The Drug Technology Boom

Cannabis is joining the coca leaf in the ranks of drugs improved by technology.

Concentrates are made from the entire plant, while the smokable flower is only a part. To sell flowers, plants must be cut, trimmed, and dried. The process takes weeks and a lot of manpower. For refined product, the entire plant can be processed without having to wait. Solvents turn live plants into BHO (butane hash oil) on the spot. Those who produce concentrates have a sellable product within 24 hours, where it would take weeks to properly prepare buds.

Dabs are refined marijuana with highly concentrated doses of THC, which explains why, when I tried it, I could feel my thoughts. About 50 percent of the marijuana flower is vegetative plant matter and weeded out in clarification. What’s left are the cannabinoids and terpenes (the good stuff with the medical applications and flavor).

Marijuana is oil- and fat-soluble, which is why edibles (like brownies) work. When the flowers are simmered in butter, the butter takes on the intoxicating components of the plant, which can be then be strained out; boiling it in water would just get it hot and wet. Once ingested (however they’re ingested) and absorbed into the bloodstream, fat-soluble drugs collect in fatty tissue like the brain.

Whether a substance is fat- or water-soluble depends on polarity. Fat-soluble materials are nonpolar, meaning they lack electrical charge. Nonpolar molecules are held together by covalent bonds, in which electrons are shared between connected atoms. Because it’s fat-soluble, concentrates are made with oil-based solvents (often butane) to suspend the cannabinoids. This separates the essential oils from the plant matter.

For those of us who weren’t in AP Chemistry, a solvent is a material that dissolves another, chemically different material (the solute). There are water-based solvent-extraction techniques, but they are less popular.

“Blasting” (extracting concentrated THC from the plant) is complicated, dangerous, and easy to find on YouTube.

The solvent is introduced to the solute (dank, loud, nugs, and other stupid names), resulting in a yellow liquid, as long as ventilation has been good enough to prevent suffocation by fire.

The product of the last chemical reaction becomes the reactant in the next one. The liquid is heated to evaporate the remaining harsh chemicals until it resembles delicious crème brûlée. The material is then moved into a vacuum chamber where the pump bubbles and fluffs it some more. (The strict need for a vacuum chamber is a point of some Reddit dispute, but it remains the favored process.)

When the fluff looks like gooey home insulation, it returns to the heat source to take its final form. Once isolated, the beneficial compounds can take a variety of structures. A few variables determine the consistency, but temperature is the big one.

“Shatter,” as it’s referred to in this state, looks like the meth seen in Breaking Bad, but yellow. It’s solid yet fragile and breaks apart easily. Shatter is subjected to an additional process to extract the lipids, fats, waxes, and terpenes. It’s the purest of the refined products. Good shatter can reach over 80 percent THC.

“Wax” looks like a mother extracted it from a 14-year-old boy’s ear. It still has the terpenes, which makes it more flavorful but less potent than shatter—usually 70 to 80 percent. Of the three most popular concentrates, it’s definitely the one I’d most like to get under a microscope.

“Honey oil” looks a bit like shatter and feels a lot like maple syrup. It’s the least refined and most flavorful of the three. (...)

Since concentrates are better vaped than smoked, their growing popularity is changing the apparatuses used to consume them. The first vaporizer I ever used was a direct-inhale box. If you tried to get someone stoned with that today, they’d laugh at you. They were analog, complicated, and hard to use. I never once felt that I got stoned, and oh lord did I try. (...)

The two technologies are evolving alongside one another. Since that pioneering stoner first invented the apple pipe, potheads have been seeking to optimize consumption.

“Some people lack the skills to become accomplished stoners,” Greene laughed. “If you hold the lighter the wrong way, you burn your thumb; everyone can push a button.”

I don’t know if I agree. Ritual is part of addiction. Don’t get me wrong: I think pot is great and everyone should get stoned, but I am, without a doubt, addicted. My dad hasn’t smoked since the ’80s, but he still prides himself on rolling great joints (and put to the test, he will). Similarly, I get a rush out of tearing open a new bag of Agent Orange (or Green Crack or another unfortunately named strain), ripping apart the bud, and packing the bowl. The texture of flowers crumbling between my fingers is an intoxicating part of the experience.

