DL Goines, Chez Panisse 2005
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The Excrement Experiment

No one knows how many people have undergone fecal transplants—the official term is fecal microbiota transplantation, or FMT—but the number is thought to be at least ten thousand and climbing rapidly. New research suggests that the microbes in our guts—and, consequently, in our stool—may play a role in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to allergies and obesity, and reports of recoveries by patients who, with or without the help of doctors, have received these bacteria-rich infusions have spurred demand for the procedure. A year and a half ago, a few dozen physicians in the United States offered FMT. Today, hundreds do, and OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states. The Cleveland Clinic named fecal transplantation one of the top ten medical innovations for 2014, and biotech companies are competing to put stool-based therapies through clinical trials and onto the market. In medicine, at any rate, human excrement has become a precious commodity. (...)

Scattered case reports in the medical literature described C. difficile patients, some on their deathbeds, who received fecal transplants and recovered, often within hours. Then, in January, 2013, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the first randomized controlled trial involving FMT, comparing the therapy to treatment with vancomycin for patients with recurrent disease. The trial was ended early when doctors realized that it would be unethical to continue: fewer than a third of the patients given vancomycin recovered, compared with ninety-four per cent of those who underwent fecal transplants—the vast majority after a single treatment. A glowing editorial accompanying the article declared that the trial’s significance “goes far beyond the treatment of recurrent or severe C. difficile” and predicted a spate of research into the benefits of fecal transplants for other diseases.

“Nothing in health care works ninety per cent of the time,” Mark B. Smith, a microbiologist at M.I.T. who is a co-founder of OpenBiome, the stool bank, told me. Zain Kassam, a gastroenterologist who is OpenBiome’s chief medical officer, put it this way: “It’s the closest thing to a miracle I’ve seen in medicine.” (...)

Among the desperately ill, FMT’s reputation as a wonder cure has outstripped the science supporting its use. The lure of a potential remedy that is widely available, inexpensive, and considered relatively low-risk has yielded an improvisational approach to treatment and a growing D.I.Y. transplant population. When Jon Ritter agreed to serve as a donor for Tom Gravel, the Greenwich Village Crohn’s patient, Gravel paid the charges for the blood and stool screening that Ritter’s insurance didn’t cover. But these tests can cost hundreds of dollars, and many patients are circumventing the medical system altogether. On YouTube, FMT how-to videos have received thousands of views, and on Facebook there are private forums where people trade advice about the procedure. “There are a lot of people who are doing this at home,” Lawrence Brandt, of the Montefiore Medical Center, says. “Some of them are doing it under the instructions of their physicians. Some of them are doing it by reading the Internet.” One of his patients, ill with C. difficile and unable to find a donor, asked whether she could use her dog’s feces. (The answer was no.) Another placed an ad in her local paper; more than forty-five people responded. Instances of FMT going terribly wrong are hard to find, although there have been anecdotal reports of people developing bacterial and viral infections following the procedure.

Like Mark Smith, of OpenBiome, the F.D.A. watched the surging demand for fecal transplants with concern. In the early nineteen-eighties, at least twenty thousand people became infected with H.I.V. after receiving blood transfusions contaminated with the virus, because doctors didn’t know to screen for it. Could a similar, as yet unknown threat be lurking in a donor’s stool? In May, 2013, agency officials convened a public workshop on FMT in Bethesda, where they explained that the F.D.A. considers stool to be a drug. This wasn’t particularly surprising. The agency defines a drug as any material that is intended for “use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease.” An exception has been written into law for body parts, including skin, bone, and cartilage, which are classified as tissue. But the statute excludes most human secretions from this category.

Substances labelled drugs are subject to a rigorous approval process. Pharmaceutical companies typically spend many years and millions of dollars researching and testing a drug before submitting it to the agency for approval. Until the F.D.A. approved a fecal-transplant therapy, the procedure would be considered experimental. In order to offer it to patients, doctors would need to file an investigational new-drug application, or I.N.D., and obtain the agency’s permission. “That hit the whole field like a ton of bricks,” Smith, who attended the workshop, told me. “There was this increasing momentum around fecal transplants, and all of a sudden the whole field hit the brakes.”

