[ed. Remember when computers almost seemed to have personalities of their own? Maybe not.]
How I Introduced a 27-year old computer to the web.
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This is the Life

Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, bird-watching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.

Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best shoes you can afford, you seek to know Rome's best restaurants and their staffs, drive the best car, and vacation on Tenerife. And what a cook you are!

Or you take the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids; you grill yams; you trade for televisions and hunt white-plumed birds. Everyone you know agrees: this is the life. Perhaps you burn captives. You set fire to a drunk. Yours is the human struggle, or the elite one, to achieve... whatever your own culture tells you: to publish the paper that proves the point; to progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock options, benefits; to get the loan to store the beans till their price rises; to elude capture, to feed your children or educate them to a feather edge; or to count coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the enemy, and be a big man or beloved woman and die respected for the pigs or the title or the shoes. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, necklaces, degree, murex shells, or ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.

Who is your "everyone"? Chess masters scarcely surround themselves with motocross racers. Do you want aborigines at your birthday party? Or are you serving yak-butter tea? Popular culture deals not in its distant past, or any other past, or any other culture. You know no one who longs to buy a mule or be named to court or thrown into a volcano.

So the illusion, like the visual field, is complete It has no holes except books you read and soon forget. And death takes us by storm. What was that, that life? What else offered? If for him it was contract bridge, if for her it was copyright law, if for everyone it was and is an optimal mix of family and friends, learning, contribution, and joy of making and ameliorating what else is there, or was there, or will there ever be?

by Annie Dillard, Billemory.com |  Read more:

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Conjuring Images of a Bionic Future

Dick Loizeaux recently found himself meandering through a noisy New York nightclub. This was unusual; Mr. Loizeaux, a 65-year-old former pastor, began suffering hearing loss nearly a decade ago, and nightclubs are not really his scene. “They’re the absolute worst place to hear anybody talk,” he said.

But this time was different. Mr. Loizeaux had gone to the club to test out theGN ReSound Linx, one of two new models of advanced hearing aids that can be adjusted precisely through software built into Apple’s iPhone. When he entered the club, Mr. Loizeaux tapped on his phone to switch his hearing aids into “restaurant mode.” The setting amplified the sound coming from the hearing aids’ forward-facing microphones, reducing background noise. To play down the music, he turned down the hearing aids’ bass level and bumped up the treble. Then, as he began chatting with a person standing to his left, Mr. Loizeaux tapped his phone to favor the microphone in his left hearing aid, and to turn down the one in his right ear.Photo

Dick Loizeaux, 65, who began suffering hearing loss nearly a decade ago, recently had a “comfortable conversation” in a noisy New York nightclub using the GN ReSound Linx hearing aid.

The results were striking. “After a few adjustments, I was having a comfortable conversation in a nightclub,” Mr. Loizeaux told me during a recent phone interview — a phone call he would have had difficulty making with his older hearing aids. “My wife was standing next to me in the club and she was having trouble having the same conversation, and she has perfect hearing.”

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the latest crop of advanced hearing aids are better than the ears most of us were born with. The devices can stream phone calls and music directly to your ears from your phone. They can tailor their acoustic systems to your location; when the phone detects that you have entered your favorite sports bar, it adjusts the hearing aids to that environment.

The hearing aids even let you transform your phone into an extra set of ears. If you’re chatting with your co-worker across a long table, set the phone in front of her, and her words will stream directly to your ears.

When I recently tried out the Linx and the Halo, another set of iPhone-connected hearing aids made by the American hearing aid company Starkey, I was floored. Wearing these hearing aids was like giving my ears a software upgrade. For the first time, I had fine-grain control over my acoustic environment, the sort of bionic capability I never realized I had craved. I’m 35 and I have normal hearing. But if I could, I’d wear these hearing aids all the time.

IPhone-connected hearing aids are just the beginning. Today most people who wear hearing aids, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs and other accessibility devices do so to correct a disability. But new hearing aids point to the bionic future of disability devices.

As they merge with software baked into our mobile computers, devices that were once used simply to fix whatever ailed us will begin to do much more. In time, accessibility devices may even let us surpass natural human abilities. One day all of us, not just those who need to correct some physical deficit, may pick up a bionic accessory or two. (...)

Imagine earpieces that let you tune in to a guy who is whispering across the room, or eyeglasses that allow you to scan the price of any item in a supermarket. Google and several international research teams have been working on smart contact lenses. In the beginning, these devices might monitor users’ health — for instance, they could keep an eye on a patient’s blood pressure or glucose levels — but more advanced models could display a digital overlay on your everyday life.

