Swag Reflex

This year’s Oscars goodie basket is worth a record $230,000. Even the academy is disgusted.

Psst—did you hear about the controversy at the Oscars? No, I don’t mean the dearth of minorities nominated for Academy Awards, which is a real and shameful scandal.

This year’s purported thank-you package for Oscars presenters and prominent nominees, a basket containing goodies worth an estimated $230,000, is causing a furor. First, activists opposed to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories urged a boycott of the costliest item, a $55,000, 10-day jaunt to Israel including first class airline tickets and luxury accommodations.

Then the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stepped up with a lawsuit.That gift bag? Has nothing to do with them, no way, no how. Instead, the academy would like Distinctive Assets, the promotional and product-placement company that’s distributing the things to the 25 nominees in the directing and acting categories and host Chris Rock, to cease advertising its giveaway as the “14th Annual ‘Everyone Wins’ Nominee Gift Bags in honor of the Academy Awards®.” Specifically, the academy is alleging trademark infringement.

Why is the academy ticked off? It’s not because someone asked, “Hey, why does Leonardo DiCaprio (estimated 2015 earnings: $29 million) need a free round of laser skin tightening treatment valued at $5,500, a $45,000 junket to Japan, and a $275 roll of Swiss toilet paper?” Surely he’ll show up to the Oscars anyway.

The academy is angry because of the combination of almost obscene luxury—$230,000!—and family-unfriendly freebies like a $250 vibrator and something called a Vampire Breast Lift ($1,900) that apparently besmirches the Oscars’ good name. “Press about the 2016 gift bags has focused on both the less-than-wholesome nature of some of the products,” reads the complaint, which goes on to mourn “the unseemliness of giving such high value gifts … to an elite group of celebrities."

To be clear, no one’s being particularly generous here. Jennifer Lawrence isn’t getting that Swiss toilet paper because someone’s a huge fan (though they may be!). Celebrities receive these hauls each year because companies hope the gifts will boost their bottom lines.

And the gift basket is the least of it. There’s an entire subeconomy of freebies surrounding the Oscars, not to mention other high-wattage celebrity events like the Golden Globes, the Grammy Awards and even the Kids’ Choice Awards. And this onslaught of swag seems to be growing each year.

by Helaine Olen, Slate | Read more:
Image: Michael Buckner/Getty Images

Twiggy & Justin de Villeneuve
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Ok Go

[ed. Still one of the best music videos ever...]

‘Some Rain Must Fall’, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

[ed. Pretty good description of Knausgaard's style. The anti-novel.]

In a recent interview, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard said that “a [romantic] relationship is based on lies and lies and lies . . . If you don’t lie it collapses.” His relationship with his readers, on the surface at least, depends on an opposite pact: that he will lie about nothing.

Knausgaard’s intensely autobiographical six-novel cycle, My Struggle, has become a literary monument to the aesthetic value of tactlessness. Across its thousands of pages he explores his feelings towards his loved ones with brutal candour. This commitment to the truth not only challenges the mutual illusions of family life, but also deprives his prose of the traditional novel’s formal excitements: narrative pace, suspense, symbolism. Most of our days are not, in reality, the stuff of page-turners. His characters walk around nude, stripped of all their novelistic vestments; their only meaning comes from the fact that Knausgaard has experienced them. And yet, the charisma of these books, a combination of critical acclaim, commercial success and the strange brilliance of their form, has made being hypnotised by their extensive descriptions of ordinary Norwegian life a sort of cultural obligation.

The mystery remains: how do we stomach reading Knausgaard? How does the novel form survive his onslaught against its well-tested seductions? In the first volume, the death of Karl Ove’s father gives dramatic structure to the final section. He and his brother travel to the house where their father had been living in isolated, drunken squalor with their demented grandmother. They begin obsessively disinfecting and clearing out soiled clothes. Karl Ove’s wish to hold the wake in the house — an act of redemption and reclaiming — gives urgency to the protracted accounts of bleach and garbage bags. The symbolic quality of human death rituals piggybacks symbolism into Knausgaard’s anti-novelistic novel.

