Young Women, Give Up the Vocal Fry

[ed. Another thing to blame on men, or culture, or something  (it's not clear what exactly). Bleh.]

Patriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in the form of Internalisation B, making sure they don’t get too far too fast. The latest example: the most empowered generation of women ever – today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain – is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices.

This demographic of women tends to have a distinctive speech pattern. Many commentators have noticed it, often with dismay. Time magazine devoted a column to the mannerism called vocal fry, noting a study that found that this speech pattern makes young women who use it sound less competent, less trustworthy, less educated and less hireable: “Think Britney Spears and the Kardashians.”

“Vocal fry” is that guttural growl at the back of the throat, as a Valley girl might sound if she had been shouting herself hoarse at a rave all night. The less charitable refer to it privately as painfully nasal, and to young women in conversation sounding like ducks quacking. “Vocal fry” has joined more traditional young-women voice mannerisms such as run-ons, breathiness and the dreaded question marks in sentences (known by linguists as uptalk) to undermine these women’s authority in newly distinctive ways. Slate notes that older men (ie those in power over young women) find it intensely annoying. One study by a “deeply annoyed” professor, found that young women use “uptalk” to seek to hold the floor. But does cordially hating these speech patterns automatically mean you are anti-feminist?

Many devoted professors, employers who wish to move young women up the ranks and business owners who just want to evaluate personnel on merit flinch over the speech patterns of today’s young women. “Because of their run-on sentences, I can’t tell in a meeting when these young women have said what they have to say,” confided one law partner.

“Their constant uptalk means I am constantly having to reassure them: ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’. It’s exhausting.”

I myself have inadvertently flinched when a young woman barraging a group with uptalk ran a technology-based conference call: “We’ll use Ruby on Rails? It is an MVC framework to support databases?” Well, will we?

One 29-year-old woman working in engineering told me it was easier for gatekeepers in her male-dominated field to disregard running-on, softspoken, vocally frying and uptalking women. “It is difficult for young women to be heard or even responded to in many male-dominated fields if they don’t strengthen their voices, That kind of disregarding response from men made me feel even softer and even lesser – in a vicious circle of silencing.” she said. (...)

What is heartbreaking about the current trend for undermining female voice is that this is the most transformational generation of young women ever. They have absorbed a feminist analysis, and are skilled at seeing intersectionality – the workings of race, class and gender. Unlike previous generations, they aren’t starting from zero. They know that they did not ask to be raped, that they can Slutwalk and Take Back the Night, Kickstarter their business ventures and shoot their own indie films on their phones – and that they deserve equal pay and access.

Which points to the deeper dynamic at play. It is because these young women are so empowered that our culture assigned them a socially appropriate mannerism that is certain to tangle their steps and trivialise their important messages to the world. We should not ask young women to put on fake voices or to alter essential parts of themselves. But in my experience of teaching voice to women for two decades, when a young woman is encouraged to own her power and is given basic skills in claiming her own voice then huge, good changes follow. “When my voice became stronger, people took me more seriously,” says Ally Tubis. “When people feel from your voice that you are confident, they will believe that you are smarter, and that you are better at what you do – even when you are saying the exact same thing.”

by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Noma Bar

Diary

In the early hours of 16 July, the Greek parliament voted overwhelmingly to give up its sovereignty and become a semi-colonial appendage of the EU. A majority of the Syriza Central Committee had already come out against the capitulation. There had been a partial general strike. Tsipras had threatened to resign if fifty of his MPs voted against him. In the event six abstained and 32 voted against him, including Yanis Varoufakis, who had resigned as finance minister after the referendum, because, he said, ‘some Eurogroup participants’ had expressed a desire for his ‘“absence” from its meetings’. Now parliament had effectively declared the result of the referendum null and void. Outside in Syntagma Square thousands of young Syriza activists demonstrated against their government. Then the anarchists arrived with Molotov cocktails and the riot police responded with tear-gas grenades. Everyone else left the square and by midnight it was silent again. It’s difficult not to feel depressed by all this. Greece has been betrayed by a government that when elected only six months ago offered hope. As I walked away from the empty square the EU’s coup brought back memories of another.

I first went to Greece at Easter 1967. The occasion was a peace conference in Athens honouring the left-wing Greek deputy, Grigoris Lambrakis, murdered by fascists in Salonika in 1963 as the police looked on, and later immortalised in Costa-Gavras’s movie Z. Half a million people attended his funeral in Athens. During the conference wild rumours began to spread around the hall. On the podium, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam couldn’t understand why people had stopped listening to him. Someone with family connections in the military had reported that the Greek military, backed by Washington, was about to launch a coup to pre-empt elections in which they feared the left might do a bit too well. The foreign delegates were advised to leave the country straightaway. I caught an early-morning flight back to London. That afternoon tanks occupied the streets. Greece remained under the Colonels for the next seven years.

I went to Athens this month for the same reason: to speak at a conference, this one ironically entitled ‘Rising Democracy’. Waiting for a friend in a café in Exarchia, I heard people discussing when the government would collapse. Tsipras still has supporters convinced that he will triumph whenever the next election is held. I’m not so sure. It has been an inglorious six months. The young people who voted for Syriza in large numbers and who went out and campaigned enthusiastically for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum are trying to come to grips with what’s happened. The café was packed with them, arguing furiously. At the beginning of the month they were celebrating the ‘No’ vote. They were prepared to make more sacrifices, to risk life outside the Eurozone. Syriza turned its back on them. The date 12 July 2015, when Tsipras agreed to the EU’s terms, will become as infamous as 21 April 1967. The tanks have been replaced by banks, as Varoufakis put it after he was made finance minister.

