America's First Hippie

My mother hated hippies. She also wasn’t keen on meeting strangers, long-haired or otherwise. And her mood was especially dark that day in 1970 when the two of us were vacationing at the Hilton in Beverly Hills. She’d been waging a long battle with my father, her ex-husband, over me, their seven-year-old, and worried that she’d either lose custody or I’d “turn hippie” thanks to California’s corrupting influence. So when a hyperactive senior citizen with shoulder-length silver hair, a scraggly beard, and love beads around his neck approached us in the hotel lobby while banging a tambourine, shaking maracas, dancing a Russian cossack jig, and chanting, “I’m-a the Gypsy Boots, I live on nuts and fruits,” I wasn’t surprised when my mother yelled at him to get lost. I wanted him to scram, too. Ordinary hippies—the ones I saw on TV or hitchhiking through our New Jersey suburb—they intrigued me, but this one seemed crazy. Scary crazy. Why was this man who looked older than my grandparents behaving like a kindergarten escapee?

“Make him leave, Ma,” I whispered.

She certainly tried to. But Gypsy Boots was a man on a mission, which was to cheer up the sad-sack divorcee and kid he’d just come across. And, being irresistible, he succeeded. Within minutes, Gypsy had my mother and me smiling at him, then laughing with him, applauding his antics, trying out his musical instruments, and humming along to his inane ditties. Boots wasn’t drunk or on drugs, as I had heard other hippies were. Like the female protagonist of the film Harold And Maude, this guy was just chronically jubilant, the archetypal holy fool. After he was gone, leaving me with a free autographed copy of his self-published memoir, Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat, my mother admitted that she hadn’t felt this happy since before my father left her. It amazed me to hear her say that. And it amazed me to realize I felt the same way.

What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t know for a long time, was that Gypsy Boots was important, nationally important, an odd figure who had changed the course of American culture. He wasn’t just an old hippie, he was the ur hippie. His journey started in the late 1930s, when Boots, nearing 20, left the working world, grew his hair and beard long, and went “back to nature.” This was way beyond Thoreau at Walden Pond: For years at a time, Boots would sleep in California forests, bathe in mountain streams, feed himself by foraging for nuts and fruits and vegetables, practice yoga, and wear practically nothing in the way of clothing. A dozen other Nature Boys, as they were called, kept him company (including eden ahbez, who wrote “Nature Boy,” the hit song for Nat King Cole, supposedly about Boots), but Gypsy was the most visible of the gang, the one who would eventually become a star.

Long before the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, “Hollywood’s ageless athlete,” as Boots was known, created a counterculture for them to inhabit. He did this by performing fitness demonstrations on network television and in movies, opening one of America’s first health-food restaurants, racing around LA in his crazily painted van with organic treats for a network of customers—all to spread his message, which was deadly serious in spite of his constant clowning: “Why cling to sickly, fretful, conformist ways when you can be your healthiest, happiest, most authentic self?”

Gypsy died in 2004, just short of his 90th birthday. With his centennial coming up next year, I’ve been thinking a lot about him—what he meant to history and what he meant to me.

by Gary Lippman, Vice |  Read more:

Photo: Kees Van Voorthuizen

Google Concedes That Drive-by Prying Violated Privacy

Google on Tuesday acknowledged to state officials that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one.

While the settlement also included a tiny — for Google — fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.

Complaints have led to multiple enforcement actions in recent years and a spate of worldwide investigations into the way the mapping project also collected the personal data of private computer users.

“Google puts innovation ahead of everything and resists asking permission,” said Scott Cleland, a consultant for Google’s competitors and a consumer watchdog whose blog maintains a close watch on Google’s privacy issues. “But the states are throwing down a marker that they are watching and there is a line the company shouldn’t cross.”

The agreement paves the way for a major privacy battle over Google Glass, the heavily promoted wearable computer in the form of glasses, Mr. Cleland said. “If you use Google Glass to record a couple whispering to each other in Starbucks, have you violated their privacy?” he asked. “Well, 38 states just said they have a problem with the unauthorized collection of people’s data.”

George Jepsen, the Connecticut attorney general who led the states’ investigation, said that he was hopeful the settlement would produce a new Google.

“This is the industry giant,” he said. “It is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy.”

The applause was not universal, however. Consumer Watchdog, another privacy monitor and frequent Google critic, said that “asking Google to educate consumers about privacy is like asking the fox to teach the chickens how to ensure the security of their coop.”

