Ritual Protest and the Theater of Dissent

I helped start a consulting firm to put on other people’s protests. Organizations in North America would hire our team to organize “civil disobedience” involving anywhere from 10 to 10,000 people. They all have a standard set of goals, a never-changing list of menu items. A certain number of people will risk arrest. A specific group will be arrested. Something visually symbolic needs to happen with the appropriate backdrop. A US senator’s home perhaps, or the post card zone in front of the White House.

We rent the stages and sound systems, walkie talkies and bullhorns. We contract out the production of hand painted banners and placards. We coordinate the building of massive props and facilitate “nonviolent direct action” trainings for our client’s action participants. We can produce for our clients anything from dozens of people in koala bear suits to banners affixed to helium balloons to be released in designated convention center lobbies. We can fill an intersection with stuffed animals, if it will provide a moving visual for our client’s narrative needs.

We are our client’s police liaisons. We can navigate the ins and outs of the municipal and federal police forces of major cities. We pull permits. We plan actions without permits. We negotiate arrests ahead of time. We negotiate them during the protests. Sometimes we convince the police to arrest our clients, who are tired students who have been sitting in PVC lock boxes on the sidewalk in front of an elected official’s house too long for the press cycle or are on track to miss their chartered bus reservations.

We are hired to choreograph events intended to appear as manifestations of dynamic, broad based social movements, but any sense of spontaneity in our events is manufactured. Many of the protests that make headlines are less a coalescing of organized dissent than manufactured feel-good content for an activist’s social media feed. (...)

The organizations that hire us have news coverage on the top of their list of goals. The story arc of the planned and paid for event is crafted ahead of time in a familiar “story-based strategy” model. While we carry out the action, the organizational staff are sending out press releases, making press calls, and providing pre-selected spokespersons to media for comment in line with the client’s narrative. When media show up at events, they are directed to press tables where they are fed approved talking points and participants are handed pre-printed chant sheets.

The most preferable time to do an action is either first thing in the morning when participants can stand in the street long enough to block rush hour traffic, which ups the chances of arrest and news coverage, or at 11am after the press have concluded their morning staff meetings and are ready to head out of the office. Weekend actions make it possible to draw more participants, but make it more difficult to draw the media. These are generally the key concerns around which we plan a demonstration.

The politics that inform these actions, where not entirely opaque, are based on a semi-spiritual belief that the right recipe of symbolism, passion, and powerful visuals will inspire significant political action that will alter the course of this or that unjust policy or state of affairs. Organizers want to inspire the people who view their protest images on their phones. To this end, they reach for clichéd tropes of earlier social movements to galvanize the imagination of onlookers. They sing the familiar songs, sometimes with their own lyrics added in, and steel themselves in the unimpeachable credentials of social justice saints of yore. In one characteristic overreach, an organizer told a crowd that they were the “Harriet Tubmans” of the environmental movement, freeing people from the slavery of fossil fuels. Historical inspiration belongs in these fights, but an equation with Tubman exposes the delusion of demonstrators who believe they are in the midst of a powerful social movement instead of a tired ritual.

Alongside this myth of the spark that will set the prairie on fire, there is generally the belief that the person targeted, be it a governor, CEO, or even the President, will “do the right thing” if confronted with demonstrations that make a powerful appeal to his or her moral compass. Both “theories of change”rely almost entirely on a media strategy, and thus the steady drift of Social Movement Inc. into PR land.

by Virginia Hotchkiss, Nonsite | Read more:

h/t 3QD

Mariana Rodrigues
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Shortage of Auto Mechanics Has Dealerships Taking Action

If the sticker shock faced by car shoppers in the showroom isn’t enough to provoke a cardiac episode, a visit to the dealership’s service department might do the job. That’s where a tire-kicking customer is likely to spot the sign announcing labor charges upward of $125 an hour, a rate typical in cities and at the low end for luxury brands.

Besides chest pains, the number might also elicit a gasp of realization: “That’s way more than I earn.”

It’s true that a mechanic wielding wrenches is not paid that hourly rate — the shop’s cash flow must cover sophisticated diagnostic tools and contribute its share toward the dealership’s prime real estate. But top-level technicians in the field can earn $100,000 a year after achieving master mechanic status and five years of experience, said Robert Paganini, president of the Mahwah, N.J., campus of Lincoln Technical Institute.