I.N.D.s are intended to capture every aspect of a prospective therapy in exacting detail. At the Bethesda workshop, one gastroenterologist said that it had taken her hundreds of hours to complete the paperwork. Many others lacked the resources and staff to devote to such a task. “What do we do with the fifteen thousand patients who are really desperate for something that works?” a doctor from the Mayo Clinic asked F.D.A. officials. “If your mother shows up with severe or recurrent C. difficile, are you going to not offer something that you know how to do safely, effectively, and say, ‘I can’t do it because the regulatory agencies in the United States have decided that this requires a special licensure’?”

by Emily Eakin, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Oliver Munday

Miri in Love

Miri had been at her new job for two months when she got her first perk. Other employees, she knew, got perks like stock options, free massages, and gym membership. This was a start-up, after all, and that was the whole point of working for a start-up. But as the office assistant, all Miri got was a talking dildo.

Bill, her boss and the founder of TALKTOYSTOME, a distribution app that handled exclusively voice responsive, talking sex toys, was a young man, younger than Miri even, who was barely thirty. He had the questionable social skills Miri had come to expect from programmers, and as such she was only sort of surprised when he called her into his office and handed her a dildo.

The dildo’s name was James.

“Anyway, welcome to the company,” Bill said. “Have a good time with him.”

Miri did not think he was as uneasy as he ought to have been, giving a sex a toy to a subordinate, but she was also curious. She was unsure if she’d ever had an orgasm before, and James came with glowing customer reviews, and an average four and a half star rating.

Now, as she removed James from his packaging, she wondered how Bill selected this particular model for her. James seemed awfully large, and this particular model was an obnoxious shade of hot pink.

Her first and only date with James did not go well.

“You like it like that, don’t you?” James shouted. “You want me to fuck you harder, don’t you?”

Miri felt acutely uncomfortable.

She poured herself a glass of wine, but it didn’t help. Using James felt a little like humping a helicopter. To make things worse, she couldn’t figure out how to turn the volume down on him, and she was sure his stupid, booming voice could be heard through the thin walls of her apartment.

She put James away, and wondered how you even dispose of a dildo—she couldn’t just throw James in her trash. What if one of her neighbors saw? So she put James in her sock drawer, and hoped to god that Bill wouldn’t ask how she liked him.

The next day Miri wanted to tell Bo about her conversation with Bill, but Ashley wouldn’t leave him alone. Distantly, Miri could hear Bo saying “I’m just not sure what you’d like me to do,” which figured, because Ashley was the worst, and had no idea what she was doing, a reality which never stopped her from delegating. Ashley was fresh out of college and already ran their social media marketing. She spent most her time cussing loudly about vendors and fucking around on Facebook, a role in their company which, Miri had to admit to herself, made her deeply envious.

“Bo,” Ashley whined. “I need this document in legal AND in letter.”

“I’m just not sure what you’d like me to do,” Bo repeated.

Miri loved Bo.

He was tall, square-shaped and black. His full name was Bo_Laser, and also, he was a combination printer and flat bed scanner. Miri had worked with some terrible printers in her long career of shitty admin jobs, and so she could appreciate a good printer when she met one. And Bo was a good printer. Like the vibrating dildos and sucking, rubber orifices they sold, Bo talked, and was voice responsive. But unlike the sex toys they sold, his voice had been recorded by Benedict Cumberbatch, making everything he said sound, Miri thought, rather alluring.

by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Boing Boing | Read more:
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Google Fiber May Be Making the Digital Divide Worse

For Google, the creation of Google Fiber was a response to a very specific problem: Even though the United States is the undisputed leader in cutting-edge tech, the country’s network of broadband services is shockingly lackluster. The average download speed in the United States is slower than that of Estonia, and residential customers often pay higher prices in the U.S than in countries like France or Japan for comparable service.

The issue, at least domestically, is a lack of competition. A 2013 report by New America Foundation found that the places in the U.S. with the best Internet service were generally the ones where consumers had a variety of Internet service providers (ISPs) to pick from; however, most Americans have few, if any, choices.

The reason Comcast is the most hated company in America isn’t just because of its legendarily terrible customer service—it’s also because a large percentage of their customers don’t have any alternatives if they want high-speed Internet access. (...)

Sometime next year, the some residents of Austin, Texas, will get to experience the joy of having Google Fiber deliver piping hot Internet, undoubtedly boasting some of the fastest download speeds of anywhere on the planet, all over every last inch of their homes.

But not everyone in Austin will necessarily be able to sign up for Google Fiber, even if they are able to spare $70 a month for ridiculously fast Internet. When Google selects a city to deploy Fiber, it’s not guaranteed that every part of that city will be eligible for that service.

