Monday, October 26, 2015
Freedom From Fries
Like many of their millennial peers, Kathleen Davis and Andrea Nguyen eat out a lot. “Nothing fancy,’’ Davis told me one recent evening, as she took a sidewalk table next to mine at Sweetgreen in Nolita. “We want what we eat to be healthy and tasty,’’ Davis said. “Decent prices matter, too.” The women were working their way through one of the restaurant’s seasonal specialties—the “wastED” salad, which consists almost entirely of carrot peels, broccoli stalks, roasted bread heels, cabbage cores, and other ingredients that are usually tossed out.
Ten years ago, no American would have regarded a bowl of vegetable scraps dressed with lime-cilantro or spicy pesto vinaigrette as fast food. Many people wouldn’t have considered it food at all. But millions of diners, fuelled by concerns about their health and the state of the environment—and propelled by a general distaste for industrially produced and highly processed food—have begun to shun the ubiquitous chains that have long shaped the American culinary character. Sweetgreen and places like Lyfe Kitchen, Chipotle, Smashburger, Five Guys, Shake Shack, and Dig Inn now occupy the rapidly expanding middle ground between restaurants with tablecloths and the giant fast-food chains. The category, referred to broadly as fast casual dining, is growing more quickly than any other segment of the market.
For more than fifty years, eating at fast-food restaurants has been an almost clinically impersonal experience: the food is rapidly prepared, remarkably cheap, utterly uniform, and served immediately. The cheeseburger you get at a McDonald’s in Orlando is exactly the same as the one you get at a McDonald’s in San Francisco, Montreal, or Little Rock. Each month, more than two hundred million people eat at least one meal at one of the hundred and sixty thousand fast-food restaurants in the United States. McDonald’s alone serves twenty-six million people every day at its fourteen thousand American outlets—more than the population of Australia. Millions more visit Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, In-N-Out Burger, as well as the other chains that occupy virtually every highway, strip mall, and town center in the nation.
Almost seventy per cent of customers at places like McDonald’s, which are known in the trade as quick-service restaurants, get their food at a drive-through—a process that, according to last year’s Drive-Thru Performance Study, conducted by QSR, an industry magazine, takes an average of 219.97 seconds and costs most people about five dollars. I asked the women at Sweetgreen if they ever patronized McDonald’s or similar restaurants. Davis shuddered and said nothing. After a brief silence, Nguyen owned up to eating at McDonald’s once or twice a month, but not for a Big Mac or French fries. “They have some surprisingly good food these days,’’ she said in a confessional whisper. “But I would never be seen walking down the street with a McDonald’s bag in my hand.’’ I asked why. “Shame,” she replied. “I don’t know anyone who would feel differently.’’
Hers is a commonly voiced sentiment. Speed and convenience matter as much as ever to American diners. But increasingly people also demand the information that places like Sweetgreen offer. They want to know what they are eating and how it was made; they prefer to watch as their food is prepared, see the ingredients, and have a sense of where it all came from. And they are willing to pay more for what they perceive to be healthier fare. Most of these restaurants, where meals generally cost between eight and fifteen dollars, rely on a few ingredients, stress the quality of their food, and often treat the farms that supply their vegetables with the kind of reverence once reserved for fine wineries.
The rise of the healthy fast-food chain has been aided by the easing recession, but it comes largely at the expense of traditional competitors. None have struggled more than McDonald’s, one of the world’s most recognizable brands. In March, the company replaced its chief executive with one of his deputies. Two months later, it ended its long-established practice of issuing monthly reports on individual store sales. And this year, for the first time since 1970, McDonald’s will close more locations in the U.S. than it opens. When I asked Dan Coudreaut, the company’s executive chef and vice-president of culinary innovation, what mattered most to McDonald’s, taste, price, or efficiency, he sighed. “Our main job is to create value for our shareholders, for our company, for our restaurateurs,’’ he said. “We are not a nonprofit organization and we are not married to any one area. We are married to being a successful business. Society is shifting in a major direction, so guess what—McDonald’s is going to shift, too.’’ (...)
Fast food has become a synonym for bad food. Yet, the industrial farm system that has made it possible for McDonald’s and many other chains to sell cheeseburgers for a dollar has also enabled Americans to spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than people do in any other country. At the start of the First World War, food purchases consumed half the average paycheck; today the figure is six per cent. According to federal statistics, an American in 1919 had to work for two and a half hours to earn enough money to buy a chicken; these days it would take less than fifteen minutes of labor. (...)
In less than a century, our ability to produce cheap calories on a massive scale, long considered the signature triumph of American agriculture, has become a genuine threat to the nation’s health. We wouldn’t be able to eat fifty billion hamburgers a year, and at least as many orders of French fries, unless thousands of the farms that provided the meat and potatoes were also factories. Along the way, the term “fast food’’ has come to describe so many options that its meaning has vanished. Sweetgreen serves meals you can purchase in three minutes and eat in five; that’s fast food. But it consists of salads and fresh soups, not processed meat, fattening sodas, or fries. The latter is the kind of fast food that people associate with McDonald’s; it’s also what millions of Americans eat at home every day.
by Michael Specter, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Andrew B. Meyers
Ten years ago, no American would have regarded a bowl of vegetable scraps dressed with lime-cilantro or spicy pesto vinaigrette as fast food. Many people wouldn’t have considered it food at all. But millions of diners, fuelled by concerns about their health and the state of the environment—and propelled by a general distaste for industrially produced and highly processed food—have begun to shun the ubiquitous chains that have long shaped the American culinary character. Sweetgreen and places like Lyfe Kitchen, Chipotle, Smashburger, Five Guys, Shake Shack, and Dig Inn now occupy the rapidly expanding middle ground between restaurants with tablecloths and the giant fast-food chains. The category, referred to broadly as fast casual dining, is growing more quickly than any other segment of the market.