So, it would be logical to conclude, applicants must be banging on dealership doors for those jobs.

Not quite: It’s the dealerships and auto manufacturers banging on doors, eagerly seeking out candidates at job fairs, trade schools and events for veterans. The shortage of qualified technicians is so acute that a year ago, BMW of North America began its own recruiting program, making its pitch to students at postsecondary technical schools and career fairs. While that may be a common practice for multinational corporations, it’s unusual in that the job openings will be at independently owned BMW franchises.

The shortfall of automotive technicians is not new, but as vehicles have grown more computerized and vocational programs have disappeared from high schools, the situation has become more urgent. No longer is the career path a matter of looking over the shoulder of a patient mentor. Advancing in the profession demands digital skills — a diagnostician who can solve puzzles without physical clues, like an engine bearing that knocks or an axle shaft that vibrates.

John Fox, director of Fiat Chrysler’s Performance Institute, said that the automaker’s United States dealerships could absorb 5,000 technicians over the next two years, having hired 3,000 in the last two. Numbers of that scale give Mark Davis, automotive programs manager at Seminole State College in Sanford, Fla., confidence that his estimate of technician shortfalls — more than 25,000 at American dealerships over the coming five years — is actually quite conservative. Worse yet, there may not be enough training institutions in the country to keep up, Mr. Davis said.

It’s a situation that cannot be ignored. With competition for car buyers cutting into their profits, dealers’ service departments have grown into a vital income source. According to a 2016 report by the National Automobile Dealers Association, 266,000 technicians are employed to perform mechanical and body repairs. Last year, customers at dealerships in the United States spent $18.9 billion on labor charges in the service department. Warranty work, whose costs are picked up by the automakers, accounted for another $9.6 billion.

All along, car companies have operated training programs to convey the specialized repair information peculiar to their new models. But that continuing education is intended to update experienced mechanics. To replenish the entry-level ranks as technicians change jobs or retire — turnover runs as high as 20 percent a year — automakers need to start at a more basic skill level, expanding the range of their own programs and partnering with private technical schools to reverse the technician deficit.

Enrolling suitable recruits is not easy.

“There’s less of a mechanical interest and understanding among young people,” said Gary Uyematsu, national technical training manager at BMW of North America, noting that the biggest hurdle in hiring is the difference in basic skills. “They are not hands-on. Mechanics used to start with some gas station experience. Now the experience a person gets working at a gas station is selling slushies.”

by Norman Mayersohn, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Fred R. Conrad

There Is a Fake IDGod, and He Lives in China

Andy’s* first fake ID arrived from China a few weeks into his freshman year of college.

He and a friend, both 18, decided they had better get IDs to buy beer, so they placed an order with IDGod, the biggest online fake ID vendor in the world. IDGod is both the name of the vendor and a real person, Andy explains; he first heard the name as a sophomore in high school from seniors who were getting their own IDs. “He’s a god, basically. A group of Chinese men — they may be gangsters or involved in organized crime, no one really knows for sure — formed IDChief, a huge fake ID operation that sold to teens in the U.S.,” he continues. “As they got bigger, tension grew on the inside, and they separated into different ‘companies,’ one of which became IDGod, which proved to be the most successful.”

Now a 19-year-old college sophomore in the Midwest, Andy has accumulated at least 20 more fake IDs. His reasoning is obvious (and timeless): Generation after generation, a fake ID has been a teenager’s golden ticket to a previously inaccessible realm of grown-up vices (booze, bars and casinos), making them both a Hollywood teen movie trope and a must-have for the not-quite-20-something.

You might think Andy doesn’t need two dozen fake IDs, but how else can he keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation? “There are things people do to make sure they have the best product on the market, which is why people like me have so many IDs.” He showed me a couple photos of his latest — a fake Utah license considered to be one of the best currently on the market. (It certainly looked legit to me.) The key, he says, is replicating the unique perforations and microprint that are present on most real IDs under an ultraviolet light.

He suggests holding my California ID up to the light and looking for a small bear, one of the Golden State’s perforations. These are the security features a discerning fake ID customer looks for when shopping for vendors, since they’re the first things seasoned bouncers and liquor store owners look for when trying to spot a fake, and they’re nearly impossible to replicate without sophisticated machinery.