Greece, in fact, has a lot of tanks, because the German and French arms industries, eager to get rid of surplus hardware in a world where wars are fought by bombers and drones, bribed the politicians. During the first decade of this century Greece was among the top five importers of weapons, mainly from the German companies Ferrostaal, Rheinmetall and Daimler-Benz. In 2009, the year after the crash, Greece spent €8 billion – 3.5 per cent of GDP – on defence. The then Greek defence minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, who accepted huge bribes from these companies, was convicted of corruption by a Greek court in 2013. Prison for the Greek; small fines for the German bosses. None of this has been mentioned by the financial press in recent weeks. It didn’t quite tally with the need to portray Greece as the sole transgressor. Yet a Greek court has been provided with conclusive evidence that the largest tax avoider in the country is Hochtief, the giant German construction company that runs Athens airport. It has not paid VAT for twenty years, and owes 500 million euros in VAT arrears alone. Nor has it paid the contributions due to social security. Estimates suggest that Hochtief’s total debt to the exchequer could top one billion euros.

It is often in times of crisis that radical politicians discover how useless they are. Paralysed by the discovery that those they thought were friends are not their friends at all, they worry about outrunning their voters and lose their nerve. When their enemies, surprised that they have agreed to more than the pound of flesh demanded, demand more still, the trapped politicians finally turn to their supporters, only to discover that the people are way ahead of them: 61 per cent of Greeks voted to reject the bailout offer.

It’s no longer a secret here that Tsipras and his inner circle were expecting a ‘Yes’ or a very narrow ‘No’. Taken by surprise, they panicked. An emergency cabinet meeting showed them in full retreat. They refused to get rid of the ECB placeman in charge of the Greek State Bank, and rejected the idea of nationalising the banks. Instead of embracing the referendum results, Tsipras capitulated. Varoufakis was sacrificed. The EU ministers loathed him because he spoke to them as an equal and his ego was a match for Schäuble’s.

Why did Tsipras hold a referendum at all? ‘He’s so hard and ideological,’ Merkel complained to her advisers. If only. It was a calculated risk. He thought the ‘Yes’ camp would win, and planned to resign and let EU stooges run the government. The EU leaders launched a propaganda blitz and pressured the Greek banks to restrict access to deposits, warning that a ‘No’ vote meant Grexit. Tsipras’s acceptance of Varoufakis’s resignation was an early signal to the EU that he was about to cave in. Euclid Tsakalotos, his mild-mannered successor, won the rapid approval of Schäuble: here was someone he could do business with. Syriza accepted everything, but when more was demanded, more was given. This had nothing to do with the economy, and everything to do with politics. ‘They crucified Tsipras,’ an EU official told the FT. Greece had sold its sovereignty for a third bailout and an IMF promise to help reduce its debt burden – Syriza had begun to resemble the worm-ridden cadaver of the discredited Pasok.

by Tariq Ali, LRB |  Read more:

Image: via:

Javier Torok
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Gil Scott Heron

[ed. My nephew, Tony (in the middle). Hope he got to keep those boots.]
via:

My Month of Hell

Day 1
Coach Brad is a magnificent, roaring Clydesdale of a man, standing 6-and-a-half feet tall, with blond hair, a golden complexion, and deep-set blue eyes. He speaks in a core-shaking baritone. His head looks like it ought to be atop a pedestal in the antiquities wing of the Met, where it could be quietly admired. His facial features are so architectural that I scribble in my notebook, “Looks part Klingon.” Then Coach Brad slaps his hands together and booms: “Excellent! You should all be taking notes, like this guy!” I haven’t a clue what he’s been talking about for the past five minutes to our timid group of misshapen nerds, but have jotted down odd words like “burpee,” “snatch,” and “jumping squat.”

Each level of the Black Box, an open-floor-plan CrossFit gym in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, is divided into four “pods.” Some CrossFitters from other gyms around the city criticize the Black Box for its factory-like atmosphere, where classes of different skill levels, with about 20 students each, stream in and out with blazing efficiency all day long, nearly every hour from about 5 a.m. until 8 at night.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, about a half dozen of us are in the southwest pod of the second floor for Elements Class 1, our introduction to CrossFit. All around us there’s a psychotic whir of jump ropes slicing through the air, well-bred young women in yoga pants and ponytails swooping like orangutans along wooden rings suspended from the ceiling, and scores of people crawling guerrilla-style along the floor. The whole thing has a sort of Taylor Swift-meets-jihad feel.

Three days ago, when I set out to report on doing a month of CrossFit, I was put in touch with Craig Convissar, a 30-year-old attorney and one of CrossFit’s biggest cheerleaders. We met at one of the Black Box’s monthly LGBT workout classes that he helps organize. He’s a self-appointed liaison between LGBT CrossFitters and the gym through a Facebook group called Black Box: Guerrilla Queer WOD (it has 229 members). He’s also active in a citywide LGBT CrossFit community called OUTWOD. “WOD” is CrossFit jargon for “Workout of the Day” and is pronounced “wad.”

