The Rules Do Not Apply

I first met Ariel Levy in 2009, soon after moving from London to New York, but I had been a fan for more than a decade. Her frank articles about pop culture and sex, which she wrote in her first job at New York magazine from the late 1990s, provided the template of what I wanted to write one day. Her 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, a blistering look at how young women were being sold the lie that emulating pole dancers and Paris Hilton was empowering, became one of the defining feminist statements of that decade. At the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008, she breaks up the magazine’s occasional aridity with vivid articles about sexuality and gender. (She got her job when she told editor David Remnick that, “If aliens had only the New Yorker to go by, they would conclude that human beings didn’t care that much about sex, which they actually do.”)

Heroes rarely live up to your fantasies, but Levy exceeded them. Usually we’d go out for drinks – cocktails that knocked me sideways, but barely seemed to touch her sides – and from the start she struck me as being just like her writing: laid-back, wise, curious, kind. Sometimes Levy’s wife, Lucy, would join us. “Isn’t she hilarious?” Levy would say after Lucy had said something that wasn’t, actually, all that funny, but I envied them their mutual devotion after almost a decade together. I, by contrast, was lonely and, like generations of single women in their mid-30s before me, starting to panic. But like a lot of women of my particular generation, I felt ashamed of this. Panicking about not having a baby? How retrograde. So I never admitted any of it to Levy, who seemed more likely to eat her own hair than indulge in such uncool, unfeminist thoughts.

I left New York in 2012 and, despite my doomy fears, had twins when I was 37. Levy and I stayed in touch by email, and although her messages became shorter and more distant, I assumed everything was fine, because she was Ari. But in 2013, I opened the New Yorker and learned that it was not. (...)

In 2012, Levy conceived a baby with sperm from a friend, having overcome the reservations she’d long had about parenthood. She was about to turn 38: “It felt like making it on to a plane the moment before the gate closes – you can’t help but thrill,” she wrote in her 2013 New Yorker article, Thanksgiving In Mongolia.

When she was five months pregnant, she flew to Ulaanbaatar for work. Her friends were concerned but, she wrote, “I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi desert pregnant.” After two days of abdominal discomfort, she ran into the hotel bathroom, crouched on the floor and blacked out from the pain. When she came to, her baby was on the floor next to her. “I heard myself say out loud, ‘This can’t be good.’ But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell,” she wrote. She stared in awe at his mouth, “opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world”.

She had suffered a severe placental abruption, a rare complication in which the placenta detaches from the uterus. In shock, Levy held the 19-week foetus while blood spread across the tiles. She eventually called for help, taking a photograph of her son before the ambulance turned up. She was taken to a clinic where a kind South African doctor tended to her while she bled and sobbed. “And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me,” she wrote.

Levy flew back to New York and, within two weeks, her relationship with Lucy came to an end. For months afterwards, Levy continued to bleed and lactate: “It seemed to me grief was leaking out of me through every orifice.” She looked obsessively at the photograph of her baby, and tried to make others look, too, so they could see what she saw and they did not: that she was a mother who had lost her child.

Her article, which won a National Magazine Award in 2014, ends at that point, and I assumed that the end of Lucy and Levy’s marriage was tied to the loss of their child. In fact, that was “a whole other shitshow”, Levy says now. When she returned from Mongolia, she realised through her fog of grief that Lucy, who had struggled with alcoholism before, needed to go to rehab, badly. The women, still in love but too broken to support one another, separated. Today, they are in touch, but, Levy says, “There are times when one of us says, ‘I gotta stop talking to you for a while because this is too painful.’ Just because you get divorced, you don’t magically stop caring about each other.”

The breakup is one of only several shitshows recounted in Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, which looks, in self-lacerating detail, at events in her life before she went to Mongolia, and hints at some that came after. It is not the book that many expected would follow Female Chauvinist Pigs, not least because it could be spun as a warning to women about the perils of waiting too long to have a baby. Placental abruption, Levy writes, “usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood pressure. But sometimes it just happens because you’re old.” She doesn’t go into this in the book, but Levy, who is now 42, has not been able to conceive again, despite having undergone “a ridiculous amount of IVF” over the past four years.

The alternative way of looking at Levy’s memoir is that she is dealing with a subject that feminism has never been able to resolve: the immovable rock of fertility, butting up against female progress. Levy says she had always wanted to be a writer, “so I built my life with that as my priority”; by the time she realised she also wanted to be a mother, she was in her late 30s. She writes that she and her generation “were given the lavish gift of agency by feminism”, coupled with a middle-class, western sense of entitlement that led them to believe that “anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules.”

“Of course, this is partly about class,” she says now. “I don’t hear women who are less privileged thinking they’re entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That’s a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon. It makes me laugh when people say, ‘Why don’t you “just” do surrogacy, or “just” adopt?’ Believe me, there is no ‘just’ about them.” Surrogacy costs $100,000-$150,000 in the US, while adoption costs are on average between $20,000 and $45,000 (costs in the UK are much lower). After the money Levy spent on IVF (“A lot. A lot, a lot, a lot”), those options are less possible than ever.

Doomy warnings that women need to stop shillyshallying and sprog up are published in the Daily Mail every day. They are far less common from prominent feminist writers, and Levy agrees there is no point in lecturing young women, “because it doesn’t do anything, and they know it already. They’re like, ‘Eff you: I’m busy trying to earn money and figure myself out.’ It’s just a design flaw that, at the exact moment so many of us finally feel mature enough to take care of someone beside ourselves, the body’s like: ‘I’m out.’”

by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Annabel Clark

South Korea Stunned By Leader's Rapid Ouster

This was not supposed to happen in South Korea. It was too divided, too corrupt, too much in thrall to the rich and powerful who'd always had their way.

Four months ago, the idea that the country's leader, along with the cream of South Korean business and politics, would be knocked from command after sustained, massive, peaceful protests would have been ludicrous.

Now Park Geun-hye, thanks to a court ruling Friday, is no longer president and may very well face criminal extortion and other charges. The head of the country's biggest company, Samsung, sits in jail, when he's not in a courtroom facing trial for bribery and embezzlement linked to the corruption scandal that felled Park. And a Who's Who of once untouchables languishes behind bars waiting for their day in court.