Niki Fenwick, a Google spokeswoman, said on Tuesday that “we work hard to get privacy right at Google, but in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”

Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million for bypassing privacy settings in the Safari browser, the largest civil penalty ever levied by the F.T.C. In 2011, Google agreed to be audited for 20 years by the F.T.C. after it admitted to using deceptive tactics when starting its Buzz social network. That agreement included several rather vague privacy provisions.

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Helen Carnac
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A Small Good Thing

“My son’s dead,” she said with a cold, even finality. “He was hit by a car Monday morning. We’ve been waiting with him until he died. But, of course, you couldn’t be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can’t know everything-can they, Mr. Baker? But he’s dead. He’s dead, you bastard!” Just as suddenly as it had welled in her, the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her hands over her face, and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and forth. “It isn’t fair,” she said. “It isn’t, isn’t fair.”

Howard put his hand at the small of her back and looked at the baker. “Shame on you,” Howard said to him. “Shame.”

The baker put the rolling pin back on the counter. He undid his apron and threw it on the counter. He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly. He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory. “Please sit down,” he said. “Let me get you a chair,” he said to Howard. “Sit down now, please.” The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. “Please sit down, you people.”

Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. “I wanted to kill you,” she said. “I wanted you dead.”

The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the adding machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and receipts. He pushed the telephone directory onto the floor, where it landed with a thud. Howard and Ann sat down and pulled their chairs up to the table. The baker sat down, too.

“Let me say how sorry I am,” the baker said, putting his elbows on the table. “God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son, and sorry for my part in this,” the baker said. He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. “I don’t have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can,” the baker said. “I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please,” the man said, “let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?”

It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffee-maker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.

“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. “It’s good to eat something,” he said, watching them. “There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in here.”

They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

“Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf.

“It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

by Raymond Carver, Cathedral 

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The American Mind

Sooner or later, anyone who writes about America must reckon with Garry Wills. Not that it’s easy to do. The books are demanding enough—not the prose, which is graceful and elegant—but the arguments, which are unfailingly original, often provocative, occasionally subversive and, now and again, utterly perverse, yet stamped every time with the finality of the last word.

In his 50 or so books, a handful of them masterpieces, Wills has ranged further than any other American writer of his time, covering much of the western tradition, ancient and contemporary, sacred and profane. His subjects include Jesus, Paul and Augustine, American presidents old and new (Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Reagan, the second Bush), Shakespeare and Verdi, the outrages of American militarism, the glories and delinquencies of his beloved-despised Catholicism and—why not?—John Wayne (Wills is a devotee of John Ford’s Westerns.) For diversion, Wills extrudes densely learned articles in the New York Review of Books, the august journal that since the 1970s has been the main stage of his brutal dismantlings of inferior—that is to say, other—minds. To be reviewed by Wills, I can attest, is to feel like a vagrant caught urinating in the master’s hedges: after the initial panic, one experiences a strange, penitential relief. God, or at least one of His retainers, really is watching.

On a dour Sunday morning in December, I visited Wills, who is nearing 79 but looks 20 years younger, at his large three-storey house in Evanston, a prosperous suburb to the north of Chicago. For 30-odd years Wills has been affiliated with Northwestern, the excellent liberal arts university a few blocks from his home. Remarkably, given his proximity to the University of Chicago, that citadel of serious thought has never tried to recruit him for its faculty, despite his Pulitzer Prize, his membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his National Humanities Medal (awarded by Bill Clinton the same week Wills urged him, in Time magazine, to resign over the Monica Lewinsky dalliance).

The snub pays silent tribute to Wills’s singularity. The University of Chicago favours upholders of tradition like Saul Bellow or the culture critic Allan Bloom. Wills might seem to fit. He has a PhD in classics from Yale. His Latin is still good, and he reads French and Italian. But he puts all this to heretical purposes. He is America’s best living explainer, exposing the nation’s most cherished myths, which he approaches in the manner of a holy blasphemer. He has become an invaluable guide to the modern United States, connecting the present, in all its strangeness, to the nation’s imprisoning history, the patterns of behaviour unchanged since the earliest days of the republic: the convergence of individualistic licence and submission to authority, of “free-market” avarice cloaked in the language of spiritual quest. More incisively than any other thinker he bracingly answers the questions that most puzzle outsiders: why is religion such an enduring force in American politics? Why is there such popular mistrust of government? Why can’t Americans give up their love affair with guns? And he has done all this as an outsider himself—a practising Catholic, a proud Midwesterner who avoids the literary scene, a cheerful iconoclast who has infuriated friends, and presidents, on both the right and left.

by Sam Tanenhaus, Prospect | Read more:

Photo: Gasper Tringale

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Michael Whelan - Sentinels
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Tom Hodgson
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RATs

"See! That shit keeps popping up on my fucking computer!" says a blond woman as she leans back on a couch, bottle-feeding a baby on her lap.