Some Rain Must Fall, the fifth book of the cycle to be translated into English, returns briefly to this haunted house. Karl Ove is back scything the long grass out front. More coffee is brewed. Or perhaps it is the same coffee as before. Knausgaard gives us a few new vistas on to these mournful days, including the funeral itself. One of the startling joys of My Struggle’s looping, non-chronological form is that reading collides with the processes of memory. When Knausgaard revisits the same detail thousands of pages and, perhaps for the reader, several years apart, he manages to transfer the author’s act of recollection on to us. At these strange junctures, where two strands of the story cross, it is as though author and reader are remembering together, simultaneously.

But in the scheme of this volume this return to the father’s death is a glimpse through a keyhole. The other 600 pages must do without this traumatic epicentre, and earn their keep elsewhere. This volume concerns Karl Ove’s 14-year residence in the provincial town of Bergen, where he pursues various studies and jobs, takes summer breaks, drinks heavily, falls in and out of love and, most crucially, turns himself into a writer.

If the first book built itself towards one particular death, the fifth encodes death into its microstructure; it is felt on every page. One evening Karl Ove tells us: “I got dressed and went downstairs, death, out of the door, death, up the hill, death, through the underpass, death, down the road, death, along the fjord, death, and into the park, which wrapped itself around me with its living yet sleeping darkness.” These thoughts arise between him masturbating in the shower and having “a couple of beers” in the café before his brother turns up.

On one hand this passage is part of a familiar novelistic tradition of the young male anti-hero — morbid, horny, banal — mired in existential crisis. On the other, it is a shorthand for the latest book’s power. These Bergen years are infused with death, not because of Karl Ove’s gauche tussles with mortality, but because they belong to a dead age. We know already which love affairs will endure and which will not, and so death oversees the hungover waffle-eating. It crawls under the duvet with Karl Ove and his cosy, doomed relationships. Part of Knausgaard’s wizardry is that our knowledge of his story doesn’t drain this book-length flashback of intensity, but rather enhances it. The mundane details of this period — the cyclical drunkenness and self-loathing, the days spent reading and failing to write well — are rendered exquisite because the reader can feel the loss of them. Dramatic irony, generated when the audience’s knowledge of the fictional universe exceeds that of the characters, is this volume’s cold-blooded pulse.

The same irony animates the account of Karl Ove’s writerly ambitions. He feels he lacks the necessary imagination: “Everything I wrote was connected to reality and my own experiences.” This volume foreshadows the huge project that is to come, of which it, in fact, is a part. One evening he wonders: “Why actually should you write about actions? X loves Y, Z kills W, F commits embezzlement and is caught by G . . . ” Here he questions the cause-and-effect of traditional narrative. As with previous volumes, Some Rain Must Fall has exchanged novelistic plotting for the relative formlessness of life, where the causes of our effects are often hidden.

by Laurence Scott, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: Anne Rose

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[ed. Yow.]

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thepolyvorecollection:
organic by f-resh featuring Tokyo Milk

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[ed. Seems like a good all-purpose, go anywhere outfit.]

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10 Sites To Download Free Audio Books

If you’re looking for a place to download some free audio books, you’re in luck. Whether you want to get inspired, scared by a mystery, or simply have something to listen to on a long drive, there are loads of places to find free audio books. They may not be on the New York Times Bestseller list but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth your time.

For example, Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ is not quite selling like the ‘Shades of Gray’ but it’s an important read. In any case, these sites all host free audio books that are worth checking out!

NOTE: These are all legal sites that host public domain books. There’s more than enough great stuff in these libraries so check them each out when you have the time!

Free Classic Audio Books
This site hosts a myriad of books that are all in mp3 or m4b format. You can find what you’re looking for by sorting by the author’s last name. The advantage of using the iPod format (m4b) is that it remembers where you stop in a file.

Project Gutenberg
Another source for the classics. Read timeless tales from Dickens, Poe, and more with Project Gutenberg’s massive inventory. Boasting more than 2,000 free audiobooks in basically all categories, this should be one of your bookmarked sites!

Books Should Be Free
Like the aforementioned ‘Art of War,’ many all-time bestsellers are available on Books Should Be Free. They’re from the public domain and you can find what you’re looking for through some handy sorting tools. Want a children’s book? How about just seeing the adult book results? Yep, you can do that.