This swift upending of the status quo has so shaken the country's foundations that it has left people here a bit stunned.

Now comes the hard part.

South Koreans will look to take their peaceful revolution - and the genuine sense of empowerment that many of the average citizens who took to the streets in protest, week after week, now feel at their accomplishment - and turn it into lasting progress.

Among the first of the many big, uneasy questions that linger over this enterprise: What happens next?

In the short term, at least, the answer is more politics, and of the lightning-quick variety. Half a dozen or so candidates will now scramble, over the next two months, for a shot at becoming the next president of South Korea. Elections will likely come May 9.

The current smart money is on a liberal - Moon Jae-in, who lost to Park in 2012 and who now leads in early polls - but conservatives, though in disarray and currently viewed as toxic by many South Koreans of all political stripes, still have strong bastions of support in the country's south, if a charismatic candidate arises.

The qualities of the next leader will help answer another fundamental question: Will the confidence that many won from South Korea's version of "people power" last?

South Korea is no stranger to rapid, intense change. The country whiplashed from Japan's colonization to total war in the 1950s, to an economic "miracle" of rebuilding supported by a brutal dictatorship, to one of the world's most successful democracies.

Just below the surface have always lurked deep social and political divisions - between conservative and liberal, rich and poor, men and women. The entrenched elite often seemed to just chug along, untouched. If they did topple from power or privilege, it was because of violent change, when the streets filled with tear gas and riots, not, as in past months, singing, smiling families of all social classes and political backgrounds.

Park's fall may have shattered that pattern.

Among the changes: an energized citizenry who can now point to concrete proof that they can make a real difference when they're united, and an eagerness among civic groups to build on their ability to turn popular anger into peaceful protests that actually worked.

There's no guarantee that any of this will last.

"Now is a critical transition moment," said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. "Starting tomorrow, the question is, where does all this energy go? The unifying factor was a focus on getting rid of a problem. Now, they have to figure out, how do you turn that energy into something more constructive than destructive?"

by Foster Klug, AP |  Read more:

Image: Lee Jin-man

The Album Doesn’t Count

[ed. See also: Ed Sheeran has 16 songs in the Top 20 – and it's a sign of how sick the charts are.]

It’s about the event.

For how long have we heard it’s about the new record, the hit, that they are the engine of all that follows.

Maybe with Top Forty, but in the rest of the music sphere…

Lady Gaga had one of the stiffest follow-up albums of all time, even rivaling Peter Frampton’s “I’m In You,” but now she’s gonna sell out stadiums, how can this be?

She can’t seem to write a hit to save her life. But she was on the Super Bowl and the Grammys, never mind two years with Tony Bennett, and she’s seen as a star and is doing business accordingly.

Now if you’re playing the hit game, if you occupy the Spotify Top 50, it’s a different world. So many of the popsters live and die by the hit. Without it, they’re nothing. Especially if their tracks are part of the combine, made by the producers du jour. But if you’re more self-contained, if you’re doing something a bit different, the music is still important, it’s what seals the deal, gives you your audience, but to sustain it’s less about having hits and satiating those who haven’t cared previously as opposed to staying in the public eye. The old days of disappearing between album cycles, of being mysterious, those are done. Today you humanize yourself and stay in the game. As for recordings, they should be dripped and dribbled out, to keep fans satiated, but to get them coming to your show…

You’ve got to be on TV and online and…

Kinda like John Mayer. He’s on Snapchat, masquerading as Hank Knutley on Kimmel, you see him around, you think of him as a friend, like someone on a sitcom, as opposed to the distant musical titans of yore.

So you go where the eyeballs are. Unless your credibility is at stake. You take chances, mistakes are forgotten overnight, you play with whomever asks, you make YouTube videos, you weigh in on popular culture and more, and when it comes time to monetize…

You’re top of mind.

For far too long the industry has been playing a radio game. Wherein the charts are all that matter. Getting on the airwaves, reaching mass. But the dirty little secret is music is now all niche. Think about satiating your niche, not those distantly interested. Every act today is a big niche, from Taylor Swift to Beyonce to Metallica. All that press about Ed Sheeran? Most people have not listened to his new album and will not, they don’t care, in today’s overloaded society you have a hard time keeping up on what you do care about.

Forget the radio, forget the charts, forget sitting at home afraid you’re not gonna get it right. Get into the swim. Sure, hire a PR agent to spread the story if it’s worth telling, but really you’re looking for your fans to talk about what you do, and it all happens online, and online becomes so two-dimensional that people yearn to interact live.

We’re wiping the classic acts off the map. As well as their handlers and the record company people who sustained them and were inured to the old ways. Younger people are infiltrating the business who are willing to take chances, to start with a blank slate.

Your act can get started on NPR, like Alabama Shakes, a press story if there ever was one.

Or “CBS Sunday Morning”…

The former gets other scribes paying attention and the latter is a victory lap for those who care.

But both are event-like.

Think about what you can do that’s new and different that will generate a story, that will live on YouTube, that will endear yourself to your fans. It’s much more important than working with indie promo and slaving over adds and chart position, neither of which resonate with the public. Come on, if you’re listening to terrestrial radio you’re the most out of it person extant, you probably can’t afford a concert ticket. Better for an act to appear on Howard Stern or a hit podcast or some place online with traction.

Once again, the old metrics do not apply.

by Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter |  Read more:
Image: via:

Elliott Smith, My First Celebrity Death

[ed. See also: Needle in the hay: Elliott Smith's incomparable brilliance lives on.]

Sunset Boulevard is a long road. It goes on – and on – for 22 miles, following a path stamped out by cattle in the 18th century that now cuts between Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, reaching the ocean at what was once the ranch of the silent film producer Thomas Ince. Ince was known as “the Father of the Western”, and by the time he died in 1924, he had made more than 800 pictures (150 two-reelers in 1913 alone). A photograph from around this time shows him in a cap and thick, checked jacket, his eyes looking to his right with a glare as quiet and fearsome as Vito Corleone’s.

