Mystery Humans

Updated genome sequences from two extinct relatives of modern humans suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.

The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in London. The results suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet-unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

The first published Neanderthal and Denisovan genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups bred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today. (...)

The Denisovan genome indicates that the population got around: Reich said at the meeting that as well as interbreeding with the ancestors of Oceanians, they also bred with Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans in China and other parts of East Asia. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.

by Ewen Callaway, Nature |  Read more:

Image: Ria Novosti/SPL

James Brown

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How He and His Cronies Stole Russia

For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze the attempts at privatization, discuss the ebb and flow of political parties and the growth and decline of an independent media.

Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better, we didn’t have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn’t follow our advice, the public was apathetic, President Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Sometimes we hope that reforms will return, as many believed they might during the short reign of President Dmitry Medvedev.

Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if it made no difference which mistakes were made, which privatization plans were sidetracked, which piece of advice was not followed? What if “reform” was never the most important story of the past twenty years in Russia at all?

Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy is not the first book to ask this question. (...) In her introduction, Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:

Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.

In other words, the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism. Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.

That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we’ve long known for a long time, of course. In her book Sale of the Century (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite wanted everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.

Dawisha takes Freeland’s realization one step further. She is arguing, in effect, that even before those nefarious rules were written, the system had already been rigged to favor particular people and interest groups. No “even playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by—or stolen from—the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.

by Anne Applebaum, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Yuri Maltsev/Reuters

Why “BoJack Horseman” is Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen

[ed. This is indeed a very bizarre show. And funny.]

It’s hard to explain “BoJack Horseman.” It’s an animated show about a guy, who is also a horse, who is also a washed-up sitcom actor who makes poor personal and professional decisions. His ex-girlfriend and agent is a cat lady. Not a lady who has cats; a lady who is a cat. The editor who wants to publish his memoirs is a penguin. (Naturally, he works for Penguin.) In the title sequence, BoJack sleepwalks through various scenes of D-list celebrity with a dazed, absent look on his face; in one of the last moments, he sinks underwater without struggling, evoking “The Graduate’s” Benjamin Braddock on his horsey face.

“BoJack Horseman” is a show that tries for many things: raunchy comedy that engages with the disaffection of the bored and wealthy; the pathos of being old and forgotten in a culture that constantly rewards the new; and the bizarre, unremarked-upon reality of a Hollywood populated by animal-people and people-people. (Princess Carolyn, BoJack’s agent, energetically claws at a huge scratching post when she goes to the gym.)

It’s more weird than entertaining, at least at first. But sticking with the curiosity long enough reaps surprising rewards. BoJack’s story starts as an animated comedy about an asshole — in the vein of “Family Guy” — and turns into a time-jumping drama about an asshole in the process of painfully acknowledging that he is, well, an asshole — à la “Mad Men.” BoJack Horseman does the difficult work of transforming from something like Peter Griffin to something like Don Draper in 12 half-hour episodes. (...)

And most crucially: “BoJack Horseman” is a strange creation, one that could not have existed just five years ago, one that feels avant-garde even now. This wanton combining of genres, borrowing of styles, and moneyed experimentation with expensive celebrity guests would be nearly impossible to sell to any major network except maybe HBO (which did something like this with “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). All the more surprising considering that “BoJack Horseman” is not a program from a veteran showrunner of a beloved sitcom, like Larry David, or a wealthy scion of a Hollywood family, like any number of the Coppola kids’ projects. The show is instead the brainchild of a novice showrunner, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and the distinctive visual style of production designer Lisa Hanawalt, also a newcomer to television. The show is a pastiche of styles that borrows from the dark, surreal comedy of Adult Swim shows and the family drama of “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Simpsons,” but it also has the demonstrated freedom to use two back-to-back episodes to tell the same story from different perspectives, as it does with “Say Anything” and “The Telescope.” It isn’t afraid to end things on, as it describes, “A Downer Ending,” as it does in the penultimate episode of the season. And it’s willing to tell the convoluted story of BoJack stealing the “D” from the Hollywood sign and then pinning it on his rival Mr. Peanutbutter and then starring in the film adaptation of the real event, but not playing himself, playing Mr. Peanutbutter, all while Mr. Peanutbutter is preparing to marry Diane, BoJack’s ghostwriter, whom they both are in love with. (It is more than a little confusing, and revels in its silly complexity.)