With my vape, I’m beginning to appreciate a new set of rituals. I play with the temperature settings, pack the oven with a particular gold pencil, and meticulously scrape the lid clean. These aren’t the same rituals that make me feel like I’m in my childhood bathroom blowing smoke into the ass end of a fan while listening to Belle and Sebastian’s Tigermilk, but there’s magic in the new as well.

by Cece Lederer, The Kernel | Read more:
Images: Imgur, Andres Rodriguez/Flickr (CC BY 2.0), Vjiced/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Television

[ed. Full album here.]

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The Glacier Priest

[ed. Amazing how everything looks much the same. The Wikipedia entry doesn't mention it, but I assume the Hubbard Glacier was named after the Rev. Bernard Hubbard, remembered by Newsweek after he died as: "the Glacier Priest, a tireless Jesuit who led 32 expeditions to Alaska and once listed the requisites of an explorer as "a strong back, a strong stomach, a dumb head, and a guardian angel."]

Winter Forever

The New York Times has something to say about the season:

Long stretches of painfully frigid weather, brief respites, then more snow, ice and freezing rain. Freeze, thaw, repeat — the cycle expands in the mind to unbearable infinities, the unyielding sensation of being trapped. But check the calendar: This week means we are officially in late February, which means March. March means daffodils, which means this all must eventually end.

It’s a nice thought, but I am here to tell you that, like all hope, this optimism is deeply misplaced. Sure, the calendar will change. The birds will sing again. The scent of fresh urine will alight on the nose as you wander the streets. Perhaps it will even once more grow so warm that we shall shed the heavy layers of clothing with which we bundle ourselves before each undertaking outdoors. But mark my words: What you’ve seen this winter and the winter before can never be erased. There is no return from such raw horror. However hard the sun shines down on you in future days you will always carry this winter around in your cold, barren heart. The light that once danced and played behind your eyes has been permanently dimmed and replaced by a mean, dull glare that stares shivers into anything it surveys. If the human race lasts another hundred years each member of the species will carry within its shattered soul a darkness so intense that the all the trees of the fields shall bend their branches away in fear from its frigid malevolence. Winter will never end, nor will you ever rid yourself of it. It is in you, and of you. It is you. There is no turning back, ever. Your stock of sorrows will freeze and, having frozen, crack into a thousand tiny icicles that stab sadness into any spare bit of joy that threatens to melt your bitter, broken spirit. When you walk you carry with you the icy frost of death which, with the wind chill factor, feels like negative five degrees icy frost of death. The only warmth left for you will come when you are lowered for the last time into the ground’s final embrace.

by Alex Balk, The Awl | Read more:
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Donna Summer

[ed. Hey, didn't Lady Gaga kill it at the Oscars last night? Sound of Music covers. Huh. Who would have thought?]

How Pop Made a Revolution

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, Bob Stanley, W.W. Norton, 624 pages

I wish I could say that my love of pop music began when my middle school music teacher showed me a documentary called “The Compleat Beatles.” That would be the socially acceptable, hipster-sanctioned origin story. But truthfully, the affair began a couple years earlier in 1986, when I conspired with some friends to flood our local top 40 station with requests for the song “Rock Me Amadeus.” Dismayed that Falco’s masterwork had slipped in the charts, we resolved to do whatever we could to reverse its fate. This was either true love or something equally intense—a force that could drive a 12-year-old boy to cold-call a radio station and then sit next to the stereo for hours with finger poised over the tape-record button, enduring songs by Mister Mister and Starship, just waiting for that descending synth motif to issue forth from the speakers.

I’m not terribly surprised that “Rock Me Amadeus” receives no mention in Bob Stanley’s new book. While the song embodies the very essence of pop—it is quirky, flamboyant, goofily ambitious, yet so very of its moment—it was ultimately a failed experiment, a novelty hit. (Though, to be fair, it was no less kitschy than The Timelords’ “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” which does receive mention.) I listen to it now and wonder what the hell my 12-year-old self was thinking. But that’s love, right? It rarely makes sense after it has passed. Stanley clearly knows something about the fever dream of the besotted pop fan, and much of his book is written from that headspace.