“I’ve definitely gotten stronger, and my cardiovascular endurance has gotten way better,” Convissar says. “I know I’m a much better athlete than I thought I was.” He’s been doing CrossFit for almost two years, and before that took trampoline classes and had been a member of a gym geared toward the musical theater community.

“I look at it this way: I have a share in the Pines with nine other boys. Most of them look better than me when they take their shirts off, but I know that in a physical fitness competition I could crush any of them,” he says, which I find bizarre because it looks like he could club a seal with his biceps and deflect bullets with the pecs stretching out his crossfit south brooklyn T-shirt.

He also has huge, bloody calluses on his hands. When I ask another CrossFitter, Steve, about his own scabby calluses, he says, “I guess I haven’t found any lifting gloves that I really like yet,” which I later learn is probably a lie. No one in CrossFit wears lifting gloves, because massive, disgusting, bloody hands are a sort of hanky code among members — a way to spot your own in society, as well as a badge of honor.

CrossFit gyms, in further parlance, are called “boxes.” They are pared-down, bare-bones facilities that reflect the gritty CrossFit philosophy, which mixes Olympic weight lifting, calisthenics, and gymnastics with that eye-rolling paleo diet (what the cavemen would have eaten!) — heavy on meat and veggies and forbidding sugars, grains, and dairy.

After the gay workout, a guy named Jake invites a bunch of us to his rooftop around the corner for drinks. “If you’re on the paleo diet, you can only drink wine and tequila,” he explains.

Jake is one of the few not excessively cheerful people in CrossFit.

“I hate New York,” he says. He’s leaning against the ledge, watching airplanes fly northward along the West Side of Manhattan while his fellow CrossFitters gather in circles to talk about CrossFit. He has a hobby of memorizing flight paths and can identify aircraft from the ground, saying things like, “That’s a US Airways Embraer 190, probably the 3 o’clock from Reagan to LaGuardia.”

“CrossFit is designed for someone who doesn’t have a life outside of CrossFit,” Jake says. “All these guys have really drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Steve, who does CrossFit six days a week on top of swimming and boxing classes at two other gyms, pipes up from several feet away. “They actually didn’t drink Kool-Aid at Jonestown,” he says, referring to the 1978 mass cultic suicide of more than 900 people. “It was actually Flavor Aid.”

Day 2
As part of our warm-up, we move back and forth across the pod several times, first like a crab, then like a bear, then like Frankenstein. Everyone looks completely stupid. It seems to me an exercise in humiliation designed to crush the ego and subjugate.

I spot Craig in the pod next door and flash him a big, dumb grin while waving exaggeratedly, but he only looks at me wide-eyed and gives a cryptic nod before darting away. It is sort of like the most popular girl in school being spotted by that differently abled girl she was nice to that one time. (...)

A CrossFit gym opens somewhere on earth every few hours. In the 1990s, a personal trainer in Southern California named Greg Glassman kept getting kicked out of gyms for his unorthodox training philosophy. In 1995, he started his own operation in Santa Cruz, and in 2000, he founded CrossFit Inc. In 2009 there were around 1,000 CrossFit-affiliated gyms in the world; six years later that number is approaching 13,000 (for comparison, in 2014, the global number of Starbucks stores was 21,000). CrossFit claims between 2 million and 4 million members, with more than 100,000 “level 1 certificate holders” (trainers), according to Russell Berger, a spokesperson for CrossFit.

There is no board of directors at CrossFit Inc. Glassman owns 100% of the company and has been known to pop into affiliates across the country unannounced. CrossFit ruthlessly pursues legal action not only against non-affiliated gyms for brand infringement, but against researchers who question the safety and effectiveness of the workout. The company has also been accused of retaliating for negative press coverage. Glassman has been quoted saying things like, “We’re changing the world. We’re doing all the right things for all the right people for all the right reasons,” and “The strength and value of CrossFit lies entirely within our total dominance of other athletes, and this is a truth that cannot be divined through debate, only competition.” In a recent interview with CBS News, a correspondent remarked that the way he talks about CrossFit sounds like preparation for war.

“Yeah, why not?” he said. “Getting ready for war, getting ready for [an] earthquake, getting ready for mugging, getting ready for the horrible news that you have leukemia. What awaits us all is [a] challenge, that’s for sure.”

I phone Daniel Shaw, a psychoanalyst in Manhattan and volunteer for the International Cultic Studies Association. He moderates a support group once a month for cult survivors, sees several former cult members in his private practice, and wrote the book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. He is also a former member of Siddha Yoga, which, in a 1994 New Yorkerarticle, was exposed for widespread abuse and cultishness.

“At the head of [any cult] is a person whose narcissism has led them to believe they are superior to others and therefore entitled in ways that other people are not to control people,” Shaw explains. “What they basically are saying is, because of my superiority, I and only I can give you what you need to fix you and make you better, to make you be what you’re supposed to be, and you need me.”

“In a cult, there is a mission,” he continues, “whether it’s world peace or spiritual enlightenment or whatever. Religions often have a mission — say, to build a community of the faithful who support each other and do good work. Well, if you look at the church [as being that], they are fulfilling their vision. When you look at a cult who say they’re creating world peace, they’re not creating world peace. They are, however, creating a very wealthy and powerful leader. That’s the difference.”

