priced between $10 and $25 for a cartoonish 1.75 liters of spirit, with no other size options. It’s that these spirits come with a mixed-in spice of intrigue, mystique, and lore. Connoisseurs (and anyone who puts them to a taste test, really) consider them legitimately good. Kirkland Signature American Vodka was not merely in the Wirecutter review for the best vodka, which was written by Haley Perry, a former bartender. It earned the top spot, a “unanimous favorite.”

Rumors have long abounded that Kirkland vodka is simply a dressed-down version of the most gussied-up mass-market vodka: Grey Goose. This isn’t the case, but the rumor itself, which has been swirling for nearly two decades—at least—leads us to a better understanding of a world in which the two could plausibly be confused. Because we live in that world. As the Kirkland saga exemplifies, vodka is both firmly lodged in American consumption and woefully misunderstood.

Vodka has been popular in Europe—namely, Poland and Russia and Sweden—for generations and generations. But in the past century, it has had a transcendent rise here in the U.S. and, since 1976, has been the bestselling spirit in the country. In 2023 Americans bought $7.2 billion worth of vodka, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. That’s more than whiskey, cognac, gin, and rum. Tequila and mezcal are on the rise, but they still sit in second place, with $6 billion in sales.

But vodka, for its long history as a commercial juggernaut, has also become something of a punchline in the drinking and bartending communities. Abou-Ganim, who wrote the 2013 book Vodka Distilled, recounted a trip to an Oakland cocktail bar where he was surprised to find its menu completely lacking in vodka-based options. He asked the mustachioed twentysomething bartender whether the establishment carried vodka at all.

“Yes, we carry two,” the bartender said to him. “And in my opinion, that’s two too many.”

There’s an underlying paradox in vodka that might explain its status among the nation’s snootiest imbibers: No one seems quite sure whether it’s supposed to taste like nothing or whether it’s supposed to taste like something.

by Scott Nover, Slate |  Read more:

Image: LeMusique/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Costco.

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park

“The Caring Hand,” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber. Photo by Kris Graves (Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery, Alabama)

Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South (New Yorker)

[ed. See also: The Transatlantic Slave Trade: 500 Years Later, Are We Still Slaves? (The Washington Informer).]

Jacob’s Dream

MAGA meets the Age of Aquarius

Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s, winner of the Phoenix New Times Best Gluten-Free Restaurant award in 2015. Despite a protracted hunger strike and 317 days isolated in a cell, Jacob’s prison sentence of forty-one months for obstruction of an official proceeding on January 6, 2021, had been shortened owing to good behavior, and he was let out about a year early on supervised release.

It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective. “People are brainwashed by the elites and their propaganda networks,” he said. “Mass hypnosis, bro.”

He had agreed to meet with me on a number of conditions, including:

1. That I mention Dr. Royal Raymond Rife, the American inventor of an oscillating beam-ray medical technology that, according to Jacob, is a cure for cancer that has been quashed by the government, the military, and pharmaceutical giants; and

2. That I call attention to the existence of a clean, free, wireless, and renewable energy source powered by the earth’s magnetic field that was discovered by Nikola Tesla but suppressed by the government because such a technology would make the existing energy grid obsolete, and thus threaten the rule of the globalists and their corporate monopolies.

Jacob believes he has been sent to earth to combat wicked forces such as Warner Bros. and MGM. He believes in the clear and present danger of a global ring of slave-trading, adrenochrome-swigging Clintonistas. He would also like to lift the ban on psilocybin mushrooms. And he’s been doing the work for a long time—for “millennia,” he told me. “I have reincarnated on this planet numerous times throughout the ages.”

Jacob is as apt to paraphrase Shirley MacLaine as WikiLeaks Vault 7 or Alex Jones, which is why I had reached out to him. He is Exhibit A of the widely reported observation that MAGA, QAnon, and the broader conspiratorial mishmash draw substantial support from the consciousness-raising, om-chanting, sound-healing, joint-toking, crystal- and chart-reading crowd, the long-haired hippies who half a century ago were lumped together with the fellow travelers of the left, but have been reincarnated two generations later as pivotal elements of the Trump coalition. Jacob and his cosmic vibrations epitomize that political reversal. Perhaps, I thought, there was something in his belief system that could explain how the self-evident truths that guided the foundation of American democracy had lost their way in the wilderness.

I figured the tattoos would be a good place to start. As he was perusing Picazzo’s menu, I mentioned the marks on the backs of his hands. They were planets, pyramids, and runes, he said—the alphabets native to early Germanic and Norse peoples. The massive dark blots on his shoulder took six and a half hours. “My reality—what I thought was reality—was ripping at the seams right in front of my closed eyelids,” he said, recalling the ordeal. “I was seeing the quantum particles.”

He was also tripping on mushrooms. (...)

His biological father spent most of Jacob’s youth in jail and played no role as a parent. His stepfather, whom he calls his dad, committed suicide.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “when one has not had a good father, one must create one.” Carl Jung ratified the idea of the fantasy father in 1919, when he labeled the concept an “archetype,” by which he meant a mental compendium of mythic, legendary, and fairy-tale fathers all wrapped up into one enormous daddy issue.

Jacob, who was born in 1987, came of age in the wake of Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book published in 1990 about modern man’s alienation from heroic male archetypes that spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a seminal work of the mythopoetic men’s movement. Like Jacob, Bly served in the Navy. Like Jacob, Bly’s father was an alcoholic. Like Jacob, Bly was interested in Old Norse mythology—in particular, the epic tales of the principal Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain mystical knowledge, subjected himself to nine days and nights of torture. He lanced himself with a spear and hung upside down from Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree that connects the nine realms of the universe, a tattoo of which lies over Jacob’s heart.

In the era of Iron John, “manosphere” membership required bongos, sweat lodges, hugging, weeping, and throwing spears at boars. Today, it’s about getting buff, buying liver-enzyme pills online, and keeping a paleo diet. (...)

I nodded, and we sat in silence for a while. A waiter appeared, smiling in a vague, embarrassed sort of way. He seemed to have recognized Jacob and was ready to stand at attention.

But The Shaman’s thoughts had roamed far from the realm of gluten-free food. “The most evil things happen when a person believes that they are anonymous, when they’ve covered their face,” he mused after some time. “Whether it be with war paint, or whether it be with a mask.” Which struck me as odd, because at the Capitol on January 6, Jacob had painted his face. He had covered his head with a coyote-tail headdress and topped it off with buffalo horns. Holding his staff and megaphone, he sat his ass down in the presiding officer’s chair.

Now he looked me square in the eye.

“You’re paying, right?”

For the record, The Shaman ordered his pizza topped with artichoke hearts, basil, chicken, and mushrooms.

In court, Jacob’s lawyer told the judge that his client would not kill an insect, that he was picked on as a child and bullied as a teenager. After high school, he joined the Navy and found himself aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, a floating apocalypse-in-waiting, bristling with surface-to-air missiles, Super Hornet fighter jets, Prowler radar jammers, and Seahawk helicopters. It was the same ship aboard which John Frankenheimer filmed scenes for Seven Days in May, the 1964 black-and-white classic in which Kirk Douglas plays Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, who uncovers a plot against the United States government masterminded by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was the first movie of its kind, ushering in what became a standard in Hollywood thrillers after the Kennedy assassination: the deep state conspiracy.