What a joy it is to find a music writer who didn’t get the rock-critic memo—the one that says you’re supposed to worship at the altar of punk rock, praise Radiohead, and hate the Eagles. Stanley has plenty of nice things to say about the Eagles, the Bee Gees, Hall and Oates, and Abba. Conversely, he has nothing but contempt for The Clash, those self-anointed exemplars of punk rock. “The Clash set out parameters,” he writes, “and then squirmed like politicians when they were caught busting their own manifesto.” (Stanley prefers the more self-aware Sex Pistols.) Radiohead fare even worse; he describes these critical darlings as “dad rock.” Vocalist Thom York sings “as if he was in the fetal position.”

Of Bob Dylan, a figure as close to a saint as we get in the annals of rock lit, Stanley writes: “along with the Stones he sealed the concept of snotty behavior as a lifestyle, snarled at the conventional with his pack of giggling lickspittle dogs, and extended Brando’s ‘What have you got?’ one-liner into a lifelong party of terse putdowns.” For those of us who grew up reading far too many issues of Rolling Stone for our own good, this is bracing tonic indeed.

What gives Stanley the edge over so many other music journalists is the fact that he is a songwriter himself, and a fairly successful one at that: his band Saint Etienne had a string of UK Top 20 hits in the 1990s. It is easier for musicians than for non-musician critics, I believe, to see beyond genre boundaries and appreciate tunefulness wherever it may reside. Stanley, whom I’m pretty sure would rather be known as a “musician who writes” than a “writer who plays music,” takes a more expansive view of the term “pop” than a lot of other writers might do. In his view, pop simply means “popular.” It is not, as is typically imagined, a specific sound—say that of a Britney Spears or Katy Perry. Under Stanley’s definition, Nirvana qualifies as pop. So do Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, and Glen Campbell.

At 624 pages, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! is a doorstop of a book, but Stanley’s enthusiasm for the material keeps the narrative moving briskly. He can get inside a song and describe its magic to outsiders like no one else I have ever come across. Consider the following highlights: Of the “clattering, drum-heavy” mix of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” he writes, “It sounded like jump blues, only with someone dismantling scaffolding in the studio.” On Abba: “No one musician stands out on any of their hits because they don’t sound like anyone played an instrument on them; they all sound like a music box carved from ice.” On the Police: “Singer Sting had a high, mewling voice that, appropriately, sounded a little like the whine of a police siren.” And, as is probably apparent already, Stanley is very effective with the terse putdown. My favorite concerns The Cure—a band that has spawned an entire cottage industry of mopey imitators: “It was all somehow powdery and a little slight,” he writes. “The Cure were more about stubbing your toe than taking your life.” Ouch.

Stanley’s two preoccupations throughout the book are innovation and craft, in that order. He gives a lot of space to sonic pioneers like Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and later the architects of early hip-hop and house music, detailing how each wave of experimentation inevitably made its way into the heart of the mainstream sound, eventually becoming calcified until the next upheaval came along to shake things up.

by Robert Dean Lurie, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image: The Beatles / Wikimedia Commons

War Porn

In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don't get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates. In the meantime, Americans are clearly finding it difficult to remain emotionally roiled up about our confusing wars in Syria and Iraq, the sputtering one in Afghanistan, and various raids, drone attacks, and minor conflicts elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand). American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

There’s Only One War Movie

Wandering around YouTube recently, I stumbled across some good old government-issue propaganda. It was a video clearly meant to stir American emotions and prepare us for a long struggle against a determined, brutal, and barbaric enemy whose way of life is a challenge to the most basic American values. Here's some of what I learned: our enemy is engaged in a crusade against the West; wants to establish a world government and make all of us bow down before it; fights fanatically, beheads prisoners, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of its followers in inhuman suicide attacks. Though its weapons are modern, its thinking and beliefs are 2,000 years out of date and inscrutable to us.

Of course, you knew there was a trick coming, right? This little U.S. government-produced film wasn’t about the militants of the Islamic State. Made by the U.S. Navy in 1943, its subject was “Our Enemy the Japanese.” Substitute “radical Islam” for “emperor worship,” though, and it still makes a certain propagandistic sense. While the basics may be largely the same (us versus them, good versus evil), modern times do demand something slicker than the video equivalent of an old newsreel. The age of the Internet, with its short attention spans and heightened expectations of cheap thrills, calls for a higher class of war porn, but as with that 1943 film, it remains remarkable how familiar what’s being produced remains.