Contrary to popular belief, says Shaw, even everyday, healthy people are susceptible to getting involved in cults. “Everybody can be at some point in their life vulnerable to be lonely or frustrated or despairing or discouraged, and cults make tremendous promises,” he says. “They’re great advertisers. They offer solutions. They are friendly and they have communities.”

by Chadwick Moore, Out |  Read more:

Image: Luke Austin-Paglialonga

The Low Road

The first boy to break my heart was the first one to whom I gave it. This is pretty standard; if your teen romance ended not in tears and mournful mixtapes, you probably did it wrong.

His name was Geoff and he was tall and lanky and white, after a fashion. I was tall and shapely and black, after a fashion. We met at boarding school in New Hampshire, a strange and chilly place, surreal for both of us. He took me for pizza, made me mixtapes, introduced me to the Sugar Hill Gang, gave me a dozen red roses for Valentine’s Day. I took it all, wary and ecstatic. No male human being save my brother had ever really loved me before, but Geoff’s affection meant such loving was possible. Part of me prayed it would last forever. Part of me knew it would not.

I don’t remember the precise reason it fell apart. Maybe because I wouldn’t sleep with him or maybe he got bored or maybe I was a confused and contradictory mess. Maybe he was young and confused himself, finding his way in a bifurcated world: white skin, black stepfather, child of Harlem and fancy boarding school. I don’t even remember how he told me, what words he used, whether we stood together in the snow outside my dorm or the pain sliced over the phone. All I remember is that it hurt deeply for awhile and then less so, and that he moved on to someone else before getting into trouble and being expelled from school.

What lessons we take from life depend so much on the classroom to which we’ve been assigned. By the time I landed in boarding school I was pretty sure I was too much to be loved: too tall, too fat, too black. There are reasons for this—absent father, mother herself unloved and overwhelmed, an omnipresent cultural representation of blackness as ugliness—but in general people did the best they could with the tools they had at the time and so this is not about assigning blame. The point is simply that I entered the world of romantic love not believing myself worthy, and so what I took from that first heartbreak was confirmation. Geoff was the first boy to break my heart but it never occurred to me to seek revenge against him. This was the right impulse but the reason behind it, strangely, was wrong.

Not everyone who breaks your heart is a monster. Not everyone who wounds you deserves to be wounded in return. Geoff was not and did not but those are not the reasons I failed to consider revenge. I sought no revenge against Geoff because his wounding of me seemed not only expected but justifiable: the sure and natural course of things. Geoff hurt me but I was never angry at his hurting, not even a little. It was my own damn fault for losing his love. (...)

Revenge, wrote Nietzsche, can be either self-preservation (striking out at a person to prevent further hurt) or readjustment (a usually futile attempt to settle scores.) Futile because revenge will not return whatever was destroyed by the action of the offender—unless that thing was honor. Limbs and loved ones and burned houses cannot be reclaimed if taken, but honor can. An intentional attack proves the attacker is not afraid of us. Revenge proves we are not afraid of him. Thus balance is restored.

In such case, writes Nietzsche, a person will forgo revenge for only three reasons:

• He loves the offender.
• He finds the offender beneath his contempt and bother.
• He kinda despises himself. “Depending on whether he projects himself strongly or weakly into the soul of his opponent and the spectators, his revenge will be more embittered or tamer; if he lacks this type of imagination entirely, he will not think of revenge at all, for in that case the feeling for ‘honor’ is not present in him and hence cannot be injured.”

In other words, revenge will never occur to the one who lacks the self-esteem to be offended, who views the cruel and casual slogging of her heart as painful but expected, life’s little par for the course. Revenge will not occur to the one who suspects she deserves such mistreatment, who believes life deigns for her only the attentions of such blatant, unrelenting jerks. “A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all,” Nietzsche said.

Between Geoff and the first rising of my revenge lay some 30-odd years of relationships, the bulk of which I spent with one very good and decent man. S. and I met when I was 19 and he was 20. I was a sophomore in college, plowing my way forward to a more secure life. He had dropped out and was working in a restaurant and hanging out with friends, trying to figure out how to restart his life. Turned out I could help with that.

During our time together I graduated and got a job as a reporter and he went back to school and I got another job and he got his degree and I got another job and we moved to Philadelphia and he went to grad school and we got married and I got another job and he finished his Ph.D. and we moved to New York and got a dog and had a child and I wrote a novel and quit my job and had another child and he got a job and we moved to Boston and the marriage came slowly apart. My fault, or so I reasoned. If S. was a good and well-intentioned man, which he was, and if he loved me, which he did or tried to, as best he could, and if the marriage was still unsustainable then it must be because there was something deep and broken inside of myself. Almost none of the women in my family had sustained a marriage beyond a decade but we all believed this to be the result of choosing untenable men. If somehow I had managed to chose a decent guy and still couldn’t make it work, what did that mean?

Coming apart was terrible anger and pain and woundedness. The worst thing he said, during our divorce mediation, was that he feared I would take the children and move to California to be near my family. I was astonished that a man who had known me for twenty years would think I would take my children from their father, given how much my father’s absence from my life had wounded me. But then I understood: he didn’t really think I would do such a thing to be near family. He thought I might do it out of anger. Even after twenty years of knowing me, he still thought me capable of wounding my children out of spite.

Which is strange because there are no spiteful women in my family. Grudge-holders, yes; there are women in my family who can hold a grievance like Pavarotti could hold high C. But grudge-holding, of course, serves only to wound the grudge-holder; the object of unforgiveness goes skipping on with his life. Still, these seemed to be the options: wounded acceptance or self-destructive unforgiveness.

