For $178 Million, the U.S. Could Pay for One Fighter Plane – or 3,358 Years of College

Does free college threaten our all-volunteer military? That is what Benjamin Luxenberg, on the military blog War on the Rocks says. But the real question goes beyond Luxenberg's practical query, striking deep into who we are and what we will be as a nation.

Unlike nearly every other developed country, which offer free or low cost higher education (Germany, Sweden and others are completely free; Korea's flagship Seoul National University runs about $12,000 a year, around the same as Oxford), in America you need money to go to college. Harvard charges $63,000 a year for tuition, room, board and fees, a quarter of a million dollars for a degree. Even a good state school will charge $22,000 for in-state tuition, room and board.

Right now there are only a handful of paths to higher education in America: have well-to-do parents; be low-income and smart to qualify for financial aid, take on crippling debt, or...

Join the military.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill provides up to $20,000 per year for tuition, along with an adjustable living stipend. At Harvard that stipend is $2,800 a month. Universities participating in the Yellow Ribbon Program make additional funds available without affecting the GI Bill entitlement. There are also the military academies, such as West Point, and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, commonly known as ROTC, which provide full or near-full college scholarships to future military officers.

Overall, 75 percent of those who enlisted or who sought an officer’s commission said they did so to obtain educational benefits. And in that vein, Luxenberg raises the question of whether the lower cost college education presidential nominee Hillary Clinton proposes is a threat to America's all-volunteer military. If college was cheaper, would they still enlist?

It is a practical question worth asking, but raises more serious issues in its trail. Do tuition costs need to stay high to help keep the ranks filled? Does unequal access to college help sustain our national defense?

Of course motivation to join the service is often multi-dimensional. But let's look a little deeper, and ask what it says about our nation when we guarantee affordable higher education to only a slim segment of our population. About seven percent of all living Americans were in the military at some point. Less than 0.5 percent of the American population currently serves. Why do we leave the other 99.95 percent to whatever they can or can't scrape together on their own? (...)

As a kind of thought experiment, let's begin by rounding off the military higher education benefit, tuition and living stipend, to $53,000 a year. We’ll note a single F-35 fighter plane costs $178 million.

Dropping just one plane from inventory generates 3,358 years of college money. We could pass on buying a handful of the planes, and a lot of people who now find college out of reach could go to school.

The final question many people will be asking at this point is one of entitlement. What did those civilians do that the United States should give them college money?

Ignoring the good idea of expanding “service” to include critical non-military national needs, the answer is nothing. If we started giving out the funds today, those civilians did nothing for them. But maybe it is more important than that.

Security is defined by much more than a large standing military (and that does not even touch the question of how, say, an eight year occupation of Iraq made America more secure). The United States, still struggling to transition from a soot and steel industrial base that collapsed in the 1970s to something that can compete in the 21st century, can only do so through education. More smart people equals more people who can take on the smarter jobs that drive prosperity. It is an investment in one of the most critical forms of infrastructure out there – brains.

To be sure, the issue of how much the United States should spend on defense, and how that money should be allotted, is complex. But the changes to spending discussed here exist far to the margins of that debate: the defense budget is some $607 billion, already the world’s largest by far. The cost of providing broader access to higher education would be a tiny fraction of that amount, far below any threshold where a danger to America’s defense could be reasonably argued.

by Peter Van Buren, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Randall Mikkelsen

The Perils of Planned Extinctions

A cynical move is underway to promote a new, powerful, and troubling technology known as “gene drives” for use in conservation. This is not just your everyday genetic modification, known as “GMO”; it is a radical new technology, which creates “mutagenic chain reactions” that can reshape living systems in unimaginable ways.

Gene drives represent the next frontier of genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and gene editing. The technology overrides the standard rules of genetic inheritance, ensuring that a particular trait, delivered by humans into an organism’s DNA using advanced gene-editing technology, spreads to all subsequent generations, thereby altering the future of the entire species.

It is a biological tool with unprecedented power. Yet, instead of taking time to consider fully the relevant ethical, ecological, and social issues, many are aggressively promoting gene-drive technology for use in conservation.

One proposal aims to protect native birds on Hawaii’s Kauai Island by using gene drives to reduce the population of a species of mosquito that carries avian malaria. Another plan, championed by a conservation consortium that includes US and Australian government agencies, would eradicate invasive, bird-harming mice on particular islands by introducing altered mice that prevent them from producing female offspring. Creating the “daughterless mouse” would be the first step toward so-called Genetic Biocontrol of Invasive Rodents (GBIRd), designed to cause deliberate extinctions of “pest” species like rats, in order to save “favored” species, such as endangered birds.

The assumption underlying these proposals seems to be that humans have the knowledge, capabilities, and prudence to control nature. The idea that we can – and should – use human-driven extinction to address human-caused extinction is appalling.

I am not alone in my concern. At the ongoing International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, a group of leading conservationists and scientists issued an open letter, entitled “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience,” demanding a halt to the use of gene drives in conservation. I am one of the signatories, along with the environmental icon David Suzuki, physicist Fritjof Capra, the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Tom Goldtooth, and organic pioneer Nell Newman.

The discussions that have begun at the IUCN congress will continue at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Mexico this December, when global leaders must consider a proposed global moratorium on gene drives. Such discussions reflect demands by civil-society leaders for a more thorough consideration of the scientific, moral, and legal issues concerning the use of gene drives.