Ince had just turned 44 when he boarded a yacht owned by William Randolph Hearst, where the newspaper magnate, his mistress Marion Davies and film celebrities including Charlie Chaplin had gathered for his birthday party. Within 24 hours, Ince was dead. According to Hollywood lore, the LA Times ran the headline “Movie producer shot on Hearst yacht!” in its morning edition, but dropped it come the evening. The official cause of death was heart failure, but rumours about the “true” circumstances of Ince’s demise still circulate – a recent example being the Peter Bogdanovich film The Cat’s Meow, in which Cary Elwes plays the doomed film-maker, shot by Hearst in a jealous rage.

When public figures die, it becomes everybody’s business. Death is ordinarily a private matter, but for the famous – who live as characters in some collective fantasy – it can be another excuse for public speculation, for public myth-making. After David Bowie’s death last year, fans and journalists interpreted the video for his single “Lazarus” as a cryptic message about the illness that killed him. It was a reasonable supposition, since the song begins with the lines “Look up here, I’m in heaven”, and the video shows the singer in a hospital bed. According to a BBC documentary that aired in January, however, Bowie came up with the video’s concept before receiving his final diagnosis. It was all just a weird coincidence. But listening to the song and Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, today, I find it hard to escape the sense that here is a transmission from beyond the grave.

The myths surrounding the lives and deaths of stars can overpower the often mundane reality. Bobby Kennedy probably had nothing to do with Marilyn Monroe’s barbiturates overdose on 5 August 1962 – but faced with a choice between glamorous tragedy and sad fact, many choose to believe the former, however fantastical.

The singer-songwriter Elliott Smith was a very different kind of star to Bowie, or Monroe, or even his peer Kurt Cobain. Both Cobain and Smith killed themselves mid-career after long periods of drug dependency (Smith was “clean” at the time of his death in 2003), and both were significant figures on the Beatles-ish pop end of 1990s alternative rock.

But where Nirvana transfigured misery into an exhilarating, cathartic squall, Smith turned it inward. Even as a grungy rocker in his early band Heatmiser, he sang as if every word were some shameful secret, as if his whispery voice were the voice in our heads when we are most alone. Smith was signed to the major label DreamWorks Records in 1997 and was nominated for an Oscar for his song “Miss Misery” the following year (it was used in the Gus Van Sant movie Good Will Hunting), but somehow the usual glamour of fame and success never stuck to him. He always came across as an underdog. And to his fans, myself included, his music felt like personal property. It didn’t belong to pop culture at large. It belonged to us.

All music is, of course, performance, and I’m pretty wary of those claims of “authenticity” that still pass for so much music criticism. (How many reviews of the Sharon van Etten album Tramp obsessed over how “she was essentially without a home over its recording process”?) That Smith recorded most of his early albums, from 1994’s Roman Candle to 1997’s Either/Or, on rudimentary tape equipment gives his music a self-consciously uncommercial sound, which translates upon listening as more “genuine” than that of slick, studio-made work. But it’s an aesthetic effect – a lo-fi style that is no more or less valid than Nile Rodgers’s sparkly productions for Madonna, or Steve Albini’s keeping-it-real recordings for, say, Nina Nastasia.

Nonetheless, Smith traded on this image of emotional honesty and privacy that seemed always at odds with his status as a relatively well-known public figure. He appeared on MTV, on late-night chat shows such as Conan O’Brien, on magazine covers and on several major movie soundtracks, the most notable being Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. Perhaps his deliberate rejection of the myths of stardom was a myth in itself – sort of like the barroom pick-up line about having no pick-up line.

All of this complicated our ability to deal with Smith’s death back in 2003. At least, it complicated it for me. When I first heard that he had stabbed himself in the chest and died, something in me shut down. I’d been bemused by those who had mourned Princess Diana so lavishly in August 1997 – “How could anyone cry about the death of a stranger?” I’d thought. But Elliott Smith felt personal. He was a personal public figure, if that makes sense. It was as if I’d lost a part of myself.

by Yo Zushi, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Justin Hampton via: Amazon

Erotic Exposure

[ed: See also: Glenn Greenwald interview on privacy.]

The difference between gossip and surveillance is hard to articulate, just as it is sometimes hard to tell where a neighbourhood ends and the country begins. In Miranda Lambert’s song “White Liar,” the husband goes out cheating on a Friday, and by Monday his wife has news for him: “My cousin saw you on the street with a redhead named Bernice.” With this version of the adultery story, the cousin brings the news because she cares about the wife, and maybe also about the husband. It is not none of her business.

Now here is another version. Last summer in Blackpool, the down-at-heel resort town of which the Kinks sang in “Autumn Almanac,” a woman and her lover were waiting in line for coffee at a gas station. The conversation turned to the mechanics of the liaison itself – my man thinks I’m at work. Do I pick up if he calls? A young man, Stevie Wilcock, overheard them. He opened Facebook and typed:

David. If your Girlfriend/wife is mid 40’s, went to work this morning wearing a black skirt, black tights and a light blue shirt... She told you she was in a meeting all day with work. She isn’t, she’s currently stood in front of me at the costa Coffee machine in Chester Shell garage, telling another man this whole story whist they’re laughing about it. Oh she also drives a black Ford Fiesta with the Reg ******. Pack your stuff and get yourself gone Dave.

We have no idea whether David read this, nor do we know, or care, who David is. Likewise, despite what seems to be Wilcock’s intention, namely to expose and punish a woman who has humiliated a man, we have no clue as to the identity of the “Girlfriend/wife”. The registration number is an amusing bit of sleuthing, but what if the car were the man’s? What if it were rented? Tens of thousands of people saw this post on Facebook, yet most of them saw it as a curiosity, rather than something to be genuinely curious about, and there is no certainty that Wilcock achieved the objective he gleefully envisioned (“get yourself gone Dave”). Many relationships survive affairs. Maybe this Facebook post is now the story David and his wife tell their friends, “laughing about it”.

Wilcock did expose someone with his post. He exposed Stevie Wilcock. If we Google the name “David”, we get Bible verses, a Michelangelo. If we Google the registration number, we get a jumble of unrelated articles. But Google “Stevie Wilcock” and we immediately come to the news of an anonymous British woman’s sexual life, accompanied by a picture of scruffy, austere Wilcock, sitting in what I think is the back of a van, staring out at us with his bland, grey-blue eyes. Unless he does something outstandingly noteworthy or criminal, the post will define him for the rest of his life. “Stevie Wilcock, isn’t he that guy who…?”