Librophile
When you first go to this site, you’re shown the price of every book. That price is $0.00, possibly the best price ever. Librophile has a substantial library of audio books as well as e-books that you can search by keyword, language, price (free), and more.

Lit2Go
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom.

LibriVox
LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. There are several options for listening. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

LearnOutLoud Free Audio
LearnOutLoud.com has scoured the Internet to bring you over 5000 free audio and video titles. This directory features free audio books, lectures, speeches, sermons, interviews, and many other great free audio and video resources. Most audio titles can be downloaded in digital formats such as MP3 and most video titles are available to stream online. Enjoy!

Podiobooks
The term podiobook was coined by Evo Terra in April 2005 to describe serialized audiobooks which are distributed via RSS, much like a podcast. Podiobooks is supported by donations (if you use it, you should think about giving!) and boasts a solid set of sorting tools. You can browse popular books, award-winning books, all titles, etc. Lots of great novels in here!

Storynory
Beautifully read audio stories for children and adults. Listen online or via podcast or app. Fairytales, myths, legends and stories from around the world.

AudioCloset
The audiobooks are absolutely free. They have a solid set of books that are worth reading such as Kipling and Dickens. All audiobooks have been recorded especially for the AudioCloset website.

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Nor a Lender Be

The day after International Women’s Day in March 2015, I attended a Clinton Foundation production put on by its No Ceilings initiative at the Best Buy Theater in New York City. It wasn’t a campaign event—the 2016 race had not really started at that point—nor was it a panel discussion, as there were no disagreements among the participants or questions from the audience. Instead, it was a choreographed presentation of various findings having to do with women’s standing in the world. But if you paid attention, the event provided a way to understand Hillary Clinton’s real views on the great social question before the nation—the problem of income inequality.

Onto the stage before us came former secretary of state Clinton, the Democratic Party’s heir apparent; Melinda Gates, the wife of the richest man in the world (the event was produced with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); various NGO executives; a Hollywood celebrity; a Silicon Valley CEO; a best-selling author; an expert in women’s issues from Georgetown University; a Nobel Prize winner; and a large supporting cast of women from the Third World. Everyone strode with polished informality about the stage, reading their lines from an invisible tele­prompter. And back and forth, the presenters called out to one another in tones of supportiveness and sweet flattery.

In her introduction to the event, for example, the TV star America Ferrera, who has appeared at many Clinton events both philanthropic and political, gave a shout-out to the “incredible women who have brought us all here today” and the “amazing girls” whose conversation she had been permitted to join. Then Chelsea Clinton, who announced herself “completely awed” by the “incredible swell of people and partners” who had participated in some event the previous day, invited us to hearken to the “inspiring voices of leaders, of communities, of companies, of countries.”

Those were just the first few minutes. It kept on like that for hours. When someone’s “potential” was mentioned, it was described as “boundless.” People’s “stories” were “compelling” when they weren’t “inspiring,” “incredible,” or “incredibly inspiring.” A Kenyan activist was introduced as “the incomparable.”

But the real star of this show was the Creative Innovator, the figure who crops up whenever the liberal class gets together to talk about spreading the prosperity around more fairly. In this case, the innovations being hailed seemed mainly to be transpiring in the Third World. “Every year, millions and millions of women everywhere are empowering themselves and their communities by finding unique, dynamic, and productive ways to enter the workforce, start their own businesses, and contribute to their economies and their countries,” said Chelsea Clinton, introducing an “inspiring innovator and chocolatier” from Trinidad.

Melinda Gates followed up the chocolatier’s presentation by heaping even more praise: “She is an amazing businesswoman, you can see why we all find her so inspiring.” Then, a little later on: “Entrepreneurship is really vital for women…. It’s also their ability to advance into leadership roles into corporations. And corporations play such a big role in the global economy.”

Roughly speaking, there were two groups present at this distinctly First World gathering. Many of the people making presentations came from Third World countries—a midwife from Haiti, a student from Afghanistan, the chocolate maker from Trinidad, a former child bride from India, an environmental activist from Kenya—­while the women anchoring this swirling praise fest were former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the wealthy foundation executive Melinda Gates.

What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the world’s pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top. The hardship those Third World women have endured and the entrepreneurial efforts they have undertaken are powerful symbols of the struggle of American professional women to become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (one of the ambitions that was discussed in detail) or of a woman to be elected president, which was the unspoken theme of the entire event.