About six months into his assignment, the ship psychologist diagnosed him with schizotypal personality disorder, an incurable condition characterized by social isolation, limited reactions to social cues, and sometimes a penchant to dress unusually. He received what the military calls a “general discharge, under honorable conditions,” in 2007, and returned to his mother’s house in Phoenix.

The living room here has an ornamental equine vibe—lit by a horse lamp, wall adorned with images of horses—except for the bookshelf, where what might have been a cowboy hat has been replaced by a Trump hat. Martha Chansley doesn’t subscribe to cable television. She believes that the buffalo is a “mystic” animal. When a reporter and camera crew from FOX 10 Phoenix descended on her house after her son had been taken into custody, she noted another mystical bond, this one with Donald Trump: “We are a part of him, and he is a part of us.”

“My mom was always kinda into woo-woo,” Jacob admitted.

After being discharged from the Navy, he remembered how he had once happened upon a CD in his mother’s car. The plastic case showed a bald and bearded hippie who had been dismissed from his psychology assistant professorship at Harvard because of his research on psychedelic drug therapies.

“I was like—oh, okay, that’s interesting.”

What The Shaman had stumbled across was a set of lectures given by Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert. Four years after his dismissal from Harvard, Alpert had traveled to India and changed his name to Baba Ram Dass. Four years after that, he published a book called Be Here Now, which sold two million copies and became a counterculture bible for Steve Jobs, Wayne Dyer, and George Harrison.

“I was awestruck,” Jacob said.

by Frederick Kaufman, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Pep Montserrat

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Adaptation Channels the Book’s Spirit But Not Its Brilliance

In his 2008 sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu created a fascinating world where cutting-edge particle physics, VR gaming, and Chinese history played crucial roles in shaping humanity’s response to an imminent planet-wide threat. It also seemed unfilmable. The depth of the book’s ideas about cultural memory and the complexity of its central mystery made The Three-Body Problem feel like a story that could only work on the page.

That hasn’t stopped streamers from trying, and last year, Tencent debuted its own live-action, episodic take on Liu’s book. Netflix spent a fortune putting 3 Body Problem in the hands of executive producers David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. Their adaptation is leaner and more diverse than the book in a way that makes it a very different kind of story. Often, it’s a good one — and very occasionally a great one — that works as an introductory crash course to the basic ideas key to understanding the larger concepts that shape Liu’s later books.

But rather than confronting the sophistication of the book, Netflix’s main priority with 3 Body Problem seems to be selling it as the next Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss’ last series). And while it’s easy to understand why the streamer might want that, it’s hard not to see the show as a flashy but stripped-down version of the source material.

3 Body Problem involves a constellation of distinct narratives spanning multiple decades and generations. But at its core, the show is a compelling thriller about how the sins of humanity’s past come to shape its future. In a world where the scientific community has been rocked by an alarming wave of mysterious suicides, private intelligence officer Clarence Shi (Benedict Wong) and a group of researchers get swept up in a race to save the planet from destruction.

As a former agent of both MI5 and Scotland Yard, Clarence is no stranger to shadowy plots. But he’s vastly out of his depth in the worlds of cutting-edge theoretical physics and materials engineering. Meanwhile, scientist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is also navigating uncharted waters as she struggles to make sense of what’s happening to her peers and why many experiments involving particle accelerators are going wrong. The panic of the present day pushes Jin to reconnect with her four best college friends, and the dynamic of the reunited “Oxford Five” inches closer to revealing a world-ending threat.

Given the structural complexity of Liu’s books, it isn’t surprising that Netflix’s 3 Body is streamlined in a much more linear fashion that makes it feel like Lost-style mystery-within-a-mystery you’re figuring out alongside Clarence. But it’s actually in 3 Body Problem’s core group of characters that you can most clearly see the steps Benioff, Weiss, and Woo took to rework Liu’s ideas for a more global audience.

Before the book’s story in present-day China really gets going, Liu spends quite a bit of time in the past in order to give you a better grasp of the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist movement to purge society of capitalists and intellectuals. It’s the Party’s reversal of these horrifying policies — instead embracing academia and scientific research — that sets China on a path to become a global superpower. And as the book moves into the present, that historical context helps you appreciate why a sudden and sustained spike in inexplicable scientist suicides would prompt the government to deploy counter-terrorism operatives to investigate.

In the novel, much of the early mystery is rooted in the fact that its characters — like offputting former detective Shi Qiang (often referred to as “Da Shi”) and nanomaterials specialist Wang Miao — are solving it in isolation. Netflix’s answer to Da Shi, Clarence, is now British and a softer, more contemplative presence than his curmudgeon literary counterpart. The show also splits Wang’s character into the Oxford Five, an ethnically diverse group of friends consisting of Jin, research assistant Saul (Jovan Adepo), nanotech expert Auggie (Eiza González), physics teacher Will (Alex Sharp), and snack magnate Jack (John Bradley).

Making characters fumble in the darkness on their way to solving the puzzle of Three-Body was one of the many ways Liu mirrored, on a microscopic level, the book’s larger ideas about the power of collaborative efforts versus the control that comes from individual decision-making. But because the show’s Oxford Five are all friends (and former lovers in some instances) who quickly begin working together, relationships drive the plot forward more than its existential puzzle. These changes bring a new level of interpersonal drama to Netflix’s show that isn’t present in the book, especially for Auggie, who’s haunted by visions of a glowing countdown that seems to be seared onto her retinas. Dividing Wang into five distinct characters emphasizes the idea that there’s power in looking at complicated problems from a diverse array of unique perspectives.

But because the Oxford Five are all based on a single character and spend so much time talking each other through theories about what’s going on, scenes focused on them often feel the show taking a moment to spell out plot points in ways that feel clumsy and inorganic. This is less the case when 3 Body Problem shifts its focus to the past and zeroes in on the life of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a promising young astrophysicist whose entire world is upended by the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like in the book, 3 Body Problem truly begins with Ye and how the personal choices she makes — all informed by her experiences as a survivor of the Revolution — have an incalculable impact on the future at a worldwide scale.

In both the book and Netflix’s adaptation, Ye’s story is a powerful one that contextualizes the present in important ways. But the show is less willing to dwell in it. Rather than consider the political and personal effects of the Revolution, the series commits to being a thinky but easily digestible chronicle of the world readying itself for war. (...)

Meanwhile, the show invests in the messy lives of the Oxford Five and their flirtations with a futuristic piece of technology that plunges its wearer into an unimaginable world of riddles, mathematics, and roleplaying. The headset also gives the show a way of stepping outside the confines of the detective genre and into an otherworldly space that has the recognizable markers of science fiction, like planets with multiple suns. Smartly, 3 Body Problem balances out some of that predictability by placing many of its most imaginative, impossible set pieces in the game where the uncanny combo of Netflix’s signature visual look and an inordinate amount of shiny VFX. And it actually works as a plus rather than a minus here because of how unsettling playing the game is supposed to feel.

There are at least a few truly breathtaking action sequences unevenly sprinkled throughout 3 Body Problem’s first season. But for all their terrifying beauty, they’re not quite enough to keep the show from feeling like Netflix’s adequate attempt at distilling a literary masterpiece into eight hours of television. 

by Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge | Read more:

Image: Netflix/The Ringer

[ed. Precisely. See also: 3 Body Problem’s Failure of Imagination (TNR); The Real Issue With Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (The Atlantic), and, The ‘3 Body Problem’ Exit Survey (The Ringer).]