Zach Sharf at Indiewire made the case that “BoJack Horseman” is the most Netflix-friendly of the studio’s current originals, arguing that like Season 4 of “Arrested Development,” “BoJack Horseman” “has made the streaming service’s binge-watching platform vital to experiencing the show as a whole.” What strikes me about “BoJack Horseman” is that it’s a show that demonstrates not just what Netflix can do well, comedically, but also how much the mold for animated shows can be further broken. “BoJack Horseman” is so much weirder than I thought a show could get while still being fun and moving; I wouldn’t have known that if Netflix hadn’t thrown money at this particular (and likely quite expensive) project.

by Sonia Saraiya, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

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Paige Jiyoung Moon
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Not Dead Yet: How Some Video Stores are Thriving in the Age of Netflix

[ed. Not so fast. See also: Nine years working at one of the last Indie video stores in America.]

That the number of video stores around the world is on the decline isn’t exactly breaking news. For the past decade, a range of options—DVD-by-mail, video on demand, standalone rental boxes, and online streaming among them—have posed major challenges to the viability of video stores, rendering the phrase itself an anachronism. But just because Blockbuster couldn’t keep its iconic blue awnings hanging doesn’t mean there aren’t some intrepid entrepreneurs (and diehard cinephiles) taking a cue from their digital counterparts and finding ways to not just survive in the age of Netflix, but thrive.

Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012.

While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” Part of that is location: Video Free Brooklyn resides on Smith Street, a main thoroughfare of the borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which means steady walk-in traffic. And once people find it, they tend to come back. “The neighborhood tends to be more educated and media-savvy,” Hillis says, “which translates to more discerning tastes.”

Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.” (...)

Fisher admits that the convenience and on-demand nature of digital entertainment always will pose a challenge to physical retail outlets, but believes the issue goes beyond the idea of instant gratification. “There is room for all these things,” he says, “but it’s dangerous if people reach the mindset of, ‘If it’s not on Netflix it’s not worth watching.’ Because the selection is so small. It’s the same with cable television and on-demand services—even if you subscribe to all of these different avenues, you’re missing out.”

It’s not that streaming platforms aren’t being curated—it’s who’s doing the curating. “What’s passively happening, whether people realize it or not, is that corporations are deciding what we should watch,” adds Barr. “The thing that made VHS catch on in the ’80s was this great sense of emancipation; prior to that, the only way you were seeing a movie was just by going to a theater. With streaming we are regressing a little bit, because once again the sacrifice we are making in order to have the ease of streaming is that we are putting that decision-making process in the hands of Netflix, Amazon, or whatever service.” And more often than not, those decisions are financially motivated—which is fine for the company’s coffers, but can also lead to that all-too-familiar fatigue that comes with scrolling past endless straight-to-video schlock and movies you’ve already seen but keep getting recommendations for.

by Jennifer M. Wood, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Scarecrow Video

Digital Cosmopolitans

The early 1980s weren’t especially kind to Paul Simon. He ushered in the second decade of his post–Simon & Garfunkel life with One Trick Pony, a forgettable companion album to a forgettable film starring his former musical partner, Art Garfunkel. When a 1981 reunion concert with Garfunkel brought 500,000 people to New York’s Central Park, and sold over two million albums in the United States, the two began touring together. But “creative differences” brought the arrangement to a premature end, and a planned Simon & Garfunkel album became a Simon solo release, Hearts and Bones, that was the lowest-charting of his career. With the breakup of his marriage to the actress Carrie Fisher, “I had a personal blow, a career setback and the combination of the two put me into a tailspin,” Simon told his biographer Marc Eliot.

During this dark period, Simon was mentoring a young Norwegian songwriter, Heidi Berg. Berg gave Simon a cassette of mbaqanga music featuring musicians from Soweto, then the most notorious blacks-only township in apartheid South Africa. While the identity of the album Simon heard is uncertain, it likely featured the Boyoyo Boys, a popular Sowetan band, and listening to the cassette in his car, Simon began writing new melody lines and lyrics on top of the sax, guitar, bass, and drums of their existing tracks.