“[The way that cable companies historically operated,] there would often be franchise fees or build-out requirements that would make a company start building out in certain neighborhoods first or they couldn’t activate without a certain portion of the geography,” explained Brian Dietz, spokesperson for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. “Those rules were meant to avoid new providers entering the market from being able to cherry-pick the most profitable neighborhoods.” (...)

Google, on the other hand, uses a different model. Google slices up each city into hundreds of different “fiberhoods,” which can qualify for service if enough people within each one show interest through a process called a “rally.” In Kansas City, Google dispatched employees into each individual neighborhood and worked with local community groups, sometimes employing tactics like handing out free ice cream, to hit the requisite number of households in that area to justify deployment. (...)

In November, the company unveiled a new program in Austin called Unlocking the Connection that takes this community service aspect to the next level. In a partnership with the Texas capital’s public housing authority, Google agreed to give free broadband connections to the approximately 4,300 residents of all 18 city-owned public housing projects—as long as the buildings’ surrounding fiberhoods demonstrate enough interest to quality for service.

It’s this last move that shows why Google’s methods for selecting fiberhoods is simultaneously noble and problematic. Google is able to go back, expending money and time, to the communities who were left out, even to the point of giving some of them free connections, because Google can still make money from those people just by their being online. If Verizon or Time-Warner Cable were put in the same situation, they’d have little incentive to pursue further action. (...)

“I think this [rally model] is going to catch on and it worries me greatly,” insisted Christopher Mitchell of Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit group that advocates for the expansion of municipal broadband networks. “Google is popularizing the idea of building essential infrastructure with a market-driven approach. We don’t build roads like that—if we did, there’d be no roads in rural areas. We don’t build electricity like that—if we did, our economy could be far weaker. We recognize that those things are essential infrastructure.”

This demand-driven model is one that, even without Google, is starting to catch on nationally. With Google using Fiber as a publicity campaign for how the company would like to see high-speed broadband deployed across the board, it not only gives the company’s more traditional competitors greater incentive to discriminate based on socioeconomic geography, but it also pushes cities to let them do so.

by Aaron Sankin, The Kernel | Read more:
Image: J. Longo

How TV Took Off in a Big Way

Here are a few things that did not exist in American television 10 years ago:

Binge-watching; recapping; scripted series on networks devoted to old movies, science and history; zombies; streaming services; popular series that end just because the story is done; film-franchise adjacency; shows that begin as miniseries and then continue indefinitely; multiplatform viewing; two concurrent versions of Sherlock Holmes; A-list film directors; television shows devoted to talking about television shows; live tweeting; micro-audiences; immediate remakes of British series; any remakes of European series; European series; subtitles; cord-cutting; horrific violence; series in which the cast stays the same but the story changes; series in which the title stays the same but the story and cast change; really good computer graphics; comedies more dark than funny; amazing international locations; an overabundance of stories characterizing the many ways in which television has changed in the past 10 years.

Here's the most important thing that did not exist in the television universe 10 years ago: ownership.

Technically, the citizens of these United States have always been the proprietors of the airwaves over which television was broadcast, but it didn't feel that way. We watched what the network executives offered us when they offered it. Good television was like good weather, fleet and ephemeral; you enjoyed it while it lasted. Maybe you watched it again in reruns while you were sick or sad or trying to get ahead on the ironing. (...)

"When television became archivable, everything changed."

That's what veteran television writer Glen Mazzara said to me a couple of years ago during a conversation about the "new golden age" everyone was talking about with wearisome regularity at the time.

The show runner for "The Walking Dead" at the time, Mazzara had called me to say in the nicest way possible that it would be really great if television critics would stop comparing television to film and novels as if the comparison in itself were some huge compliment. Television was an independent art form, he said, and should be judged on its own terms.

But those terms were changing. Technology had granted the medium both a flexibility and a permanence it had lacked before. The idea that people could now watch a show in its entirety, that they could take entire seasons with them when they traveled and collect their favorites for further viewing, offered television writers a shot at something historically reserved for an anointed few: legacy.

An unexpected turn of events when you consider the dire predictions of less than 10 years ago, when many people assumed that reality would soon control almost every time slot on every network and that the television set itself would vanish, replaced by a forest of laptops and mobile phones. The scripted drama was dead, the sitcom was dead, the family hour was dead. Despairing critics and viewers imagined a world in which the broadcast networks were overrun with singing competitions, "Two and a Half Men" and the increasingly brutalized victims of "NCIS" and "CSI" while the Young People watched webisodically told narratives and YouTube.