The Waterboys

Now he's brought down the rain 

And the Indian summer's reign is through

In the morning you'll be following your trail again

Fair play to you

You ain't calling me to join you 

And I'm spoken for anyway 

But I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

Your beauty is familiar 

And your voice is like a key 

That opens up my soul 

And torches up a fire inside of me 

Your coat is made of magic 

And around your table angels play 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

Somebody left his whisky 

And the night is very young 

I've some to say and I've more to tell 

And the words will soon be spilling from my tongue

 

I will rave and I will ramble 

I'll do everything but make you stay 

Then I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away 

I will cry when ye go away...

Normies: Why It's Miserable To Be Stuck In the Middle

For the last 15 years, a number of Hawaii residents have been increasingly plagued by a phenomena some call “being stuck in the middle.”

The term refers to what happens when one’s social and economic mobility is frozen by a set of circumstances largely outside of an individual’s control that keep them locked in a state where they make just enough to get by, but not enough to be happy or move up in life.

Worse yet, residents who find themselves stuck in the middle may also feel they are invisible to policymakers, as their voting demographic often doesn’t attract the kind of political representation to push them out of their rut. Because politics is often about the friction that occurs between haves and have nots, the middle, transitional space just between haves and have nots – the “have just enough but not that much” if you will – are the forgotten, expendables in moments of social upheaval. Many such individuals work, live, and ultimately, die in the background of Hawaii, unfulfilled and frustrated.

Before we explore this social phenomena further, I’d like to ask you a potentially indiscreet question that you may or may not have ever been asked before.

Are you a normie?

“Danny, a … what?” you may be saying. I asked if you might be a “normie.” It’s a term that originally gained traction online during the presidency of Barack Obama among politically engaged persons on the politically extremes of far right and far left, but now has become an important concept in the emerging political conflict to define the future of America.

The closest thing in your vocabulary to what a normie constitutes is a political “moderate” but a better description is to say a normie is someone who basically exists (but not thrives) in society with conventional beliefs, typical expectations, minimal vices, few excesses, maximum social conformity, and is your average garden variety individual.

They get up in the morning, they cook breakfast, send the kids to school, go to work, pick up the kids, cook dinner, go to sleep, and repeat the same thing the next day. They don’t protest, they don’t hold signs on Beretania Street or Pennsylvania Avenue, they usually vote for the same party without fail their entire life, and they aren’t given to wild swings of opinions, unless of course, you really make them mad or inconvenience them.

They don’t buy expensive cars. They don’t take out huge loans they can’t pay. They occasionally take the kids on vacation, but do so only after saving for long periods of time. They are the most miserable people in Hawaii, because they happen to be the most responsible people in Hawaii, a state that rewards irresponsibility and excess.

This is not to suggest that they are not exceptional. In fact, many of them are the glue that holds society together so the fringes can gripe without consequence. They aren’t radicalized, and want society to be predictable, stable and consistently governed by the same set of rules they’ve been trained to play by their entire life.

You’ll find many normies working in fields like insurance, education, health care, the civil service, police and especially the field-grade officer corps of the military. Normies, since the end of World War II, typically come from a long line of middle class professional suburban Americans and end up becoming, themselves, middle class professional suburbanites just like their parents and grandparents before them. (...)

“Normies” are hated by the far right and far left because they see, mostly, nothing wrong with America, the idea, or America, the country as a whole. The only thing “wrong” for a normie is when they see that a government bureaucrat or elected official neglecting basic services and infrastructure that they’ve come to depend on, because if the traffic gets out of control, or the school bus service becomes unreliable, that threatens the normie’s ability to do what they do best and must do above all else – go to work, make money, feed the kids and pay the bills.

Yes, if you’re a normie, chances are you have a household income of between $55,000 to $250,000, you have at least a college education, you are very skilled or very technically proficient in something rare and mysterious that important people pay you to deal with so they don’t have to themselves, and you’re likely upset that both Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to know what they’re talking about lately.

Key normie gripe: Things are not so bad, things are not so great, but things sure as hell aren’t what they’re supposed to be.

And why do normies know better than the Democrats and Republicans in charge? Because in all likelihood, they’re probably also the cogs in the collective machine that’s being run into the ground, so they intimately know better than others what works and what doesn’t work. But because they’ve been trained to work hard, keep their heads down, save as much as possible, and hope, in the end, “it will all work out,” the normies are doomed when all is said and done.

by Danny de Gracia, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Rap Reiplinger

[ed. One of the greats. Definitely not a normie.]

Nonprofit Neighborhoods: The Birth of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Phil Rocco and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Claire Dunning about the complex history of how nonprofit organizations became so pervasive in US political life and the issues with how the non-profit system promises to address big, structural problems while at the same time structurally constraining what these groups are and aren't allowed to do. [ed. Transcript excerpts]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33

And we are joined by a wonderful guest that we're very excited to talk to you today about their book. Claire Dunning is a historian of the United States in the 20th century, whose work focuses on poverty, racial capitalism, governance and the nonprofit industrial complex, and is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and History at the University of Maryland College Park. Claire is the author of the book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State published by University of Chicago Press. Claire, welcome to the Death Panel. It is so great to have you here today.

Claire Dunning 2:07

Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:09

First off, I mean, I know we were talking about this before we started, but we all really loved your book. And I really appreciated specifically the way that you think about your work as a historian as using historical analysis to get at and attempt to offer an answer not to a question necessarily about the past, but a forward looking question, as you've put it. And this book really does that in terms of trying to answer a few really important questions about why nonprofits have the role that they have in our political economy. And whether nonprofits, charity, or philanthropy can really, truly achieve racial and economic justice, or if those goals are themselves prevented by the very structure of the state's relationship to these kinds of nonprofit organizations. But it also gets at this question sort of about why the state is the way it is, and how it's constructed. And sort of how these choices and values that we sort of see and maybe take for granted as embedded in the political economy really have a very deep and important historical logic to them. And it's a really sort of careful and diligent history that was also fascinating and really fun to read. And I don't want to jump ahead, though. So just to start us off, for listeners who might not be familiar with the book or your work, can you talk about sort of some of the main arguments in Nonprofit Neighborhoods and elaborate on this idea that I mentioned sort of about how you think of your work and how you think about history in terms of pointing us towards knowledge about the present?

Claire Dunning 3:35

Thank you for all of that. I think I'll start with your second question first. As a reader, I love to know where people come up with their research topics. And we dedicate so much of our lives to these things, I want to know sort of what's the human story behind it. So maybe I'll start offering my own and sort of why I think this history can and hopefully is useful to those of us in the present. After college, I was working at a community foundation for a couple of years. And it was my first exposure really to thinking about the nonprofit sector, as a sector. So we were a grant making entity. I was a sort of junior staff member who got to observe these larger conversations, as my colleagues were grappling with both really sort of nitty gritty questions about budgets and accountability, and how our grant dollars were supporting particular programs, how they were evaluating their programs, etc. But then also grappling with big questions about legacies of racism. It was also the financial crisis. So we were sort of asking questions, at the time, about families going through foreclosure, but also nonprofits in the housing space going through foreclosure and how did we, and how could a foundation support these entities? 