The biggest goal, however, is beating a fake ID owner’s worst nightmare: The box scanner. The small box shows all the ID’s information on a screen that a bouncer, store owner or casino worker can easily look at to spot a fake. Box scanners scan the entire front and back of an ID and compare it to a real one. And as there are no perfect fake IDs, there’s no way to pass the scanner’s test. Thankfully, Andy says, they aren’t that common; they are mostly in our country’s preeminent college town, Boston.

For Andy, though, the best part of his fake IDs, which he’d like to collect from all 50 states, is that he uses them for far more than just buying booze. They’re a way to enrich your life, he says. If a museum in Chicago is offering half-price admission for state residents, he’ll whip out his fake Illinois ID. If the Bronx Zoo is running a similar promotion, he’s got a New York one.

by C. Brian Smith, MEL |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Online Marketplace That’s a Portal to the Future of Capitalism

About three years ago, like millions of other Instagram users, I became acquainted with an app called Wish. At first, my awareness was purely subliminal. Wish ads appeared in my social-media feeds without explanation or context, peddling a deliriously weird selection of heavily discounted products: a smartwatch for under $20; selfie sticks for around $5; a “self-stirring mug.” By the end of 2015, though, these posts were appearing with striking frequency. That year, Wish’s parent company was reported to be one of the largest advertisers on Facebook and Instagram during the holiday season.

Finally, I relented. A friend and I signed up and agreed on an amount each of us would spend on the other. The packages, ordered over the course of New Year’s Eve, would be surprises. Ordering on Wish, I soon found out, is dangerously easy. (When I signed up, the first purchase was free; I chose yellow toe socks.) Shopping involves scrolling through an intoxicating admixture of goods: Commodity necessities appear next to fast fashion and knockoff apparel; extraordinarily cheap but on-trend electronics mingle with what I can only describe as global manufacturing overspill. Among the items I sent to my friend, on our modest budget: a laser pointer; 100-count “super strong” small magnets; a functioning violin; a spare part for the window mechanism on an Audi A6; a deep-V-neck sweater; and of course, the self-stirring mug. Shipping was often free, or only a dollar. The items were extraordinarily well reviewed, often by thousands of customers. The deals seemed, if not exactly too good to be true, at least economically unfeasible — which, close enough.

My experience as a recipient was more informative. A sampling of my haul, clearly selected under the influence: “Macho Man” Randy Savage-style sunglasses with built-in Bluetooth speakers; a pillow cover emblazoned with unrepeatably offensive text; a T-shirt with an obscene graphic print; a pale silkish robe; a bag of loose Sri Lankan coins; a fondant mold shaped like a human fetus; and a 12-hole ceramic ocarina. Packages arrived in waves over the next month, carrying with them a hint at what makes operations like Wish possible: their shipping labels. Most were classified as “ePacket,” courtesy of the United States Postal Service and China Post.

These shipments were made in accordance with a bilateral trade agreement between the United States and China that originated in 2010, meant to address the rising tide of cross-border e-commerce. Items up to 4.4 pounds — more than the weight of, for example, a violin and bow — can be shipped as ePackets, at extremely low rates with tracking numbers and delivery confirmation. Tracking is crucial for foreign sellers that are up against consumer skepticism and comparatively slow shipping times. The deal seems to have worked: ePacket’s usage has ballooned in recent years.

This obscure trade deal has become the quiet conduit for an explosion in a new and underexamined American consumer behavior: buying things directly from their countries of manufacture. (Similar agreements also exist with Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.) This, obviously, presents a problem for the stores and retailers accustomed to serving as importers themselves. Brick-and-mortar retailers are already experiencing a grim 2017, shedding tens of thousands of jobs a month under pressure from e-commerce. Cross-border purchases compound the issue: Because of ePacket, and the decades-old international postal agreements that serve as its foundation, lightweight product shipments from China are heavily subsidized by the U.S.P.S. “It’s providing an artificially low rate,” says Jim Campbell, a consultant and lawyer specializing in international postal law. “It’s redistributing wealth, and the winners are essentially the big exporters.” Accordingly, these agreements have drawn intense criticism from American retailers large and small. In 2015, an Amazon representative testified in front of Congress about what he called a “completely unnecessary and illogical” system.