Which, of course, they do. But they also watch television, perhaps less than previous generations and certainly on their laptops and mobile devices, but also on their flat screens; they watch it whenever they want to but also in real live-tweeting time (hello, "Pretty Little Liars.")

by Mary McNamara, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Emiliano Ponzi

Paul Wunderlich, Gut getroffen (Well taken), 1983.
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Robert LaDuke, Wings
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The Time I Spent Nine Hours in Jail

It Wasn't for Any Good Reason, It Was for the Dumbest Reason Imaginable

I didn't go to jail for any kind of a cool reason. I wasn't arrested at a protest; I didn't assault somebody deserving. I went to jail because I was a doofus. How I became a doofus of the magnitude I was—that's a different story.

Step one was a car accident. I caused it. It was the summer of 1998, I'd just turned 29, and I was leaving Capitol Hill in my old Volvo one late afternoon, heading back to Fremont, where I lived. I was near the old B&O Espresso, making a right turn onto East Olive Way, and I didn't leave enough room between cars going by for me to fit in, and I got rear-ended. The car behind me got rear-ended, too.

There was no place to pull over without blocking traffic, and I didn't get that I didn't have to find a great parking spot to deal with this matter. I didn't know that you can and should just stop and get out and face the music. So I did a U-y and parked on a side street across the way.

I got out of the car and checked things out. There, across the way, were two angry-looking men out of their cars, yelling at each other. I watched them do that for a spell. If this were a party, I wouldn't have gone up and introduced myself just then. It wouldn't have been the right moment.

And then I reflected for a bit on how nice it was that there were three of us, three cars involved in this accident. Each mad guy over there already had someone to yell at. Why mess with something that's worked out so elegantly? Shouldn't I just let them continue? Isn't it, in a way, more polite? Because aren't they just going to get madder and more stressed out if I go over there?

The sun was setting in the west, meanwhile—so pretty. I'd been driving west, heading to my apartment, where no men were yelling. And then I thought about the sounds of the accident. On the spectrum of sounds caused by cars making contact with other cars, I rated the sounds I'd heard at about a 2. No explosions, no crunching. Just boonk. Boonk. And so maybe this day didn't have to end with bad feelings! For me, I mean. Maybe I could just get back into my car and drive toward the sun, like I was doing, and then take a right and be home, all by myself, the evening my oyster.

So that's what I did.

We have to double back now to an earlier bad decision, one that took place seven years before the car accident. A group of people in a bar was proclaiming that my friend Caitlin and I would never get tattoos. The implication was that we were pussies. Well, fuck these people. We weren't pussies. Caitlin and I vowed right then and there that not only would we get tattoos, we would get them the very next morning.

After the sun came up, Caitlin pulled up in front of my apartment in her little Corolla and we drove to the tattoo parlor. Caitlin already knew what she was going to get, AS YOU SHOULD WHEN YOU ARE RIGHT ABOUT TO GET A TATTOO. She was going to get a small blue rose on her left shoulder. I didn't know what I was going to get. I only knew that I wasn't a pussy.

Caitlin went first, and I flipped through the idea book to see what I maybe wanted on my body for the rest of my life. Eventually I saw a little picture of the Cat in the Hat. This seemed kind of good. I liked Dr. Seuss. That book was pretty good. Not a favorite, necessarily, but hey. Good enough. Done. And so I got a small, meaningless, shitty Cat in the Hat tattoo on my left shoulder, right where it would show if I were wearing a tank top and standing on a side street on Capitol Hill and somebody who'd witnessed a car accident could use it as an identifying characteristic when they reported the person who caused it leaving the scene of said accident to the police.

by Tina Rowley, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Mike Force

Aaron Rodgers: Master of the Hard Count

During every Green Bay training camp, an inexperienced defensive lineman rotates in for a play or two, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers stifles a laugh. He glances at the Packers’ defensive line coach, Mike Trgovac, who knows precisely what Rodgers is about to do but is powerless to stop it.

Toward the end of his cadence, just before Rodgers calls for the ball to be snapped, he articulates the word “hut” with such gusto that the poor lineman bulldozes over the line of scrimmage, goaded offside by the N.F.L.’s leading expert in pre-snap subterfuge.

Just as valuable an asset as his arm strength, mobility and microprocessor of a brain is Rodgers’s voice, loaded with bass and thump and a tinge of soul. With it, he has coaxed eight neutral-zone infractions this season — including three in the first 21 minutes against Carolina last month — by using rhythm and inflection to exploit defenders’ aggressiveness, a tactic known as a hard count.