As I see it, we are simply not asking the right questions. Our technological prowess is largely viewed through the lens of engineering, and engineers tend to focus on one question: “Does it work?” But, as Angelika Hilbeck, President of the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) argues, a better question would be: “What else does it do?”

When it comes to the GBIRd project, for example, one might ask whether the “daughterless mouse” could escape the specific ecosystem into which it has been introduced, just as GMO crops and farmed salmon do, and what would happen if it did. As for the mosquitos in Hawaii, one might ask how reducing their numbers would affect the endangered hoary bat species.

Ensuring that these kinds of questions are taken into account will be no easy feat. As a lawyer experienced in US government regulations, I can confidently say that the existing regulatory framework is utterly incapable of assessing and governing gene-drive technology.

Making matters worse, the media have consistently failed to educate the public about the risks raised by genetic technologies. Few people understand that, as MIT science historian Lily Kay explains, genetic engineering was deliberately developed and promoted as a tool for biological and social control. Those driving that process were aiming to fulfill a perceived mandate for “science-based social intervention.”

Powerful tools like genetic modification and, especially, gene-drive technology spark the imagination of anyone with an agenda, from the military (which could use them to make game-changing bio-weapons) to well-intentioned health advocates (which could use them to help eradicate certain deadly diseases). They certainly appeal to the hero narrative that so many of my fellow environmentalists favor.

by Claire Hope Cummings, Project Syndicate | Read more:
Image: Michael Morgenstern via:

Here's the thing...
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I Used to Be a Human Being

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I didn’t. I knew why I’d come here.

A year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours. Each morning began with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes. Throughout the day, I’d cough up an insight or an argument or a joke about what had just occurred or what was happening right now. And at times, as events took over, I’d spend weeks manically grabbing every tiny scrap of a developing story in order to fuse them into a narrative in real time. I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

I was, in other words, a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.

If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?”

But the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day; a new-media business that was actually profitable; a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate me; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego. If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.

I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it. I got a steady workout routine, and it gave me the only relief I could measure for an hour or so a day. But over time in this pervasive virtual world, the online clamor grew louder and louder. Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades — a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise. So much of it was irresistible, as I fully understood. So much of the technology was irreversible, as I also knew. But I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.

By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.

And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.

by Andrew Sullivan, Select/All, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Kim Dong-kyu, Based on: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich (1818).

Man v Rat: Could the Long War Soon be Over?

[ed. Not sure about this. See also: The Perils of Planned Extinction.]

First, the myths. There are no “super rats”. Apart from a specific subtropical breed, they do not get much bigger than 20 inches long, including the tail. They are not blind, nor are they afraid of cats. They do not carry rabies. They do not, as was reported in 1969 regarding an island in Indonesia, fall from the sky. Their communities are not led by elusive, giant “king rats”. Rat skeletons cannot liquefy and reconstitute at will. (For some otherwise rational people, this is a genuine concern.) They are not indestructible, and there are not as many of them as we think. The one-rat-per-human in New York City estimate is pure fiction. Consider this the good news.

In most other respects, “the rat poblem”, as it has come to be known, is a perfect nightmare. Wherever humans go, rats follow, forming shadow cities under our metropolises and hollows beneath our farmlands. They thrive in our squalor, making homes of our sewers, abandoned alleys, and neglected parks. They poison food, bite babies, undermine buildings, spread disease, decimate crop yields, and very occasionally eat people alive. A male and female left to their own devices for one year – the average lifespan of a city rat – can beget 15,000 descendants.

There may be no “king rat”, but there are “rat kings”, groups of up to 30 rats whose tails have knotted together to form one giant, swirling mass. Rats may be unable to liquefy their bones to slide under doors, but they don’t need to: their skeletons are so flexible that they can squeeze their way through any hole or crack wider than half an inch. They are cannibals, and they sometimes laugh (sort of) – especially when tickled. They can appear en masse, as if from nowhere, moving as fast as seven feet per second. They do not carry rabies, but a 2014 study from Columbia University found that the average New York City subway rat carried 18 viruses previously unknown to science, along with dozens of familiar, dangerous pathogens, such as C difficile and hepatitis C. As recently as 1994 there was a major recurrence of bubonic plague in India, an unpleasant flashback to the 14th century, when that rat-borne illness killed 25 million people in five years. Collectively, rats are responsible for more human death than any other mammal on earth.

Humans have a peculiar talent for exterminating other species. In the case of rats, we have been pursuing their total demise for centuries. We have invented elaborate, gruesome traps. We have trained dogs, ferrets, and cats to kill them. We have invented ultrasonic machines to drive them away with high-pitched noise. (Those machines, still popular, do not work.) We have poisoned them in their millions. In 1930, faced with a rat infestation on Rikers Island, New York City officials flushed the area with mustard gas. In the late 1940s, scientists developed anticoagulants to treat thrombosis in humans, and some years later supertoxic versions of the drugs were developed in order to kill rats by making them bleed to death from the inside after a single dose. Cityscapes and farmlands were drenched with thousands of tons of these chemicals. During the 1970s, we used DDT. These days, rat poison is not just sown in the earth by the truckload, it is rained from helicopters that track the rats with radar – in 2011 80 metric tonnes of poison-laced bait were dumped on to Henderson Island, home to one of the last untouched coral reefs in the South Pacific. In 2010, Chicago officials went “natural”: figuring a natural predator might track and kill rats, they released 60 coyotes wearing radio collars on to the city streets.