For more than fifty years, eating at fast-food restaurants has been an almost clinically impersonal experience: the food is rapidly prepared, remarkably cheap, utterly uniform, and served immediately. The cheeseburger you get at a McDonald’s in Orlando is exactly the same as the one you get at a McDonald’s in San Francisco, Montreal, or Little Rock. Each month, more than two hundred million people eat at least one meal at one of the hundred and sixty thousand fast-food restaurants in the United States. McDonald’s alone serves twenty-six million people every day at its fourteen thousand American outlets—more than the population of Australia. Millions more visit Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts, In-N-Out Burger, as well as the other chains that occupy virtually every highway, strip mall, and town center in the nation.Almost seventy per cent of customers at places like McDonald’s, which are known in the trade as quick-service restaurants, get their food at a drive-through—a process that, according to last year’s Drive-Thru Performance Study, conducted by QSR, an industry magazine, takes an average of 219.97 seconds and costs most people about five dollars. I asked the women at Sweetgreen if they ever patronized McDonald’s or similar restaurants. Davis shuddered and said nothing. After a brief silence, Nguyen owned up to eating at McDonald’s once or twice a month, but not for a Big Mac or French fries. “They have some surprisingly good food these days,’’ she said in a confessional whisper. “But I would never be seen walking down the street with a McDonald’s bag in my hand.’’ I asked why. “Shame,” she replied. “I don’t know anyone who would feel differently.’’
Hers is a commonly voiced sentiment. Speed and convenience matter as much as ever to American diners. But increasingly people also demand the information that places like Sweetgreen offer. They want to know what they are eating and how it was made; they prefer to watch as their food is prepared, see the ingredients, and have a sense of where it all came from. And they are willing to pay more for what they perceive to be healthier fare. Most of these restaurants, where meals generally cost between eight and fifteen dollars, rely on a few ingredients, stress the quality of their food, and often treat the farms that supply their vegetables with the kind of reverence once reserved for fine wineries.
The rise of the healthy fast-food chain has been aided by the easing recession, but it comes largely at the expense of traditional competitors. None have struggled more than McDonald’s, one of the world’s most recognizable brands. In March, the company replaced its chief executive with one of his deputies. Two months later, it ended its long-established practice of issuing monthly reports on individual store sales. And this year, for the first time since 1970, McDonald’s will close more locations in the U.S. than it opens. When I asked Dan Coudreaut, the company’s executive chef and vice-president of culinary innovation, what mattered most to McDonald’s, taste, price, or efficiency, he sighed. “Our main job is to create value for our shareholders, for our company, for our restaurateurs,’’ he said. “We are not a nonprofit organization and we are not married to any one area. We are married to being a successful business. Society is shifting in a major direction, so guess what—McDonald’s is going to shift, too.’’ (...)
Fast food has become a synonym for bad food. Yet, the industrial farm system that has made it possible for McDonald’s and many other chains to sell cheeseburgers for a dollar has also enabled Americans to spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than people do in any other country. At the start of the First World War, food purchases consumed half the average paycheck; today the figure is six per cent. According to federal statistics, an American in 1919 had to work for two and a half hours to earn enough money to buy a chicken; these days it would take less than fifteen minutes of labor. (...)
In less than a century, our ability to produce cheap calories on a massive scale, long considered the signature triumph of American agriculture, has become a genuine threat to the nation’s health. We wouldn’t be able to eat fifty billion hamburgers a year, and at least as many orders of French fries, unless thousands of the farms that provided the meat and potatoes were also factories. Along the way, the term “fast food’’ has come to describe so many options that its meaning has vanished. Sweetgreen serves meals you can purchase in three minutes and eat in five; that’s fast food. But it consists of salads and fresh soups, not processed meat, fattening sodas, or fries. The latter is the kind of fast food that people associate with McDonald’s; it’s also what millions of Americans eat at home every day.
by Michael Specter, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Andrew B. Meyers
Why Laws Against Begging Don't Work
All across America, municipalities have criminalized begging. This is bizarre. It is now clearly established that the first amendment protects people who express themselves by spending millions of dollars. How can it fail to protect people who express themselves by asking for one dollar?
Many cities have suggested that begging fails to express ideas worthy of the first amendment. Not so. Requests for charity – whether from homeless persons, Salvation Army volunteers or firefighters – express need. They do so inherently and sometimes profoundly.
During a recent retrospective on hurricane Katrina, the radio program This American Life told the story of a middle-class woman from New Orleans whose life was so thoroughly destroyed after the hurricane that she wound up at a Kmart parking lot in Dallas, begging for money so she could buy diapers for her grandkids. “They needed Pampers, they needed food,” she explained. So she sat on a curb and “begged every car that came out of that parking lot”.
The story of this woman’s plea for help was gut-wrenching. And yet, public officials across the country are trying to make what she did illegal.
Some, like Portland, Maine, have done so by banning all speech in public spaces traditionally used by panhandlers, such as traffic medians. Others, like Grand Junction, Colorado, have enacted no-begging buffer zones within which all panhandling, no matter how peaceful, is deemed “aggressive”. Because these bans criminalize speech, and because the first amendment’s free-speech guarantee does not say “except for poor people”, the ACLU and other groups have challenged anti-begging laws in court.
No one wants to be accused of stifling speech. So the champions of these crackdowns on begging say what people always say when criminalizing words: asking for money is merely conduct, and thus doesn’t deserve the first amendment’s utmost protection.
One city that has unabashedly expressed this view is Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell has banned begging in its 400-acre downtown historic district and in numerous 20-foot buffer zones around restaurants, bus stops and other places where people might seek charity. The city reasons that substantially all begging – even standing by a restaurant with a sign that says “Please Help” – is coercive and devoid of value.
Thus, when the ACLU of Massachusetts and the law firm Goodwin Procter sued on behalf of two homeless people, Lowell compared them to vermin:
“[P]anhandling represents a raucous alternative culture that for reasons of economic dependence – or in a different view, parasitism – must occupy the same geographic space as those mainstream souls who lack the ‘need’ – or perhaps the chutzpah – to importune strangers for money.”
This view misunderstands the first amendment and offends democratic values.
Anti-begging measures contradict not one but two recent supreme court decisions: McCullen v Coakley, which invalidated a Massachusetts law creating buffer zones around reproductive health clinics, and Reed v Town of Gilbert, which invalidated an Arizona sign code because its rules hinged on what each sign said. So zones that prohibit begging are unconstitutional both because anti-speech buffer zones are problematic under McCullen, and because singling out one type of speech – begging – is content-based, like the sign code struck down in Reed.
Many cities have suggested that begging fails to express ideas worthy of the first amendment. Not so. Requests for charity – whether from homeless persons, Salvation Army volunteers or firefighters – express need. They do so inherently and sometimes profoundly.