“What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make a record of that song. And if I couldn’t find the right musicians or I couldn’t find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good song and a kind of mediocre record,” Simon told Billboard magazine’s Timothy White. “I set out to make really good tracks, and then I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.’”

In the hopes of working this new way, Simon appealed to his record company, Warner Bros., to set up a recording session with the Boyoyo Boys. In 1985, that was far from an easy task. Since 1961, the British Musicians Union had maintained a cultural boycott of South Africa, managed by the UN Center against Apartheid. The boycott was designed to prevent musicians from performing at South African venues like Sun City, a hotel and casino located in the nominally independent bantustan of Bophuthatswana, an easy drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. But the boycott covered all aspects of collaborations with South African musicians, and Simon was warned that he might face censure for working in South Africa.

When Simon turned to Warner Bros. for help, the company called Hilton Rosenthal. Then managing an independent record label in South Africa, Rosenthal had in the past worked with Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, the two musicians who became the heart of Juluku, a racially integrated band that electrified traditional Zulu music and brought it to a global audience. Rosenthal’s label had partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute Juluku’s records in the United States, so Warner executives knew he could help Simon navigate a relationship with South African musicians.

As a white South African who’d recorded a highly political, racially integrated band in apartheid Johannesburg, Rosenthal was aware of some of the difficulties Simon might face in recording with Sowetan musicians. He assured Simon that they would find a way to work together and sent him a pile of twenty South African records, both mbaqanga acts and choral groups including Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Then he arranged a meeting with his friend and producer Koloi Lebona, who set up a meeting with the black musicians’ union, to discuss whether members should record with Simon. (...)

The sessions that Rosenthal and Lebona organized led to Graceland, one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. It won Grammy awards in 1986 and 1987, topped many critics’ charts and regularly features on “top 100 albums of all time” lists. It also made a great deal of money for Simon and the musicians he worked with, selling over sixteen million copies. South African songwriters share credits and royalties with Simon on half of the album’s tracks, and Simon paid session musicians three times the US pay scale for studio musicians. Many involved with the project, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, drummer Isaac Mtshali, and guitarist Ray Phiri went on to successful international music careers.

At its best, Graceland sounds as if Simon is encountering forces too large for him to understand or control. He’s riding on top of them, offering free-form reflections on a world that’s vastly more complicated and colorful than the narrow places he and Art Garfunkel explored in their close harmonies. The days of miracle and wonder Simon conjures up in “The Boy in the Bubble” are an excellent metaphor for anyone confronting our strange, connected world.

Collaborations like Graceland don’t happen without the participation of two important types of people: xenophiles and bridge figures. Xenophiles, lovers of the unfamiliar, are people who find inspiration and creative energy in the vast diversity of the world. They move beyond an initial fascination with a cultural artifact to make lasting and meaningful connections with the people who produced the artifact. Xenophiles aren’t just samplers or bricoleurs who put scraps to new use; they take seriously both forks of Kwame Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitans: they recognize the value of other cultures, and they honor obligations to people outside their own tribe, particularly the people they are influenced and shaped by. Simon distinguishes himself from McLaren by engaging with South African musicians as people and by becoming an advocate and promoter of their music.

Unlike xenophiles, outsiders who seek inspiration from other cultures, bridge figures straddle the borders between cultures, figuratively keeping one foot in each world. Hilton Rosenthal was able to broker a working relationship between a white American songwriter and dozens of black South African musicians during some of the most violent and tense moments of the struggle against apartheid. As a bridge, Rosenthal was an interpreter between cultures and an individual both groups could trust and identify with, an internationally recognized record producer who was also a relentless promoter of South Africa’s cultural richness. Rosenthal, in turn, credits Koloi Lebona with building the key bridges between black musicians and the South African recording community. (...)

What happens when people encounter another culture for the first time? Will we find a bridge figure to help us navigate these encounters? How often do we embrace the unfamiliar as xenophiles, and how often do we recoil and “hunker down,” as Robert Putnam observes?