My colleagues were understandably thinking about the present and the future. And I just fundamentally couldn't understand why this was the set of relationships and what the role of the foundation was, and what the role of the city government, who was often in a lot of these meetings, what their role could or should be in this moment of crisis. And to me, that was a historical question about how we got to this current landscape and why we had both such a rich array of nonprofit organizations and such persistent inequality. And there was some temporal mismatch, right, we were talking in three or five year grant cycles at best. And we're also talking about problems that are decades, centuries in the building. And we're talking about individual small neighborhoods, but also talking about a financial crisis that was enveloping the whole city, country, globe. 

So there were all these sort of puzzles that came up for me in that work. And again, plenty of people were asking about it in the present. And to me, it felt like a story whose origins lie in the past. So I went to graduate school, decided to write about the history of the nonprofit sector. Several of my advisors sort of had this puzzled look on their face when I said [Beatrice and Phil laughing], I want to write about the nonprofit sector. They said, well, what is that? And I said, well, A, I don't really know and B, it's sort of an awkward term, right, because the nonprofit sector incorporates everything from really small organizations to huge universities and hospitals. So it's an awkward catch-all term. But I think that there's work that we can do to historicize it and understand why these entities are so ubiquitous in our contemporary landscape, particularly in cities, and why we rely on them in moments of crisis and moments of semi-stability to solve public problems, right? Why do we rely on private entities to solve public problems? Why do we rely on small entities to solve big ones? And why do we rely on strategies that haven't really proven useful thus far? So those are sort of the questions animating this. 

And so it's a story about Boston, which I write about as both sort of on the vanguard of social welfare experimentation during the 20th century, as people sort of looked to the city, and some of its successes and some of its failures as a model to replicate. It was a forerunner in a lot of federal programs. And it's a local story, because I think local stories give us that granularity to understand these big concepts of state and market and nonprofit sector, what that actually looks like. So the book, in brief, sort of locates the origins of what some people call the nonprofit industrial complex or just sort of the growth of the nonprofit sector, in the post World War II period, in a moment where cities were undergoing significant demographic and political economic changes, through deindustrialization and suburbanization, and cities seemed to be in this moment of urban crisis. Scholars have written a lot about this notion of urban crisis and how it was a constructed idea and social and political and economic manifestations. And I sort of write about well, there's also a governance change, and an administrative, and how government functions comes out of this moment of crisis, comes out of urban renewal, where the government for the first time begins to make direct grants from the federal government to local community organizations, and grants that sort of employ and charge these local community groups to facilitate participation in urban renewal, provide some services to people who are being displaced by urban renewal. And what begins as sort of these experiments on the ground, I write about a group called Freedom House in Boston, ends up becoming a blueprint for a wider array of policy and political strategies for dealing with Civil Rights protests, Black activism, long standing structural poverty, and these patterns of grant making. Initially, federal government to local nonprofit, later mediated by different tiers of government, becomes a really popular way of managing crisis and responding to demands. And that popularity, while genuine for a lot of reasons, I argue, really masks a deep inadequacy as a strategy for dealing with structural problems, whose structural origins remain fundamentally intact. That small nonprofit programs, while valuable, while important, right -- this isn't to denigrate the work that they do, or the important, in many ways, life saving role that nonprofit organizations can play -- it's masking a sort of deeper undercurrent of inadequacy. And this has not been a strategy to repair historical and ongoing harms. And so that's sort of the overarch of the book. It goes from the 1950s to the present, traces the sort of rise of what we would call today, social innovation, the notion that private entities can and should respond to our public problems, and argues that we need to think at a bigger, structural level, not just did this organization build 10 units of housing, or provide these after-school programs, or tweak their budgets here or there. But let's try and have a bigger conversation about why these organizations play the roles that they do.

Phil Rocco 10:21

... I think moving to a new city, I'm always like, okay, trying to understand politics. And it evidently is really difficult, not just because journalism has been sort of like hollowed out, which it has been, but also because the journalism that does exist, it's really hard to report on things that go on behind closed doors, with no public meetings, of a very decentralized set of nonprofits, right. And I think that trying to understand sort of why that is, and why, you know, if you look at like the local government's tax rolls in whatever city you're in, you're gonna see tons of exemptions, and the list of exemptions, that tells you where power lies, really. But, you know, I think you historicize that as something that didn't emerge directly because of machinations at the local level, but really, is the product of federal government strategies to try to respond to various iterations of what people called, with various meanings, like "the urban crisis." And so I wonder if you could talk about like, you know, this is really a story about the role of the state in reshaping the role of like the "voluntary" sector to do things the state might otherwise be doing, and where power might otherwise be concentrated in government agencies, the state is actually doing things to change kind of where power lies. So I wonder if you could talk about like, what's the role of the federal government in changing the political landscape of cities?

Claire Dunning 13:10

Thank you for all of that. I think that was one of my biggest surprises. And I think I continue to surprise people by thinking about, we have -- we have this myth in the United States, right, of the independent nonprofit sector, the charitable realm. We call it the "third sector" -- ... as if it is completely independent from state and market, right. And that's no accident that people are invoking and coming up with this term, right? Government money supports nonprofit organizations more than private donations. That fact -- I teach it to my students, I write about it and talk about it with regard to my book. It's a shocking fact. We are so invested in this notion, pro or con, right, that the nonprofit sector is its own thing. But it is constituted by law, right, by political and policy underpinnings. The IRS regulates who is or who is not a nonprofit organization. And the notion that nonprofits are independent, right, the historical record shows us no, not at all, right. Federal policies are creating government programs that are funneling dollars from government pockets into nonprofit organizations and with dollars, right, if you've ever had a grant or applied for one, you know that that grant relationship is one of power and authority, but also of data sharing, of information, of budgets and control, right. So when the policy is coming down, or coming out of Washington, saying all of you community organizations, please apply for funding -- it's a level of surveillance and insight that the government gets to local organizations and the government gets to set priorities around who the recipients are and sort of what cities, what the kinds of programs they're running. Some of the strings attached to these set by government policy include things like representation on boards of directors, who gets hired in what kinds of staff roles. And these administrative strings, they can cut in both directions, right. So in the 1960s, under the War on Poverty, the phrase maximum feasible participation, which under law constituted a requirement that recipient organizations had to employ and hold on their board of directors, people whose lives were directly impacted by the programs that were being funded, right. So primarily, this means people who are low income and people of color. And this requirement is a huge shift in terms of who's getting to make decisions and people on the ground had to fight dramatically for representation on boards. Sometimes these rules increased, in a few occasions, they decreased the role that local folks had over organizations in their own neighborhoods. But all of this is structured by the state, by policy. So what's happening in Boston is a hyperlocal story. But Phil, as you said, right, it's happening all across the country, because organizations like the ones I write about in Boston, are being held to the same standards, are operating under the same sets of guidelines, right, the same kinds of programs and expectations, feedback mechanisms, budgetary requirements, reporting expectations, all of the reams of paperwork that are flowing between nonprofits and their funders, government funders, right, largely that I'm talking about, that's a level of sort of standardization that is enveloping the nonprofit sector at a particular moment of its growth, right. And so in many ways, the policies that are coming out in the 1960s, and then continue to expand in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, etc., are a standardizing precedent that is actually encouraging the growth of the nonprofit sector. 

This is a moment when new organizations are being founded to take advantage of government programs that are offering to foot the bill. And that's a significant, sort of in many ways, a radical opportunity, that here is a chance for government dollars to reach communities that have traditionally been excluded from it. And on the one hand, that's a deeply radical moment. But it's also one that quite purposefully hides the presence of government in these private organizations. It's a way of circumventing white supremacist tiers of government by getting around exclusionary political systems, but it's also a way of masking government, by sort of emphasizing the notion that private is better, private is more responsive, in ways that it absolves the government of responsibility, even as they're really present in it. 