Like propaganda films and sexual pornography, Hollywood movies about America at war have changed remarkably little over the years. Here's the basic formula, from John Wayne in the World War II-era Sands of Iwo Jima to today's American Sniper:

*American soldiers are good, the enemy bad. Nearly every war movie is going to have a scene in which Americans label the enemy as “savages,” “barbarians,” or “bloodthirsty fanatics,” typically following a “sneak attack” or a suicide bombing. Our country’s goal is to liberate; the enemy's, to conquer. Such a framework prepares us to accept things that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster. Racism naturally gets a bye; as they once were “Japs” (not Japanese), they are now “hajjis” and “ragheads” (not Muslims or Iraqis). It’s beyond question that the ends justify just about any means we might use, from the nuclear obliteration of two cities of almost no military significance to the grimmest sort of torture. In this way, the war film long ago became a moral free-fire zone for its American characters.

*American soldiers believe in God and Country, in “something bigger than themselves,” in something “worth dying for,” but without ever becoming blindly attached to it. The enemy, on the other hand, is blindly devoted to a religion, political faith, or dictator, and it goes without saying (though it’s said) that his God -- whether an emperor, Communism, or Allah -- is evil. As one critic put it back in 2007 with just a tad of hyperbole, “In every movie Hollywood makes, every time an Arab utters the word Allah… something blows up.”

*War films spend no significant time on why those savages might be so intent on going after us. The purpose of American killing, however, is nearly always clearly defined. It's to “save American lives,” those over there and those who won’t die because we don't have to fight them over here. Saving such lives explains American war: in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, for example, the main character defuses roadside bombs to make Iraq safer for other American soldiers. In the recent World War II-themed Fury, Brad Pitt similarly mows down ranks of Germans to save his comrades. Even torture is justified, as in Zero Dark Thirty, in the cause of saving our lives from their nightmarish schemes. In American Sniper, shooter Chris Kyle focuses on the many American lives he’s saved by shooting Iraqis; his PTSD is, in fact, caused by his having “failed” to have saved even more. Hey, when an American kills in war, he's the one who suffers the most, not that mutilated kid or his grieving mother -- I got nightmares, man! I still see their faces!

*Our soldiers are human beings with emotionally engaging backstories, sweet gals waiting at home, and promising lives ahead of them that might be cut tragically short by an enemy from the gates of hell. The bad guys lack such backstories. They are anonymous fanatics with neither a past worth mentioning nor a future worth imagining. This is usually pretty blunt stuff. Kyle’s nemesis in American Sniper, for instance, wears all black. Thanks to that, you know he’s an insta-villain without the need for further information. And speaking of lack of a backstory, he improbably appears in the film both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in Sadr City, a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad, apparently so super-bad that his desire to kill Americans overcomes even Iraq's mad sectarianism.

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch |  Read more:

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Underwater Road (Wild West), Brad Hamers on Flickr
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We're All Gonna Die

[ed. As my generation ages I'm beginning to see more articles like this. It's a good sign. The concept of what constitutes a good death needs to be radically redefined. See also: As I Lay Dying.]

I’m writing this after hearing an apparently innocuous and encouraging snippet of news – that a new lung cancer treatment is capable of giving sufferers a possible “extra 200 days” of life. Another morning, another “battle against cancer” fought, and in this case won – sort of.

Yet I find myself rather in sympathy with the one in five Dutch doctors who, it was reported this week, would consider helping someone die even if they had no physical problems but were “tired of living”. Because these doctors have the maturity to face the fact that life has a natural end.

The wearying truth is, there are just so many “battles”, and they appear to be multiplying all the time. A new drug to treat strokes. A breakthrough in the “war” against heart disease. A promising initiative on Alzheimer’s. We are fed, daily, the hopeful news: fatal disease is slowly on the retreat. But there’s always one more, and sooner or later we all lose.

Which brings me back to the news item that got me thinking in the first place. An extra 200 days for lung cancer sufferers. I found myself wondering – what kind of days? Of course, all days may seem worth living when you are faced with your imminent demise. But sometimes the endless quest to extend our days has the smack of futility about it.

For it seems to me that in the constant narratives of “triumphs” over this disease or that illness, we are not engaged so much in a struggle against disease, but death itself. We are only partially rational beings – and at the non-rational level, we believe medicine will save us from our fates.