Turns out there is another way.

by Kim McLarin, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Luis Molina-Pantin, Scenery III (Women's Jail), 1997

Body Shaming Black Female Athletes Is Not Just About Race

Serena Williams won her 21st Grand Slam title at Wimbledon this month. This marks the 17th time in a row that she has defeated Maria Sharapova. Yet Williams, who has earned more prize money than any female player in tennis history, is continually overshadowed by the woman whom she consistently beats. In 2013, Sharapova earned $29 million, $23 million of that from endorsements. That same year, Williams earned $20.5 million, only $12 million of that from endorsements. How’s that possible? Because endorsements don’t always reward the best athlete. They often reward the most presentable according to the Western cultural ideal of beauty.

I know, you think this article is about racism. It’s not.

Misty Copeland just became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. But when she was 13, she was rejected from a ballet academy for having the wrong body type. As an ad featuring Ms. Copeland put it, summarizing the responses she received early in her career: “Dear candidate, Thank you for your application to our ballet academy. Unfortunately, you have not been accepted. You lack the right feet, Achilles tendons, turnout, torso length, and bust.” At 13? That criticism of her body being too muscular and “mature” has followed her throughout her career. “There are people who say that I don’t have the body to be a dancer, that my legs are too muscular, that I shouldn’t be wearing a tutu, that I don’t fit in,” Copeland said in response.

What do these two highly successful athletic women have in common? They seem to endure more body shaming than their white, less successful counterparts.

(Still not about racism.)

In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes, “Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Morrison’s assessment of social ideals for physical beauty as destructive is harshly accurate. We have established a definition of beauty so narrow that almost no one can live up to it. Women struggle to fit within the constrictions of social expectations of thin, youthful, sexuality as constricting as a Victorian corset. We display these paragons of beauty from billboards and magazine covers and Victoria Secret ads with the full knowledge that because of the use of photo-enhancing, lighting, makeup, and other morphing techniques, the women shown are as real as the CGI-created Hulk in the Avengersmovies.

There’s plenty of evidence showing how harmful this beauty standard is to society. The typical American woman spends about $15,000 on makeup over a lifetime (if that same money were invested into a retirement plan, it would give her about $100,000 at age 70). Even though Americans spend the most on cosmetics in the world, we are ranked only 23rd in one list of “satisfaction with life.” In a futile effort to fit this mythical ideal of beauty, millions of American women torture their feet with high heels, undergo unnecessary cosmetic surgeries, starve themselves, and make themselves physically and mentally miserable—all over an imaginary ideal they didn’t even create.

OK, I lied: Some of the body shaming of athletic black women is definitely a racist rejection of black women’s bodies that don’t conform to the traditional body shapes of white athletes and dancers. No one questions the beauty of black actresses such as Kerry Washington (Scandal) or Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave) because they fit the lithe image perpetuated by women’s fashion magazines. The body shaming of Williams and Copeland is partly because they don’t fit the Western ideal of femininity. But another cause is our disrespectful ideal of the feminine body in general.

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Time |  Read more:

Image: Julian Finney—Getty Images

Bush Pilot's View: Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness

Fake Road Trippin' Through Europe in a Computer-Generated Truck

The call of the open road can be unrelenting. Once you hear it, it takes hold of you, whispering “go, get out” every time you're in the driver’s seat. You start zooming out your GPS just for fun. Anything with wheels seems like a conduit for adventure.

In most cases, I would advise you to just go for it. But if you simply can’t throw off your shackles, there is another option. It’s called Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or, as its buddies call it, ETS2) is made by a Czech company called SCS Software, and it’s pretty much what it sounds like—a simulation game in which you drive a truck around Europe. You start out with a dream and not much else, working as a trucker-for-hire for companies that want to ship dry milk from Duisburg to Dortmund or lumber from Germany to France.

You make money by completing jobs well and on time, and lose it for damaging cargo, breaking traffic laws, or crushing the small innocent vehicles that drive too close to the median. If you shift your gears right, you can build up enough cash to buy your own trucks and truck yards and, of course, redecorate your truck with fun paint jobs. And you do all this by “driving”—little taps of the arrow keys that rev you up and down the highways and byways of scores of realistically-rendered European cities (and even more, if you install the expansion packs).

The original Euro Truck Simulator wasn’t much to CB radio home about, and neither were its single-nation followups. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 has garnered critical acclaim, several awards, and a cultish following. More dedicated fans trade favorite routes on Reddit, post time-lapse videos of good drives, and even build themselves desktop control centers complete with pedals, steering wheels, and multiple screens.

While some enjoy the challenge of becoming a trucking titan, others seem to prefer just zoning out and “driving,” taking life turn by turn. In a feature for PC Gamer, Andy Kelly documents a multi-day trip, from Odense, Denmark to Bergen, Norway: “Euro Truck is a bizarre kind of therapy for me,” he writes. “It’s pure escapism, with trucks.”

It struck me, while investigating this fervor, that Euro Truck Simulator 2 might be a great option for someone who can’t squeeze in a European road trip whenever she wants—in other words, someone like me. So with all the spontaneity of someone stuffing their things in a backpack and taking off, I paid my $23 (way less than a tank of gas in Europe), chose my rig, and set to truckin’.

by Cara Giaimo, Atlas Obscura |  Read more:

Image: Euro Truck Simulator 2/Joshua Livingston/Flikr

Is This a Selfie?