What the spectacle had to offer ordinary working American women was another story.

That was my first experience of the microclimate of goodness that always seems to surround Hillary Rodham Clinton. The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet’s most victimized people, I would discover, is a recurring theme in her life and work.

But it is not her theme alone. Regardless of who leads it, professional-class liberalism seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself, and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue objects over the years, people and ideas whose surplus righteousness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify in their name whatever your program happened to be. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, for example, this favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s draconian crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes such as charter schools.1 I am taking Democrats to task here, but of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they’ve got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison-building spree.

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: this is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with. But ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison-building spree.

by Thomas Frank, Harpers |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Expedia Thinks It Can Help You Find the Dream Vacation You Didn’t Know You Wanted

On a Monday morning in mid-October, in a suburb of Seattle, a young woman named Megan went online to make some travel plans. She and her parents, along with her siblings and their spouses, wanted to go somewhere tropical in January, and in a flurry of texts and Facebook messages, Belize had emerged as the leading candidate. It had fallen to Megan, as it often did, to execute. So, a little after 9 a.m., she typed the name of the online travel agency Expedia into her browser bar and began to explore flights.

Her preference was for Alaska Airlines—she’d had good luck with the carrier—but when she couldn’t find anything, she started looking at American. She noticed there was only one ticket left for the least expensive flight, which caused her some concern. She grew more apprehensive as she noticed that the cheaper available flights had long layovers. Then she saw that some of the layovers were in Los Angeles, and she briefly considered a visit to Disneyland.

After eight minutes, without settling on a flight, Megan began to explore hotels. The photos from a “jungle spa” resort caught her eye—it looked adventurous but also pampering—so she was crestfallen when she noticed that it was booked up for the dates she wanted. “Oh, so sad,” she said softly. She looked through the reviews of another promising hotel and found it had no Wi-Fi, which wouldn’t be a problem, but also ants, which would. She stumbled onto a review someone had written about going to a resort to recover after “a surprising end to a marriage engagement.” That bummed Megan out a bit.

Then she found what looked like the one. This hotel wasn’t on the beach, but the reviews mentioned a spiral staircase, which sounded neat, and an on-site bakery. Megan loved bakeries. And it wasn’t too expensive. She’d have to confirm with her family, she reminded herself, but it was pretty close to ideal.

At that moment, a disembodied woman’s voice came over a speaker and told Megan she was finished. The voice belonged to an Expedia user-experience researcher named Susan Motte, who, with a team of programmers and designers from the company’s hotel-shopping and activities-booking teams, had been sitting in the next room watching Megan through a two-way mirror. Megan, who actually was planning a family trip to Belize (and whose full name Expedia asked not to be used, for privacy reasons), had been invited to the Usability Lab at Expedia headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., compensated with a gift card, and asked to use the site as she would at home. An eye tracker mounted on the bottom of the computer monitor logged where Megan was looking on the screen at any given moment. Sensors on one side of her face measured the electrical impulses in two muscles—the zygomaticus major, which tugs the corner of the mouth into a smile, and the corrugator supercilii, which furrows the brow. Megan’s emotions, manifested in infinitesimal changes in muscle fiber tone, had been playing out on a screen mounted on the wall in the adjoining room. A red waveform on a scrolling graph tracked her tension during the session, a green waveform below it, her delight.

All of her reactions, and her answers to the questions Motte asked as Megan used the site, went into a growing database. Expedia, the parent company of more than a dozen travel-oriented brands in addition to Expedia.com, is obsessed with figuring out how to make booking travel online more intuitive, more efficient, and more enjoyable. That means, among other things, understanding the psychodrama of trip planning: the shifting desires and paralyzing wealth of choices, the unsettling gyrations in room rates and ticket prices, the competing demands of family members and budgets and schedules, the need to balance the thirst for adventure against the fear of Zika virus in Latin America or Islamic State in Europe.

There’s a modest body of literature on the psychology of vacations, and one of its findings is that much of the pleasure comes from anticipation—a 1997 study found that people are happier thinking about a trip beforehand than when they’re actually taking it. The goal of Expedia’s usability researchers is not only to make Expedia’s various sites and mobile apps more efficient but also to make them an extension of the vacation fantasies that are always running in the back of our heads.