Still, here they are. According to Bobby Corrigan, the world’s leading expert on rodent control, many of the world’s great cities remain totally overcome. “In New York – we’re losing that war in a big way,” he told me. Combat metaphors have become a central feature of rat conversation among pest control professionals. In Robert Sullivan’s 2014 book Rats, he described humanity’s relationship with the species as an “unending and brutish war”, a battle we seem always, always to lose.

Why? How is it that we can send robots to Mars, build the internet, keep alive infants born so early that their skin isn’t even fully made – and yet remain unable to keep rats from threatening our food supplies, biting our babies, and appearing in our toilet bowls?

Frankly, rodents are the most successful species,” Loretta Mayer told me recently. “After the next holocaust, rats and Twinkies will be the only things left.” Mayer is a biologist, and she contends that the rat problem is actually a human problem, a result of our foolish choices and failures of imagination. In 2007, she co-founded SenesTech, a biotech startup that offers the promise of an armistice in a conflict that has lasted thousands of years. The concept is simple: rat birth control

The rat’s primary survival skill, as a species, is its unnerving rate of reproduction. Female rats ovulate every four days, copulate dozens of times a day and remain fertile until they die. (Like humans, they have sex for pleasure as well as for procreation.) This is how you go from two to 15,000 in a single year. When poison or traps thin out a population, they mate faster until their numbers regenerate. Conversely, if you can keep them from mating, colonies collapse in weeks and do not rebound.

Solving the rat problem by putting them on the pill sounds ridiculous. Until recently no pharmaceutical product existed that could make rats infertile, and even if it had, there was still the question of how it could be administered. But if such a thing were to work, the impact could be historic. Rats would die off without the need for poison, radar or coyotes.

SenesTech, which is based in Flagstaff, Arizona, claims to have created a liquid that will do exactly that.

by Jordan Kisner, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Frank Greenaway/Getty Images/Dorling Kindersley

WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

The Post editors concede that one — and only one — of the programs that Snowden enabled to be revealed was justifiably exposed — namely, the domestic metadata program, because it “was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law, and posed risks to privacy.” Regarding the “corrective legislation” that followed its exposure, the Post acknowledges: “We owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.” But that metadata program wasn’t revealed by the Post, but rather by The Guardian.

Other than that initial Snowden revelation, the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, the editors say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM, about which the Post says this:

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.)

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Pantelis Saitis via Washington Post

The Quiet Power of Maya Lin

Older artists who struggle futilely for recognition often envy those who achieve great success at an early age. But never being able to surpass or even equal a youthful triumph can be a cruel fate for those who believe you are only as good as your latest work. This is the potentially daunting reality that Maya Lin has lived with for three and a half decades, since she skyrocketed to fame at the age of twenty-one, when during her senior year as a Yale undergraduate architecture major she won the open design competition that resulted in the most influential public monument created since World War II: the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1981–1982 in Washington, D.C.

Although Lin’s rigorously abstract scheme—devoid of the representational elements and allegorical imagery typical of war monuments since ancient times—provoked great controversy in some quarters when it was chosen from among the 1,421 contest entries, her powerful melding of the period’s two main avant-garde sculptural developments, Minimalism and Earth Art, fundamentally recast popular notions of commemorative architecture. This symmetrical composition of two wedge-shaped, vertically paneled, polished black granite walls set at a 125-degree angle to each other and sunk ten feet below grade at their deepest is inscribed with the names of 58,307 American military personnel who died as a result of the Vietnam War between 1957 and 1975.

The sloping walkway parallel to this 493-foot-long expanse of stone begins at street level and then reaches its nadir at the monument’s midpoint. The transit along the declivity gives one the palpable impression of being swamped by a tide of mortality as the rows of names rise higher and higher above one’s head. Then, as the pedestrian path begins to ascend at the structure’s midpoint, the opposite occurs, the sensation ebbing and abating as one reaches the flat expanse of the Mall once again, filled with relief that the flood of names has finally ended. It is not uncommon to see visitors in tears or even sobbing after they have negotiated this symbolic abyss, a journey made all the more unnerving because of the unconsoling directness of the experience.

The adage that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan certainly pertains to those involved with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial commission, although the person most responsible for its triumphant outcome—the artist herself—has never tried to arrogate sole credit for what became a hugely complicated and highly politicized process. Robert Doubek, who served as executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund—the nonprofit organization created in 1979 to raise money for the monument’s construction—has written a heartfelt memoir of the struggle to bring this patriotic dream to fruition, and he is not at all reticent in aggrandizing the part he played.

As the definite article in his subtitle suggests, Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: The Inside Story is not only a first-person but also a one-sided account of this frequently contentious saga. Nonetheless, for all its flaws and self-serving paybacks, this is a valuable contribution to the memorial’s historiography, above all in Doubek’s portrayal of conflicting forces vying for supremacy. We get a vivid sense of the emotions Lin’s design aroused among those who felt her scheme was disrespectful to the memory of the fallen because of its uncompromising abstraction and the way it is dug into the earth—a grave, a pit, a latrine, detractors charged—rather than elevated to a position of high honor.