 

All selfies are photos. Not all photos are selfies. This distinction is lost on many — including brands on Twitter, television news anchors, your parents, and let’s be real, newspapers — which have used the word “selfie” to describe group photos, buildings, scenery and more. It’s time to clear up what exactly a selfie is.

I held a camera and took a photo of myself.

That is a selfie.

I took a photo of myself and two friends.

That is a selfie. Also called a groupie.

I set the self-timer on a camera, stepped back five feet, and it took my photo.

That’s in the selfie family, but isn’t a pure selfie. Consider it a self-portrait.

I took a photo of a slice of pizza and called it a “pizza selfie.”

Are you in the photo with the pizza?

No, it is just of the pizza.

Not a selfie.

I took a photo of a photo of myself.

That is a photo of a photo of yourself.

I used a selfie stick to take a photograph of myself.

That is a selfie.

I used a 300-foot selfie stick to take a photograph of myself, but because of the distance, I am barely visible in the photo.

That is still a selfie.

I used a 300-foot selfie stick to take a photograph of myself, but before the camera went off, a migrating trumpeter swan grabbed the camera, somehow aimed it at me, and tapped the shutter.

The bird took a photo of you. Not a selfie.

The bird also took a photo of itself.

Then the bird also took a selfie.

I swallowed a camera that is programmed to take a photograph every time I breathe.

Is that safe? Please check with a doctor.

by Jason Fiefer, NY Tiimes |  Read more:

Video: The Chainsmokers/YouTube

Mother Love Bone

GOP Enters Panic Mode

[ed. Hilarious. But, as much as it pains me, I have to agree with The Donald: McCain was no war hero. What's heroic about being captured as a POW? You survive (or not). That's it. Many others have had similar experiences. McCain hasn't done shit for veterans. Plus, he gave us Sarah Palin. 'Nuff said.]

When Donald Trump announced he would give 2016 another try as a republican presidential candidate, the GOP saw him as a mild nuisance. Little did they appreciate just how big of a "nightmare" he would very soon become, a nightmare which now sees the flamboyant billionaire whose self-reported net worth fluctuates daily with a double digit percentage lead over his closest competitor Scott Walker.

But the biggest mistake the GOP did is their inability to comprehend that either the US public enjoys being trolled, or is just so sick of the left/right paradigm, it will gladly latch on to anyone, even the most farcical, self-lampooning candidate, who promises a break from the old routine which has proven not to work for the common American.

The latest confirmation that the Trump "nightmare" is causing not only sleepless nights but also panic attacks for a GOP that is scrambling to respond to the Donald's juggernaut is not only open attempts at caricature, which however merely feed Trump's ego and push him to troll his accusers even more, but to use the influential Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper and a critical voice when it comes to endorsing, or panning, presidential candidates in this first caucus state, to call on Donald Trump to drop out of the 2016 presidential race.

Officially the Register's position was simply in escalation to the furor over the real estate magnate's weekend comments about Sen. John McCain's service during the Vietnam War. As Fox reports, in an editorial piece published late Monday, the Register said Trump's comments were "not merely offensive, they were disgraceful. So much so, in fact, that they threaten to derail not just his campaign, but the manner in which we choose our nominees for president."

The paper, the most influential in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, went on to say that if "[Trump] had not already disqualified himself through his attempts to demonize immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, he certainly did so by questioning [McCain's] war record."

Unofficially, it is called throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Following this weekend's firestorm, Trump - who clearly enjoys playing the starring role in every social scandal - appeared to back off some of his comments Monday, telling Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that "if there was a misunderstanding, I would totally take that back." However, Trump also said he "used to like [McCain] a lot. I supported him ... but I would love to see him do a much better job taking care of the veterans."

Whether Trump's apology is sincere or not, the nationwide response he got for his comments, coupled with his popularity surge, will merely encourage him. And since for the real estate magnate, advertising is everything, the fact that he has become the only topic of discussion, whether at the water cooler or during the prime time news circuit, expect the Trump-eting to continue to whatever bitter end is in store.

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge |  Read more:

Image: williambanzai7

Eva Cassidy

The NRA Was Here - Until It Wasn't

[ed. See also: Coming in Heavy and Gundamentalism.]

“Universal” background checks will never be “universal” because criminals won’t submit to them, and magazine bans will only put the law-abiding at a disadvantage against multiple attackers.

— David Keene, Past President, National Rifle Association

In the news lately: a woman adjusting her bra holster shot herself in the head, a guy open-carrying the handgun he’d owned for one day had the gun stolen by an armed robber, Texas encourages guns on college campuses, and Ronald Reagan allegedly carried concealed well into his 80s after the attempt on his presidential life.

And there was a massacre in a South Carolina church.

As a gun owner, I’d like to think that four of those five headlines could have been avoided.

Let’s say there could be a national organization committed to gun safety and common sense. Such an organization could fight hard for intensive safety training for gun buyers, educate the gun-owning populace about the dangers of open carry, participate in a feasibility study about arming drunken frat boys, and help establish a timeline for gently disarming octogenarians suffering from Alzheimer’s.