The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker's computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman's screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman's computer.

The woman is startled. "Did it scare you?" she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. "Yes," he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a "dangerous site."

"I think someone hacked into our computer," says the young man.

Far away, the hacker opens his "Fun Manager" control panel, which provides a host of tools for messing with his RAT victims. He can hide their Windows "Start" button or the taskbar or the clock or the desktop, badly confusing many casual Windows users. He can have their computer speak to them. Instead, he settles for popping open the remote computer's optical drive.

Even over the webcam, the sound of shock is clear. "Stay right here," says the woman.

"Whoa!... the DVD thing just opened," says the young man.

The hacker sends the pair a message that reads "achoo!" and the young man laughs in astonishment. "Disconnect from the Internet," he says. "Your laptop's going to go kaboom next."

The video freezes, the mayhem lasting for slightly more than one minute. Copies of the incident aren't hard to find. They're on YouTube, along with thousands of other videos showing RAT controller (or "ratters," as they will be called here) taunting, pranking, or toying with victims. But, of course, the kinds of people who watch others through their own webcams aren't likely to limit themselves to these sorts of mere hijinks—not when computers store and webcams record far more intimate material. (...)

RAT tools aren't new; the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow famously released an early one called BackOrifice at the Defcon hacker convention in 1998. The lead author, who went by the alias Sir Dystic, called BackOrifice a tool designed for "remote tech support aid and employee monitoring and administering [of a Windows network]." But the Cult of the Dead Cow press release made clear that BackOrifice was meant to expose "Microsoft's Swiss cheese approach to security." Compared to today's tools, BackOrifice was primitive. It could handle the basics, though: logging keystrokes, restarting the target machine, transferring files between computers, and snapping screenshots of the target computer.

Today, a cottage industry exists to build sophisticated RAT tools with names like DarkComet and BlackShades and to install and administer them on dozens or even hundreds of remote computers. When anti-malware vendors began to detect and clean these programs from infected computers, the RAT community built "crypters" to disguise the target code further. Today, serious ratters seek software that is currently "FUD"—fully undetectable.

by Nate Anderson, ARS Technica |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

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Slapping Cabbages

If you have ever been set the peculiar task of imagining and creating the sound for ‘Alien Pod Embryo Expulsion' and found yourself at a loss, not to worry, a quick web search will provide an answer. One of the suggestions on this excellent resource is to use canned dog food, or more precisely, the sound of the food coming out of the can: "The chunky stuff isn't so good, but the tightly packed all-one-mass makes gushy sucking sounds when the air on the outside of the can is sucked into the can to replace the exiting glob of dog food". This sound, suggests the writer of this delightfully descriptive entry, can be used also for all kinds of ‘monster vocalisations'. It is fairly easy then to imagine how this gloppy mass can sound dense, hyper-salivating, evilly unctuous (or comically so), and quite suitable for the desired result. Several other helpful solutions are at hand here: ‘pitched up chickens' can substitute for bat shrieks, the spout of a 70's coffee percolator can apparently do the trick for a bullet in slow motion, rotten fruit for ‘flesh squishes', and for depth charges, i.e., anti-submarine explosive weapons, the slowed down by half sound of a toilet flushing with a plate reverb effect on it could possibly be entirely satisfactory. (Renoir's 1931 talkie Un Purge Bébé is famous for the sound of a toilet flush – a first in cinema).