by John Herrman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Salmieri

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Why String Theory Is Still Not Even Wrong

At its best, physics is the most potent and precise of all scientific fields, and yet it surpasses even psychology in its capacity for bullshit. To keep physics honest, we need watchdogs like Peter Woit. He is renowned for asserting that string theory, which for decades has been the leading candidate for a unified theory of physics, is so flawed that it is “not even wrong.” That phrase (credited to Wolfgang Pauli) is the title of Woit’s widely discussed 2006 book (see my review here) and of his popular blog, which he launched in 2004. Woit, who has degrees in physics from Harvard and Princeton and has taught mathematics at Columbia since 1989, tracks mathematics as well as physics on his blog, and some of his riffs (like a recent one on the difference between Lie groups and Lie algebras) are strictly for experts. But he provides plenty of clear, non-technical explanations for non-experts like me. Woit, whom I’ve known for more than a dozen years, is a good guy. He can be blunt, but he is always fair, and he does not indulge in cheap shots, snark or grandstanding. The next time the media tout an alleged breakthrough in physics or mathematics, check out Not Even Wrong to get the real scoop. Woit and I recently had the following email exchange. —John Horgan (...)

Horgan: You've recently denounced “fake physics.” What is it? Are journalists mostly to blame for it?

Woit: By "fake physics" I mean pseudo-scientific claims about physics that share some of the characteristics of "fake news", in particular misleading, overhyped stories about fundamental physics promoting empty or unsuccessful theoretical ideas, with a clickbait headline. Those most to blame for this are the physicists involved, who should know better and be aware that the way they are promoting their work is going to mislead people. Journalists need to be skeptical about what they're being told by scientists, but often they're more or less accurately reporting impressive sounding claims being made by physicists with impeccable credentials, and not in a good position to evaluate these.

Horgan: Do you still think string theory is “not even wrong”?

Woit: Yes. My book on the subject was written in 2003-4 and I think that its point of view about string theory has been vindicated by what has happened since then. Experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider show no evidence of the extra dimensions or supersymmetry that string theorists had argued for as "predictions" of string theory. The internal problems of the theory are even more serious after another decade of research. These include the complexity, ugliness and lack of explanatory power of models designed to connect string theory with known phenomena, as well as the continuing failure to come up with a consistent formulation of the theory.

Horgan: Why do you think Edward Witten told me in 2014 that string theory is “on the right track”?

Woit: I think the conjectural picture of how string theory would unite gravity and the standard model that Witten came up with in 1984-5 (in collaboration with others) had a huge influence on him, and he's reluctant to accept the idea that the models developed back then were a red herring. Like many prominent string theorists, for a long time now he no longer actively has worked on such models but, absent a convincing alternative, he is unlikely to give up on the hope that the vision of this period points the way forward, even as progress has stalled.

Horgan: Are multiverse theories not even wrong?

Woit: Yes, but that's not the main problem with them. Many ideas that are "not even wrong", in the sense of having no way to test them, can still be fruitful, for instance by opening up avenues of investigation that will lead to something conventionally testable. Most good ideas start off "not even wrong", with their implications too poorly understood to know where they will lead. The problem with such things as string-theory multiverse theories is that "the multiverse did it" is not just untestable, but an excuse for failure. Instead of opening up scientific progress in a new direction, such theories are designed to shut down scientific progress by justifying a failed research program.

Horgan: What’s your take on the proposal of Nick Bostrom and others that we are living in a simulation?

Woit: I like quite a bit this comment from Moshe Rozali (at URL http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3208#comment-1733601): "As far as metaphysical speculation goes it is remarkably unromantic. I mean, your best attempt at a creation myth involves someone sitting in front of a computer running code? What else do those omnipotent gods do, eat pizza?"

Horgan: Sean Carroll has written that falsifiability is overrated as a criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science? Your response?