It’s a question as old as the Odyssey, where Odysseus’s encounters with people of other lands remind readers that his name, in Greek, means “he who causes pain or makes others angry.” For all the kindly Phaeacians who sail Odysseus back to Ithaca, there are Cyclopes who eat men and destroy ships. When we encounter new cultures, should we expect cooperation or conflict? The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart consider this ancient question through the lens of media. In their book Cosmopolitan Communications, they look at what happens when people encounter different cultures through television, film, the Internet, and other media.

by Ethan Zuckerman, Salon | Read more:
Image: Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell (Credit: AP/Luiz Ribeiro/Hachette Book Group)

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Hanafuda
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Crazymeds

Crazymeds.us is an excellent and highly informative site which I will never recommend to my patients.

It’s excellent because it gives mostly accurate and readable descriptions of the costs and benefits of every psychiatric medication. It has a laser-like focus on what patients will actually want to know and was clearly written by someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of every treatment’s strengths and potential pitfalls.

This is important because the standard psychiatric response to someone who wants to know about a medication (when it’s not “shut up and trust me”) is to print out an information sheet from somewhere like drugs.com or webmd.com. These sites at worst just copy paste the FDA drug information sheet, and at best list off side effects in a rote and irrelevant way that only a robot could love. (...)

Everything crazymeds.us does is (...) Well-written, funny, mostly accurate (with the occasional mistake but no more than you’d expect from an individual effort), and precisely targeted to what patients really need to know.

And I still don’t recommend it to my patients, and probably never will. Why not?

Well, for one thing, it’s called crazymeds.us.

Most psychiatric patients have no problem with the word “crazy”. Either they don’t think of themselves as crazy, or they jokingly call themselves crazy and are happy to let other people in on the joke, or they self-identify as crazy as matter-of-factly as they’ll tell you the time of day, or they just don’t care.

But some psychiatric patients care about it a lot. Either they’re moderately neurotic people who are scared that if they accept psychiatric help with their mild depression it puts them in a category of “total lunatic” from which they will never escape, or they’re social justice types who are watching like hawks for any sign that their psychiatrist is a privileged ableist oppressor trying to use slurs to trivialize their concerns and victim-blame them for their problems.

I can usually tell which category a given person is in pretty quickly, but the chance of accidentally slipping up and recommending to someone from the second category a site called crazymeds.us is too horrible to contemplate.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Crazymeds

After Normal

Last February, Zelda was born in the middle of a snow storm. Even though I had a C-section and Zelda was born a little early, we were happily shipped home just thirty six hours later. Mom (that’s me now, it turns out) was doing great and Zelda was a trooper.

In hindsight, I might have chosen to hang about in the hospital as long as my insurance would cover—which I think was about five days—but, in the haze and the happiness of a healthy birth, when the doctor says, “You’re doing great, up and walking all over the place! Would you be happier at home?” you don’t consider the nurses who pop in every hour to ask you if you want water or food, or to re-swaddle your baby because you have no idea how to do that yet. You don’t think about the fact that you push a button every time the baby cries because OF COURSE you don’t know what she wants; you don’t think about the fact that when she is feeding at your breast it’s very helpful to have a nurse peer over and say, “Yes, that’s right,” or, “No, honey, that’s your elbow she is sucking on.” You only think of returning home to some semblance of normalcy. No one tells you that normal is over; it’s gone, poof.

When we took a tour of our hospital about two months before Z was born, Josh and I saw a couple—yes, they walk you through a working hospital!—getting off the elevator. They looked maniacal, giggling as they rolled off the lift, dad with a little car seat in hand. And in that car seat was the tiniest thing, a slip of a babe. I don’t know if it was sleeping or just being a newborn, but we talked about it then: “They look like they’re stealing it!” They seemed so happy and full of possibility. Tears welled up in my eyes. They knew everyone was beaming at them, all the pregnant ladies in a row waiting to get on the elevator, to ride up to see where their own babies would be born. They didn’t know what awaited at “home.”