Doubek admits that he was no fan of Lin’s design as it emerged from the crowd of other submissions during the selection process. “[Her] sketches and drawings were very amateurish,” he writes, “and the black shapes said nothing to me. ‘What the hell is that?’ I had thought.” A very different reaction came from the West Point–trained Jack Wheeler, cofounder (with another former soldier, Jan Scruggs) and chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, who instantly declared, “It’s a work of genius.” Doubek still didn’t get it. “I had anticipated a messiah emerging from the mists of competitionland,” he recalls of his first meeting with Lin. “But she didn’t have a lot to say and didn’t seem to know or care much about us. I felt like I had let a genie out of the bottle only to have the genie chill out.”

Things between them never improved greatly, and in the book’s postscript the author sourly notes that it was only in 2007 that “Lin for the first time expressed thanks to me and the others with VVMF,” oblivious to why it may have taken her so long. But Doubek’s obtuseness was far from the worst adversity Lin faced, as she endured vicious sexist and racist attacks from those outraged that an Asian woman—a “gook,” many openly said—should determine how the Vietnam War was memorialized for the ages.

Concerted objections to Lin’s design among veterans’ groups led to the addition of a naturalistic bronze statue, Frederick Hart’s The Three Soldiers, which depicts a trio of zombielike combatants who exhibit the so-called thousand-yard stare of battle-hardened warriors. Unveiled a year after the main memorial’s completion, this kitschy tableau was at least placed far enough away from the great earthwork to inflict minimum damage. Not surprisingly, Hart’s hypermasculine lineup spurred feminists in turn to demand yet another sculptural supplement to the site, which resulted in the Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1993), a bronze figural group by Glenna Goodacre that shows three servicewomen tending to a wounded GI in the attitudes of an overcrowded but still male-centered Pietà.

As the art historian Harriet F. Senie reports of her study visit to the Mall in 2005, Lin’s and Hart’s works impel very different responses from visitors. In contrast to the main memorial, The Three Soldiers, she writes,

attracted a respectful crowd but not an awed or silenced one…. One young man wearing fatigues and smoking a cigarette was…draped over the figures: respect was not evident. The sculpture, composed of so much posturing, seemed to prompt some more in its visitors.

In her new book, Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11, Senie examines the changing nature of commemorative design during the three decades that separated those two watersheds in American history. She seems to side with early opponents of Lin’s scheme who somehow interpreted it as critical of the Vietnam conflict. As she writes:

The guidelines for the competition…insisted that the memorial make no political statement about the war. It might be argued that refusing to discuss the war was tantamount to a negative statement about it and that silence itself could be considered a distinct form of rhetoric. Although responsibility for the creation of meaning at a memorial (or any work of art) ultimately rests with the viewer, the rhetorical effect of silence is heightened at the VVM by its reflective surface. As one confronts the names, essentially staring both separation and mortality in the face, interpretation inevitably becomes personal and—given the nature of this war—political….

Visitors behave reverentially, as if they were at a cemetery, largely because the presence of bodies is implied by the list of names on the Wall…. Even though most of the Vietnam dead are buried in local cemeteries around the country, interment is implied by the way the memorial is placed into the ground.

There are many good things in Memorials to Shattered Myths—especially Senie’s insightful interpretation of the modern phenomenon of spontaneous vernacular memorials, which arise on the site of tragic incidents ranging from fatal traffic crashes to random shootings and are quickly festooned with flowers, balloons, candles, stuffed animals, and handwritten tributes. However, her reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial strikes me as mistaken, most of all her assertion that the design is somehow evasive about the true nature of the war and inevitably mistaken for an actual burial ground. I find the opposite to be the case.

The pervasive influence of Lin’s masterwork has been repeatedly demonstrated in a period when traditional forms of architecture and sculpture seem wholly inadequate in memorializing events once deemed unimaginable, most clearly the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s National September 11 Memorial of 2003–2011 on the site of that catastrophe reinterprets several of Lin’s concepts in highly original ways.

So as not to become architecture’s Lady of Perpetual Mourning, Lin has turned down all but three subsequent offers to design memorials, including that at Ground Zero. She is now working on what she promises will be her final effort in that vein, the Memorial to the Sixth Extinction, intended to raise awareness of species protection and funded through her What is Missing? Foundation. (The other two commemorative commissions she did accept were the Civil Rights Memorial of 1989 in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Women’s Table of 1993 at Yale, which was commissioned in 1989 to mark twenty years of coeducation at her alma mater.)

She turned instead to environmental sculptures, as well as to a smaller number of modestly scaled buildings that have led some to underestimate her degree of professional ambition. Yet in contrast to architecture as many males in the profession still would define it—the bigger, costlier, and showier the better—her meditative view of the building art provides a means for expressing poetic impulses about humanity’s place in the natural, rather than man-made, environment. Indeed, Lin’s steadfast determination to ignore the corruptions of modern publicity—that fatal addiction of postmillennial culture, signified in her profession by the hideous neologism “starchitect”—is among her most important qualities.

It could be said that such indifference is easy for someone whose place in architectural history is already secure. But the blatant degree to which some of Lin’s colleagues in the profession, female as well as male, have fallen in with the contemporary celebrity industry offers a cautionary contrast. When Jerry Seinfeld was asked last year on CBS News Sunday Morning how he could ever possibly exceed the phenomenal success of his eponymous TV sitcom, which ended in 1998, he replied in words that echo Lin’s attitude: “There’s only one way to top it. And that’s to remain an artist and not a ‘star.’”

by Martin Filler, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Tim Hursley

Daisuke Kumakiri
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Saya 2016

Just when you thought the uncanny valley couldn’t get much uncannier, Saya’s parents released a new photo of our favorite not-so-typical Japanese schoolgirl.