The basic act Megan performed under such close scrutiny plays out tens of millions of times a day—in homes, in offices, in line at the coffee shop on smartphones. In 2015 people performed 7.5 billion airfare searches and booked 203 million hotel room nights through Expedia and the other sites owned by the company—Hotels.com, the “meta-search” site Trivago, the business travel site Egencia, the discount site Hotwire, Australia’s Wotif, and others. Over the past decade revenue has more than tripled, from $2.1 billion in 2005 to $6.7 billion last year, and the stock price has risen fivefold. Along with Priceline, whose sites include Priceline.com, Kayak, and OpenTable, Expedia dominates the online travel business. (...)

Expedia sees its traveler-behavior data as a defense against superfluity. Despite its size and name recognition, Expedia doesn’t have its own hotel rooms or its own airplanes. It’s a middleman among other middlemen. Booking.com still has the bigger inventory of hotel listings; Google shows flight and hotel results right in the search page. Even TripAdvisor, spun out of Expedia in 2011, has become a major competitor by allowing visitors to book directly on its site. For Expedia to continue to justify its commissions and its existence, it has to be better than everyone else at divining vacationers’ desires. That draws on both the steady churn of testing and learning and the more open-ended qualitative work in the Usability Lab, where researchers use terms like “delight” and “fantasy” in a clinical manner.

“We’re doing more work to understand the dream state, the plan state,” says Scott Jones, who runs Expedia’s design and user-experience department. “People are always planning a trip. They may not be actively shopping for a trip, but they’ve always got this idea in mind.” The problem, as he sees it, is that purchasing the tickets and reserving the room breaks the spell. “Booking travel online has become so full of decisions and answering questions,” Jones says. “People are always daydreaming about trips, but as soon as they come to our site, it becomes more of a work thing.”

by Drake Bennett, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Johnson

Kira Hiromu, The Thinker, ca 1930
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An Open Letter To My CEO

[ed. English major moves to San Francisco, rents an apartment she can't afford, is offered an entry-level job in a tech company which she accepts (even though it's not the "media" position she really wanted, writing memes and twitter jokes), has all her benefits paid, and gets free food at work. But apparently this isn't enough because she's written an 'open letter' to her CEO shaming him for... well, I'm not sure exactly what. Not fully acknowledging her true awesomeness? Not drowning her in money? You'll have scroll down to the end to see how this turned out. I don't know, maybe this is just satire. It certainly hits every dumb Millennial cliche I can think of. See also: this, this and this. Hmm, must have hit a nerve.]

Dear Jeremy,

When I was a kid, back in the 90s when Spice Girls and owning a pager were #goals, I dreamed of having a car and a credit card and my own apartment. I told my 8-year old self, This is what it means to be an adult.

Now, seventeen years later, I have those things. But boy did I not anticipate a decade and a half ago that a car and a credit card and an apartment would all be symbols of stress, not success.

I left college, having majored in English literature, with a dream to work in media. It was either that or go to law school. Or become a teacher. But I didn’t want to become a cliche or drown in student loans, see. I also desperately needed to leave where I was living — I could get into the details of why, but to sum up: I wanted to die every single day of my life and it took me several years to realize it was because of the environment I was in. So, I picked the next best place: somewhere close to my dad, since we’ve never gotten to have much of a relationship and I like the weather up here. I found a job (I was hired the same day as my interview, in fact) and I put a bunch of debt on a shiny new credit card to afford the move.

Coming out of college without much more than freelancing and tutoring under my belt, I felt it was fair that I start out working in the customer support section of Yelp/Eat24 before I’d be qualified to transfer to media. Then, after I had moved and got firmly stuck in this apartment with this debt, I was told I’d have to work in support for an entire year before I would be able to move to a different department. A whole year answering calls and talking to customers just for the hope that someday I’d be able to make memes and twitter jokes about food. If you follow me on twitter, which you don’t, you’d know that these are things I already do. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s get back to the situation at hand, shall we?