Of course we all “know” that we are going to die – but that order of knowledge, for most of us, is of the same kind that tells us we are all made of stardust, or that at the core of the atoms in our bodies and brains there is only a void. In other words, our imagination can’t grasp it. It’s just a rumour, in this case a nasty one.

And good job too, you may say. There is an argument that strong denial mechanisms are essential in order to survive our existential plight. The endless jogging and fitness regimes, the constant struggle to find out what “superfood” it is this week that will reduce the chance of this or that threat to our health; even the dangerous sports that convince us that we can outmanoeuvre mortality. Maybe the maintenance of such delusions is the secret of a happy life.

Yet for many the thought won’t quite go away. Thus, we are never quite at peace, because we are always working so hard to keep our eyes from staring at the sun. We immerse ourselves in trivial distractions – shopping, loud music, flashing lights. As the existential psychologist Rollo May observed: “Anxiety about nothing tries to become anxiety about something.” That is to say, anxiety about nothing-ness.

I watch the runners on Hampstead Heath every day puffing and panting – suffering – in order to put off the big event, and while I admire them, I wonder if it isn’t all in vain. As a recent study on cancer at Johns Hopkins University revealed, lifestyle is somewhat overrated as a panacea for extending life. Researchers found that more than two-thirds of cancers are driven by random mistakes in cell division that are completely outside our control. And beyond that, there are genetic predispositions, also outside our control.

Furthermore, only this month it was discovered that 50% of people will get cancer – as opposed to one in three, the previous estimate. So perhaps, rather than being at constant battle stations, we should get used to the idea, especially as a former editor of the BMJ, Richard Smith, said it was probably the best way to go: “Nature taking its course.” All that straining and sweating, all those nasty Lycra outfits, all those dreary stalks of broccoli – they may be there not to help us to prolong our lives so much as safeguard our illusions.

by Tim Lott, The Guardian |  Read more:

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Cold, Dark, and Happy: Alaska Is the New Leader in Well-Being

[ed. As a former Alaskan (35 yrs.) I can see why this survey might be valid. First, there's the awesome beauty of the state, which anyone can experience, even if they live in Anchorage. How much of it they experience depends on the time, money and effort they're willing to expend to get "out there", but it's a young population in general and everyone is pretty active (to keep from going nuts). Second, 'individuality' is celebrated (if not enshrined in the state's constitution) so no one feels like anyone is looking over their shoulder, or that they have to conform to any overiding community values or standards. So there's a lot of room for people to express themselves (and, in the process, find association with other like-minded micro-communities). Finally, Alaskans just like being thought of as "Alaskan". It implies a sort of hardiness and apptitude that you can't find anywhere else*. And yes, there are bears in the backyard and moose on the doorstep, but those things just add to the enjoyment and mystique of being in a place so completely different than anywhere else. The mindset is: the harder it gets, the more invigorated people feel (to get through whatever it is they have to get through). That's really the Alaskan ethos.]

"Alaskans are the best in the nation in terms of exercise," explained Dan Witters, a research director at the polling agency Gallup, in making the case that Alaska is the nation's new bastion of well-being. "Which just goes to show you that you don't need year-round good weather to demonstrate good exercise habits."

Even if I remain unconvinced on that front, the fact that people manage to exercise more in Alaska than people in any other state—somehow—is just one of the many metrics that landed the state the number-one spot in a massive study of health and well-being across America, released this week.

Alaskans also reported the lowest stress levels of any population in the country over the past year, and the state had the lowest rate of diabetes. Maybe most surprisingly, despite the cold and darkness, Alaskans also had the second lowest rate of depression diagnoses in the country.

Witters, who oversaw the 2014 Gallup-Healthways study of 176,702 Americans, seemed to find genuine excitement in the ascension of Alaska—more than once calling it "really neat" and suggesting that it is a model that other states would do well to emulate. Indeed, the state's victory is a realization of longer-term trends, Witters explained, that he has been measuring and observing in Alaska for a while now.

The state has actually been in the top 10 multiple times since the first annual well-being rankings in 2008—Hawaii and Colorado are the only states to have made the top 10 every year—though Alaska has never before been number one. Other rural, colder states seem to score highly in well-being, too: South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Utah all made the top ten.