We first met Saya 1 year ago when husband-and-wife digital artists Teruyuki and Yuki Ishikawa released a photo of their beautiful daughter. Indeed, Saya is only as real as the pixels on your screen and was gently brought to life by the tokyo-based freelance 3D CG artists. Over the last year Saya has matured, meaning that Telyuka, as the duo are called, made slight improvements to her based on feedback from the public, working in their spare time as they attempted to balance commercial work and personal projects. Saya is now so human-like it leads to an important question: have we safely made it across the uncanny valley?

by Johnny, Spoon & Tamago |  Read more:

Image: Telyuka.com

A Persnickety Spy For Luxury Hotels

On a recent Wednesday evening, Ann, a fifty-three-year-old securities lawyer who lives in Manhattan, checked into Room 310 at a swanky hotel in midtown. (Average nightly rate: four hundred and twenty-eight dollars.) She dropped her purse in the corner and headed straight for the bathroom, where she gripped the sides of the toilet and peered inside. “It checks out,” she said. Back in the room, she sat down on the bed and ran her hands across the dark-gray velvet headboard, which complemented the light-gray velvet comforter. She leaned back slowly on four large, white pillows and bounced up and down a few times. “Firm, but not crazy-firm.” This seemed to satisfy her. Getting up, she stood by the side of the bed, then dropped to her hands and knees. She lifted the sheets and looked under the mattress. “Is that a hair?” she asked, extracting one from the underside of the mattress. She whipped out a notepad and started scribbling.

Ann is a hotel inspector. (She asked that her full name not be used, so that she could protect her identity as an undercover operator, so to speak.) Like a detective analyzing a crime scene for potential clues, Ann travels the world at the behest of Small Luxury Hotels of the World (S.L.H.), poking and prodding her way around hotel rooms, spas, restaurants, and lobbies, and reporting back on everything from how many times a staff member smiles and makes eye contact during an interaction to optimum bed bounciness. She is required to test every aspect of a hotel, from on-site facilities (spa, gym, yoga studio) to food and beverage options (which means breakfast, lunch, dinner, and room service, usually all in one day). “I’m kind of a pain in the ass,” she said. “I’m the one who rings up for new coat hangers.”

S.L.H. is an association of five hundred and twenty luxury boutique hotels in eighty countries. The majority of these hotels are independently owned, and getting the S.L.H. seal of approval is hard: about a thousand hotels look to join the brand every year, but only about five per cent are successful. The vetting procedure can take anywhere from one to three months, and successful entry into the group allows the hotel owner to post a plaque bearing the S.L.H. logo near the entrance—useful marketing for hotels charging upward of three hundred dollars for a single night’s stay.

S.L.H. has around a hundred hotel inspectors, and Ann has been one of them for seven years. Although she travels a lot for work, she performs inspections only during personal vacation time, and inspects between three and five S.L.H. properties a year. She is always reimbursed for her expenses at the hotel.

As a seasoned traveller, Ann has become accustomed to subtle differences among hotels according to what part of the world they’re in. European hotels, for example, excel at “funky bathroom hardware.” American hotels have “smushier” pillows. A hotel in Asia had a nightstand drawer devoted to charging devices, with every kind of international adapter. “I see something like that, there could be rats on the floor and I wouldn’t care,” she said. She’s bagged enough hotel slippers that she keeps a basketful by the door in her apartment for guests. Pens, too: “I could furnish a small school with the amount of hotel pens I have.”

Back in the room in New York, Ann took a peek inside the closet. The robes were soft, and monogrammed with the hotel’s name. The extra blanket and pillowcase warranted a closer look. Ann stood on her tiptoes. Another hair—long and black. She made a face. “Is it the end of the world? No. But at some point, it starts to matter.”

The furniture in the room checked out. A few slight scuffs, but someone had obviously taken pains to paint over them. “It’s a high-traffic room, I get it.” Next to the bed, a large tablet displayed touch-screen controls for the television, blinds, and thermostat. A sleeping app had options for sounds like “rocky beach” and “crickets.” Ann pressed “crickets”—and the noise of a thousand angry insects filled the room. “God, no,” she yelled, trying to turn it off.

The perception of an untouched, unscuffed room is a powerful marketing tool. We may be in control of our environment when we’re at home, but we’re at the mercy of someone else when we stay in a hotel. This is why we crave the illusion of a space that looks and smells brand-new, unsoiled by the hands—and hairs—of other humans. “The best hotels try to create an impression of what perfect, effortless living would be like,” Sean Hennessey, an assistant professor at N.Y.U.’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, said. “Hotel managers try very hard to have rooms look pristine, including having the housekeeper vacuum while walking out backwards, so there are no footprints in the carpet. Seeing someone else’s hair in your sink shatters that illusion.” (Though the idea of “hospitality” may be changing: compare this to the Airbnb experience, which encourages travellers not just to acknowledge that someone else lives in that space but to embrace it.)