When deployed, it puts stress on the opposition, forcing players to ponder a challenge besides merely trying to thwart Rodgers, the league’s best quarterback for the past two months. It slows the pass rush, reveals potential blitzers and helps Rodgers decipher a defense, uploading critical data about its alignment and assignments.

The tactic can enable Green Bay to steal 5 free yards via a penalty, and sometimes — in third-and-short situations, especially — that is the team’s objective. But because the play often continues after the flag is thrown, Rodgers immediately looks to throw downfield for a long gain.

“He’s a master at a lot of things,” the ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer said, “but he’s completely mastered this.”

by Ben Shpigel, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeff Haynes/Associated Press

H. Alan Cheung, Chinese Graffiti II (1995).
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Talking Heads

[ed. The apartment building in 'Singles', one of my all-time favorite movies. See it here, with a cameo by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. I think that's Janet's car out front (with new windows).] photo: markk

Sherree Valentine Daines, Champagne rendezvous
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Understanding “New Power”

We all sense that power is shifting in the world. We see increasing political protest, a crisis in representation and governance, and upstart businesses upending traditional industries. But the nature of this shift tends to be either wildly romanticized or dangerously underestimated.

There are those who cherish giddy visions of a new techno-utopia in which increased connectivity yields instant democratization and prosperity. The corporate and bureaucratic giants will be felled and the crowds coronated, each of us wearing our own 3D-printed crown. There are also those who have seen this all before. Things aren’t really changing that much, they say. Twitter supposedly toppled a dictator in Egypt, but another simply popped up in his place. We gush over the latest sharing-economy start-up, but the most powerful companies and people seem only to get more powerful.

Both views are wrong. They confine us to a narrow debate about technology in which either everything is changing or nothing is. In reality, a much more interesting and complex transformation is just beginning, one driven by a growing tension between two distinct forces: old power and new power.

Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.

New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

The battle and the balancing between old and new power will be a defining feature of society and business in the coming years. In this article, we lay out a simple framework for understanding the underlying dynamics at work and how power is really shifting: who has it, how it is distributed, and where it is heading.

by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, Harvard Business Review |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Forty Years Young: Hello Kitty and the Power of Cute

It's 15 minutes before the doors will open at the very first Hello Kitty convention in downtown Los Angeles, and thousands of people are lined up to get in. Some have been there since three in the morning, and most are decked out in some sort of Hello Kitty gear, whether it be full-on cosplay or a favorite T-shirt.

There's just somuch. So much to look at, so much to do, so much to buy.Kitty Con, like the Hello Kitty brand itself, is a lot to take in. There's just so much. So much to look at, so much to do, so much to buy. You can have Hello Kitty nail art done by Sanrio's resident nail artist, Masako Kojima, while you eat a bow-adorned donut from the Hello Kitty Cafe truck and a complimentary Hello Kitty Yoplait yogurt in Friendship Berry. You can revive your phone at a glowing Hello Kitty charging station, take out cash at a Hello Kitty-wrapped ATM, and wash your hands with Hello Kitty soap in the bathrooms. (Rumor has it there was also Hello Kitty toilet paper in the stalls, but that was all used—or stashed in the plastic Hello Kitty backpacks that came with admission—by the end of the first morning.)

You can get free Hello Kitty tattoos, both temporary and very permanent ("Hug Life" in ornate script is a personal favorite), and you can spend gobs of money on merch like Hello Kitty Spam musubi kits and Beats by Dre headphones, all charged on a Hello Kitty credit card that you can sign up for at a kiosk some 20 feet away. You can get schooled in the art of Hello Kitty flower arranging, cookie decorating, and scrapbooking. You can play Hello Kitty Wheel of Fortune and take part in a Hello Kitty cosplay contest. You can Instagram yourself in any number of Hello Kitty-themed tableaux. You can even meet Hello Kitty herself, dressed up in one of her myriad outfits whipped up expressly for the occasion.(...)

Hello Kitty was birthed in 1974, not quite girl, not quite cat, but rather gijinka—an anthropomorphization. It was anthropologist Christine Yano who caused the internet to explode this summer with her declaration to the Los Angeles Times that "Hello Kitty is not a cat" in promotion of the Japanese American National Museum exhibit she curated to coincide with Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary.