During a recent retrospective on hurricane Katrina, the radio program This American Life told the story of a middle-class woman from New Orleans whose life was so thoroughly destroyed after the hurricane that she wound up at a Kmart parking lot in Dallas, begging for money so she could buy diapers for her grandkids. “They needed Pampers, they needed food,” she explained. So she sat on a curb and “begged every car that came out of that parking lot”. The story of this woman’s plea for help was gut-wrenching. And yet, public officials across the country are trying to make what she did illegal.
Some, like Portland, Maine, have done so by banning all speech in public spaces traditionally used by panhandlers, such as traffic medians. Others, like Grand Junction, Colorado, have enacted no-begging buffer zones within which all panhandling, no matter how peaceful, is deemed “aggressive”. Because these bans criminalize speech, and because the first amendment’s free-speech guarantee does not say “except for poor people”, the ACLU and other groups have challenged anti-begging laws in court.
No one wants to be accused of stifling speech. So the champions of these crackdowns on begging say what people always say when criminalizing words: asking for money is merely conduct, and thus doesn’t deserve the first amendment’s utmost protection.
One city that has unabashedly expressed this view is Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell has banned begging in its 400-acre downtown historic district and in numerous 20-foot buffer zones around restaurants, bus stops and other places where people might seek charity. The city reasons that substantially all begging – even standing by a restaurant with a sign that says “Please Help” – is coercive and devoid of value.
Thus, when the ACLU of Massachusetts and the law firm Goodwin Procter sued on behalf of two homeless people, Lowell compared them to vermin:
“[P]anhandling represents a raucous alternative culture that for reasons of economic dependence – or in a different view, parasitism – must occupy the same geographic space as those mainstream souls who lack the ‘need’ – or perhaps the chutzpah – to importune strangers for money.”
This view misunderstands the first amendment and offends democratic values.
Anti-begging measures contradict not one but two recent supreme court decisions: McCullen v Coakley, which invalidated a Massachusetts law creating buffer zones around reproductive health clinics, and Reed v Town of Gilbert, which invalidated an Arizona sign code because its rules hinged on what each sign said. So zones that prohibit begging are unconstitutional both because anti-speech buffer zones are problematic under McCullen, and because singling out one type of speech – begging – is content-based, like the sign code struck down in Reed.
by Matthew Segal, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Joel Stettenheim/CORBIS
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Blocking Enzymes in Hair Follicles Promotes Hair Growth
Inhibiting a family of enzymes inside hair follicles that are suspended in a resting state restores hair growth, a new study from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center has found. The research was published today in the online edition of Science Advances.
In experiments with mouse and human hair follicles, Angela M. Christiano, PhD, and colleagues found that drugs that inhibit the Janus kinase (JAK) family of enzymes promote rapid and robust hair growth when applied to the skin.
The study raises the possibility that JAK inhibitors could be used to restore hair growth in forms of hair loss induced by male pattern baldness, and other types of hair loss that occur when hair follicles are trapped in a resting state. Two JAK inhibitors have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One is approved for treatment of blood diseases (ruxolitinib) and the other for rheumatoid arthritis (tofacitinib). Both are being tested in clinical trials for the treatment of plaque psoriasis and alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
“What we’ve found is promising, though we haven’t yet shown it’s a cure for pattern baldness,” said Dr. Christiano. “More work needs to be done to test if JAK inhibitors can induce hair growth in humans using formulations specially made for the scalp.”
Christiano and her colleagues serendipitously discovered the effect of JAK inhibitors have on hair follicles when they were studying alopecia areata, a form of hair loss that’s caused by an autoimmune attack on the hair follicles. Christiano and colleagues reported last year that JAK inhibitors shut off the signal that provokes the autoimmune attack, and that oral forms of the drug restore hair growth in some people with the disorder.
In the course those experiments, Dr. Christiano noticed that mice grew more hair when the drug was applied to the skin than when the drug was given systemically. This suggested JAK inhibitors might be doing something to the hair follicles in addition to stopping the immune attack.
JAK inhibitors trigger the follicles’ normal reawakening process, the researchers found. Mice treated for five days with one of two JAK inhibitors sprouted new hair within 10 days, greatly accelerating the onset of hair growth. No hair grew on control mice within the same amount of time. (...)
“There aren’t many compounds that can push hair follicles into their growth cycle so quickly,” said Dr. Christiano. “Some topical agents induce tufts of hair here and there after a few weeks, but very few compounds have this potent an effect so quickly.” The drugs also produce longer hair from human hair follicles grown in culture and on skin grafted onto mice.
In experiments with mouse and human hair follicles, Angela M. Christiano, PhD, and colleagues found that drugs that inhibit the Janus kinase (JAK) family of enzymes promote rapid and robust hair growth when applied to the skin.The study raises the possibility that JAK inhibitors could be used to restore hair growth in forms of hair loss induced by male pattern baldness, and other types of hair loss that occur when hair follicles are trapped in a resting state. Two JAK inhibitors have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One is approved for treatment of blood diseases (ruxolitinib) and the other for rheumatoid arthritis (tofacitinib). Both are being tested in clinical trials for the treatment of plaque psoriasis and alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
“What we’ve found is promising, though we haven’t yet shown it’s a cure for pattern baldness,” said Dr. Christiano. “More work needs to be done to test if JAK inhibitors can induce hair growth in humans using formulations specially made for the scalp.”
Christiano and her colleagues serendipitously discovered the effect of JAK inhibitors have on hair follicles when they were studying alopecia areata, a form of hair loss that’s caused by an autoimmune attack on the hair follicles. Christiano and colleagues reported last year that JAK inhibitors shut off the signal that provokes the autoimmune attack, and that oral forms of the drug restore hair growth in some people with the disorder.
In the course those experiments, Dr. Christiano noticed that mice grew more hair when the drug was applied to the skin than when the drug was given systemically. This suggested JAK inhibitors might be doing something to the hair follicles in addition to stopping the immune attack.
JAK inhibitors trigger the follicles’ normal reawakening process, the researchers found. Mice treated for five days with one of two JAK inhibitors sprouted new hair within 10 days, greatly accelerating the onset of hair growth. No hair grew on control mice within the same amount of time. (...)