Every now and then, Ann snapped a picture on her smartphone and tapped some notes into an app, which has replaced the forty-one-page document that inspectors used to be required to fill out. After an inspection is finished, S.L.H. sends the hotel an official report, and if there are problems the hotel has thirty days to clean up its act. Other luxury hotels also use inspectors, too, both for in-person inspections as well as for online and voice reservations. According to Hennessey, one of the benefits of hotel mystery shoppers, as they’re known in the industry, is that they help insure employees don’t lose their edge. “Mystery shoppers check for specific acts, like employees saying ‘Good morning’ as well as ‘Would you like another drink or would you like to upgrade to suite for only fifty dollars?’ ” Hennessey told me. His daughter once worked in reservations at a boutique New York hotel, where she became proficient in sniffing out undercover inspectors. “The caller says they’ll be in New York next week and asks if the Yankees will be in town,” Hennessey said. “Then the caller will ask if the hotel can arrange a massage. Who goes to a Yankees game and then gets a massage?”

by Laura Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum 

DEA Bans Kratom as Alternative Opioid Treatment

[ed. We're all supposedly going through a collective opioid withdrawal and the DEA springs into action and bans kratom, an alternative treatment... guess they felt they had to do something to make the situation worse. See also: Drugmakers Fought State Opioid Limits Amid Crisis.]

Binh Nguyen started using opiate pain medications after his doctor wrote him a prescription to mute the piercing pain of an acute liver condition. The pills did help with the pain, and they also changed the way the world looked a bit—how it felt to be on opiates became how it felt to exist.

“It escalated from there,” says Nguyen of his addiction. Soon he was swallowing upward of five 30-mg Oxycodone pills a day and scrambling to keep up with his maintenance painkiller habit.

Nguyen’s life changed after a friend told him about a legal herb that the friend was using to kick his heroin addiction. The botanical-derived psychoactive substance, kratom, was legal and available for purchase around Seattle. It wasn’t so much that the effects were similar to those of opiates, but the herb kept withdrawal symptoms at bay and was a good, natural way to ease anxiety and feel a little energized, Nguyen says. More than a year later his mental state and quality of life have improved substantially, he says. He still takes kratom most mornings, but he doesn’t need it to get out of bed or make it to work.

Nguyen’s story isn’t unusual. Since kratom started appearing on the shelves of head shops in the U.S. around 2007, many have come to rely on the East Asian tree leaf to stay clean, curb chronic pain, or get through the day. But unfortunately for its adherents, and despite the lack of adverse effects, the botanical’s days as an accessible legal remedy in the United States will come to an end October 1.

On August 30, the DEA announced its intent to make the active components found in kratom leaves—mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine—illegal “in order to avoid an imminent hazard to public safety.” The temporary move to Schedule I—the category of the Controlled Substances Act occupied by drugs believed to have high abuse potential and no medical value—is intended to allow time for an unregulated substance to be scheduled through formal rule-making procedures.

That, though, is of little comfort to people like Nguyen, who are already sold on kratom’s lifesaving effects.

Mitragyna speciosa, a deciduous tropical tree in the coffee family that is indigenous to Thailand, has been used to manage pain, enhance concentration, and replace opiates since the 1800s in Southeast Asia. In the U.S. its therapeutic benefits have yet to be formally established, though early research shows promise.

A paper published by Columbia University’s Dalibor Sames and Andrew Kruegel this summer in the Journal of the American Chemical Society demonstrated that kratom’s active ingredients activate the same receptors as does morphine. Research led by Susruta Majumdar at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has been showing a kratom derivative’s potential as a building block for a safe and effective pain medication. (...)

Joe Salender just returned from this year’s Burning Man, where he shared kratom with many people who had never heard of the plant. “It was an amazing thing, but my overall vibe is kind of bummed,” he says. He’s stocked kratom at his Olive Way glassware shop, Holy Smoke, for seven years, and for much of that time he’s been watching with concern as some state governments rushed to regulate the plant. Kratom arrived from Southeast Asia hot on the heels of the notorious designer drug bath salts, and, in the wake of the wave of negative media coverage that followed, lawmakers in many states began to work to make the botanically derived psychoactive substance illegal. Its novel ability to help wean users from heroin didn’t help kratom’s reputation, either, Salender says; many people assumed that if kratom kept opiate withdrawals at bay, it also must be highly addictive.

User Aaron Farmer, who replaced coffee with kratom, says that’s not the case. He’s been drinking kratom tea daily for over a year, and says that when he’s taken a break, the withdrawals have been slightly less severe than those he experienced when he quit drinking coffee.

The DEA doesn’t necessarily disagree with that assessment. In a press release, the agency said 660 calls “related to kratom exposure” were made to poison-control centers between 2010 and 2015. Fifteen “kratom-related” deaths occurred between 2014 and 2016, the agency said. However, DEA public information officer Jodie Underwood clarified that the scheduling decision “is not to say or suggest that these active materials in the kratom plant are as dangerous as heroin or LSD or even other scheduled controlled substances—it simply means that the substances meet the statutory criteria as a Schedule I controlled substance.”

by Lael Henterly, Seattle Weekly |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

As Amazon Arrives, the Campus Bookstore Is a Books Store No More

[ed. They're everywhere. I wonder why Amazon doesn't start branding everything with their logo like Nike does.]

As school started at Stony Brook University this month, two freshmen, Juan Adames and John Taveras, set out to buy textbooks.

They had not heard yet that the bookstore was a books store no more.

This summer, Stony Brook, part of the State University of New York, announced a partnership with the online retailer Amazon, now the university’s official book retailer. Students can purchase texts through a Stony Brook-specific Amazon page and have them delivered to campus.