So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week. Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent. She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we’ve got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven’t seen him in the past few months. Do you think he’s okay? Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless. He brought a big bag with him and stocked up on all those snacks you make sure are on every floor (except on the weekends when the customer support team is working, because we’re what makes Eat24 24-hours, 7 days a week but the team who comes to stock up those snacks in the early hours during my shift are only there Mondays through Fridays, excluding holidays. They get holidays and weekends off! Can you imagine?). By and large, our floor pummels through those snacks the fastest and has to roam other floors to find something to eat. Is it because we’re gluttons? Maybe. If you starve a pack of wolves and toss them a single steak, will they rip each other to shreds fighting over it? Definitely.

I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?

Let’s talk about those benefits, though. They’re great. I’ve got vision, dental, the normal health insurance stuff — and as far as I can tell, I don’t have to pay for any of it! Except the copays. $20 to see a doctor or get an eye exam or see a therapist or get medication. Twenty bucks each is pretty neat, if spending twenty dollars didn’t determine whether or not you could afford to get to work the next week. (...)

Will you pay my phone bill for me? I just got a text from T-Mobile telling me my bill is due. I got paid yesterday ($733.24, bi-weekly) but I have to save as much of that as possible to pay my rent ($1245) for my apartment that’s 30 miles away from work because it was the cheapest place I could find that had access to the train, which costs me $5.65 one way to get to work. That’s $11.30 a day, by the way. I make $8.15 an hour after taxes. I also have to pay my gas and electric bill. Last month it was $120. According to the infograph on PG&E’s website, that cost was because I used my heater. I’ve since stopped using my heater. Have you ever slept fully clothed under several blankets just so you don’t get a cold and have to miss work? Have you ever drank a liter of water before going to bed so you could fall asleep without waking up a few hours later with stomach pains because the last time you ate was at work? I woke up today with stomach pains. I made myself a bowl of rice.

Look, I’ll make you a deal. You don’t have to pay my phone bill. I’ll just disconnect my phone. And I’ll disconnect my home internet, too, even though it’s the only way I can do work for my freelance gig that I haven’t been able to do since I moved here because I’m constantly too stressed to focus on anything but going to sleep as soon as I’m not at work. Should I sell my car? It’s not my car, actually, it’s my grandpa’s. But the back left tire is flat and the front right headlight is out and the registration is due to be renewed in April and I already know I can’t afford any of that. I haven’t even gotten an oil change since I started this job (in August). But maybe I could find someone on Craigslist who won’t mind all of that because they’ll look at the dark circles under my eyes and realize I need the cash more than they do.

by Talia Jane, Medium |  Read more:

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With This Genetic Engineering Technology, There’s No Turning Back

[ed. See also: When Extinction is a Humanitarian Cause]

The students in Anthony James’s basement insectary at the University of California, Irvine, knew they’d broken the laws of evolution when they looked at the mosquitoes’ eyes.

By rights, the bugs, born from fathers with fluorescent red eyes and mothers with normal ones, should have come out only about half red. Instead, as they counted them, first a few and then by the hundreds, they found 99 percent had glowing eyes.

More important than the eye color is that James’s mosquitoes also carry genes that stop the malaria parasite from growing. If these insects were ever released in the wild, their “selfish” genetic cargo would spread inexorably through mosquito populations, and potentially stop the transmission of malaria.

The technology, called a “gene drive,” was built using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR and is being reported by James, a specialist in mosquito biology, and a half dozen colleagues today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A functioning gene drive in mosquitoes has been anticipated for more than a decade by public health organizations as a revolutionary novel way to fight malaria. Now that it’s a reality, however, the work raises questions over whether the technology is safe enough to ever be released into the wild.

“This is a major advance because it shows that gene drives will likely be effective in mosquitoes,” says Kevin Esvelt, a gene drive researcher at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. “Technology is no longer the limitation.”

Starting last summer, Esvelt and other scientists began warning that gene drives were about to jump from theory to reality (see “Protect Society from Our Inventions, Says Genome Editing Scientists”) and needed more attention by regulators and the public. The National Academy of Sciences is studying the science and ethics of the technology and plans to release recommendations next year on “responsible conduct” by scientists and companies.

Gene drives are just the latest example of the fantastic power of CRISPR editing to alter the DNA of living things, which has already set off a debate over the possibility that gene editing could be used to generate designer human babies (see “Engineering the Perfect Baby”). But Henry Greely, a law professor and bioethics specialist at Stanford, says environmental uses are more worrisome than a few modified people. “The possibility of remaking the biosphere is enormously significant, and a lot closer to realization,” he says. (...)