“There aren’t many compounds that can push hair follicles into their growth cycle so quickly,” said Dr. Christiano. “Some topical agents induce tufts of hair here and there after a few weeks, but very few compounds have this potent an effect so quickly.” The drugs also produce longer hair from human hair follicles grown in culture and on skin grafted onto mice.
by Columbia University Medical Center | Read more:
Image: S. Harel et al., Sci. Adv. 1, e1500973 (2015)
Image: S. Harel et al., Sci. Adv. 1, e1500973 (2015)
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President
What happened on the Hill Thursday echoed the famous scene from All the President's Men, when super-source Deep Throat scolds reporter Bob Woodward for botching a story about hated Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman.
"You let Haldeman slip away," says Deep Throat.
"Yes," answers a sheepish Woodward.
"You've done worse than let Haldeman slip away. You've got people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible."
With Thursday's interminable, pointless, haranguing, disorganized, utterly amateurish attempt at a smear job, the Republicans and their tenth-rate congressional attack schnauzer, South Carolina's Trey Gowdy, got people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. Over the course of 11 long hours, they made the most eloquent argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency yet offered by anyone, including Clinton herself.
Hillary's detractors, and I've been one of them, have long complained that she is a politician without firm principles. She, her husband and the other Third Way types who've dominated the modern Democratic Party specialize in a kind of transactional politics, in which issues are endlessly parsed to maintain a balance between fundraising interests and populist concerns. It's a strategy that wins elections, but doesn't get the heart racing much.
But there is one overriding principle that does animate and define the Clinton campaign, and that's keeping Republicans out of office. For years, this has been the Democratic Party's stock answer for every sordid legislative compromise, every shameless capitulation to expediency, every insulting line of two-faced stump rhetoric offered to get over: We have to do this to beat the Republicans.
I never bought that argument, for a lot of reasons, but Trey Gowdy made it look pretty good Thursday. Those idiots represent everything that is wrong not just with the Republican Party, but with modern politics in general. It's hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn't be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power.
What was that whole thing about? What was Gowdy trying to prove? That Sidney Blumenthal had Hillary's private email address, and an ambassador didn't?
The overriding implication of the Benghazi hearing seemed to be that Hillary Clinton was so crass, unfeeling and politically self-involved as to not care if members of her State Department were massacred. Again, Hillary has a lot of flaws, but we're supposed to believe that she doesn't have a problem with dead Americans? Seriously?
This is the same kind of abject stupidity we saw in the 9/11 Truth movement, which believed unquestioningly that a whole bund of Bush administration officials was willing to see Americans murdered en masse in order to further some convoluted world domination scheme. (...)
If you follow partisanship to the extreme, this is where you end up: Israel-Palestine, Serbia-Albania, Ajax-Feyenoord, Sox-Yankees, Republicans-Democrats. You get to a place where you don't merely disagree with your opponents, you actively disbelieve in their basic humanity.
The Republicans at the Benghazi hearing made Hillary a proxy for an aspect of this phenomenon that virtually every blue-state American has seethed at in the last decade or so: being accused of treason.
We've been told that we hate veterans, that we sympathize with terrorists, that we long for a UN takeover or Soviet rule. It's said all the time that it makes us happy to see cops shot or soldiers killed in battle. Not only do we hear this on right-wing TV, we see the amazing spectacle of millions of conservatives believing it. To believe this stuff, you'd have to believe we aren't even people.
Hillary was forced into that same narrative Thursday. In this hearing she wasn't really being accused of mismanaging just the latest of thousands of logistical screw-ups by the U.S. government over the years.
On a deeper level the Republican committee members were accusing her of not caring about martyred American lives, because, well, "liberals" only care about the victims of torture or police brutality or other special interest groups they can exploit for political gain. In conservative legend, they don't care about "regular" Americans.
"You let Haldeman slip away," says Deep Throat."Yes," answers a sheepish Woodward.
"You've done worse than let Haldeman slip away. You've got people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible."
With Thursday's interminable, pointless, haranguing, disorganized, utterly amateurish attempt at a smear job, the Republicans and their tenth-rate congressional attack schnauzer, South Carolina's Trey Gowdy, got people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. Over the course of 11 long hours, they made the most eloquent argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency yet offered by anyone, including Clinton herself.
Hillary's detractors, and I've been one of them, have long complained that she is a politician without firm principles. She, her husband and the other Third Way types who've dominated the modern Democratic Party specialize in a kind of transactional politics, in which issues are endlessly parsed to maintain a balance between fundraising interests and populist concerns. It's a strategy that wins elections, but doesn't get the heart racing much.
But there is one overriding principle that does animate and define the Clinton campaign, and that's keeping Republicans out of office. For years, this has been the Democratic Party's stock answer for every sordid legislative compromise, every shameless capitulation to expediency, every insulting line of two-faced stump rhetoric offered to get over: We have to do this to beat the Republicans.
I never bought that argument, for a lot of reasons, but Trey Gowdy made it look pretty good Thursday. Those idiots represent everything that is wrong not just with the Republican Party, but with modern politics in general. It's hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn't be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power.
What was that whole thing about? What was Gowdy trying to prove? That Sidney Blumenthal had Hillary's private email address, and an ambassador didn't?
The overriding implication of the Benghazi hearing seemed to be that Hillary Clinton was so crass, unfeeling and politically self-involved as to not care if members of her State Department were massacred. Again, Hillary has a lot of flaws, but we're supposed to believe that she doesn't have a problem with dead Americans? Seriously?
This is the same kind of abject stupidity we saw in the 9/11 Truth movement, which believed unquestioningly that a whole bund of Bush administration officials was willing to see Americans murdered en masse in order to further some convoluted world domination scheme. (...)
If you follow partisanship to the extreme, this is where you end up: Israel-Palestine, Serbia-Albania, Ajax-Feyenoord, Sox-Yankees, Republicans-Democrats. You get to a place where you don't merely disagree with your opponents, you actively disbelieve in their basic humanity.
The Republicans at the Benghazi hearing made Hillary a proxy for an aspect of this phenomenon that virtually every blue-state American has seethed at in the last decade or so: being accused of treason.
We've been told that we hate veterans, that we sympathize with terrorists, that we long for a UN takeover or Soviet rule. It's said all the time that it makes us happy to see cops shot or soldiers killed in battle. Not only do we hear this on right-wing TV, we see the amazing spectacle of millions of conservatives believing it. To believe this stuff, you'd have to believe we aren't even people.