The organization could be led by people with a formidable collective expertise about firearms, making it a trusted and respected go-to source on the subject. It could have a PR department skilled in reaching out to both sides of the trigger, but not afraid to take a clear stand on a particular side when the common welfare of everyone called for it. It could take these stands because it would be a gun owners’ association, an advocate for the sport and the hobby, and a responsible organizational citizen.

As such, it would never dream of acting as a lobbyist for the manufacturers. If anything, it would lobby the manufacturers to become members and adopt the organization’s platforms on safety, integrity, social responsibility, and civic sanity.

Such potential the NRA has pissed away.

But I don’t want to come across as being completely down on the National Rifle Association. I’m not the type to send donations every time the group has yelped for funds, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been a paying member.

As an idealist, I could cling to the memory of an organization that was once a proud model of personal integrity and civic responsibility. As a gun owner, I could look to the group’s non-political activities and see some really valuable resources still being offered to young people, hunters, trainers, range owners, safety officers, and a dozen other groups connected with shooting sports.

And besides, when I joined the NRA I got $2,500 worth of insurance for my guns, for free.

But as an average American, the organization makes me ill. It knows about the inadequate training and clueless buying and haphazard range regulation that goes on, but just try advocating changing any of that through legal requirements. Any lawmaker who does is slapped with an NRA-sanctioned TYRANT label, and the group’s full arsenal of political influence is brought to bear against the “gun-grabbing traitor.” (Go to the NRA-ILA web site, but have plenty of antacids on hand.)

In an ideal world where things make sense, a respected and respectable NRA could intervene in the name of safety and responsibility when, say, a reckless state lawmaker goes the other way and tries to remove any requirements for gun ownership, except maybe needing to solemnly recite the Second Amendment from memory. And it would intervene when that lawmaker ignores the advice of law enforcers who know, from decades of experience that a rookie-level legislator doesn’t have, what the fallout can be from gun laws conceived by dipshits.

But the NRA doesn’t intervene on behalf of anything that benefits or advances a civil society. Instead, it just rants and bellows and lies and threatens and makes fools of members like me. Which is why I’m not a member anymore.

Okay, wait. There was that one time, just a year or so ago, when the NRA actually spoke against certain gun owners and condemned a weekend flurry of open-carry wackos who carried their military-style rifles into Texas restaurants. Wisely, carefully, the NRA author of that online statement pointed out that scaring the living hell out of unarmed families is not an effective way to convert new souls to the gun cause.

The exact term that the NRA statement used for this activity was “downright weird.”

I had to agree that carrying ARs into Waffle Houses and causing customers to shit themselves was a bizarre way to try and make gun friends. But the extremists on the other side pushed back hard, and just 24 hours later the NRA erased its statement and blamed it on an “unauthorized” scribe who presumably would be executed immediately by an in-house firing squad.

It could have been the NRA’s finest hour. The organization could have used its powerful voice to project continued calm analysis of a stupid situation. A sudden turn toward rational leadership in a mini-crisis where leaders were needed could have brought swarms of new pro-gun converts into the nest. Hell, I would have re-upped my membership immediately and proudly. Go, NRA!

By rediscovering its long-lost main focus on safety and responsibility, the NRA could have refereed a conflict that will only become more dangerous. Unarmed bystanders will keep hurling insults and angry protests at ignorant armed madmen—and women—who threaten the unarmed and their families. And armed advocates will keep wanting to “educate” the ignorant unarmed about the safety and normality of military rifles in social settings.

Eventually one of the parties will find the continued conflict intolerable. Hint: it won’t be the unarmed that cause the resulting tragedy.

This is why the NRA tried to defuse the tension by telling the extremists to keep their rifles at home because the “education” campaign wasn’t working as intended, and never could. It was alienating the undecided and pushing fence-sitters over to the I Will Never Own a Gun Because Those Fuckers Are Crazy side of the divide.

For an all-too-brief moment in history, the NRA shined brightly as a voice of reason and guidance about a “rifles in your face” campaign that was misguided and self-defeating. But then, once again and literally overnight, the NRA ran away and resumed its usual mantra: People can perish. Profits are cherished.

As a gun owning NRA member, I didn’t want to fight against gun safety. I refused to swear allegiance to high-capacity ammo magazines. I wasn’t an automatic advocate for any firearms or munitions manufacturer just because it existed. And because I have a heart, I couldn’t go into a defensive posture every time a mass shooting happens, deflecting attention away from the pain others are experiencing and onto my own Second Amendment rights instead.

by Robert Lawrence, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: The Truth About Guns

Don't Call the Cops

[ed. Calling all criminals! Burglaries, stolen cars, vandalism, arson... no problem!]

Janelle La Chaux paid a visit to Oakland police headquarters Friday to fill out a crime report. She believed her former roommate on 31st Street had stolen her 22-inch flat-screen and she wanted to document the theft.

"I could have called them when I was at the place where it happened, but I just decided to come down here because I don't want to wait," La Chaux, 30, said as she filled out a form in the lobby. "Sometimes I call them and it just takes a long, long time to come."

Nowadays, police may not come at all.

On Tuesday, the city laid off 80 officers to help eliminate a $30.5 million budget deficit, prompting the department to announce that officers would no longer be dispatched to take reports for most nonviolent crimes. "With current levels of staffing, we are unable to respond to many lower-priority calls," said Officer Jeff Thomason, a police spokesman.