The mosquitoes have two important genetic additions. One is genes that manufacture antibodies whenever a female mosquito has a “blood meal.” Those antibodies bind to the parasite’s surface and halt its development. Yet normally, such an engineered mosquito would pass the genes only to exactly half its offspring, since there’s a 50 percent chance any chunk of DNA would come from its mate. And since the new genes probably don’t help a mosquito much, they’d quickly peter out in the wild.

That’s where CRISPR comes in. In a gene drive, components of the CRISPR system are added such that any normal gene gets edited and the genetic cargo is added to it as well. In James’s lab, practically all the mosquitoes ended up with the genetic addition, a result Esvelt calls “astounding.”

What worries Esvelt is that, in his opinion, the California researchers haven’t used strict enough safety measures. He says locked doors and closed cages aren’t enough. He wants them to install a genetic “reversal drive” so the change can be undone, if necessary. “An accidental release would be a disaster with potentially devastating consequences for public trust in science and especially gene-drive interventions,” he says. “No gene-drive intervention must ever be released without popular support.”

James says the experiment was safe since the mosquitoes are kept behind a series of locked, card-entry doors and because they aren’t native to California. If any escaped, they wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

In fact, the whole point of a gene drive is to release it into the wild, a concept that has long been accepted, at least in theory, by public health organizations including the Gates Foundation. Now that they’re actually possible, however, alarming news headlines have compared the technology to “the next weapon of mass destruction” and even raised the specter of insect terrorism, such as mosquitoes that kill people with a toxin.

by Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: Matt Panuska

Let Me Tell You About Smaug

[ed. If Donald Trump had written Lord of the Rings.]

Let me tell you about Smaug. Now, I knew the guy a long time, a good friend, he worked with me on the Laketown deal and told me he learned a lot from watching me. You could say I invented him. By the way, people do tell me that all the time, that I am one of the great teachers. They tell me that on my hit show The Apprentice, they tell me that in life.

But Smaug, if he learned anything, he didn’t learn enough. He turned out to be a terrible investor, a real dummy, just sat on his gold. He literally sat on it! No deals, no moves. I said Smaug, you dummy, you gotta be out there making deals, negotiating, sitting down at the table, incinerating people with fire. You’re not going to make any money sitting there like a big lazy dumb rock! You’ll be small potatoes forever! But he didn’t listen and he stayed in that backwater and he got so lazy, he was such a slow moving target – I mean, come on, an illiterate redneck takes one shot at you and boom, done, gone, dead. At a Trump property, we are always on the move, we are cutting deals, the best deals, and we use gold the way it was meant to be used, on fountains, escalators, walls – all the best, and very classy, people say.

I’m the best at talking to Sauron, I really am. Tough guy, tough negotiator but you really just have to have a man-to-man. Not like the people running Gondor, they’re stupid. I mean, how stupid are they? Now, my tower – and let me tell you, it’s the biggest, classiest tower, great views of the whole ring of stone and the forest and the river – I can get him on the line. Doesn’t answer anybody else, but when I want him, here’s there. I’ll be so good at dealing with him, it’ll make your head spin.

See now Gandalf, that guy is a total failure. Very low in the polls. Can’t win Rohan, can’t win Gondor. Everywhere I go they tell me they are glad to get rid of him. How many towers has he built? He doesn’t even have his own house. Very low energy. His idea of a good hotel, you ever been to the Green Dragon? What a dump. Terrible mattresses. Good beer, you know, I give him that, I don’t drink but they tell me very good beer, but the place attracts a very bad crowd, not classy at all. Awful service. Gandalf is like – dwarves, hobbits, these guys in green smocks and stuff – I mean, I’m very open-minded, the dwarves love me, but this is who you ask to kill a dragon? You bring them in and they fight over gold, we need to make better deals and tell them to go get their own gold. Very bad deals!

by Federalist Staff, The Federalist |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable

The first thing you notice at Donald Trump's rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd.

Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such problems.