And it's that sort of complex landscape, I think, of where public and private are intersecting in ways that are both democratic and anti-democratic, and the presence of the state with these private organizations. It's messy and complicated. And to me, that's what makes this work fascinating and important to sort of tease out those various lines of, there's no immediate good guys and bad guys, if we will, right. It's sort of these complex processes responding to an unequal landscape. But the state is so deeply present here. And nonprofit organizations are both simultaneously expanding state capacity, right, the ability for local groups to implement programs of their own design on public dollars, is an absolute game changer, particularly in marginalized communities. And these relationships, right, they are appended to the state, and they lose a lot of control when they accept these kinds of grant dollars. So it sort of cuts both ways.

by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Phil Rocco, Jules Gill-Peterson, Claire Dunning, Death Panel |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Podcast at link.]

Flexible Labor, Rigid Capital

At around 1:45 AM this morning, March 26th, a container ship, the Dali, flagged out of Singapore, was leaving the port of Baltimore when it briefly lost power and control. That brief loss of power - in the video of the incident it appears to occur for only a few seconds - led the ship to crash into one of the support pillars of the Francis Scott Key bridge, which spanned the Patapsco river, and which collapsed entirely within seconds. (...)

The Port of Baltimore is, by tonnage, the fifth busiest port on the Eastern Seaboard. It handled about 265,000 containers in 2023, about 1/3 as many as the port in Norfolk and about 12% of what is handled annually in the massive New York/Newark complex.

It is likely that this amount can be picked up by other ports, although the global shipping system is already facing severe disruption from the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, drought-lowered water levels in the Panama Canal, and continued insecurity in the Black Sea thanks to the war on Ukraine. Container ships were already backed up across the Eastern Seaboard by January. Shipping companies have been facing significant rerouting over the last few years, increasing the cost of shipping in terms of fuel spent, cargo spoilage, and war risk/conflict insurance and security.

These cost increases are then experienced as inflation in the cost of commodities and goods. In the case of fuel, which overwhelmingly goes through the Red Sea, this can have a spiraling inflationary effect as transporting the fuel gets more expensive, which increases the cost of the fuel, which then again increases the cost of shipping the next batch of said fuel, etc.* This also increases emissions as ships travel both further and faster to make up for differences. (...)

Thus, a brief mechanical failure in a single ship can lead to consequences that reverberate across the global economy. This eventuality was more comically underlined in March 2021, when the container ship the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal. And perhaps more interesting to people interested in the revolutionary potential of infrastructure disruption, the Houthi attacks on the Red Sea have dropped shipping through the Suez by over 60%, and lead to drastic and dramatic transformation of global shipping patterns which, according to historian and shipping expert Sal Mercogliano, is potentially the largest disruption of shipping since the world wars.

The just-in-time supply-chain economy, in which elaborate global information and logistical structures allow companies to respond in real time to shifts in market availability and demand, is often described with terms like "flexibility". This is most infamously practiced in the fast fashion industry, in which companies can track exactly how certain styles are selling live in all of their stores around the globe, and adjust how much of each garment, style, size or design they are making so rapidly that within a few weeks slight shifts in consumer preferences are reflected in store inventories.

A particular sundress sells out in Southern California, store managers across the region request resupplies, a research analyst in Bangalore recognizes the blip, who informs a marketing team in New York that sends orders to production management in Hong Kong, who mobilize four different contractors in Bangladesh, who order more of the particular cloth pattern; the factory that makes that pattern hires fifteen temp workers to meet this sudden demand, which they then ship to the sweatshops where the design is sown, the sweatshops crank out a quadruple order of the popular sundress, which a Cambodian truck driver takes overland to Shanghai, where it will take flex space in a pre-booked shipment (organized by a Vietnamese subcontractor) and move across the Pacific in a container ship built in South Korea owned by a Swedish company and registered in Panama, crewed by an Indonesian captain with a Filipino crew using navigation software designed in Norway. All of it happening within a few weeks.

But this kind of "just-in-time" production and information forward economy is also reflected in "surge pricing", "print-on-demand" technologies, drop-shipping Amazon storefronts, and any other variety of borderline scammy business models that allow companies and retailers to scale particular pieces of their operations up and down at incredible speeds.

As we have seen from the Houthis, from Supply Chain Inflation, and will likely now see from the Baltimore Port disaster, this "flexibility" is built on a severely rigid set of conditions. Logistical outcomes must go smoothly. When the system is working well, sellers have a level of flexibility in inventory management, price setting and demand response that retailers thirty years ago could only dream of. But one small disruption - a single ship having a mechanical failure, a single political actor attacking a particular choke point - can have untold cascading effects, effects that require massive geopolitical and economic efforts to adjust for.

In classic capitalist ideological fashion, rather than supple, flexible and strong, the system is in fact incredibly rigid and brittle, amplifying small problems into massive disasters. What is actually made flexible is the work force--who can be easily hired and fired to meet demand, who can be "offshored" or avoided entirely if they protest, unionize, or otherwise see wage increases. Precarity, surplus population status and an explosion of slums, scams and grey markets are the results.

This massive system offloads the insecurity and costs of this constantly changing "flexible" arrangement onto the workers, who pay through their bodies, their wages, their lives a cost that used to be held by the capitalist firms as "risk". This risk took the form of inventory and warehousing, sales competition and the basic vagaries of fads and fashions when it came to consumer demand, and more structural fluctuations when it came to basic commodities.

But this mass downward redistribution of risk and flexibility has also put tremendous strain on "nature" itself, through the acceleration of emissions and waste produced by this mode of production. Workers and the ecology of our planet have paid for the construction of this system. But the physical world and the social world have real limits to what they will take.

by Vicky Osterweil, ACAB |  Read more:

Image: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images via

Suno: A ChatGPT for Music Is Here

"I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.”

 

Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the fuck is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny. (...)

Suno uses the same general approach as large language models like ChatGPT, which break down human language into discrete segments known as tokens, absorb its millions of usages, styles, and structures, and then reconstruct it on demand. But audio, particularly music, is almost unfathomably more complex, which is why, just last year, AI-music experts told Rolling Stone that a service as capable as Suno’s might take years to arrive. “Audio is not a discrete thing like words,” Shulman says. “It’s a wave. It’s a continuous signal.” High-quality audio’s sampling rate is generally 44khz or 48hz, which means “48,000 tokens a second,” he adds. “That’s a big problem, right? And so you need to figure out how to kind of smoosh that down to something more reasonable.” How, though? “A lot of work, a lot of heuristics, a lot of other kinds of tricks and models and stuff like that. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to done.” Eventually, Suno wants to find alternatives to the text-to-music interface, adding more advanced and intuitive inputs — generating songs based on users’ own singing is one idea.

OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits over ChatGPT’s use of books, news articles, and other copyrighted material in its vast corpus of training data. Suno’s founders decline to reveal details of just what data they’re shoveling into their own model, other than the fact that its ability to generate convincing human vocals comes in part because it’s learning from recordings of speech, in addition to music. “Naked speech will help you learn the characteristics of human voice that are difficult,” Shulman says. (...)