Let's clear something up, before we get in too deep: Technically, sure, Hello Kitty is not a cat—she's a character, not an actual animal. But she's a character in the form of a cat, the semantics of which were lost in translation and generated a collective freak-out. She's not a cat, but she's not not a cat, and that's something we're going to have to be okay with. (...)

The core of Hello Kitty's near-universal appeal comes from her impeccable simplicity: two eyes, six whiskers, a nose, and a bow, all on a pleasingly round face. "I really look at her as the most perfect of our designs," notes Sanrio art director Dan Peters. "Her basic shape is really appealing. She's huggable, and there are no sharp edges to her. I think everybody can relate to that and be like, 'Oh my gosh, she is just so cute.' She's a simple, perfectly drawn character, and it's very difficult to find that."

The result is a "Zen-like countenance," as Dave Marchi calls it. Marchi has been at Sanrio for nearly 15 years (this is a company that truly retains its employees) and is currently its senior director of brand management and marketing.

"People look at her and feel this love or whatever it is they feel, which is also described as this element of kawaii, a very particular Japanese form of cuteness," he says. "But to call it cuteness is just not enough—it goes beyond that. It's a feeling that you get from looking at Hello Kitty that's almost like being in love. It's this insatiable hunger."

"To call it cuteness is just not enough—it goes beyond that. It's this insatiable hunger."For Hello Kitty, as per the JANM exhibit, "kawaii can be taken as a relational term, swaddled in emotions of attachment that draw people to an object." It should come as no surprise that girl culture is at the very heart of kawaii, though you most certainly don't have to be a girl to take comfort in Kitty. "So CUTE!" is a common refrain at Kitty Con, from men and women alike.

by Julia Rubin, Racked |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth Daniels

Obsessed With Baby Names

Writers are largely preoccupied with words, rolling them around like unpolished rocks in our minds and on the page until smooth, glistening sentences emerge. For some, it can take a painstaking amount of time to determine whether the leaves on a tree are evergreen or olive-hued. My low point arrived when I had a heated internal debate over whether or not a tapenade could be “slathered.”

Despite being control-freak wordsmiths, though, we have almost no control over the most important word in our lives: our name. There’s no mental ping-pong over what we’d like to be called happening in utero, no roundtable discussion with fellow crying newborns in the nursery about whether we should be called “Arthur” or “Arlo.”

I’ve been deeply fascinated with names since I was a child—their cadence and candor, how they flit off of the tongue—and how powerful they can be. My childhood stories hammered out on a chunky Royal typewriter were filled with elaborately noir-named female detectives (Thora Marigold Dell) and anthropomorphic unicorns with Victorian surnames (Cornelius Thurston Vandenberg). A pair of Norwegian Elkhounds I raised as a child were christened with long, rambling pedigree names (Sophia Amalie Adelheide and Kristian Thor Gunnar) more befitting a royal toddler than a fuzzy sidekick.

Such a quirky interest isn’t something that’s easy to chatter about at slumber parties or sock hops, and certainly wasn’t a way to make my fellow middle schoolers think I was less of an odd duck. Fortunately, I found a name-loving tribe in the wilds of the Internet: baby name message boards.

My message board home base, Nameberry, is full of name enthusiasts actively discussing the way that names flow together—mostly in preparation for their own child. There are several moderators who serve as elders, calling back trends from decades prior and making lofty recommendations with the help of regulars concerned with syllables, consonant sounds, and how to blend a poster’s family heritage with personal naming taste. Among others, there are message boards for naming boys, girls, pets, and characters in a novel. There’s an entire vernacular to learn in order to be able to use the forums effectively: “Berries” are users, “sibsets” look at how sibling names work together, and “teenberries” are a cluster of teenage-name lovers. It’s not unusual to witness an intense discussion about whether “Daphne Jane” or “Daphne June” has a better aural flow.

What I love most about these baby names websites, and the message boards therein, is that they’re places of eternal optimism about the future. There’s nothing but pure, radiating excitement about the days lying ahead and unabashed hopefulness for new life. When situations feel grim or the world feels dire, it’s easy to swaddle myself in a community that’s not only thinking long and hard about words, but words that will name people and things that will inhabit a brighter tomorrow. A soon-to-be named Clara might be a future Supreme Court Justice, an Ezra could help craft an international peace treaty. In many ways, those name choices will have helped them to reach those lofty goals.

by Sarah Baird, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Tamaki Sono/The Atlantic

Yuji Moriguchi
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Turntable Room
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