Hillary was forced into that same narrative Thursday. In this hearing she wasn't really being accused of mismanaging just the latest of thousands of logistical screw-ups by the U.S. government over the years.
On a deeper level the Republican committee members were accusing her of not caring about martyred American lives, because, well, "liberals" only care about the victims of torture or police brutality or other special interest groups they can exploit for political gain. In conservative legend, they don't care about "regular" Americans.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: via:
My Mum Was a Keanu Reeves Superfan
[ed. Me too. I'll watch anything with Keanu in it.]
Meredith Nirui, my mom, moved to Japan in 1989 to escape the Islamic leadership transition in Iran, and became more aware of western culture after witnessing the legions of Hollywood-obsessed Japanese girls in Kobe. After my father forced her to watch the movie Speed, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, my mom took an immediate interest in the Canadian actor. “I remember absolutely hating action movies and I was really mad your dad forced me to watch this film with tons of explosions and violence,” she said, “but the moment I started watching Speed, I was so mesmerized by Keanu. I loved absolutely everything about him, and he had such a great energy. I can't quite explain it.”From this moment on, she religiously kept tabs on the actor in the media, while forming an impressive VHS collection of Keanu's films — Point Break, Feeling Minnesota, My Own Private Idaho—you name it. “I joined a Keanu fan club online and would visit the forums every night and stay on for hours. I would put you and your brother to bed and rush to the computer,” she said. “From the web, I learned he was the bass player in the post-grunge band Dogstar. They became my new favourite band.”
By 1996, my mom had built a detailed Keanu shrine on the interior of our linen closet, featuring a bunch of posters and cut-outs from TV Weekly and other tabloid mags, along with a life-size framed Keanu poster stapled to our living room wall. When she discovered through a forum that Dogstar was touring in the U.S, she saw this as an opportunity not only to see him in the flesh, but to potentially profess her love for him face-to-face. “A completely random girl asked me if I wanted to meet her in Chicago and drive around to all the shows. I was really scared of meeting a stranger off the Internet, but I had Keanu in mind and would do whatever it took to get to him.” She met with the stranger in Chicago, and they drove for days over the span of two weeks to see Keanu play each and every show.
by Ava Nirui, Dazed | Read more:
Image: Meredith Nirui
Some Thoughts About Constant Connectivity
I have no illusion that my refusals are in any way reflective of a growing movement against constant connection. If anything, it’s only going further the other way. For example: Do people in Silicon Valley ever turn off their phones? The answer seems to be an occasional, semi-braggy “yes, but only when I’m running marathons,” which is overshadowed by an overwhelming “no, not really, not by choice,” or, as one person actually put it, “We’re building a company for the long term and being offline is not an option.” “I do sleep with my phone under my pillow, though!” says a woman who prides herself on carving out two-to-four hours “away from device-enabled connectivity.”
I get it. I understand that once you have the technology it is almost impossible not to use it, even if you know it is ultimately bad for you. I am aware that making yourself constantly available—creating a world, in fact, where being unavailable is not an option—is a way to signal how busy and vital and valuable you are. If your self-esteem is completely wrapped up in the idea that “online” equals “working” and “working” is how you demonstrate your level of importance, the idea that you might miss an email is horrifying, because it robs you of your carefully-constructed concept of yourself as a dynamic, important part of the digital age.
And then there’s this: “I can come up with a long list of reasons why you should be a lot more worried about people who are on their phones than people who are off them. But culture is a weird thing. Sometimes we want to be pure and above it all, to be observational. Other times we want to fit in. At that moment, in that bar, anyone not looking at their phone was presumed to be a serial killer. So I took mine out of my pocket and looked at it, and everyone else chilled out.”
by Alex Balk, The Awl | Read more:
Image:
Crusty Broiled Cod with Littlenecks and Chouriço
INGREDIENTS
½ cup panko, lightly toasted
¼ cup chopped parsley
3 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon lemon zest
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
4 5-ounce pieces cod fillet, about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick
1 lemon, quartered
2 tablespoons medium or hotsmoked paprika
Salt
Cracked black pepper
½ pound chouriço, diced medium
12 littleneck clams, well washed
½ cup dry white wine
PREPARATION
Heat broiler (to high if you have the option).
Combine panko, parsley, garlic, lemon zest and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a small bowl, mix well and set aside.
Rub cod and lemon quarters all over with remaining oil, sprinkle with paprika, salt and pepper, then place in 9-by-12-inch shallow baking dish or disposable foil pan. Arrange chouriço and clams around cod and pour in wine. Place under broiler on top rack (about 3 to 4 inches from flame) and broil, turning dish back to front after about 5 minutes, until fish is almost opaque and littlenecks are open, 10 to 12 minutes.
Sprinkle panko mixture over the cod and return to broiler until crumbs are crispy golden brown, another 2 to 3 minutes.
Split cod, clams, chouriço, and lemon among 4 shallow bowls, pour pan juices around and serve.
by John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rikki Snyder
Friday, October 23, 2015
Animal Collective
[ed. Probably as close as anyone's gotten to the old Beach Boys sound. Too bad they couldn't keep it going.]
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit?
The Miller quick coupler comes in a few different sizes. The one I tried out has the proportions of a laundry bin and weighs nearly 700 pounds. It allows the operators of hydraulic digging machines to switch buckets without ever leaving the cab. Two flanges rise from its sides, supplying it with the Volkswagen-like curves that inspired its nickname, the Bug. The flanges are drilled clean through with four holes set inside four bosses; beneath the front pair of holes are two upturned latches, like the open ends of two wrenches. Other than its poppy-red color, the device appears to be an ordinary specimen from the menagerie of heavy-duty construction equipment.
But in a Chicago courtroom on Oct. 26, the Bug will star in a multimillion-dollar dispute that represents a new frontier in the march of global capitalism. The nominal occasion is a paternity feud between two of the Bug’s corporate parents, Miller UK, the equipment manufacturer based in Cramlington, England, and Caterpillar, the American construction-equipment giant that was once Miller’s biggest customer. The themes of Miller UK v. Caterpillar are classics of the intellectual-property genre: greed, betrayal, bloodlines. But Miller’s method of funding its side of the production is something new. Rather than paying its lawyers out of pocket, Miller has turned to a private firm to front the money for its legal costs: the Illinois-based Arena Consulting, which is headed by two brothers, Herbert and Douglas Lichtman. If Miller loses, Arena gets nothing. If it wins, Arena will get a share of the proceeds, which could run well into the tens of millions of dollars.