Or consider the future of prosthetic limbs, which are now benefiting from advances in robotics and mobile software. Advanced prosthetic devices can now be controlled through mobile apps. For instance, the i-Limb Ultra Revolution, made by Touch Bionics, allows people to select grip patterns and download new functions for their prosthetic hands using an iPhone. The longer you use it, the smarter your hand becomes.

by Farhad Manjoo, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Stuart Goldenberg

The Revenge of the Lawn

It wasn’t until 1870 that the definition of a house as separate from its fellows, surrounded by a yard, really took hold in the American mind. By then, detached housing was becoming the suburban norm. Vested interests promoted the freestanding home on its island of green as a healthful alternative to the overcrowded city, where the threat of epidemics, in the era before modern sanitation, was ever-present. “The new ideal was no longer to be part of a close community,” writes Jackson, “but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world.” Holding the world at arm’s-length, the prim, croquet-ready lawn—made possible by Elwood McGuire’s human-powered mower, which arrived on cue in the fateful year of 1870—both embodied and enabled the new social philosophy of the suburbs. Jackson writes,

Although visually open to the street, the lawn was a barrier—a kind of verdant moating separating the household from the threats and temptations of the city. … [It separates] the family by real estate from intruders into private space.

Securing the perimeter of the nuclear family’s compound, the inevitable white-picket fence stood guard, a Leave It to Beaver update of the frontier stockade. “He put up a barbed wire fence/ To keep out the unknown,” Joni Mitchell sings, in “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975), a Didion-esque indictment of the same status-seeking, spiritually arid suburbanites Malvina Reynolds mocks in her 1962 folk song, “Little Boxes” (inspired by the Levittown-like California housing development of Westlake), and whom Didion submits for our sardonic consideration in her essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966). Like Didion, who sets her morality play in San Bernardino, Mitchell uses The Valley and its sprinkler-swished lawns as a metaphor for the blank-brained narcissism and materialism that for many (especially New Yorkers of the Woody Allen persuasion) are L.A.’s gifts to American culture:

He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns

Even now, when we experience the crack-up of the suburban dream as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order through movies like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road and TV shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Weeds, the lawn endures in the public mind as a symbol of the American idyll, or at least a white, middle-class idyll. (...)

Despite such tectonic shifts, the suburban lawn remains an imperishable symbol of the American Dream, even of America itself, the deflation of its symbolic currency and its environmental unsustainability notwithstanding. The perfect lawn has always been environmentally unsustainable, its non-native grasses guzzling precious water and nourished by chemical fertilizers, its unblemished sward a victory over insurgent flora and fauna achieved through sustained carpet-bombing with toxic herbicides and pesticides. In an age of water wars and global warming, it’s morally obscene. According to a 2002 Harris Poll, 50-70% of all urban fresh water is squandered on lawns, more than half of which is wasted “because of inappropriate timing or dosage. Nearly all the water used could be saved by appropriate use of native landscaping that does not require any watering beyond natural rainfall.” We dose our lawns with 67 million pounds’ worth of synthetic pesticides annually, three times the amount used, per acre, on agricultural crops. We spend $5.25 billion on fossil-fuel-derived lawn fertilizers, whose fringe benefits include poisoning surface and ground water. Our gas-powered mowers produce as much pollution in one hour as our cars do over the course of a 20-mile drive; every year, they guzzle 580 million gallons of gas.

by Mark Dery, Boing Boing |  Read more:

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Deadbeat Dams

Of the more than 80,000 dams listed by the federal government, more than 26,000 pose high or significant safety hazards. Many no longer serve any real purpose. All have limited life spans. Only about 1,750 produce hydropower, according to the National Hydropower Association.

In many cases, the benefits that dams have historically provided — for water use, flood control and electricity — can now be met more effectively without continuing to choke entire watersheds.

Dams degrade water quality, block the movement of nutrients and sediment, destroy fish and wildlife habitats, damage coastal estuaries and in some cases rob surrounding forests of nitrogen. Reservoirs can also be significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Put simply, many dams have high environmental costs that outweigh their value. Removing them is the only sensible answer. And taking them down can often make economic sense as well. The River Alliance of Wisconsin estimates that removing dams in that state is three to five times less expensive than repairing them.

The message has been slowly spreading around the country. More and more communities and states have reclaimed rivers lost to jackhammers and concrete. Last year, 51 dams in 18 states were taken down, restoring more than 500 miles of streams, according to the group American Rivers. Nearly 850 have been removed in the last 20 years, and nearly 1,150 since 1912.