We might think of Wilcock and “White Liar” as belonging to two separate spheres of knowledge: the written and the oral. One sphere contains surveillance, where records are generated and maintained for a far-removed observer, and the other has usually contained gossip, the kind of knowledge that flows around us changeably, valuable only to those who inhabit a relevant space – a group of friends, or a school cafeteria, or a small town.

In her 1965 essay “On Morality”, Joan Didion claimed that in the California desert “stories travel at night”. She explained, a bit fantastically: “Someone gets in his pickup and drives a couple of hundred miles for a beer, and he carries news of what is happening, back wherever he came from.” Hundreds of miles is a lot for a beer, but when I think of the use of gossip, it is this sort of scene that I think of: the pleasure of news from the nearby afar, the way you hurt someone who I care about, the warning that the stranger arriving late tonight at the motel is known to be bad with his debts and once several towns over pulled a knife when he got drunk. That you were spotted on the street with a redhead named Bernice, and your wife’s cousin tipped her off.

Most major religions disapprove of gossip. (From the Koran: “And do not spy or backbite each other. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his brother when dead?”) In the legal system, too, a court will prevent witnesses from recounting remarks made by people who have not testified, so-called hearsay evidence. Because you cannot expect God or a judge to condone gossip, it sits just outside the realm of official record, where it does us a necessary service by carrying information back and forth that might not otherwise appear in a newspaper or a trial transcript.

The less access that you have to traditional channels, the more important gossip becomes. Gavin Butt in his study of queer artists in post-war New York, writes that gossip has “historical importance in disseminating knowledge about same-sex sexuality”. (Warhol’s diaries, full of married men with “a problem”, i.e. gay desire, are the case in point.) So where society makes full expression of the self impossible, gossip can give it the mercy of a double life.

Then, more mercifully still, gossip vanishes. It must be new or it is not worth repeating. Only the most embarrassing moments turn into memes, and if you grew up before Google Image search, you may remember that memes were in-jokes and folded notes, not images, and that these could be forgotten in a way that they cannot be forgotten now. An incident from my childhood makes this obvious. As a boy from a liberal suburb in Massachusetts, I liked having sex with my male friends. I also had a tendency to take a good thing too far. Once, at a birthday party, I fellated a boy in front of a large group, in a bedroom in broad daylight. (This was a stupid thing to do, but if you think that it is hard to get a blowjob as a teenage boy, try giving one.) The next day I received a phone call from a member of the bedroom’s audience, Pete, who told me he and his friend Willy were blackmailing me for $160, payable, quite reasonably, in $40 installments. If I failed to pay the first installment by Friday, he would start telling everyone what I had done. I told him I would come up with the cash, then went upstairs and sat trembling in my bedroom, flooded with shame and terror.

The next day was Thursday. In school, I found Nick, a sly and elfin boy who could always be counted on to spread a rumour. He would not believe what I had seen, I told him. What? he said. I can’t, I said. Please? Nick said. OK, I said, fine. But you cannot tell anyone. Pete blew Willy at a party. This being unusual news, the rest of the school took an interest, and by the end of the day it was accepted fact. I left at 2pm to find Pete standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by a hostile crowd. “They suck dicks,” he wailed, pointing at my friends and me. “They do.” Like two missiles colliding in mid-air, the stories disintegrated into the cool water of confusion. I never paid the $160. (...)

In ads for its new video-streaming service, Facebook advises me to “go live” when I see something arresting. When a person walks an animal that is not a dog, for instance, or when a scene unfolds at the airport baggage claim. Things that I once might have related to a friend, I am now supposed to film. It is one of the odd realities of our era that although we live under a sprawling surveillance apparatus, we eagerly volunteer to do surveillance of our own. We already know that Facebook shares data with the NSA. When coupled with facial-recognition software, Facebook Live will become a geolocation tool of unstoppable reach and depth.

For a person who finds himself the subject of unwanted attention on Facebook or Google, the options for recourse are quickly depleted. There are really only a handful. Facebook will accept takedown requests in cases of abuse. Where search engines are concerned, citizens of the European Union can invoke the “right to oblivion” law, which allows them to petition Google to remove compromising information. One may as well petition a leopard to donate to the Vegan Society. If Google declines to grant your request, you can appeal to a court, but by that time the page has been indexed and mirrored, now accessible from anywhere. Because the internet is moving toward a single-identity system – Google and Facebook, who know who you are, lie beneath most of your interactions online – the double life becomes endangered.

It is a strange phrase, “the right to oblivion”, and the strangeness is revealing. It does not mean what it thinks it does. Strictly speaking, the right to oblivion would be the right to a state equivalent of never having existed. Not even a puff of smoke but the absence of anything ever having burned in the first place. The right to be completely forgotten, to have an unmarked death. What the EU wishes to intend by it, however, is the right to keep a certain part of life out of print: a bankruptcy, a nude photograph sent to a former lover. The spectre of a beautiful Latin word – oblivion from oblivisci, to forget – conscripted into sentences beside the American neologism“Google”, metaphorises the horror of our predicament, adults standing helplessly before the blinking and childlike incomprehension of the Valley. Oblivion, meet Google.

by Jesse Barron, The Tank |  Read more:

Image: Shizuka Yokomizo, Stranger No.1, 1998. Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo

The 100 Websites That Rule the Internet

100 Websites That Rule the Internet
by Jeff Desjardin, Visual Capitalist |  Read more (click here for larger graphic):
Image: Visual Capitalist

via:

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Going Underground: Inside the World of the Mole-Catchers

[ed. I think I'd hate moles less if they weren't so wily. Do a Google search of mole traps and look at all the various contraptions. There are millions of them because NONE OF THEM WORK! One hardware store even recommended a hose attachment for the exhaust pipe on my truck, which did absolutely nothing except make my lawn start to smoke (but maybe got the moles a little high). Now  I use cinch mole traps, which the local golf course uses, but have to purchase them by mail order (because Washington state considers them inhumane). It's pretty much hit or miss. Mostly miss. Drives me nuts, like Bill Murray in Caddyshack.] 