This new form of lawsuit funding is called litigation finance. It lies at the crossroads of two Anglo-American tendencies. The first is our litigious side, in which we celebrate our equality before the law by dragging those who have wronged us before a judge. The second is our ingenious mercantilism, as demonstrated by our penchant for turning everything from church raffles to mortgages into marketable securities to be chopped up, bundled and resold. Like the celebrity bonds backed by royalties and popularized by David Bowie during the 1990s, litigation finance represents the expansion of securitization into hitherto virgin territory. Those involved in the practice argue that it allows smaller companies like Miller to afford a day in court. Detractors worry that it could give rise to a litigation arms race, with speculative money aggravating the already high costs of the American legal system.
While the amount of litigation funded by outside financiers is still relatively small, the industry — which barely existed outside personal-injury cases until the mid-2000s — is growing rapidly, driven by increasingly permissive laws, the promise of high returns and hourly billing rates that run $500 or more for the largest and most sophisticated law firms. Between 2013 and 2014, Burford Capital, a public company traded in Britain, increased its lawsuit investments from $150 million to $500 million. During the same period, its profits rose by 89 percent, with a 61 percent net profit margin. The two-year-old Gerchen Keller, one of the industry’s youngest funds, has now raised $475 million in private capital. With investor-backed war chests, plaintiffs are crossing borders to find the most favorable jurisdictions, and sometimes enlisting the help of foreign governments. Like equities and mortgages, lawsuits are making a transition from a private arrangement to a fully monetized asset class. The ‘‘portfolio’’ held by IMF Bentham, an Australia-based funder, consists of 39 cases, which the firm values at just over $2 billion. United States lawmakers are beginning to ask questions. In August, two senators from the Judiciary Committee sent letters to major funders asking them for the names of the cases they had invested in and many details of their business dealings. The letter called litigation finance a ‘‘burgeoning industry’’ that was ‘‘largely unregulated and operates with no licensing or oversight.’’
Larger companies, even those with their own in-house counsel, are selling off pieces of lawsuits to smooth out cash flow and offload risk. Juridica Investments, a Miami-based fund with $650 million under management, specializes in working with Fortune 500 companies, which make up 80 to 85 percent of its investments, according to Richard Fields, its chief executive, who says that outside funding helps align the interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers with those of their clients. ‘‘You want the largest recovery, in the shortest time, with the least uncertainty,’’ he says. Smaller companies can use litigation financing to finance growth, by using their future award as a credit line.
Over the last century, many have come to see lawsuits as a means of expression, a political weapon and a powerful deterrent against those who might do wrong. And yet creating lawsuits is not the same as creating something like the Bug. Litigation is a zero-sum industry — every dollar in damages taken home by the winner, minus fees, must be wrung out of the loser. Litigation also helps shape legal precedent, defining the terms under which civil justice may be sought. It’s hard to imagine how billions in outside capital won’t wind up changing the justice system. The only question is how.
by Mattathias Schwartz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sam Island
But in a Chicago courtroom on Oct. 26, the Bug will star in a multimillion-dollar dispute that represents a new frontier in the march of global capitalism. The nominal occasion is a paternity feud between two of the Bug’s corporate parents, Miller UK, the equipment manufacturer based in Cramlington, England, and Caterpillar, the American construction-equipment giant that was once Miller’s biggest customer. The themes of Miller UK v. Caterpillar are classics of the intellectual-property genre: greed, betrayal, bloodlines. But Miller’s method of funding its side of the production is something new. Rather than paying its lawyers out of pocket, Miller has turned to a private firm to front the money for its legal costs: the Illinois-based Arena Consulting, which is headed by two brothers, Herbert and Douglas Lichtman. If Miller loses, Arena gets nothing. If it wins, Arena will get a share of the proceeds, which could run well into the tens of millions of dollars.This new form of lawsuit funding is called litigation finance. It lies at the crossroads of two Anglo-American tendencies. The first is our litigious side, in which we celebrate our equality before the law by dragging those who have wronged us before a judge. The second is our ingenious mercantilism, as demonstrated by our penchant for turning everything from church raffles to mortgages into marketable securities to be chopped up, bundled and resold. Like the celebrity bonds backed by royalties and popularized by David Bowie during the 1990s, litigation finance represents the expansion of securitization into hitherto virgin territory. Those involved in the practice argue that it allows smaller companies like Miller to afford a day in court. Detractors worry that it could give rise to a litigation arms race, with speculative money aggravating the already high costs of the American legal system.
While the amount of litigation funded by outside financiers is still relatively small, the industry — which barely existed outside personal-injury cases until the mid-2000s — is growing rapidly, driven by increasingly permissive laws, the promise of high returns and hourly billing rates that run $500 or more for the largest and most sophisticated law firms. Between 2013 and 2014, Burford Capital, a public company traded in Britain, increased its lawsuit investments from $150 million to $500 million. During the same period, its profits rose by 89 percent, with a 61 percent net profit margin. The two-year-old Gerchen Keller, one of the industry’s youngest funds, has now raised $475 million in private capital. With investor-backed war chests, plaintiffs are crossing borders to find the most favorable jurisdictions, and sometimes enlisting the help of foreign governments. Like equities and mortgages, lawsuits are making a transition from a private arrangement to a fully monetized asset class. The ‘‘portfolio’’ held by IMF Bentham, an Australia-based funder, consists of 39 cases, which the firm values at just over $2 billion. United States lawmakers are beginning to ask questions. In August, two senators from the Judiciary Committee sent letters to major funders asking them for the names of the cases they had invested in and many details of their business dealings. The letter called litigation finance a ‘‘burgeoning industry’’ that was ‘‘largely unregulated and operates with no licensing or oversight.’’
Larger companies, even those with their own in-house counsel, are selling off pieces of lawsuits to smooth out cash flow and offload risk. Juridica Investments, a Miami-based fund with $650 million under management, specializes in working with Fortune 500 companies, which make up 80 to 85 percent of its investments, according to Richard Fields, its chief executive, who says that outside funding helps align the interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers with those of their clients. ‘‘You want the largest recovery, in the shortest time, with the least uncertainty,’’ he says. Smaller companies can use litigation financing to finance growth, by using their future award as a credit line.