But the work is far from done. I was disappointed to see the Energy Department release a report last week on the potential to develop new “sustainable” hydroelectric dams on rivers and streams across the country. The report follows President Obama’s signing of two laws last year to encourage small hydro projects and revive nonproducing dams.

New dams are a bad idea. We’ve glorified them for decades, but our pride in building these engineering marvels has often blinded us to the environmental damage they cause. The consequences run the length of the river and beyond. Our many complex attempts to work around these obstacles would make Rube Goldberg proud. Interventions like fish elevators and trap-and-haul programs that truck fish around impoundments don’t lead to true recovery for wild fish populations or reverse the other environmental problems caused by blocking a river’s flow.

But we do know that removing dams brings streams and rivers back to life and replenishes our degraded aquifers.

by Yvon Chouinard, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Marta Monteiro

[ed. You can go now.]
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War

Young Blood

[ed. Good news Boomers! Another avenue to parasitize the young (and you thought the resurgence of vampire themes in recent culture was just a coincidence?)]

  

Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.

“I am extremely excited,” said Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “These findings could be a game changer.”

The research builds on centuries of speculation that the blood of young people contains substances that might rejuvenate older adults.

In the 1950s, Clive M. McCay of Cornell University and his colleagues tested the notion by delivering the blood of young rats into old ones. To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. After this procedure, called parabiosis, blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. The blood from the young rat flowed into the old one, and vice versa.

Later, Dr. McCay and his colleagues performed necropsies and found that the cartilage of the old rats looked more youthful than it would have otherwise. But the scientists could not say how the transformations happened. There was not enough known at the time about how the body rejuvenates itself.

It later became clear that stem cells are essential for keeping tissues vital. When tissues are damaged, stem cells move in and produce new cells to replace the dying ones. As people get older, their stem cells gradually falter.

In the early 2000s, scientists realized that stem cells were not dying off in aging tissues.

“There were plenty of stem cells there,” recalled Thomas A. Rando, a professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “They just don’t get the right signals.”

Dr. Rando and his colleagues wondered what signals the old stem cells would receive if they were bathed in young blood. To find out, they revived Dr. McCay’s experiments.

The scientists joined old and young mice for five weeks and then examined them. The muscles of the old mice had healed about as quickly as those of the young mice, the scientists reported in 2005. In addition, the old mice had grown new liver cells at a youthful rate.

The young mice, on the other hand, had effectively grown prematurely old. Their muscles had healed more slowly, and their stem cells had not turned into new cells as quickly as they had before the procedure.

The experiment indicated that there were compounds in the blood of the young mice that could awaken old stem cells and rejuvenate aging tissue. Likewise, the blood of the old mice had compounds that dampened the resilience of the young mice.

by Carl Zimmer, NY Times |  Read more:

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Kinetic Beauty

"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.”

David Foster Wallace
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Lab Rats

Tom Tomorrow
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Why the Mona Lisa Stands Out

In 1993 a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.

That was what got him thinking.

Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?

The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.

Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.

Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars”, Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”

The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts, who is employed by Microsoft to study the dynamics of social networks, had a similar experience to Cutting in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the “Mona Lisa” in its climate-controlled bulletproof box at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos in the previous chamber, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?

When Watts looked into the history of “the greatest painting of all time”, he discovered that, for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” languished in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo’s portrait of his patron’s wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn’t a scholarly re-evaluation, but a burglary.

by Ian Leslie, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Eyevine

Early-Life Crisis

I was born a friendless virgin.

During those first months, it was clear that I was depressed. I spent each day at home, lying flat on my back, looking up at the ceiling and thinking, I should really go out and meet people. But I never did. In fact, I don’t think I made a single friend in my first months alive. I was such a loser.

Instead of making connections, I distracted myself with meaningless games. I slept poorly and cried all the time. My life was nothing like “Entourage.” I had trouble meeting women but refused to use Tinder. Looks-wise, I didn’t bring a lot to the table: I had no muscle definition, a chubby face, and a very tiny penis. People would call my naked pictures “cute.”

I’ll never forget the day my mother introduced me to her friend’s daughter, Chelsea. I felt a connection from the moment she peed herself. We had a lot in common—we were both bald and androgynous. Neither of us had teeth. I thought to myself, She might be the one.

Later that night, we were lying side by side on my bed. I wanted to tell her how I felt, but suddenly I was unable to speak, or even to lift my head. My therapist says that’s right—I was literally unable to do those things, and I know what he means: I’m always sabotaging myself.