Rodriguez sees Suno as a radically capable and easy-to-use musical instrument, and believes it could bring music making to everyone much the way camera phones and Instagram democratized photography. The idea, he says, is to once again “move the bar on the number of people that are allowed to be creators of stuff as opposed to consumers of stuff on the internet.” He and the founders dare to suggest that Suno could attract a user base bigger than Spotify’s. If that prospect is hard to get your head around, that’s a good thing, Rodriguez says: It only means it’s “seemingly stupid” in the exact way that tends to attract him as an investor. “All of our great companies have that combination of excellent talent,” he says, “and then something that just seems stupid until it’s so obvious that it’s not stupid.”

Well before Suno’s arrival, musicians, producers, and songwriters were vocally concerned about AI’s business-shaking potential. “Music, as made by humans driven by extraordinary circumstances … those who have suffered and struggled to advance their craft, will have to contend with the wholesale automation of the very dear-bought art they have fought to achieve,” Reid writes. But Suno’s founders claim there’s little to fear, using the metaphor that people still read despite having the ability to write. “The way we think about this is we’re trying to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now,” Shulman says. “If people are much more into music, much more focused on creating, developing much more distinct tastes, this is obviously good for artists. The vision that we have of the future of music is one where it’s artist-friendly. We’re not trying to replace artists.”

Though Suno is hyperfocused only on reaching music fans who want to create songs for fun, it could still end up causing significant disruption along the way. In the short term, the segment of the market for human creators that seems most directly endangered is a lucrative one: songs created for ads and even TV shows. Lucas Keller, founder of the management firm Milk and Honey, notes that the market for placing well-known songs will remain unaffected. “But in terms of the rest of it, yeah, it could definitely put a dent in their business,” he says. “I think that ultimately, it allows a lot of ad agencies, film studios, networks, etc., to not have to go license stuff.”

by Bryan Hiatt, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Harry Campbell
[ed. Link to the text-to-music song Soul of a Machine here. See also: Our AI-Generated Blues Song Went Viral — and Sparked Controversy (Wired):]

Just last summer, experts on the intersection of AI and music told Rolling Stone that it would be years before a tool emerged that could conjure up fully produced songs from a simple text description, given the endless complexities of the finished product. But Suno, a two-year-old start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already pulled it off, vocals included — and their latest model, v3, which is available to the general public as of today, is capable of some truly startling results.

In Rolling Stone‘s feature on Suno, part of our latest Future of Music package, we included an unsettling acoustic blues song called “Soul of the Machine,” fully generated by Suno, which uses ChatGPT to write lyrics unless you submit some yourself. The song — generated from the prompt “Mississippi Delta blues song about a sad AI” — went viral, with more than 36,000 plays in four days, and sparked debate over cultural appropriation, Suno’s training data (the precise contents of which they won’t reveal), the technology’s effects on human artists, and more. (...)

He also says he was stunned on a technical level that all of it was generated by AI — “not just the acoustic rural ‘blues’ guitar and the mournful ‘bluesman’s’ vocals, but also the room, ambience, of the simulated recording. No mics. No board. No high-ceiling converted small church transformed into a mobile recording space by a young, committed, Alan Lomax-type character, passionate to preserve vanishing sharecropper songs for posterity. It is not inconceivable that the Alan Lomax archive (and a lot more besides) was raided to train Suno’s AI.” (Suno has declined to reveal details of its training data, though one of its main investors, Antonio Rodriguez, told Rolling Stone that he is prepared for a potential lawsuit from labels and publishers.)

Review: Invitation to a Banquet, by Fuchsia Dunlop

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023).

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be. We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow, but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is… The Meat-Shaped Stone. A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

Between the foreignness and the sheer, overwhelming size of the topic, it might seem impossible to conduct an adequate survey of the history, vocabulary, and vibe of eating, Chinese-style, for Western readers. But that’s why we have Fuchsia Dunlop. She’s an Englishwoman, but she trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (the first Westerner ever to do so). She’s written some of the best English-language cookbooks for Chinese food, and now she’s written this book: her attempt to communicate the totality of the subject she loves and which she’s spent her life studying. But the topic is just too damn big to take an encyclopedic or even a systematic approach, and so she wisely doesn’t try. Instead she writes about the weirdest and tastiest and most emblematic meals she’s had, and ties each one back to the main topic. So the book lives up to its name. Like a banquet, it doesn’t try to give you a thorough academic knowledge of anything, but rather a feast for the senses and a feel for what a cuisine is like.

What is it like? Well, Dunlop barely manages to cover this in a 400-page book, so I hesitate even to try, but let me hit a few of the high points. First, diversity. China is a continent masquerading as a country, both in population and in geographic extent, so its cuisine is comparably diverse. Most cooking traditions have one or two basic starches, China has four or five. China extends through every imaginable biome, from rainforest to tundra, desert to marshlands, and much of the genius of Chinese food lies in combining the delicious bounties offered up by this kaleidoscope in interesting or unexpected ways.

One way to think of Chinese eating is that much of it is a sort of “internal” fusion cuisine. Because China was ruled from very early on by a centralized bureaucracy with a fanaticism for river transport, the process of culinary remixing has been going on for much longer than it has in most places. The Roman Empire could have been like this, but the shores of the Mediterranean all have pretty similar climates, so there were fewer ingredients to start the process with. Already very early in Chinese history, before the 7th century, we hear of the imperial city being supplied with:

oranges and pomelos from the warm South, […] the summer garlic of southern Shanxi, the deer tongues of northern Gansu, the Venus clams of the Shandong coast, the “sugar crabs” of the Yangtze River, the sea horses of Chaozhou in Guangdong, the white carp marinated in wine lees from northern Anhui, the dried flesh of a “white flower snake” [a kind of pit viper] from southern Hubei, melon pickled in rice mash from southern Shanxi and eastern Hubei, dried ginger from Zhejiang, loquats and cherries from southern Shanxi, persimmons from central Henan, and “thorny limes” from the Yangtze Valley.

If we think of chefs as artists, the Chinese ones have since ancient times had the advantage of an outrageously diverse set of paints. But these ingredients aren’t combined willy-nilly, without respect for their time or place of origin. The Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, and their organicist conception of the universe in which everything is connected to everything else implied strict rules about which foods were to be eaten when, both for maximum deliciousness and to ensure cosmic harmony. (...)

The obsessions with freshness and seasonality come to their culmination in the one area where Chinese cuisine stands head and shoulders above all others: green vegetables. In the West, “eating your greens” is a punishment, or at best a chore, and it’s easy to see why. In much of the world vegetables are bred for yield and transportability, kept in refrigerators for weeks, and then boiled until no trace of flavor remains. Dunlop and I have one thing in common: when we’re not in China, of all the delights of Chinese cooking it’s the green vegetables that we miss the most.

When I bring American friends to a real Chinese restaurant, sometimes they’re shocked that the vegetable dishes cost the same amount as the main courses. Why does a side dish cost so much? But no Chinese person would ever think of a vegetable course as a “side” dish, they’re part of the main attraction, and more often than not they’re the stars of the show. In the West, you can now get decent baak choy, but this is just one of the dozens and dozens of leafy greens that the Chinese regularly consume, many of them practically impossible to find outside Asia.