Over the last century, many have come to see lawsuits as a means of expression, a political weapon and a powerful deterrent against those who might do wrong. And yet creating lawsuits is not the same as creating something like the Bug. Litigation is a zero-sum industry — every dollar in damages taken home by the winner, minus fees, must be wrung out of the loser. Litigation also helps shape legal precedent, defining the terms under which civil justice may be sought. It’s hard to imagine how billions in outside capital won’t wind up changing the justice system. The only question is how.
by Mattathias Schwartz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sam Island
Romantic Regimes
In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States. It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend.
In my desk, I kept a precious document of American life, sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York a year earlier: an article about the Pill, ripped from the US girls’ magazine Seventeen. I read it lying in bed, feeling my throat getting dry. Staring into its glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in a different country, I would turn into someone beautiful, someone boys turned their heads for. I dreamed that I would need this kind of pill, too.
Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and borrowed a stack of Seventeens that stood taller than me. I was determined to find out precisely what happened between American boys and girls when they started liking each other, and what I was supposed to say and do in order to reach the stage when ‘the Pill’ would prove necessary. Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I looked for words and expressions that had to do with American conduct in courtship and wrote them out on separate cards, just like my English teacher in St Petersburg had taught me.
I soon gathered that the lifecycle of a Seventeen-approved relationship went through several clear stages. First, you developed a ‘crush’, normally on a boy a year or two older than yourself. Then, you asked around a bit to establish whether he was a ‘cutie’ or a ‘moron’. If he was the former, Seventeen gave you thumbs up to ‘hook up’ with him once or twice after ‘asking him out’. Throughout the process, several boxes needed to be ticked: did you feel like the young man ‘respected your needs’? Were you comfortable ‘asserting your rights’ – in particular, refusing or initiating ‘body contact’? How was the ‘communication’? If any of the boxes remained unticked, you would ‘dump’ him and start looking for a replacement, until someone who was ‘good boyfriend material’ came along. Then you would start ‘making out on the couch’ and graduate into a Pill‑user.
Sitting in the American school library, I stared at my dozens of handwritten notes and saw an abyss opening up: a gulf between the ideals of love that I had grown up with and the exotic stuff I was now encountering. Where I came from, boys and girls were ‘falling in love’ and ‘seeing each other’; the rest was a mystery. The teen film drama that my generation of Russians grew up with – a socialist replica of Romeo and Juliet set in a Moscow commuter neighbourhood – was deliciously unspecific when it came to declarations of love. To express his feelings for the heroine, the protagonist recited the multiplication tables: ‘Two times two is four. It is as certain as my love. Three times three is nine. That means you are mine. And two times nine is 18, and that’s my favourite number because at 18 we will get married.’
What else was there to say? Not even our 1,000-page Russian novels could match the complexity of Seventeen’s romantic system. When engaging in love affairs, the countesses and officers were not exactly eloquent; they acted before they spoke, and afterwards, if they weren’t dead as a result of their hasty undertakings, they gazed around speechless and scratched their heads in search of explanations.
Although I did not yet have a PhD in sociology, it turned out that what I had been doing with the copies of Seventeen was exactly the kind of work that sociologists of emotion perform in order to understand how we conceptualise love. By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine ‘normal’ behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.
The clash of romantic regimes was precisely what I was experiencing on that day in the school library. The Seventeen girl was trained for making decisions about whom to get intimate with. She rationalised her emotions in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘rights’, and rejected commitments that did not seem compatible with them. She was raised in the Regime of Choice. By contrast, classic Russian literature (which, when I was coming of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described succumbing to love as if it were a supernatural power, even when it was detrimental to comfort, sanity or life itself. In other words, I grew up in the Regime of Fate.
by Polina Aronson, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
In my desk, I kept a precious document of American life, sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York a year earlier: an article about the Pill, ripped from the US girls’ magazine Seventeen. I read it lying in bed, feeling my throat getting dry. Staring into its glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in a different country, I would turn into someone beautiful, someone boys turned their heads for. I dreamed that I would need this kind of pill, too.
Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and borrowed a stack of Seventeens that stood taller than me. I was determined to find out precisely what happened between American boys and girls when they started liking each other, and what I was supposed to say and do in order to reach the stage when ‘the Pill’ would prove necessary. Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I looked for words and expressions that had to do with American conduct in courtship and wrote them out on separate cards, just like my English teacher in St Petersburg had taught me.I soon gathered that the lifecycle of a Seventeen-approved relationship went through several clear stages. First, you developed a ‘crush’, normally on a boy a year or two older than yourself. Then, you asked around a bit to establish whether he was a ‘cutie’ or a ‘moron’. If he was the former, Seventeen gave you thumbs up to ‘hook up’ with him once or twice after ‘asking him out’. Throughout the process, several boxes needed to be ticked: did you feel like the young man ‘respected your needs’? Were you comfortable ‘asserting your rights’ – in particular, refusing or initiating ‘body contact’? How was the ‘communication’? If any of the boxes remained unticked, you would ‘dump’ him and start looking for a replacement, until someone who was ‘good boyfriend material’ came along. Then you would start ‘making out on the couch’ and graduate into a Pill‑user.
Sitting in the American school library, I stared at my dozens of handwritten notes and saw an abyss opening up: a gulf between the ideals of love that I had grown up with and the exotic stuff I was now encountering. Where I came from, boys and girls were ‘falling in love’ and ‘seeing each other’; the rest was a mystery. The teen film drama that my generation of Russians grew up with – a socialist replica of Romeo and Juliet set in a Moscow commuter neighbourhood – was deliciously unspecific when it came to declarations of love. To express his feelings for the heroine, the protagonist recited the multiplication tables: ‘Two times two is four. It is as certain as my love. Three times three is nine. That means you are mine. And two times nine is 18, and that’s my favourite number because at 18 we will get married.’
What else was there to say? Not even our 1,000-page Russian novels could match the complexity of Seventeen’s romantic system. When engaging in love affairs, the countesses and officers were not exactly eloquent; they acted before they spoke, and afterwards, if they weren’t dead as a result of their hasty undertakings, they gazed around speechless and scratched their heads in search of explanations.