Roger Page purchased his home in East Bilney, a Norfolk farming community, about 25 years ago. For the better part of those 25 years, he bore no ill will toward the moles. He was fond of wildlife, or at least what little of it remained in the country. A family of deer foraged in the backyard. Foxes lolled in the road at dusk. Moles were a rarity.

Page worked as a commercial pilot and when the occasional molehill erupted on his lawn, he would pat it down before departing again to New York or Hong Kong. They seemed to have an understanding, he and the moles. They mostly kept to the woods, while Page mostly kept to the garden.

But after he retired five years ago, Page expanded his back lawn and the moles became more persistent. As more and more molehills sprung up, Page came to feel as if their labours were engineered to produce in him the maximum anguish. He purchased traps at the garden centre, but they would often remain unsprung or – worse – sprung and empty.

He decided to escalate his counter-assault. During a stopover in Amsterdam, he bought a pungent bag of flower bulbs advertised as a natural mole deterrent. (The moles didn’t mind.) Next, he installed a solar-powered mole repeller, a torpedo-shaped device that emits vibrations that are supposed to keep the moles away. (The moles carried on.) He tried flooding them out with a water hose. (Moles are strong swimmers.) Finally, he tried suffocating them with the exhaust of his lawnmower. (Moles can survive in low‑oxygen environments.)

Page knew it wasn’t healthy to go on like this. Last September, he found the phone number of a woman named Louise Chapman, also known as the Lady Mole Catcher of Norwich. Traditional mole catching in Britain has experienced a resurgence following a 2006 European Union ban on strychnine, and Chapman is one of many trying to profit from the boom. A former drama teacher, she has been profiled in national newspapers and travelled to Australia in 2016 to be featured in the first season of a reality television show called Deadliest Pests Down Under, where she applied pink lipstick before hunting a funnel web spider. With the help of a business coach, she has also tried marketing Country Mole Catcher™ franchises across the country, offering newcomers to the business everything they need to get started for £7,500, plus a cut of their proceeds.

Chapman is a compact blonde woman, and – when she’s on the job – clad in Wellington boots. When we arrived at Page’s home, she popped open the back of her white Audi estate car and retrieved a bucket containing plastic flags, a garden spade and a long metal rod with a bulb on the end – a mole probe.

We followed Page to the side of his house. There, a ragged strip of lawn about the size of a tennis court lay dotted with patches of overturned earth, each patch spaced every two feet or so. The lawn looked as though it had been strafed by artillery. Chapman walked the length of it, taking note of small details: a crack in the soil, a dead patch of grass, a pile of fresh dirt. She saw herself as an archaeologist who could reconstruct the workings of an underground metropolis based on the scantest traces on the surface.

“I reckon there are three,” Chapman said at last. She gave Page a quote for the work: £80 for the first mole with the price dropping to £60 a mole for two or more. She couldn’t promise to dispatch them on the first visit or even the second one. It could take weeks, but he didn’t have to pay a penny if she wasn’t successful. “No mole, no fee,” they call it in the business. “You’ve already tried to catch them, and they might have got wily,” she warned.

Clients are sometimes taken aback by Chapman’s prices, which she makes a point of delivering in person. Page, however, readily agreed that it was worth it for his sanity, and Chapman got to work. She began by cutting a cube of turf from the roof of the mole run and carefully set it on the ground. Then, she inserted a trap shaped like a fizzy drink can into the hole and covered it with a few clumps of grass. This trap, known as the Duffus half-barrel and first patented in 1920, is based on traditional designs made of a clay or wooden barrel and a horsehair snare powered by a bent stick. In the modern metal trap, a spring-loaded wire loop functions as the snare. When the mole enters the device, it makes it halfway through this loop before brushing against the trigger. The wire loop then accelerates upward, crushing the mole against the trap’s curved roof.

Page was clearly torn between his desire to have an attractive lawn and the violent death he was about to sanction. “I don’t like killing animals,” he said. Chapman, on her hands and knees, looked up from her work. “You were driven to it,” she told him. When she had finished setting traps, she said that either she or her colleague Carole would return “in a few days”.

Chapman tossed off those last words casually, but they represented one of the most divisive issues in mole catching today. Unlike mousetraps, mole traps do not kill instantly and do not always kill cleanly. The world of mole catching is bitterly divided between those who believe that traps should be checked every 24 hours – to ensure that any injured moles are dispatched quickly, rather than being left to die a slow and agonising death – and those who don’t.

Because of the expense of driving out to check an empty trap day after day, opponents of such regulations argue that it would hasten the extinction of mole catching as it has been practised for centuries. “It will criminalise all the mole-catchers,” Chapman says. Britain would be overrun by molehills, which are not only unsightly, but can also potentially spread disease to livestock, trip up horses on race-courses, and ruin golf courses and football pitches. To professionals such as Chapman, such threats appear to outweigh the possibility that a maimed mole or an unfortunate weasel could be squirming in pain beneath someone’s lawn for days.

by Brendan Borrell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Tony Evans /Timelaps/Getty Images

A Town Under Trial

In the early 1990s, New Life Fitness & Massage kept its lights on twenty hours a day, closing at five every morning and reopening at nine. Everyone in Oak Grove knew it was a brothel. Fort Campbell, one of the nation’s largest Army posts, sits on top of the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and New Life stood right outside its northern gates next to Interstate 24. Many of its clients were Screaming Eagles: paratroopers from the famous 101st Airborne Division. Most of the others were truckers off the highway and locals of all stripes; some say judges and other dignitaries would come up from Nashville, an hour down the highway, to be ushered in and out covertly.

At twenty-six, the owner, Tammy Papler, was shrewd beyond her years. She had picked the location for the ready-made customer base in Fort Campbell, and for the pool of potential workers: soldiers’ wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends, as well as women who had recently been discharged, most of them far from their families and without safety nets. She wore her hair in a fluffy blond permanent and took the pseudonym Mercedes. Some of her employees feared her temper.

Oak Grove, Kentucky, wasn’t a city in any meaningful sense, but rather just a commercial strip hedged by trailer parks and clapboard housing. Its population was around three thousand, though this number fluctuated depending on deployments. While Fort Campbell’s officers could afford the more elegant digs on the other side of the post in Clarksville, Tennessee, Oak Grove was a haven for young enlistees, and it drew seedy businesses like mosquitos to a bog. The main stretch of highway was lined with liquor stores, pawnshops, and adult businesses: Fantasee Lingerie, Donna’s Den, Mona’s Go-Go, Classic Touch, and Cherry Video, the last of which Papler also owned. The brothel operated in the back of a small brick building that it shared with a Chinese restaurant.