My own favorite is the sublime choy sum. I remember once getting off a transoceanic flight, starving and exhausted, and being offered a bowl of it over plain white rice. The greens had been scalded for a few seconds with boiling water, then tossed around a pan for no more than a minute — just long enough that the leaves were so tender they seemed to dissolve in your mouth, but the stems still held snap and crunch. The seasoning was subtle — maybe a few cloves of garlic, some salt, a splash of wine or vinegar. Just the right amount to bring out the deep, earthy flavors of the vegetable, to somehow make them brighter and more forward, but not to overpower them. It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I think I’ll still remember it when I am old.

Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well. I’ll once again draw on a bastardized version of the Whorf hypothesis: English is a big language with a lot of borrowings, so we have a correspondingly large number of words for food textures. Imagine explaining to a foreigner the difference between “crunchy” and “crisp”, or between “soft” and “mushy”. That is already more semiotic resolution than most languages have when it comes to the mouthfeel of their food, but Chinese takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

Dunlop gives the following “non-exhaustive” list of positive texture words (there’s another list of ones with negative valence): (...)

I agree that this is non-exhaustive: I can think of several more. What many of these words have in common is that they’re “multidimensional.” For example consider the Taiwanese slang “Q”, which translates to something like the Italian al dente. Noodles that are “Q” (or even better, “QQ”) have a paradoxical combination of textures: they’re soft and chewy, so your teeth sink into them and your jaw gets a workout, but they’re also elastic and bounce around in your mouth. This is a simple example of a multilayered texture, or you might say of a food with multiple “texture notes”. Chinese chefs delight in combining textures in surprising ways, almost as much as they do flavors. In many dishes, the texture is the whole point, or at least a major one. The Cantonese dim sum snack haa gow — shrimp steamed in translucent wrappers — strikes some people as bland. But a good haa gow is only partly judged on how well it brings out the subtle inner flavors of the shrimp. Most of it is about how the skin combines pertness with falling-apart softness, and how this contrasts with the sometimes unsettling springiness of the shrimp inside. The chef will go to extreme lengths to achieve that interplay of textures with techniques that include salting, starching, shocking with cold or hot water, prolonged refrigeration, and physically beating or smacking the ingredients.

This sensitivity to texture is a big part of why the Chinese eat so much “weird stuff.” Believe it or not, chicken feet don’t actually taste great. In fact, they barely taste like anything, being composed almost entirely of bone, cartilage, skin, and gristle. What they do have is a totally unique mouthfeel, and that’s why they’re in such demand. Similarly, the brains of animals don’t have a very distinctive taste, what they have is an unctuous fattiness and creaminess, difficult to replicate in any other kind of meat. And Chinese people have a great fondness for the tails and the heads of fish — the bits a Western chef usually cuts off and leaves in the kitchen — because they offer an interesting tactile experience. I have a lot of memories of Chinese people hunting for the eyeballs of the fish, popping them into their mouths, and rolling them around with their tongues in a culinary rapture. Which brings me to the fact that this love of odd food textures also implies a different approach to table manners:

You should only eat a giant carp’s tail in the company of someone you know well, because it’s a brazenly messy business, with an unavoidable soundtrack of sucks and slurps. The only actual flesh is a tiny nugget cradled in a curve of cartilage at the distal end of the tail, which you might even tackle with chopsticks. After this easy picking, you must take the tail in your fingers so you can prise apart its two layers of spines, which are interleaved with thin seams of a sticky, ambrosial jelly. This you will want to lick out like nectar, using you teeth to scrape and your tongue to suck along each quill to extract every last delicious thread, leaving nothing but clean spines on the plate. (...)

Given all of this, it might be easier to discuss the Chinese culinary tradition in terms of what isn’t eaten. One clue comes from the cycles of assimilation and tension between settled, agrarian Sinitic people and nomadic Southeast Asian hill peoples as chronicled by James C. Scott. In ancient Chinese ethnography, the language used to describe the mostly Sinicized barbarians was “cooked”, whereas their wilder cousins were “raw.” Sure enough, Chinese people don’t eat a ton of raw foods. There are exceptions (including some I’ve already mentioned), but by and large eating ingredients in their natural state, untransformed by fire and by human craft, was considered a “barbarian” thing. Dunlop claims that the Chinese actually invented sashimi, and brought the practice of eating raw fish to Japan, but later gave it up to differentiate themselves from their neighbors.

by John Psmith, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf |  Read more:

Images: Meat-Shapped Stone; Jaddite Cabbage (Wikipedia)

The Race to See 10,000 Birds

In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild.

Such a record had previously been unthinkable, but with new technology facilitating rare bird sightings, improved DNA testing identifying a growing number of bird species, and public listing platforms making it easier to keep track of and share findings, more super-birders are inching towards the five digits.

Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him.

The mystery birder seemed to have uploaded a backlog of thousands of species he had seen over several decades to now-defunct birding site Surfbirds.com, listing more than 9,000 birds over the course of a few months in a move that took Kaestner and others by surprise.

“Two people break 10,000 species, and on the same day? Can it be?” one incredulous birder posted in February. (...)

Bird observation has come a long way since ornithologist John James Audubon announced his goal to painstakingly document all the birds in North America through physical drawings, starting around 1820. With digital cameras, birds can now be captured in high-quality photos, and artificial intelligence technology can identify birds by their calls. While in the past, birders kept lists of “lifers” – the word for a new-to-you species – in paper notebooks, most hobbyists today use online platforms to track and share their sightings. Popular apps including iBird, iGoTerra and eBird allow hobbyists to see where rare birds have been found and try their luck at spotting them.

These platforms are now at the center of the controversy between the two birders.

‘Listing’ as a sport – with few rules

There is a broad range of intensity in the practice of observing birds. Casual hobbyists are known as “bird watchers”, while seeking to log species in a more competitive manner is known as “birding”. Those who log large numbers of species and rare sightings call themselves “listers”. Those like Kaestner who seek to break world records are known as “big listers”. (...)

The variability in recognized species represented a complicating factor in the quest to hit the 10,000-bird milestone. Popular platform eBird only uses the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, while iGoTerra offers users both the Clements and International Ornithological Community’s (IOC) World Bird List taxonomies. The latter recognizes 189 more species of birds, making larger lists more attainable.

Kaestner uses both sites, but he reached his record using the IOC taxonomy, which he logged through iGoTerra. Because eBird data is used for science and conservation, sightings are moderated by volunteers around the world. If a user claims to have seen a rare species, or an unusual number of a species, a moderator may reach out for more information or request photos or audio recordings as proof.

iGoTerra, on the other hand, does not fact-check sightings. The platform allows logging of plants insects, and other species in addition to birds. eBird’s focus on collecting and using large amounts of citizen science data makes moderation more consequential, whereas iGoTerra is more “geared towards the individual”, said Björn Anderson, iGoTerra’s vice-president.

“iGoTerra is more of a gentlemen’s agreement,” he said. “We provide the tools for you to keep track, but it’s up to you to determine what you have seen.”

That policy created a “very delicate situation” in the race towards 10,000 species, said Anderson. iGoTerra’s official policy was to stay out of the debate, relying on the transparency of its product to let those following the drama make their own decisions.

The race to see 10,000 birds

Kaestner, who lives in a suburb of Baltimore, has been watching birds as long as he can remember, he says, joining his older brother birding as early as age four. The career diplomat took advantage of his travels around the world to see as many species as possible, setting a record in 1986 for being the first person to observe an example of every bird family in the wild – a feat that was recognized by Guinness World Records. He built up a reputation in the birding community as he publicly shared many of his lists and photos.