At the Verizon Giganto-Center in Manchester the night before the New Hampshire primary, Trump bounds onstage to raucous applause and the booming riffs of the Lennon-McCartney anthem "Revolution." The song is, hilariously, a cautionary tale about the perils of false prophets peddling mindless revolts, but Trump floats in on its grooves like it means the opposite. When you win as much as he does, who the hell cares what anything means?

He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he's perfected over the past months. It's a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a little U.S. Open-style applause back in the direction of the audience, his face the whole time a mask of pure self-satisfaction.

"This is unbelievable, unbelievable!" he says, staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts. There's a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off the road, but it's a packed house.

He flashes a thumbs-up. "So everybody's talking about the cover of Time magazine last week. They have a picture of me from behind, I was extremely careful with my hair ... "

He strokes his famous flying fuzz-mane. It looks gorgeous, like it's been recently fed. The crowd goes wild. Whoooo! Trump!

It's pure camp, a variety show. He singles out a Trump impersonator in the crowd, tells him he hopes the guy is making a lot of money. "Melania, would you marry that guy?" he says. The future first lady is a Slovenian model who, apart from Trump, was most famous for a TV ad in which she engaged in a Frankenstein-style body transfer with the Aflac duck, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.

She had one line in that ad. Tonight, it's two lines:

"Ve love you, New Hampshire," she says, in a thick vampire accent. "Ve, together, ve vill make America great again!"

As reactionary patriotic theater goes, this scene is bizarre – Melania Knauss didn't even arrive in America until 1996, when she was all of 26 – but the crowd goes nuts anyway. Everything Trump does works these days. He steps to the mic.

"She's beautiful, but she's more beautiful even on the inside," he says, raising a finger to the heavens. "And, boy, is she smart!"

Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not to "touch or harm" any protesters, but to instead just surround them and chant, "Trump! Trump! Trump!" until security can arrive (and presumably do the touching and/or harming).

I'd seen this ritual several times, and the crowd always loves it. At one event, a dead ringer for John Oliver ripped off his shirt in the middle of a Trump speech to reveal body paint that read "Eminent Domain This!" on his thorax. The man shouted, "Trump is a racist!" and was immediately set upon by Trump supporters, who yelled "Trump! Trump! Trump!" at him until security arrived and dragged him out the door to cheers. The whole Trump run is like a Jerry Springer episode, where even the losers seem in on the gags.

In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: "Trump! Trump! Trump!" It's a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive's every public address.

It's a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a pussy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of "watermelons," while his opponents' balls are more like "grapes" or "raisins."

Trump's balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. "I never expect to hear that from you again!" he says, grinning. "She said he's a pussy. That's terrible." Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world – in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school – the candidate beams.

What's he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

Justin Timberlake ft. Jay Z

Robert Steven Connett
via:

Edible Marijuana Goes Gourmet

20-Minute Cannabis Olive Oil

Adapted from The Cannabis Kitchen Cookbook by Robyn Griggs Lawrence/chef Chris Kilham

Makes about 1⁄4 cup THC per cup: 283.5 milligrams*

Ingredients
1⁄4 ounce cured cannabis flowers, finely ground
1⁄4 cup organic extra-virgin olive oil
coffee grinder
fine mesh strainer
cheesecloth

Method
Place cannabis into a coffee grinder and grind until powdered. The cannabis will stick to the inside of the grinder, so scrape it out thoroughly. (Be careful about licking the spoon; that’s potent goo.) Place oil into a 6-inch diameter shallow frying pan or saucepan. Using a wooden spoon, continuously stir cannabis into the oil over a very low simmer for 10–20 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool.

Line a fine mesh strainer with cheesecloth and place it over a bowl, wide-mouth jar, or measuring cup. Twist cannabis with cheesecloth, squeezing out every last drop of oil. Compost cannabis solids. Use oil immediately or transfer oil to a clean, clear or dark bottle or jar with a lid or cork. Label with the type of oil and date. Store in a cool, dry place for up to a year.

*Disclaimer: THC calculations for these recipes were made based on the assumption of 10 percent THC in the plant. That’s used as a standard, but your chances of growing or buying cannabis with 10 percent THC are extremely low. These calculations are for comparison purposes only. The potency of the material you use is the most important indicator as to how a recipe will affect you.

by Jennifer Kaplan, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Cannabis oil, Povy Kendal Atchison