The business cycle at New Life, as with Oak Grove’s small economy, rose and fell with military paydays. During the slow periods, the women would order takeout and watch the O.J. trial. There were moments of levity, and escapades. Once, two strangers came in off the interstate and plied a couple of workers with mounds of cocaine and hundred-dollar bills for an all-night party, but the men made such a mess in the Jacuzzi room that the workers had to spend their tips to have the carpet cleaned before Papler arrived in the morning.

For Ed Carter, a burly twenty-four-year-old police officer, the city was something of a playground. Carter grew up near Hopkinsville, the county seat, on a farm, where his father worked for an influential white family (the Carters were black) and his mother cleaned houses and churches for extra money. After dropping out of community college, Carter was recruited into the Police Explorers, an apprenticeship program for youths who want to work in law enforcement. He graduated into the midnight shift, responding to domestic fights of young military couples and scuffles at Oak Grove’s strip club.

With minimal training, he spent his first months on the job scrambling to learn the local geography and police procedures. But he didn’t need any instruction to push people around. (Once, Carter responded on a call about a fighting couple and he flung the husband out of their trailer.) He began to walk with a swagger. One of the badge’s perks, he found, was that wearing a uniform made it easy to pick up women—especially with so many men away on deployments. In 1992, he married a woman he’d met on the job, but this didn’t get in the way of his tomcatting.

As a bad cop, Carter was largely a product of his environment. The Oak Grove Police Department had only six officers and was known throughout Christian County for its corruption. Buddy Elliott, the police chief, was the older brother of the mayor, Jack, and together the Elliott brothers owned a major share of the local real estate. They used the police force as an arm of their business enterprises and sometimes as a revenue generator. For instance, in 1993, after some of the New Life massage parlor’s workers were charged with prostitution, Buddy Elliott came to Papler and asked whether she’d “get with the program.” She gave him $600 cash, and when the case reached a grand jury, the charges were dropped.

Over the year that followed, the cops got increasingly cozy at New Life, and some even hung out in the lobby when they were off duty. “They felt like they owned the place, they really did,” one of the workers remembers. “You never knew if they were just stopping by to say hi, or if they were wanting something.” Papler says she came up with a special procedure when an officer wanted sex: he didn’t pay, but his name was recorded at the bottom of the client register, so she could compensate the worker later herself. The Oak Grove government didn’t have much tax revenue, so when the patrol cars needed new lights, the cops imposed on Papler to foot the bill.

Carter spent more time at the brothel than any of his colleagues. He began a steady affair with the manager, and since his police salary was so meager, he compelled Papler to put him on the payroll as a “janitor.” She later said in court proceedings that the payments were really for “protection” or “hush money”—not for mopping the floors. And she was afraid that if she stopped, he’d get the place shut down. For all her friendliness with cops, Papler faced regular threats of closure. For backup, she had an emergency dispatcher keeping guard; whenever there was talk of another prostitution raid, the brothel would get a call—“a storm is coming” or “time to get the umbrellas out”—so her workers could get dressed.

Then, in the summer of 1994, Papler says, she cut Carter off. His payments cost her too much and they had a falling-out. She remembers telling him not to come back, but short of changing the locks, she couldn’t keep him out; he had a key. A few weeks later, in the early hours of September 20, two of her workers were alone at New Life. At 3:35 A.M., two colleagues found them in a back room of the brothel, naked, lying in puddles of blood, both shot through the head and stabbed in the neck. The investigators suspected Carter right away, but they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. To many, it appeared that the Oak Grove Police Department had a hand in covering up the double murder. Within months, the New Life massage parlor shut down. Carter fled town and many of the locals close to the event eventually left, too, including Papler. The sheriff’s office handed over the investigation to the state, but for more than fifteen years no one was arrested. By the time I moved to the area, the case had almost evaporated into a grisly local legend.

In the fall of 2009, I arrived in Christian County. I’d landed a job at the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville—a newspaper founded in 1869 by two ex-Confederates—as a police and government reporter. On my first drive down for the job interview (from Michigan, where I’d recently finished college) the landscape surprised me. It was flat, dominated by soybean and tobacco fields; western Kentucky is more like the plains of southern Illinois than the wooded hills of Appalachia. I met the paper’s editor, Jennifer Brown, at the city’s only Starbucks. Forty-seven, with short dark hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a light drawl, Brown grew up in Hopkinsville, raised two kids there, and had worked at the New Era for twenty-five years, mostly reporting. We talked about our favorite writers, and she gave me a rundown of local industry: it was largely agricultural, but in recent decades some auto-parts manufacturing plants had sprung up, because land was cheap and property taxes were nil.

And she told me about Fort Campbell. Comprising more than one hundred sixty square miles, it is five times the physical size of Hopkinsville, seven times that of Manhattan. Some thirty thousand soldiers were stationed there at the time, most living off-post, and it has its own golf course, bowling alley, and Starbucks franchise. In other words, a small city. The base is home to three major combat units: the 5th Special Forces Group, which was among the first deployed to Vietnam in 1961 and one of the last to leave; the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known for its involvement in the conflict in Somalia depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down; and the 101st Airborne, famous for its deployments to Europe during World War II and to Arkansas during the Little Rock desegregation crisis of 1957. Oak Grove, Brown told me, was the incorporated city outside the military gates and was permeated by Army culture.

by Nick Tabor, Oxford American |  Read more:

Image: Tamara Reynolds

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Appreciative Audience

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Bill Gates: The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes

[ed. See also: What's Wrong With Bill Gates' Robot Tax]

Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.

It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.

In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.

“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them. (...)

Below is a transcript, lightly edited for style and clarity.

Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for example.

Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.

And what the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the goods and services we have today, and free up labor, let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there.

So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead. But you can’t just give up that income tax, because that’s part of how you’ve been funding that level of human workers.

And so you could introduce a tax on robots…

There are many ways to take that extra productivity and generate more taxes. Exactly how you’d do it, measure it, you know, it’s interesting for people to start talking about now. Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don’t think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It’s OK.