The art of foley sound, of creating sound effects to accompany pictures alongside dialogue and music, is a vast creative domain, not to mention, a critical tool for the sound designer. Having met numerous Hindi film sound designers and other professionals over the last several months for a soon to be published essay, it is safe to say that the world they reside in is a unique one. The constant engagement with the sounds of cities and wilderness, days and nights, bats and beasts, trees and trains; of the sounds that can be made from objects, fabrics, fluids and other materials; and the texture, tone and timbre of sounds, is a profoundly immersive world. If there is a world of sound out there, there is indeed, yet another one mirrored within the mind's eye of the designer. A ripe peach squished down on a hard surface is as enticing to the designer as the retort of an 18thcentury cannon. To the designer, the ecological value of sounds is of great significance, and the sonic space on the soundtrack is his playground (and battlefield on occasion).

Pellucid sounds are obscured in ‘lo-fi' environments, R Murray Schafer, the pioneering composer, music educator and acoustic ecology advocate writes in The Music of the Environment (1973). In modern cities, with all the sounds of industry, progress, transportation, migration, there is much lost to the ear, in particular, perspective: "There is cross-talk on all the channels…and it is no longer possible to know what, if anything is to be listened to". But in a ‘hi-fi' soundscape, Schafer argues, it is the slightest of perturbations that matter, and "the human ear is alert, like that of an animal". He fascinatingly reproduces a sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night here:

…footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn, from the dust road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps and then reversing the process in going away.

From the helicopter sounds in Apocalypse Now (1979), the constant radio station texture in American Graffiti (1973), overhead trains of the Bronx in The Godfather (1972), to the ‘digital' surveillance sounds of The Conversation (1974), Walter Murch's work as a sound designer and re-recording mixer is iconic, to say the least. Very interestingly, he discusses the sound of the desert in The English Patient (1996) here. The desert was very quiet in actuality (which was great for production sound), he says, but that would not really work for the soundtrack. They had to devise ‘a signature' for the desert, ‘an active silence' that provided a sonic bed for the various other sounds – sandstorms, planes, jeeps, machine gun fire, campfires, etc. Pat Jackson, the sound supervisor on the film, Murch reveals, collated a wide "blend of complicated sounds that included a very, very dry insect sound and the sound of grains rolling down paper". In the opening sequence, Murch edited in a small montage of desert sounds including a percussion rattle associated with a vial of medicinal oils. This initial sonic montage served the purpose of locating in viewer in time and space of the moving image. (...)

Old comedies and variety shows caught his imagination, Brunelle writes on, pointing in particular to The Three Stooges, which had "more sound effects per square inch of film than anything except for cartoons" – the ‘fourth stooge' to his mind.

Some of the techniques and methods used for the Stooges' antics were: cracking walnuts for knuckle crunches, ukulele or violin plinks for eye pokes, a muffled kettle or bass drum hit for a bump in the stomach, hitting a rolled up carpet with a fist for body blows, various ratchets or twisting stalks of celery for when ears or limbs were twisted. The glugging/drinking effect was done by pouring water out of a one gallon glass bottle into cotton batting (which would muffle the splashing).

by Gautam Pemmaraju, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:

Photo: uncredited

A Fork of One's Own - A History of Culinary Revolution

Your kitchen may not be the mirror of your soul, but it can produce a pretty accurate image of where you’ve landed on the time line of domesticity. Take a tour through it. You’ll find not only the food you eat (and don’t), and the objects with which you preserve, prepare, cook, and serve it, but, very likely, tucked away in the back of the highest cupboard, the abandoned paraphernalia of your mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen life. And if you think seriously about this, you will eventually start asking questions about what went on in other people’s kitchens during the twenty thousand years since one smart Homo sapiens picked up a rock and ground a handful of wild barley into something he could eat—the most obvious being which came first, the food that sits in your fridge today or the technology, from the rock to the thermal immersion circulator, that got it there and puts it on the table.

I have two kitchens. For most of the year, I cook in an Upper West Side apartment, in Manhattan. It was designed in the eighteen-nineties and is probably best described as a landlord’s misguided attempt to lure tenants with horizontal evocations of the upstairs-downstairs life. The “public” rooms, meant to be seen and admired, were large and well proportioned. The “private” rooms, out of sight off a long back hall, were for the most part awkward and cramped, and perhaps the lowliest room on this totem pole of domestic status was the kitchen, where your cook, emerging each morning through the door of a tiny bedroom—in my apartment, it opened between the icebox and the sink—was expected to spend her waking hours. At the time, no one except, presumably, the cook cared that the kitchen was hot and smelly, or that she had to climb onto a chair or a stepladder to fetch the plates, or crouch on the floor to reach into the cabinets where she kept her pots and pans. Nobody else went in. There was room for only one chair, perhaps to discourage the cook from sitting down with the cook next door for a conversation, and no room at all for a table where she could have a meal.