These rankings have made little news in past years, in part because they are based entirely on self-reported surveys, which scientists are quick to dismiss. (Maybe Alaskans don't actually exercise more; they're just part of a statewide culture of lying about exercising. Maybe they don't have diagnoses of depression because doctors aren't recognizing symptoms, or people don't feel comfortable talking about it in a telesurvey. Et cetera.) But seven years and 2.1 million surveys in, the longitudinal trends seem too substantial to dismiss outright. And if people are lying, Witters concedes, at least they are most likely lying in the same ways regularly. (...)

And in community involvement, Alaska leads the nation, too. There, for example, the survey asks people whether they've received recognition in the last year for helping to improve their community. "That's a tough nut to crack nationally," Witters said. But among Alaskans, 28 percent say they have—which is actually the best rate in the country. They are also, despite (because of?) the bear population, fifth in the country in terms of feeling safe and secure.

"Another really good one that I love about Alaska, within the purpose element, is learning something new and interesting every day," Witters explained, "which is an important psychological need." That metric is a reason that college towns tend to score highly on the well-being index. And there, too, Alaska is number one in the nation, with 72 percent of residents feeling daily intellectual stimulation.

The state is held in stark contrast to the opposite end of the spectrum, the cases of Kentucky and West Virginia. If nothing else, the two states attest to the validity of the ranking system in that there is consistency in its results: The pair has managed to hold down spots 49 and 50 for six consecutive years.

"Kentucky and West Virginia are really in bad shape," said Witters. There diagnoses of depression are perennially among the highest in the nation, as are stress levels and high blood pressure. Nearly a third of West Virginians smoke tobacco, compared to 19 percent of people nationwide.

Behind those disheartening numbers is another particularly important metric: having someone in your life who encourages you to be healthy. There West Virginia also ranks last in the country. "That is a really good leverage point that they could take advantage of, that cultural change of encouraging accountability to one another," said Witters, when I asked them how West Virginia could learn from Alaska. "It's about having someone who has fundamental expectations of you, in how you live your life."

by James Hamblin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Gallup/Healthways

* "In theory it's not impossible to live like that, and of course there are people who do. But nature is actually kind of unnatural, in a way. And relaxation can actually be threatening. It takes experience and preparation to really live with those contradictions."

                                                                     ~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat" - Lily Tomlin.
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Paysage Hivernal, Valerius de Saedeleer. Belgian (1867 - 1942).
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My Own Life

[ed. This has been circulating all over the internet the last week and I'm including here for future reference. It describes a graceful exit from life with a perspective that I hope I'll have when it's my time to go, mostly a feeling of gratitude. I'm reminded of Raymond Carver's epitaph, from his poem Late Fragment]

And did you get what 

you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

---- 

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. (...)

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

by Oliver Sacks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hanna Barczyk

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

[ed. Really loved this book (additional reviews here, here and here). See also: Please Don't Thank Me For My Service. Now Ang Lee has signed on to make it into a movie.]

The last word on football and violence has yet to be uttered, though George Will came close. “Football combines two of the worst things in American life,” wrote Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” Ben Fountain throws in a few other toxic ingredients - sex, politics, religion, show business, capitalism, and Texas. Fountain, who lives in Dallas and gave up a career in law in order to write fiction full-time, scored a literary touchdown at age 48 with his first book, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a 2006 story collection that won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Fountain now sets his first novel in Texas Stadium, the gridiron shrine that was demolished in 2010 after being replaced, at a cost of $1.15 billion, by Cowboys Stadium. He describes the legendary arena as “basically a shithole. It’s cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners.” Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk spans one frigid, rainy Thanksgiving Day in which eight members of Bravo Squad are guests of honor at a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Chicago Bears. The Bravos, as they are called, are Army grunts who survived a fierce firefight with Iraqi insurgents. The encounter, which lasted three minutes and forty-three seconds, left one comrade dead and another permanently disabled.

Caught on video by Fox News, the skirmish turned the young soldiers - crude, irreverent kids - into American idols, ripe for exploitation by politicians, corporate executives, and other predatory patriots. Yanked out of Iraq, the Bravos are sent on a two-week “Victory Tour” throughout the United States. Their day in Texas Stadium, whose Jumbotron proclaims: “America’s Team Proudly Honors America’s Heroes,” caps a two-week itinerary that included a White House photo op with President George W. Bush and stops in half a dozen cities. After their propaganda mission in Texas, they will return to combat duty in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Bravos are packaged as an antidote to the national malaise caused by “nina leven.” A Hollywood hustler is lining up backers for a movie version of their ordeal, which a Texas tycoon describes as “a story of courage, of hope and optimism, love of freedom, all the convictions that motivated you young men to do what you did. . . .”