In the campus store where the textbooks used to be, there are now adult coloring books, racks of university-branded polos and windbreakers and three narrow bookshelves displaying assorted novels. The rest of the store is a vibrant collage of spirit wear and school supplies: backpacks and baseball caps; pompom hats and striped scarves; notebooks and correction fluid. There will soon be a Starbucks.

“I was a bit thrown off by the appearance,” Mr. Adames said.

It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore? (...)

According to Mr. Walton, textbooks are generally not the focus of college bookstores, anyway. A school on a two-semester system has an approximately eight-week period of textbook activity per year, he estimated.

“The function of the store has been oversimplified to textbooks,” he said. “The store really functions on a variety of levels.”

Admissions tour groups pass through; visiting alumni stop by; faculty and staff members go there for the convenience, Mr. Walton said.

“If anything’s in danger, I would say the thing that’s probably the danger is that textbooks are going to go away,” he said. “The store continues to serve a number of functions that people just don’t recognize.”

At Stony Brook, the former bookstore has become “a branding piece,” Mr. Baigent said, which helps to provide more of a “campus university identity.”

by Arielle Dollinger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Dave Sanders

Tile Gains Footing All Over
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Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right

Pragmatic Centrism Is Crony Capitalism

Neoliberal crony capitalism is driven by a grand coalition between the pragmatic centre-left and the pragmatic centre-right. Crony capitalist policies are always justified as the pragmatic solution. The range of policy options is narrowed down to a pragmatic compromise that maximises the rent that can be extracted by special interests. Instead of the government providing essential services such as healthcare and law and order, we get oligopolistic private healthcare and privatised prisons. Instead of a vibrant and competitive private sector with free entry and exit of firms we get heavily regulated and licensed industries, too-big-to-fail banks and corporate bailouts.

There’s no better example of this dynamic than the replacement of the public option in Obamacare by a‘private option’. As Glenn Greenwald argues, “whatever one’s views on Obamacare were and are: the bill’s mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry.” Public support is garnered by presenting the private option as the pragmatic choice, the compromise option, the only option. To middle class families who fear losing their healthcare protection due to unemployment, the choice is framed as either the private option or nothing.

In a recent paper (h/t Chris Dillow), Pablo Torija asks the question ‘Do Politicians Serve the One Percent?’ and concludes that they do. This is not a surprising result but what is more interesting is his research on the difference between leftwing and rightwing governments which he summarises as follows: “In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter”.

Nothing illustrates the irrelevance of democratic politics in the neo-liberal era more than the sight of a supposedly free-market right-wing government attempting to reinvent Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac in Britain. On the other side of the pond, we have a supposedly left-wing government which funnels increasing amounts of taxpayer money to crony capitalists in the name of public-private partnerships. Politics today is just internecine warfare between the various segments of the rentier class. As Pete Townshend once said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

The Core Strategy of Pragmatic Crony Capitalism: Increase The Scope and Reduce the Scale of Government

Most critics of neoliberalism on the left point to the dramatic reduction in the scale of government activities since the 80s – the privatisation of state-run enterprises, the increased dependence upon private contractors for delivering public services etc. Most right-wing critics lament the increasing regulatory burden faced by businesses and individuals and the preferential treatment and bailouts doled out to the politically well-connected. Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention. Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes. In other words, expand the scope of government to permeate as many economic activities as possible and contract the scale of government within its core activities.

Some of the worst manifestations of crony capitalism can be traced to this perverse pragmatism. The increased scope and reduced scale are the main reasons for the cosy revolving door between incumbent crony capitalists and the government. The left predictably blames it all on the market, the right blames government corruption, while the revolving door of “pragmatic” politicians and crony capitalists rob us blind.

Radical Centrism: Increase The Scale and Reduce The Scope of Government

The essence of a radical centrist approach is government provision of essential goods and services and a minimal-intervention, free enterprise environment for everything else. In most countries, this requires both a dramatic increase in the scale of government activities within its core domain as well as a dramatic reduction in the scope of government activities outside it. In criticising the shambolic privatisation of National Rail in the United Kingdom, Christian Wolmar argued that: “once you have government involvement, you might as well have government ownership”. This is an understatement. The essence of radical centrism is: ‘once you have government involvement, you must have government ownership’. Moving from publicly run systems “towards” free-enterprise systems or vice versa is never a good idea. The road between the public sector and the private sector is the zone of crony capitalist public-private partnerships. We need a narrowly defined ‘pure public option’ rather than the pragmatic crony capitalist ‘private option’.

The idea of radical centrism is not just driven by vague ideas of social justice or increased competition. It is driven by ideas and concepts that lie at the heart of complex system resilience. All complex adaptive systems that successfully balance the need to maintain robustness while at the same time generating novelty and innovation utilise a similar approach.

by Ashwin Parameswaran, macroresistance | Read more:

Boondoggles

A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.

Etymology

The term arose from a 1935 New York Times report that more than $3 million had been spent on recreational activities for the jobless as part of the New Deal. Among these activities were crafts classes, where the production of "boon doggles," described in the article as various utilitarian "gadgets" made with cloth or leather, were taught.

Dynamics

The term "boondoggle" may also be used to refer to protracted government or corporate projects involving large numbers of people and usually heavy expenditure, where at some point, the key operators, having realized that the project will never work, are still reluctant to bring this to the attention of their superiors. Generally there is an aspect of "going through the motions"—for example, continuing research and development—as long as funds are available to keep paying the researchers' and executives' salaries.