This was the kitchen where I unpacked my own pots and pans in the nineteen-seventies—a mirror of somebody else’s moment in the saga of domestic life. There would be no company while I cooked, no friends sharing a glass of wine while they chopped the tomatoes for my pasta. Supper would mean the dining room, which remains so stately and demanding that I feel obliged to break out the family silver and the wedding china and lay the plates for a four-course dinner even when I’m eating alone with my husband. (Perhaps I should make a seating plan, or put out place cards.) More to the point, there was no way to expand my kitchen to accommodate my own moment—not, at any rate, without paying a plumber to move a century’s worth of corroding pipes. The cook’s bedroom became the cubbyhole study where I shut the door and write.

I am consoled, however, by my other kitchen. It is the “please come in” room of the Umbrian farmhouse where I work, and cook, in the summer—a much more satisfying image of the way I like to live. It was once occupied by cows. And while the house itself could be considered small—given the size of the peasant families that used to live together in four or five rooms above the animals—thestalla where I built my kitchen was enormous. The first things I bought for it, after the stove, the fridge, and the dishwasher went in, were an eleven-foot table, ten chairs, a pair of outsized armchairs, and an old stone fireplace wide enough for a side of pork. The shelves for my pots and pans are low and open. The front door, which leads directly into the room, is also open. My friends are welcome to my wine, my knives, and my chopping boards.

I was at the table in that companionable kitchen, sniffing the basil and garlic I had just ground to a mash for pesto in a mortar and pestle, when I started leafing through a book called “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat” (Basic), by the British writer Bee Wilson, and came upon a chapter called “Grind.” It was full of intriguing scholarship on the false starts and transformative successes without which there would have been no pesto on my table, but what intrigued me most was a paragraph on the subject of Wilson’s mortar and pestle. It was black granite, from Thailand, and much nicer to use, she said, than the white china variety, which set her teeth on edge “like chalk on a blackboard.” I felt a wave of kitchen kinship, first because the mortar and pestle I’d been using was also stone, but also because she called hers “an entirely superfluous piece of technology,” given the far easier ways of grinding and crushing available to her in a twenty-first-century Cambridge kitchen. She used it infrequently, she said, only when she had the time and the urge for the “bit of kitchen aromatherapy” that pounding together a pesto brings. In fact, she was terrified of getting it down from the shelf where, presumably, she kept her only-infrequently equipment. It was that heavy. She worried about dropping it on her foot. I imagined it stored at the same treacherous top-of-the-stepladder level where my paella pan, my mother’s biggest turkey platter, and my New York mortar and pestle, which is also stone and weighs nearly ten pounds, have been gathering dust for years. In New York, I share her terror. In Italy, where I can slide my mortar and pestle across a counter, brace myself, and move it to the table, the only thing that ever fell on my foot was a full bottle of Barolo, and it was three in the morning, I had been working late, and the fig tart in the oven was about to burn. (...)

Wilson remains engaging, and nowhere as deeply or as smoothly as in “Consider the Fork,” where the information she has to juggle is at once gastronomic, cultural, economic, and scientific. She will begin a disquisition on, say, why the Polynesians, who had been making clay cooking pots for a thousand years, abandoned clay when they arrived at the Marquesas Islands from Tonga and Samoa, a hundred or so years into the Christian era, and went back to cooking on hot stones; she will lead you through the various explanations, the most recent (and “radical,” she says) being that the yams, taro, breadfruit, and sweet potatoes that were their staples simply cooked better, or more efficiently, on hot stones than in pots; and then she will remind you that, short of ignorance, nostalgia, or necessity, there is always something mysterious about our choices and attachments, and do it with a homely story from her own kitchen—something recognizable.

by Jane Kramer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration: Stephen Doyle.

The Brain-Chilling, Shrimp-Caressing, Lamppost-Sized, NSFW Organ Hiding In A Whale’s Mouth

This is a story about the discovery of an organ that measures twelve feet long and four inches wide. You might well assume that this is old news. After all, how could something the size of a lamppost go unnoticed by anatomists? And yet, in fact, it’s only just come to light.