But 19-year-old Billy Lynn, the focus of the novel who received a Silver Star for acting out of instinct and fear, is confused by all the attention. “It is sort of weird,” he tells Faison Zorn, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who smites him at first sight. “Being honored for the worst day of your life.” It is through Billy’s virginal eyes and his boozy, migrained brain that we encounter the wretched excess of the Stadium Club buffet; the 3,000 pairs of shoes in the equipment room; and the bloated halftime extravaganza starring Destiny’s Child. In one bravura scene, the Bravos visit the Cowboys’ locker room, where scraggly soldiers and overfed gladiators sniff each other out. “So whas it like?” asks a Cowboy, as Sunday warriors face another kind. Though he barely graduated from high school (and then, after vandalizing the Saab convertible of his sister’s ex-fiancé, chose Iraq over prison), Billy is a perceptive fellow beset with “existential spasms,” “random seizures of futility and pointlessness that make him wonder why it matters how he lives his life.” He also wonders whether to go AWOL, exiting Texas Stadium under the protection of a war resisters group.

by Steven G. Kellman, Critical Mass/National Book Critics Circle |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

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Dark Leviathan

The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. But even this browser isn’t enough. Like the Isla de Muerta in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, the landmarks of this hidden internet can be discovered only by those who already know where they are.

Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive. One link might lead to a thriving marketplace for buying and selling stolen data; another, to a wrecker’s display of false lights, a cloned site designed to relieve you of your coin and give you nothing in return.

This hidden internet is a product of debates among technology-obsessed libertarians in the 1990s. These radicals hoped to combine cryptography and the internet into a universal solvent that would corrupt the bonds of government tyranny. New currencies, based on recent cryptographic advances, would undermine traditional fiat money, seizing the cash nexus from the grasp of the state. ‘Mix networks’, where everyone’s identity was hidden by multiple layers of encryption, would allow people to talk and engage in economic exchange without the government being able to see.

Plans for cryptographic currencies led to the invention of Bitcoin, while mix networks culminated in Tor. The two technologies manifest different aspects of a common dream – the utopian aspiration to a world where one could talk and do business without worrying about state intervention – and indeed they grew up together. For a long time, the easiest way to spend Bitcoin was at Tor’s archipelago of obfuscated websites.

Like the pirate republics of the 18th century, this virtual underworld mingles liberty and vice. Law enforcement and copyright-protection groups such as the Digital Citizens’ Alliance in Washington, DC, prefer to emphasise the most sordid aspects of Tor’s hidden services – the sellers of drugs, weapons and child pornography. And yet the effort to create a hidden internet was driven by ideology as much as avarice. The network is used by dissidents as well as dope-peddlers. If you live under an authoritarian regime, Tor provides you with a ready-made technology for evading government controls on the internet. Even some of the seedier services trade on a certain idealism. Many libertarians believe that people should be able to buy and sell drugs without government interference, and hoped to build marketplaces to do just that, without violence and gang warfare.

Tor’s anonymity helps criminals by making it harder for the state to identify and detain them. Yet this has an ironic side-effect: it also makes it harder for them to trust each other, because they typically can’t be sure who their interlocutors are. To make money in hidden markets, you need people to trust you, so that they will buy from you and sell to you. Having accomplished this first manoeuvre, the truly successful entrepreneurs go one step further. They become middlemen of trust, guaranteeing relations between others and taking a cut from the proceeds.

To this end, entrepreneurs have found it necessary to create and maintain communities, making rules, enforcing them, punishing rule-breakers, and turning towards violence when all else fails. They have, in effect, built petty versions of the very governments they are fleeing. As the US sociologist Charles Tilly argued, the modern state began as a protection racket, offering its subjects protection against outsiders and each other. The same logic is playing out today on the hidden internet, as would-be petty barons and pirate kings fight to tax and police their subjects while defending themselves against hostile incursions.

by Henry Farrell, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Alex Makoli/Magnum Photos