In 2018, Kaestner realized he had surpassed 9,000 lifers and began pursuing the 10,000-bird milestone in earnest. His quest was highlighted in a May 2023 article in Outside magazine, as well as on his widely followed Facebook account. He explained his goal, how he planned to accomplish it, and his timeline – a move he now questions.

“I realize now that by publishing that, I may have been putting a target on my back,” he said. “Little did I know Jason Mann would be aiming for it.”

Mann, a little-known American birder living abroad, had recently appeared on the scene, posting occasionally on bird forum Surfbirds.com. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mann is a medical doctor and healthcare investor based in Hong Kong. In October 2023, he published a list detailing more than 9,000 species he said he had seen over the course of his lifetime. The move surprised the birding world. Nobody, including Kaestner, had ever heard of him – a rare occurrence in a close-knit community where the top players are well-recognized. Having been in the game for decades, Kaestner knew most of his high-level peers personally, on many occasions having taken birding trips with them in the spirit of friendly competition. Mann did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

The entry of a dark horse into the race sent Kaestner scrambling. He quietly moved up a planned trip to Taiwan, where he hoped to see a handful of final species. Mann was adding nearly a dozen new species per day. The sprint was on – and on 9 February 2024, having rushed to the Philippines for another birding trip, Kaestner crossed the finish line with the sighting of an orange-tufted spiderhunter, a small bird with a long curved bill and a penchant for banana plants. Kaestner immediately posted the sighting to birding apps and Facebook, with photo proof. He thought he had won.

Stunningly, Mann claimed to have seen his own 10,000th species in Colombia, a chestnut-bellied flowerpiercer, just hours before Kaestner on the same day. Mann’s achievement was later announced on the blog of a Colombian nature trip service in a post authored by Mann himself.

The shocking upset prompted online sleuths in the birding community to take a closer look at Mann’s list, where they found “several dozen extremely fishy species” that, besides Mann, “no one has claimed to have seen for decades”, according to one post on BirdForum, a community for birders with more than 100,000 visitors per month. The post had more than 400 comments discussing the validity of Mann’s sightings. Species Mann claimed to have seen included the Manipur bush quail and the new Caldonian nightjar, neither of which had been spotted since the 1930s.

“Either this guy is the luckiest birder alive, having rediscovered several lost species, or his list is not to be trusted,” one member auditing Mann’s list wrote.

by Kari Paul, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Orange-tufted Spiderhunter by Peter Kaestner

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (born Rosetta Nubin, March 20, 1915 – October 9, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. She gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and electric guitar. She was the first great recording star of gospel music, and was among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm and blues and rock and roll audiences, later being referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the Godmother of rock and roll". She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eric Clapton.

Tharpe was a pioneer in her guitar technique; she was among the first popular recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar, opening the way to the rise of electric blues. Her guitar-playing technique had a profound influence on the development of British blues in the 1960s. Her European tour with Muddy Waters in 1964, with a stop in Manchester on May 7, is cited by British guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards. (...)

Tharpe's 1944 release "Down by the Riverside" was selected for the National Recording Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2004, which noted that it "captures her spirited guitar playing and unique vocal style, demonstrating clearly her influence on early rhythm-and-blues performers" and cited her influence on "many gospel, jazz, and rock artists". ("Down by the Riverside" was recorded by Tharpe on December 2, 1948, in New York City, and issued as Decca single 48106. Her 1945 hit "Strange Things Happening Every Day", recorded in late 1944, featured Tharpe's vocals and resonator guitar, with Sammy Price (piano), bass and drums. It was the first gospel record to cross over, hitting no. 2 on the Billboard "race records" chart, the term then used for what later became the R&B chart, in April 1945. The recording has been cited as a precursor of rock and roll, and alternatively has been called the first rock and roll record. In May 2018, Tharpe was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence.

via: Wikipedia

[ed. Not inducted until 2018. See also: Shout, Sister, Shout! Sister Rosetta Tharpe (YT).]

Burt Glinn… Ad Reinhardt, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964 

via: here/here

Shrimp Jesus

Who among us will cast the first stone at shrimp Jesus? I hesitate to talk about him because I believe that AI-generated content is categorically no better or worse than other clickbait, and the best way to reckon with clickbait is to deny it that for which it seeks: attention. Writing to marvel at or deride AI clickbait seems to invite more of it, which in turn will entice us to write more critiques about it, which will only further feed the downward spiral.

The bot that invented shrimp Jesus has no doubt procedurally generated thousands of other equally zany would-be memes, but it requires scholarly attention, like this from Stanford University researchers Renee DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein, and media attention like that provided here by Jason Koebler of 404 Media to make shrimp Jesus into something culturally relevant. DiResta and Goldstein write:

The magnificent surrealism of Shrimp Jesus—or, relatedly, Crab Jesus, Watermelon Jesus, Fanta Jesus, and Spaghetti Jesus—is captivating. What is that? Why does that exist? You perhaps feel motivated to share it with your friends, so that they can share in your WTF moment. (We encourage you to share this post, of course.)

And I encourage you to share this post too. Anyone who wants to circulate content on social media has a touch of shrimp Jesus and the purity of his cynicism in their heart.

The Stanford researchers want to use shrimp Jesus to examine, in the words of their post's title, “How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth.” Of course, spammers and scammers would basically leverage anything for growth on Facebook, so the stakes of this analysis are in the composition of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms: Shouldn’t Facebook shadow-ban AI images (since they are a kind of “inauthentic behavior”), especially given the company’s recent announcement that it would seek to label the generated images it hosts as “imagined by AI”?

Facebook claims that it is “working with industry partners to align on common technical standards that signal when a piece of content has been created using AI. Being able to detect these signals will make it possible for us to label AI-generated images that users post to Facebook, Instagram and Threads.”

But Facebook is apparently already able to detect AI-generated images well enough to boost them in people’s feeds when they show any interest in any other AI-generated material, as Koebler and the Stanford researchers point out. “We don't know why this is happening exactly,” Koebler writes, “but something is happening where, when you interact with one AI-generated image, you will be recommended other ones regardless of what type of content is being shown.”

That is not surprising, since that is how algorithmic recommendation is designed to work. The algorithms generate the spammers who make the shrimp Jesus images, and the spammers use AI because they are incentivized to make the most content with the least effort. They can use AI to churn out images arbitrarily and then optimize for the ones that gain traction, much as Facebook itself does with everything on its platform.

But why should it be more concerning that Facebook treats “AI-generated” as a formal category to guide algorithmic recommendations, given the innumerable other undisclosed, nonintuitive correlations it identifies to classify and condition its users? The algorithms predict what users are supposed to like, and spammers/“creators” find ways of providing fodder for fulfilling the predictions. When I use Facebook, Facebook effectively makes a fantastical and bizarre AI-generated image of me that I can’t see directly but is refracted in everything it chooses to feed to me. In other words, I don’t just look at shrimp Jesus; I am shrimp Jesus.

The AI-generated identities that platforms make for us seem more problematic than anything that might appear in a given AI-generated image. Weird images like shrimp Jesus seem to reflect the underlying weirdness of submitting to algorithmic control. It doesn’t seem useful to act as though there is some form of “authentic” image that is appropriate for algorithmic circulation or virality, or that algorithmic recommendation is justified as long as the content is “real.”

by Rob Horning, Internal Exile |  Read more:

Image: uncredited