They set us free at about 5PM on a Thursday. We loaded her into her carseat in the hospital room, squishing little rolled up blankets around her because she was so small she needed the padding. We put her in the car and my brother-in-law drove us home, through the crazy Manhattan traffic to Brooklyn. We we were home. And alone.

by Laura June, The Awl |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dan Wynn
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Jamaica Flowers by Mariano Peccinetti Collage Art on Flickr.
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The Identity Crisis Under the Ink

Some weeks ago, during a bleary-eyed subway ride to work, I found myself staring at a young woman on the other side of the car. She wore business attire with a North Face jacket and flip-flops, and she had an infinity symbol tattooed along the outside of her left foot, only a portion of the loop had been left out to make room for the word Love. Next to her, a scruffy guy in t-shirt and jeans had ornate black and gray murals inked on each arm, one of which seemed to depict an alien fight scene, the other some sort of robot love story. To his left, squeezed in at the end of the bench, was a man thumbing his phone with quick, nervous jabs. When he turned his hand over, I saw the word Jasmine tattooed above his knuckles and a date printed beneath it.

Then there was me, a blank canvas, wondering if I was missing something. Each inked-up person on the train appeared to be in the same age group—Millennials, to use the much-maligned descriptor. Being of the same generation, presumably we all post to social media on a regular basis, through profiles and accounts that compel us to confront the question, Who are you? For some, that choice is liberating: It’s a chance to start from scratch. For others, the sheer volume of options can be paralyzing. In either case, modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.

Growing up in a rapidly changing and challenging world, most young people have struggled at some point or another with figuring out who they might be. Tattoos, recent research suggests, don’t just express identity: They help define it. Modernity compels us to declare our identity with conviction, whether we’ve found it yet or not.

Although tattoos have been around for millennia, they’re more popular now than ever. In 1960, there were approximately 500 professional tattoo artists operating in the United States. By 1995, that number had risen to over 10,000. Nearly 20 years later, demand continues to surge, and by the latest estimates, roughly 20 percent of Americans have a tattoo. What’s more, 40 percent of the people in that group are Millennials, which some academics argue isn’t a coincidence.

“We’re living in this world that’s so fragmented and so chaotic,” says Anne Velliquette, a professor at the University of Arkansas who studies the relationship between consumer behavior and popular culture. Velliquette argues that we’re more able now than ever before to “recreate identities very easily,” both online and in real life.

In 1998, Velliquette and colleagues conducted an interview-based study that found people use tattoos as a way to cement aspects of their current selves. “We were hoping to look at the postmodern identity, and really what we found is that we were in this modern era where people did know who they were,” she said. “They had a sense of their core self.” Eight years later, the team revisited the idea. The second study, like the first, found that people used tattoos as a means to express their past and present selves. But the people interviewed in the second group also seemed to need proof that their identities existed at all. They relied on tattoos as a way to establish some understanding of who they actually were.

“We continue to be struck by rapid and unpredictable change,” study co-author Jeff Murray said at the time. “The result is a loss of personal anchors needed for identity. We found that tattoos provide this anchor. Their popularity reflects a need for stability, predictability, permanence.”

For people who study identity, this permanence is key. We define who we are by the elements that stick with us—people, stories, places, memories—and we measure ourselves in relation to them, patching the highlights together into what sociologists call a “personal myth.” These myths make sense of often-turbulent lives, integrating our “remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future,” as Velliquette wrote in her 2006 report. Some people use institutions such as religion, work, and family to create this myth. Others use material objects like houses and cars to define it. But Millennials are something of a breed apart. Without access to many of the anchors their parents had to create their personal myths, that sense of stability and permanence is often harder to find.

People rarely get just one tattoo. About half of the inked-up population has between two and five, and 18 percent have six or more. In other words, tattoos aren’t just snapshots. They’re part of the ongoing narrative of the personal myth. Unlike material objects, part of what makes them so meaningful is the degree of sacrifice involved in the process. A tattoo’s acquisition “involves a painful ritual that may take hours,” Velliquette writes, and in fact “becomes a part of the object, since the experience adds meaning and becomes embodied in the tattoo.” And unlike trucks or apartments, which get manufactured en masse, “every tattoo is unique from the beginning.” People age with their tattoos and can chart the timeline of their personal myth from start to finish, just by running a finger over their skin.

by Chris Weller, The Atlantic |  Read more:

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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s—AAAACK!