After Chelsea left, I began worrying that I might be alone forever. Everyone I knew was married—my mom, my dad, and my grandparents. I had started experiencing the pains that came with aging, many of which involved my molars. I felt my mortality. My molar-tality.

by Ben Jurney, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jessica Peterson

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Sudden Death: A Eulogy

In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society reminded Americans that, for the first time in human history, we lived in a civilization where a majority of people did not have to worry about basic subsistence. More than five decades later, we find ourselves belonging to the first human civilization where sudden death is the glaring exception, not the expectation. The novelty of our position is all too easy to forget; it is even easier to assume without questioning that the present state of affairs reflects progress. After all, which of us wouldn’t rather die well-prepared at ninety than suddenly at fifty-five? And yet, the more I see of death, the less convinced I become that, in this medical and social revolution, we have not lost something of considerable value. I certainly don’t mean to glorify premature death: I suspect both “dying with one’s boots on” and “living fast, loving hard and dying young” are highly overrated feats. I do not believe that it is either dulce or decorum to die at twenty-five for one’s country. My concern is also not with the economic effects of the long goodbye: the percent of Medicare dollars spent in the last six months of life, the prospect of every gainfully-employed worker supporting two retirees. Rather, my disquiet is principally for lost human dignity. Canadian right-to-die activist Gloria Taylor, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, recently wrote: “I can accept death because I recognize it as a part of life. What I fear is a death that negates, as opposed to concludes, my life.” Sudden death is a conclusion. Too often, I fear, the long goodbye devolves into a negation.

The contrast between the death of my grandmother’s father and that of her husband fifty-eight years later is highly revealing. Grandpa Leo, a Belgian refugee who earned a comfortable living in the jewelry business, developed prostate cancer in his early seventies, survived a mild heart attack at age seventy-seven, and by his mid-eighties had trouble remembering the names of his sisters. And then, at eighty-six, he developed a metastatic lesion on the surface of his brain. In 1950, the cancer would have killed him in a matter of months. In 2006, a skilled neurosurgeon managed to scoop out the bulk of the tumor, enabling my grandfather to survive to a series of small strokes a full year later. Once again, these cerebral insults—as the medical chart termed them—would certainly have ended an octogenarian’s life in his own father-in-law’s generation. But after a two-month long hospital stay and tens of thousands of dollars in high tech imaging, modern anti-coagulants enabled Grandpa Leo to roll into a nursing home that he actually believed to be his mother’s apartment in prewar Antwerp. I visited him one afternoon and he announced how much he loved his wife—but he was actually referring to the young West African woman assigned to change his bed linens. It took two intubations, weeks on a ventilator, multiple courses of dialysis and a month of unconsciousness before my grandmother finally cried uncle and brought the process of her husband’s dying to a halt. By then, the man I’d worshiped as a child for his vigor and independence had gone nearly a half a year without responding to his own name. When Grandpa Leo died—after the best nursing care imaginable—his entire torso had become one enormous bedsore, his back and shoulders assuming the color of a side of tenderized beef. Is my grandfather’s longevity a triumph or a tragedy? On the one hand, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to know my grandfather well into my own adulthood—an opportunity that my father never had. On the other hand, faced with the prospect of following in my grandfather’s footsteps, I’d much rather drop dead in front of a firehouse at sixty.

by Jacob M. Appel, The Kenyon Review | Read more:

Arne Svenson - The Neighbors (2013)
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Debunking the Bunk Police

The parking lot after a Phish concert is a notoriously dirty drug scene. I used to feel less disturbed by it than I do now, but I was younger then and I think I glorified the drugs. Now all I see are nitrous-filled balloons that sell for twenty dollars apiece and alcoholics who will grab your ass and may or may not end up passing out in a stranger’s tent. When Phish plays the Gorge in George, Washington, and everyone camps overnight, the lot becomes a virtual no man’s land. The people that you enjoyed the concert with turn into zombies, wobbling around high on cat tranquilizers (Ketamine) or stalking the sunrise on a slow comedown from their long, winding acid trip.

At the Gorge this past July there were two Shakedown Streets, makeshift roads lined with people selling things: food, clothing, fairy wings, hula hoops, ceramic masks, stone jewelry—though it’s a destination best known for the endless array of mind-altering possibilities for sale or trade. Drug dealers will approach your campsite, trying to barter hash for tickets or a gram of Molly—MDMA, or ecstasy, the most popular drug—for around $100 cash. It’s a place where anything can be bought, sold or traded, and for years it operated according to mutual trust; when someone sold you a drug you assumed they weren’t trying to poison you, and that it was in fact what they claimed it to be. Though always illegal, LSD was in fact LSD, opium wasn’t black tar heroin, and you weren’t likely to get crack instead of the cocaine you were promised.