Although I did not yet have a PhD in sociology, it turned out that what I had been doing with the copies of Seventeen was exactly the kind of work that sociologists of emotion perform in order to understand how we conceptualise love. By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine ‘normal’ behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.
The clash of romantic regimes was precisely what I was experiencing on that day in the school library. The Seventeen girl was trained for making decisions about whom to get intimate with. She rationalised her emotions in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘rights’, and rejected commitments that did not seem compatible with them. She was raised in the Regime of Choice. By contrast, classic Russian literature (which, when I was coming of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described succumbing to love as if it were a supernatural power, even when it was detrimental to comfort, sanity or life itself. In other words, I grew up in the Regime of Fate.
by Polina Aronson, Aeon | Read more:
Image: via:
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Laurel Canyon Daze
The epic tales of Laurel Canyon’s heyday continues to linger like the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air… It’s here that the SoCal sound was born out of an era of relaxed morals (sex), folks expanding their mental horizons (drugs), and a wave of eclectic misfits coming from all over to launch, reinvent, or escape their musical careers (rock ‘n’ roll) in this sleepy, smoky, winding hippy enclave. And the women, Mama Cass & Joni Mitchell, were the (wise and worldly beyond their years) matriarchs watching over over this peaceful, easy-feeling, community headquartered on Lookout Mountain. Henry Diltz was a friend and photographer to many in the scene those days, and his visual record and memories of these times is priceless.
“When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.” —Joni Mitchell
by Jon Patrick, The Selvedge Yard | Read more:
Image: Henry Diltz
A Stay-At-Home Dad Documents His Sex Life on a Fitbit
For dinner, make Lisa’s favorites: Southwestern kale with black bean salad and organic chicken soup. Thoughtfully leave out the black beans since Lisa complained that they made her gassy during her early-morning hot yoga class.
Heartrate: 81 bpm
- -
Set the table with the wine glasses we use only for Thanksgiving and the silver candelabra with hanging crystal hearts I bought on sale last week at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
Heartrate: 86 bpm
- -
Give Lisa smoldering, seductive looks from across the table during dinner, while Piper smears chewed kale on the wall and Caleb burps loudly while picking craisins from the salad with his fingers.
Heartrate: 74 bpm
- -
Wash dishes, scour the countertops and stove. Spend an extra five minutes scrubbing the spinach and chia seed residue from Lisa’s Vitamix Turboblend 4500.
Heartrate: 91 bpm
- -
Bathe the children, get them in jammies, read a bedtime story about an ambitious rooster that dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. Tuck them them into bed and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” five times until they fall into a peaceful slumber.
Heartrate: 94 bpm
- -
Stand in our bedroom doorway as Lisa changes into satin boxers and a tight tank top. Casually mention the healthy dinner, spotless kitchen, bathed children, and extra-clean Vitamix Turboblend 4500. Wait for Lisa to offer a sexual reward for the many well-done domestic tasks. When Lisa offers nothing, take a more direct route and ask Lisa if tonight is convenient for sexual relations. Remind Lisa it’s been two weeks since our last coupling.
Heartrate: 96 bpm
- -
Do a vigorous fist pump in the hallway after Lisa checks her phone for any morning meetings, glances at her watch, and then consents to sexual relations.
Heartrate: 98 bpm
- -
Prepare for our amorous encounter: brush and floss teeth, apply Acqua di Gio to neck and earlobes, scrub my private parts vigorously with a hot washrag in case Lisa feels wild tonight, like last February when she drank too many margaritas at her book club and actually suggested that we make love that night on our bedroom floor.
Heartrate: 87 bpm
- -
Lie on the bed and wait as Lisa finishes the final chapter of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Give more smoldering, seductive looks and hope that Lisa sees the enormous bulge protruding from my flannel pjs.
Heartrate: 66 bpm
- -
Listen patiently as Lisa recounts the entire plot of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Nod eagerly and hope my energetic headshaking disperses the cologne and puts Lisa in a sexy mood.
Heartrate: 83 bpm
Heartrate: 81 bpm
- -Set the table with the wine glasses we use only for Thanksgiving and the silver candelabra with hanging crystal hearts I bought on sale last week at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
Heartrate: 86 bpm
- -
Give Lisa smoldering, seductive looks from across the table during dinner, while Piper smears chewed kale on the wall and Caleb burps loudly while picking craisins from the salad with his fingers.
Heartrate: 74 bpm
- -
Wash dishes, scour the countertops and stove. Spend an extra five minutes scrubbing the spinach and chia seed residue from Lisa’s Vitamix Turboblend 4500.
Heartrate: 91 bpm
- -
Bathe the children, get them in jammies, read a bedtime story about an ambitious rooster that dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. Tuck them them into bed and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” five times until they fall into a peaceful slumber.
Heartrate: 94 bpm
- -
Stand in our bedroom doorway as Lisa changes into satin boxers and a tight tank top. Casually mention the healthy dinner, spotless kitchen, bathed children, and extra-clean Vitamix Turboblend 4500. Wait for Lisa to offer a sexual reward for the many well-done domestic tasks. When Lisa offers nothing, take a more direct route and ask Lisa if tonight is convenient for sexual relations. Remind Lisa it’s been two weeks since our last coupling.
Heartrate: 96 bpm
- -
Do a vigorous fist pump in the hallway after Lisa checks her phone for any morning meetings, glances at her watch, and then consents to sexual relations.
Heartrate: 98 bpm
- -
Prepare for our amorous encounter: brush and floss teeth, apply Acqua di Gio to neck and earlobes, scrub my private parts vigorously with a hot washrag in case Lisa feels wild tonight, like last February when she drank too many margaritas at her book club and actually suggested that we make love that night on our bedroom floor.
Heartrate: 87 bpm
- -
Lie on the bed and wait as Lisa finishes the final chapter of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Give more smoldering, seductive looks and hope that Lisa sees the enormous bulge protruding from my flannel pjs.
Heartrate: 66 bpm
- -
Listen patiently as Lisa recounts the entire plot of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Nod eagerly and hope my energetic headshaking disperses the cologne and puts Lisa in a sexy mood.
Heartrate: 83 bpm
by Ryan Shoemaker, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: via:
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
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