Could you figure out a way to do it that didn’t dis-incentivize innovation?

Well, at a time when people are saying that the arrival of that robot is a net loss because of displacement, you ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that adoption somewhat to figure out, “OK, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact? Which transition programs have worked and what type of funding do those require?”

You cross the threshold of job-replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. So, you know, warehouse work, driving, room cleanup, there’s quite a few things that are meaningful job categories that, certainly in the next 20 years, being thoughtful about that extra supply is a net benefit. It’s important to have the policies to go with that.

People should be figuring it out. It is really bad if people overall have more fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won’t shape it for the positive things it can do.

by Kevin J. Delaney, Quartz |  Read more:

Image: Quartz

Public Pensions Are in Better Shape Than You Think

The beleaguered condition of state and local pension plans is one of those ongoing disaster stories that crops up about once a week somewhere. The explanation usually goes something like this: Irresponsible politicians and greedy public employee unions created over-generous benefit schemes, leading to pension plans which aren't "fully-funded" and eventual fiscal crisis. That in turn necessitates benefit cuts, contribution hikes, or perhaps even abolishment of the pension scheme.

But a fascinating new paper from Tom Sgouros at UC Berkeley's Haas Institute makes a compelling argument that the crisis in public pensions is to a large degree the result of terrible accounting practices. (Stay with me, this is actually interesting.) He argues that the typical debate around public pensions revolves around accounting rules which were designed for the private sector — and their specific mechanics both overstate some dangers faced by public pensions and understate others.

To understand Sgouros' argument, it's perhaps best to start with what "fully-funded" means. This originally comes from the private sector, and it means that a pension plan has piled up enough assets to pay 100 percent of its existing obligations if the underlying business vanishes tomorrow. Thus if existing pensioners are estimated to collect $100 million in benefits before they die, but the fund only has $75 million, it has an "unfunded liability" of $25 million.

This approach makes reasonably good sense for a private company, because it really might go out of business and be liquidated at any moment, necessitating the pension fund to be spun off into a separate entity to make payouts to the former employees. But the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB), a private group that sets standards for pension accounting, has applied this same logic to public pension funds as well, decreeing that they all should be 100 percent funded.

This makes far less sense for governments, because they are virtually never liquidated. Governments can and do suffer fiscal problems or even bankruptcy on occasion. But they are not businesses — you simply can't dissolve, say, Arkansas and sell its remaining assets to creditors because it's in financial difficulties. That gives governments a permanence and therefore a stability that private companies cannot possibly have.

The GASB insists that it only wants to set standards for measuring pension fund solvency. But its analytical framework has tremendous political influence. When people see "unfunded liability," they tend to assume that this is a direct hole in the pension funding scheme that will require some combination of benefit cuts or more funding. Governments across the nation have twisted themselves into knots trying to meet the 100-percent benchmark.

While all pensions have contributions coming in from workers, the permanence of those contributions is far more secure for public pensions. Plus, those contributions can be used to pay a substantial fraction of benefits.

Indeed, one could easily run a pension scheme on a pay-as-you-go basis, without any fund at all (this used be common). That might not be a perfect setup, since it wouldn't leave much room for error, but practically speaking, public pension funds can and do cruise along indefinitely only 70 percent or so funded.

This ties into a second objection: How misleading the calculation for future pension liabilities is.

A future pension liability is determined by calculating the "present value" of all future benefit payments, with a discount rate to account for inflation and interest rates. But this single number makes no distinction between liabilities that are due tomorrow, and those that are due gradually over, say, decades.

Fundamentally, a public pension is a method by which retirees are supported by current workers and financial returns, and one of its great strengths is its long time horizon and large pool of mutual supporters. It gives great leeway to muddle through problems that only crop up very slowly over time. If huge problems really will pile up, but only over 70 years, there is no reason to lose our minds now — small changes, regularly adjusted, will do the trick.

Finally, a 100-percent funding level — the supposed best possible state for a responsible pension manager — can actually be dangerous. It means that current contributions are not very necessary to pay benefits, sorely tempting politicians to cut back contributions or increase benefits. And because asset values tend to fluctuate a lot, this can leave pension funds seriously overextended if there is a market boom — creating the appearance of full funding — followed by a collapse. Numerous state and local public pensions were devastated by just this process during the dot-com and housing bubbles.

by This Week |  Read more:

Image: Haas Institute

Gary Larson

Cressida Campbell (Australian, b.1960), Verandah
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Instead of ‘1984,’ Read This

Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (1945) and “1984” (1949), Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: It’s nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans’ subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a “single mother” but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so “print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose.” Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is “powered by the whims of the retired,” and, “desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn’t wait to be old.” People who have never been told “no” are apoplectic if they can’t retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent. (...)

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those “who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future.” Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are “linked to an inflation algorithm that didn’t require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe.”

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, “I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young.” In her novel, she writes:

“The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. . . . Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. . . . Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don’t, and from the young to the old — which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you’ve only managed a new unfairness.”

Florence learns to appreciate “the miracle of civilization.” It is miraculous because “failure and decay were the world’s natural state. What was astonishing was anything that worked as intended, for any duration whatsoever.” Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of today’s secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washington’s Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:

“Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city’s elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn’t buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. . . . High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living.”

by George F. Will, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Sarah Lee

Inside the Loneliest Five-Star Restaurant in the World

You can eat foie gras at Antarctica's Concordia Station, but your closest neighbor is the International Space Station and you might not see oranges for three months.

Life in the kitchen is never easy—being a chef is a profession that involves an incredible amount of precision, creativity, and the ability to keep your cool in this uniquely stressful environment, even in the best of conditions. In a place like Antarctica's Concordia Station, one of the most isolated research facilities in the world, where day and night can last months on end and temperatures generally hover between -30 and -60 Celsius, the already stressful task of being a chef begins to sound downright hellish.

This however, is not the opinion of Luca Ficara, who has been serving as the base's resident chef since November.

When I Skyped with Ficara last week, he was well into the first full week of perpetual darkness at the base, but despite the fact that he wouldn't be seeing the sun for another three months, he was all smiles and jokes. Ficara must operate in an environment which is a far cry from "the best of conditions," yet despite all the hardships his job description entails, it's the small things that he misses most: "It's been three months since I've had a orange," he told me with a melancholy that only three months without a orange can warrant.