It’s over a mile hike from the Gorge concert venue back to the campground, and the re-acclimation from show to campsite can be as harsh as the unexpected flare of the fluorescent lights. I made the walk back with my friend Ashley, who I’d met a few weeks before at a Phish show in Saratoga Springs, New York. Ashley is beautiful, her parents are prominent government employees, and having recently graduated college, she decided to follow Phish that summer. That night she was wearing a long, button-down black tunic with a pattern of red roses and a $300 leather cowboy hat. I remember because it was my birthday, and though it had only been a few weeks, we were fast friends by the time we got to Washington. Walking back that night, we held a mutual dread for the nitrous hustlers we would have to pass, less so because we’re opposed to nitrous itself, but because in general it makes for a gross scene; they’re selling something most people want, at an absurdly inflated price, and with the Nitrous Mafia can come deaths, unnecessary aggression, and indifferent campsite neighbors who stay up until sunrise giggling and inhaling, keeping you awake with the hiss of their tank. Before we entered the campground (and thus the nitrous), we saw a booth situated at the entrance, the blur of a pink and purple jellyfish-like tent, all good vibes and chill tunes. We went closer, and there, nestled among food vendors, with no line and an austere aura, we found the Bunk Police, selling something entirely different: drug-testing kits.

We knew of the Bunk Police from Saratoga Springs, and also because they’d maintained a constant presence on the Phish tour all summer. They had been at other festivals, from the more mainstream Coachella, Bonaroo, and Wakarusa, to obscure electronic gatherings like Lightning in a Bottle and Firefly. The anonymous organization, run by volunteers, preaches harm reduction through education about misrepresented substances. The kits vary depending on the kind of drug you’re testing, but in principle they’re all the same: you dissolve a minuscule amount of your substance in the chemicals provided in your kit (one is good for about 50-100 tests), and depending upon the color change, you know what drug you’re dealing with. The test kits are essentially the same as what a cop would use if he were trying to test someone’s drugs. The Bunk Police sell kits for $20 apiece to drug users so that they can increase their safety and call out fraudulent (or simply ignorant) dealers.

Jeffrey Bryan Chambers spent the summer following the Bunk Police and filming their experience for his forthcoming documentary What’s in my Baggie? Chambers and his crew traveled across the country shooting the Bunk Police’s work, largely through BP volunteers’ interactions with customers, and the campsites where most of the testing occurs (the BP only sell the kits; they leave the testing up to you). When I asked Chambers what he and his crew found doing this work, he hesitated: “It’s hard to say an actual percentage. It’s difficult to say or even quantify all the drugs even at a festival, say like Bonaroo, where there’s upwards of 80,000 people camping in one area.” I pressed him to be more specific. “I can confidently say that from what we saw, over half of the substances were misrepresented, most commonly bath salts being sold as MDMA,” he said. Of the cocaine samples his crew tested over the summer, only one in over 30 cases even contained cocaine. As a population, we’ve been dealing with cocaine for decades, and when cut, most often it’s with methamphetamine. Bath Salts and other research chemicals—many of which are legal and available in bulk on the Internet—that masquerade as Molly and LSD, pose a more serious threat.

by Kiran Herbert, The Weeklings | Read more:
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Is Green the New Brown?

I do a lot of driving, most of it highly tedious. Two miles to the grocery store. Six miles to the mall. Twelve miles to work. The sort where every minute seems to count because the whole trip is so wearisome. In that context, it doesn’t take much to piss me off. I start stereotyping. Big pick-up trucks are driven by reckless assholes; European sedans by condescending elitists.

And then there are the bumper stickers, which can drive me batty even when I mostly agree with the political worldview they promote. Does the world really need another “Coexist” message? Or a faded reminder that the owner once believed that Barack Obama was a metonym for change?

Sometimes, though, the stars align to produce a juxtaposition so perverse that it takes my breath away. The other day I was cut off by a Toyota Prius that then proceeded to slam on the brakes, making me miss a crucial left-turn arrow while it rolled through the intersection on red.

I was incensed. The drivers of hybrids are notoriously self-righteous, practically begging everyone else to praise them for saving the world, even though the giant batteries that save them so much money are far from ecologically sound. But in my experience, Prius owners are particularly egregious in this regard.

But the Prius also seems to be the car of choice for overly cautious drivers, the way Volvos were in the 1970s. If I see one in front of me, I change lanes as soon as I can. It’s almost as bad as having a bus ahead of you.

by Charlie Bertsch, Souciant | Read more:
Image: Charlie Bertsch