I’m dreaming of a drone Christmas. Tiny drones tucked into stockings. Bigger drones beneath the tree. A drone for Dad, another for Junior, a third for your cool tween niece.

Anecdotal reports suggest that drones are topping Christmas lists all over. Why are holiday shoppers so excited? 1) These newer-model aircraft are meant to be far easier to fly than their predecessors. 2) They have cameras, allowing for all manner of creative (or mischievous) projects. 3) Folks just seem to be jazzed ever since we started calling these things “drones.” (...)

One of the leading consumer drone brands is DJI, and its Phantom drones are hugely popular, so I tried one of these first. When the DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Quadcopter arrived, I pulled it from its box, screwed on its propellers (as though I were assembling a very small piece of Ikea furniture), and folded open its one-page “Quick Start Guide.” The steps looked straightforward. Thinking I’d run a casual, preliminary experiment—maybe send the thing 10 feet in the air and then immediately land it—I walked to a softball field around the corner from Slate’s New York office. After switching on the remote control and the drone itself, I calibrated the drone’s compass as the guide instructed. All systems go. I fired up its four propellers.

Now, before I characterize what happened next, I’d like to issue a disclaimer: I am mostly not an idiot, but sometimes it is useful—in my guise as a tech columnist—when I act like one. Why? Because most of us act like idiots at one time or another. We are harried, and distracted, and it’s Christmas morning and our kid wants to fly her drone RIGHT NOW. So we glance at the Quick Start Guide and think, Hey, looks easy, and thusly we wade into a minor catastrophe.

Anyway, here’s what happened. The drone lifted off the ground and, despite all my efforts to control it, ascended to a height of 20 feet before veering straight into the chain-link fence at the edge of the field and wedging itself deeply therein. I had to climb up the fence to retrieve it. It was stuck good.

Perhaps a wiser person would have paused at this point. I did not. Undeterred, I again followed the steps in the Quick Start Guide—calibrating, starting the propellers, nudging the drone into the air with the joystick. The events that followed are seared into my brain like freeze frames from a car accident. The drone zoomed to a height of 50 feet or so, far above the top of that tall chain-link fence I’d been counting on to limit potential damage. The airborne monster did not respond to my frantic jiggling of the joystick, or to my plaintive cries of “Come back!” Instead it rose and rose—and then suddenly rocketed sidewise at alarming velocity. I watched in terror as it flew across a busy street and crashed into the third story of a tall building. It tumbled to the sidewalk with a clatter of broken, scattering plastic.

A very nice woman stood by the wreckage to safeguard it for me as I ran across the street to inspect the wounded drone. Its camera was sheared clean off. Its propellers had snapped. Its battery pack had flown loose and been badly dented. It was pure luck that nobody got hurt. I felt immensely guilty and unspeakably stupid. I genuinely hoped that no witnesses would report me to the cops.

“The most dangerous thing in that box is the Quick Start Guide,” says Peter Sachs, a drone advocate and the founder of the Drone Law Journal. “There should be no such thing. Your experience isn’t surprising—learning from just the Quick Start Guide is inevitably going to result in a crash.” Sachs says any new drone owner should be sure to study basic aeronautics and meteorology, and should initially operate only under the tutelage of an experienced drone pilot in a designated recreational airspace. I did none of that, and, yes, shame on me. At the same time, I’ve a strong hunch my desultory approach will be replicated again and again, in the days following Christmas, by excited drone newbies all over the country. People very rarely choose to study aeronautics when they can look at a Quick Start Guide. We are impatient. We do dumb stuff.

Which—given that these things weigh as much as a steam iron, soar through the skies at 30 mph, and have whirring propellers just hankering to slice through somebody’s cornea—suggests that maybe there ought to be some regulations out there to protect us from ourselves. Can you just fly a drone anywhere? Like, say, smack in the middle of a crowded city? Without any kind of permit?

by Seth Stevenson, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Robert Neubecker

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