The discovery emerged out of a blood-drenched confusion. Alexander Werth, an anatomist, was standing on an ice sheet miles off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope. He was watching Inupiat whale hunters dismember bowhead whales they had caught in the Bering Sea. This government-sanctioned hunt is one of the best opportunities for whale anatomists to get hold of fresh tissue from the animals.

To take apart the head of a whale, the hunters would slice off the lower jaws and the tongue, which could be as big as a minivan. They would then climb onto the roof of the whale’s mouth and cut away the baleen–the hair-like growths that the whale used in life to filter small animals from the water. On the roof of the mouths of bowhead whales, Werth and his colleagues noticed something strange: a peculiar rod-like organ stretching down the midline of the palate.

It had never been described in the bowhead before. What made the organ particularly peculiar was that, as the Inupiat cut the whales apart, it poured forth huge amounts of blood. Why, the scientists wondered, should a bowhead whale have an organ in the roof of their mouth? And why should it be so bloody?

One of Werth’s colleagues, Thomas Ford of Ocean Alliance, had noticed something similar in right whales twenty years ago. So Werth, Ford, and Craig George the Department of Wildlife Management at the North Slope Borough in Alaska decided to take a close look at the bowhead whales. They dissected some of the organs out of freshly killed whales, photographing them as they cut the tissue free. They brought one of the organs back to their lab, along with sections they chopped out of other organs, to examine under a microscope.

And this is where the story gets a little NSWF.

You see, the organ in the whale’s mouth turned out to be, biomechanically speaking, a twelve-foot-long penis.

The organ in the bowhead whale mouth, Werth and his colleagues found, has the same distinctively spongy tissue, along with copious vessels supplying it with blood. Its anatomy strongly suggests that the whales can engorge it–hence the bloody mess it made when the whales were cut apart. Werth and his colleagues traced the blood vessels out of the organ and into the interior of the whale head. They found that they made close contact with a web of blood vessels at the base of the brain.

Based on these findings and others, Werth and his colleagues think they know what the organ–which they dubbed the Corpus Cavernosum Maxillaris–is for. It has two jobs, the first of which is to keep the whale’s brain cool.

by Carl Zimmer, National Geographic | Read more:

Painting copyright Carl Buell

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Thomas Robson New Pictures 2
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Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932), Schweizer Alpen I (Motiv A1, A2, B1, B2, B3), 1969.
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How to Score an Office Wife

My first office marriage came naturally, almost effortlessly. There was never any formal proposal. No exchange of rings. But at a certain point, it became clear I had a work wife.

Longtime readers of GQ will recognize the term. As Tom Prince wrote a few years back, the work wife is the person who "knows you better than anyone." My office spouse and I were confidants who shared a cubicle pod. Sprightly banter ping-ponged between us all day long. We never hesitated to tell each other stuff too intimate or cringe-making to share with the rest of the office. On the occasions when we were driven to talk nasty smack about our co-workers, we would switch to stealth mode—IM—erupting into synchronous cackles that turned nearby heads. And we stuck close together, for safety, when office parties threatened to turn superweird.

Ours was a beautiful work marriage built on a mutual affection and understanding. I let her prattle on about her idyllic life with her (actual) husband, cooed over photos of three-bedroom condos she hoped to buy, and gave her a big, happy hug when she announced that she'd become pregnant. She let me prattle on about my disastrous romantic misadventures, helped me draft polite but firm text messages declining second dates, and repeatedly assured me that I would not die alone, at 53, via aspiration of unheated minestrone soup chugged straight from the can.

And then one terrible day—citing the onset of morning sickness and a plan to freelance from home once her baby arrived—she up and quit. Our cubicle pod went silent. I'd been work divorced.

It was obvious to me that I needed to work remarry. And soon, before my office-bachelor habits became too ingrained. I surveyed my options: the high-powered execs, the lowly assistants, the randos who sit over by the printer station whose jobs are still not entirely clear to me. I even eyed—vowing to remain open-minded—the hulking mailroom guy with the forearm tattoos and graying ponytail.

I'd been lucky. My first office marriage was pretty much work love at first sight. This time would be different. I'd need to have a game plan.

So I drew up a set of guidelines. Should, heaven forbid, your own work marriage ever dissolve, you may wish to consult and abide by these suggestions.

by Seth Stevenson, GQ |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

Elliot Erwitt, Wilmington, NC 1950
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