The situation can be allowed to continue for what seems like unreasonably long periods, as senior management are often reluctant to admit that they allowed a failed project to go on for so long. In many cases, the actual device itself may eventually work, but not well enough to ever recoup its development costs.

While cost overruns are a common factor in declaring a project a boondoggle, that does not necessarily mean the project has no benefit.

The project may have unseen benefits that overshadow its initial problems. For example, the cost of construction of the Sydney Opera House ballooned over 1,400 percent, but the building has since become an icon for the city and for Australia. The cost of the Space Shuttle vastly overran its initial estimates, but it was still able to carry out tasks unachievable by any other technology.

Another example is the RCA "SelectaVision" video disk system project, begun in the early 1960s and continuing for nearly 20 years, long after cheaper and better alternatives had come to market. RCA was estimated to have spent about $750 million (1985 dollars) (equivalent to $1.65 billion in 2014 dollars) on this commercially nonviable system, which was one of the factors leading to its sale to GE and later breakup in 1986.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program has suffered massive cost and schedule overruns and the fighter's military utility is the subject of heated controversy, yet the program continues to be the highest priority procurement activity for the United States Department of Defense.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

To Find Hillary Clinton Likable, We Must Learn to View Women as Complex Beings

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from the lack of stories about everyone else.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.

We tend to talk about likability as a black or white issue. But like the old adage, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” there’s no universal component of likability. After all, erudite Barack Obama, folksy Joe Biden, and angry Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more different, yet all three are beloved by their bases. Even Donald Trump—as divisive as he is—clearly has a magnetic pull among his loyal supporters.

But Clinton is different. Even many of those who plan to vote for her admit they don’t find her particularly likable. According to The Washington Post, just 33 percent of Clinton supporters are “very enthusiastic” about supporting her while 46 percent of Trump supporters say the same about their candidate. (For the record, Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.) Pundits usually blame Clinton’s favorability issues on her perceived caginess, her tone, and her general awkwardness when it comes to public speaking. Essentially: Clinton’s flaws make her unlikable.

But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws that makethem likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure. And while one might assume Joe Biden’s frequent gaffes and penchant for using words like “malarkey” would make him seem hopelessly old-fashioned, those are precisely the qualities that have transformed him into a beloved darling of the social media age. And Clinton’s own running mate, Tim Kaine, provides a particularly interesting contrast because he shares so much of her awkwardness. Yet far from being condemned for it, he was lovingly hailed as “America’s nerdy stepdad” after his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

So why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn't she seen as America's awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?

I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women. We can recognize Sanders as a fiery activist, Biden as a truth teller, and Kaine as an earnest goof, but we just don’t have an archetype—fictional or otherwise—through which to understand Clinton.

by Caroline Siede, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: YouTube and uncredited.

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That Time I Published a Personal Essay on the Internet

Bleary-eyed at three in the morning, I submitted the personal essay I’d spent months crafting. When I woke up, an email was awaiting me with the subject THIS ESSAY IS EVERYTHING!

“Ur writing is srsly #OnFleek!” wrote the editor. “I need 2 tweak a little and then we can publish it on the site. Nothing cray-cray — just some bling 4 more eyeballs/shares/RTs.”

Publish? I shakily set down my cup of coffee, my body buzzing with adrenaline and caffeine.

The essay was titled “The November of Her Years: My Mother’s Final Thanksgiving at Her Brother’s House.”

“Love the stuff about ur mom… it gives me ~ all ~ of the feels,” my editor later wrote via Instant Messenger (“my editor” — just thinking about her like that gave me goosebumps). “Quick fact-check: what does ur uncle do 4 CA$$$H?”

“Tim’s a retired nurse, but he’s gotten into computers and now does volunteer work with hospitals up in Maine to improve their databases and keep down costs — the state has hit a rough financial patch.”

“BROGRAMMER ahahahahaha… ur next-level HILARIOUS… u do u,” she wrote. “You mentioned ur mom and uncle were ✝.”

“Yes, they were lapsed Catholics, but they found some comfort in religion at the end of my mother’s life.”

“So Tim didn’t invite any1 Jewish to the dinner smh?”

“Anyone Jewish? Technically speaking, no — we were keeping it to just our immediate family, because Mom was so sick. But he wasn’t intentionally trying to—”

“Lolwut!” she wrote. “It’ll be up super-1st thing tomorrow.”

“Wait — don’t you want to give me a chance to look over your edits?”

“Kthxbai!” came on-screen before she logged off.

The next morning the essay was the lead feature on the site. The headline was “I Can’t, I Just Can’t: My Coder Uncle, Who’s THE WORST, Had an Epic Anti-Semitic Meltdown at Thanksgiving.” Here was the beginning:

“I’m chowing down on stuffing gravy turkey (om nom nom) while trying to tune out my Silicon Valley creeptastic uncle as he victim-blames the economy on the Jews.”

“That moment when you’re at my family’s literally insane Thanksgiving. HOLIDAY FAIL.”

“Thanks for running the piece,” I emailed my editor. “However, I notice you attributed various remarks to my uncle that weren’t in the original essay and removed all the references to my mother and her passing away the next week.”

“U mad?” she wrote. “Tbh, those parts of the essay were kinda ¯\(ツ)/¯, because death.”

Then the comments section began filling up.

by Teddy Wayne, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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