Instead, Oakland residents now have to file certain crime reports online or visit a police station. Those without a computer can ask that a blank form be mailed to them or pick one up at a library. Residents can still call 911 to report emergencies and crimes such as shootings, robberies, rapes and assaults.

'Never going to hang up'

No matter how crimes are reported, police said the department still wants to hear about them - even if the layoffs mean that no one will investigate if a suspect can't be identified or is long gone.

"You can still call the Oakland Police Department and say, 'I need a report.' We'll always direct you to the right place," Thomason said. "We're never going to hang up on someone and say, 'We don't do that anymore.' "

Crime analysts will use the reports to discern patterns, said Lt. Jim Meeks, who oversees investigations of property crimes and theft.

"It's designed to still provide us with intelligence," Meeks said. "It still counts. The only way we're going to know that something is going on is through the reporting."

Over the past two years, residents have been able to go to oaklandpolice.com and report lost property, theft, vandalism, vehicle burglary and vehicle tampering. In the past, however, people could ask for an officer to come take a report. That will no longer be the case.

By Aug. 2, Oakland police intend to expand the online system - called Coplogic - so residents can report seven other types of crimes, including residential burglaries in which the suspects aren't known.

"There will be no follow-up investigation and the primary purpose for filing the report is for insurance purposes," according to the department.

by Henry K. Lee, SFGate |  Read more:

Image: Chris/Kevin

Mudcrutch

Hachiko: The most loyal dog in history
via:

Up in the Air: The Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

The boarding procedure has barely started at Chicago O'Hare, and Ben Schlappig has already taken over the first-class cabin. Inside Cathay Pacific Flight 807 bound for Hong Kong, he's passing out a couple of hundred dollars' worth of designer chocolates to a small swarm of giggling flight attendants. The six suites in this leather-bound playpen of faux mahogany and fresh-cut flowers comprise the inner sanctum of commercial flight that few ever witness. They're mostly empty now, save for two men in their twenties who seem even giddier than the flight attendants. The two stand to greet him. "This is so cool!" exclaims one, and soon Schlappig is ordering champagne for everyone.

This sort of thing happens to Schlappig nearly everywhere he goes. On this trip, his fans will witness Schlappig's latest mission: a weekend jaunt that will slingshoot him across East Asia — Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo — and back to New York, in 69 hours. He'll rarely leave the airports, and when he does he'll rest his head only in luxury hotels. With wide ears, Buddy Holly glasses and a shock of strawberry-blond hair, Schlappig resembles Ralphie from A Christmas Story if he'd grown up to become a J. Crew model. Back beyond the curtain in business class, a dozen jowly faces cast a stony gaze on the crescendos of laughter and spilled champagne — another spoiled trust-fund kid, they've judged, living off his parents' largesse. But Schlappig has a job. This is his job.

Schlappig, 25, is one of the biggest stars among an elite group of obsessive flyers whose mission is to outwit the airlines. They're self-styled competitors with a singular objective: fly for free, as much as they can, without getting caught. In the past 20 years, the Internet has drawn together this strange band of savants with an odd mix of skills: the digital talent of a code writer, a lawyer's love affair with fine print, and a passion for airline bureaucracy. It's a whirring hive mind of IT whizzes, stats majors, aviation nerds and everyone else you knew who skipped the prom.

Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog "One Mile at a Time," a diary of a young man living the life of the world's most implausible airline ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes out meticulous counsel on the art of travel hacking — known in this world as the Hobby. It's not simply how-to tips that draw his fans, it's the vicarious thrill of Schlappig's nonstop-luxury life — one recent flight with a personal shower and butler service, or the time Schlappig was chauffeured across a tarmac in a Porsche. But his fans aren't just travel readers — they're gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.

"I'm very fortunate in that I do what I love," says Schlappig, stretching out in an ergonomic armchair as we reach 30,000 feet and just before the mushroom consommé arrives. In the past year, since ditching the Seattle apartment he shared with his ex-boyfriend, he's flown more than 400,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe 16 times. It's been 43 exhausting weeks since he slept in a bed that wasn't in a hotel, and he spends an average of six hours daily in the sky. He has a freewheeling itinerary, often planning his next destination upon hitting the airport. Just last week, he rocketed through Dallas, Dubai, Oman, Barcelona and Frankfurt. Yet for all his travel, it would be a mistake to call Schlappig a nomad. The moment that he whiffs the airless ambience of a pressurized cabin, he's home.

"An airplane is my bedroom," he says, stretching to reach his complimentary slippers. "It's my office, and it's my playroom." The privilege of reclining in this personal suite costs around $15,000. Schlappig typically makes this trip when he's bored on the weekend. He pays for it like he pays for everything: with a sliver of his gargantuan cache of frequent-flyer miles that grows only bigger by the day. Hong Kong, he says, is his favorite hub, and "the only city I could ever live in." The 16-hour trip has become so routine that it's begun to feel like a pajama-clad blur of champagne and caviar — or, in Schlappig's terminology, a "two-hangover flight."

As the sun descends over the polar circle, a recumbent Schlappig loses himself in a 2 Broke Girls marathon playing on a free-standing flatscreen. "The fact is, we are beating the airlines at their own game," he said last year at a gathering of the Hobby's top talent. "The people who run these programs are idiots." Then he paused. "And we'll always be one step ahead of them."

by Ben Wofford, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Bryan Derballa

Here We Go Magic