Ficara, affectionately referred to as "the David Copperfield of the kitchen" by his crewmates, hails from Sicily, where he spent five years training as a chef in the IPSSAR Hospitality School in Catania, Italy. At 30, Ficara has spent years working in kitchens in Australia, England, and Spain, although working in a kitchen on the white continent was always little more than a dream.

"To be honest, [going to Antarctica] was not in my plan," said Ficara, laughing. "It was like a lottery—you just buy a scratch card, and if you're lucky, you're going to win. You always dream about it, but you never think you will be the winner."

Each year, the Italian National Program for Antarctic Research (which maintains the base along with the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor) holds a lottery to determine who will be spending the next year as the resident chef at Concordia. This lottery system has won the station something of a reputation for its food, which received a nod in the Lonely Planet as a place "considered by many to enjoy Antarctica's best cuisine, with fine wines and seven-course lunches on Sundays."

While Ficara didn't really expect to end up in the Concordia Kitchen, he turned out to be the perfect fit for the job given his diverse culinary repertoire. The chefs chosen by the PNRA must demonstrate not only proficiency as cooks, but also a robust knowledge of international culinary practices so that they can cater to the tastes of the 13-person Concordia winter crew, who hail from England, Switzerland, France, and Italy.

The winter-over crew at Concordia is living in near total isolation, their contact with the outside world limited to digital interactions during the eight months of the year when Antarctica is so cold that jet fuel turns to gel, prohibiting any visitors from reaching the base. In these isolated conditions, food takes on a special importance for everyone at the base. While the crew may be landlocked until November, Ficara nonetheless manages to allow his colleagues to return to their homes on a nightly basis, riding on aromas of Yorkshire pudding, foie gras, or chicken parmigiana.

In addition to trying to cater to the local tastes of the various crew members, Ficara also arranges for themed nights each Saturday, occasions for which he prepares some of his most lavish meals.

"You must understand that every day is the same. So to give some effect of the end of the week we try to make special events," said Ficara. "For example, for the French crew, I tried to make a very fancy French meal. I gave somebody a job as a sommelier and explained how to serve the food. We've done a few nights like this—very stylish."

Despite the festive atmosphere that is brought about by Ficara's elaborate feasts each week at the base, it wouldn't be much of a party without another crucial ingredient: alcohol. The crew keeps a decent variety of spirits on site, but only have access to them on Saturday evenings during which they eat, drink, and be merry to celebrate the end of another week at the base. In addition to downloading recipes for cocktails to experiment with over dinner, the crew is particularly fond of wine, the lifeblood of its Italian and French crew members.

"It's not like we have a wine bar, but we have a lot of wine—unfortunately, we just have French wine," said Ficara with a laugh. "I think the best wine for everybody is the wine from where you're born, but a glass of wine is always a pleasure [even if it's French]."

During the summer months (November to February), the Concordia population grows to around 75 people, which often requires the chef to take on some additional help in the kitchen. During the eight months where there are only a dozen other crew members on site, Ficara must crank out three meals a day on his own. A daunting task, but Ficara is not always without help—he keeps the kitchen door open, always ready to offer cooking lessons to his crewmates.

"Most of the time I'm alone in the kitchen, but sometimes I like to give cooking lessons to the crew, so I'll make some muffins with Beth [Concordia's English doctor] or some pizza with Mario [Concordia's Italian Mission Commander]," Ficara told me. In addition to instructing the crew on how to cook, Luca also entertains them with stories about how he came to learn about the dish they are preparing. "It's nice when we have meals because we share the experience of traveling or we share the ingredients we'd never have known. Each plate has some history from me, so I always explain how I know how to prepare something."

by Daniel Oberhaus, Munchies |  Read more:

Image: IPEV/PNRA

Learning to Love the Secret Language of Urine

[ed. See also: How much pee is in our swimming pools? New urine test reveals the truth. Yikes.]

Learning about the body’s many excretions, secretions and suppurations in medical school, I realized that each medical specialty has its own essential effluent. And I heard that some physicians choose their careers based on the bodily fluid they find least revolting. Thus, a doctor disgusted by stool and pus but able to stand the sight of blood might end up a hematologist, while one repulsed by urine and bile but tolerant of sputum might choose pulmonology.

Many physicians are actively drawn to a particular bodily fluid, intrigued by its unique diagnostic mysteries. Each fluid that runs through the body is a language in which diseases speak to physicians, telling them what is wrong with a patient. And specializing means becoming fluent in one specific fluid’s dialect, learning to interpret its colors, textures and consistencies, and spending a career pondering its secrets.

As a medical student, I saw that a bodily fluid could shape a career. And though I resisted settling on just one (I remain a generalist), I have always been partial to pee.

I’ve studied all the body’s fluids and used each in diagnosing disease, and urine stands out in the wealth of information it grants about a patient’s condition. Conceived in the kidneys — a pair of bean-shaped organs tucked away in the abdomen’s rear — urine runs down the ureters and is conveniently stored in the bladder, from which it is gathered in plastic cups for testing. Urine analysis is performed frequently enough by physicians to have earned the shorthand “urinalysis” — no other bodily fluid can claim to be on a nickname-basis with the medical profession.

I remember the first time I watched a nephrologist turn a urine sample into a diagnosis. As a medical student at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J., I followed behind as he carried a small, plastic urine cup to the microscope room in the nephrology department. He plunged a diagnostic dipstick into the fluid to reveal bits of blood and protein unseen by the naked eye. He then placed some urine into a centrifuge, which spun rapidly and concentrated floating cells into a sediment at the vial’s bottom. After peering through a microscope at a single drop of this stuff, noting stray bits of debris flung across the viewing field, the nephrologist wove a comprehensive diagnostic tale that encompassed all the patient’s symptoms and lab abnormalities. The diagnosis turned out to be glomerulonephritis, a rare form of kidney disease. He was able to look inside that patient with a clairvoyance that seemed positively sorcerous, with urine as his crystal ball. From that moment I was determined to learn urine’s subtle language.

by Jonathan Reisman, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Christine Glade/Istock