Woit: No one thinks that the subtle "demarcation problem" of deciding what is science and what isn't can simply be dealt with by invoking falsifiability. Carroll's critique of naive ideas about falsifiability should be seen in context: he's trying to justify multiverse research programs whose models fail naive criteria of direct testability (since you can't see other universes). This is however a straw man argument: the problem with such research programs isn't that of direct testability, but that there is no indirect evidence for them, nor any plausible way of getting any. Carroll and others with similar interests have a serious problem on their hands: they appear to be making empty claims and engaging in pseudo-science, with "the multiverse did it" no more of a testable explanation than "the Jolly Green Giant did it". To convince people this is science they need to start showing that such claims have non-empty testable consequences, and I don't see that happening.

Horgan: Is it possible that the whole push for unification of physics is misguided?

Woit: In principle it's of course possible that the sort of unification present in our best current theory is all there is. There are however no good arguments for why this should be, other than that it's proving hard to do better. The lesson of history is not to give up, that seemingly hard problems of this sort often find solutions. Looking in depth into the technical issues, I don't see anything inherently intractable, rather a set of puzzling problems with a lot of structure, where it looks like we're missing one or two good ideas about how things should fit together.

Horgan: Is physics in danger of ending, as Harry Cliff has warned?

Woit: One should be wary of claims about "physics" in general since it has many subfields, facing different issues. High-energy particle physics is a subfield that is in danger of ending. On the experimental front, it faces fundamental technological obstacles. Any next generation accelerator able to explore even modestly higher energies than the LHC will be far off in the future and very expensive. Whether there's the will to finance and build such a thing is now unclear. On the theoretical front, the field is now in crisis, due to the absence of experimental results that point to a better theory, as well as a refusal to abandon failed theoretical ideas.

Horgan: Is mathematics healthier than theoretical physics?

Woit: Mathematics is in a much healthier state than theoretical physics. One reason for this is that it has never been driven by experiment, so is immune to the problem of technological experimental barriers. Absent experiment to point the way forward and keep everyone honest, mathematics has developed a different culture than theoretical physics, one that emphasizes rigorous clarity about the dividing line between what one understands and what one doesn't. This clarity makes possible agreement on what is progress: that which moves the dividing line in the right direction. I believe that in its current crisis, theoretical physics could benefit a lot from behaving more like mathematicians. (I've had no luck though in getting physicists to agree with me).

by John Horgan, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Michael Blann/Getty

The Pets’ War

In early September 1939, the citizens of London set about killing their pets. During the first four days of World War II, over 400,000 dogs and cats — some 26 percent of London’s pets — were slaughtered, a number six times greater than the number of civilian deaths in the UK from bombing during the entire war. It was a calm and orderly massacre. One animal shelter had a line stretching half a mile long with people waiting to turn their animals over to be euthanized. Crematoriums were overrun with the corpses of beloved dogs and cats; the fact that they could not run at night due to blackout conditions mandating the extinguishing of all manmade light sources so as not to aid German bombers’ navigation, further added to the backlog. Animal welfare societies ran out of chloroform, and shelters ran out of burial grounds. One local sanatorium offered a meadow, where half a million pets’ bodies were interred.

None of this was done of out any real necessity. Supplies were not yet scarce. The German blitzkrieg was not yet underway, and wouldn’t begin in earnest until September of the following year. Nor did the British government issue directives or instructions telling its citizens to kill their pets for the greater good of the Empire. Rather, it was a mass action that arose, apparently spontaneously, by a populace terrified by the new reality of war.

Almost immediately, people realized what a mistake they had made. By November, the Times was lamenting that “there is daily evidence that large numbers of pet dogs are still being destroyed for no better reason than that it is inconvenient to keep them alive — which, of course, is no reason at all, but merely shows an owner’s inability to appreciate his obligations towards his animal.” The BBC’s first disc jockey, Christopher Stone, likewise railed against the massacre on his popular radio program that same month, arguing that “[t]o destroy a faithful friend when there is no need to do so, is yet another way of letting the war creep into your home.” By then, the wholesale killing of pets had abated, and many of the animals who survived those first four days would last through the war. But the damage had already been done.

The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War Two’s Unknown Tragedy, a new book by the historian Hilda Kean, sets out to understand how and why these horrific events took place. Despite its subtitle, it does not provide much in the way of a narrative of the massacre itself; the actual incidents of September 1939 occupy only one of nine chapters. Rather, Kean works backward and forward from that month to understand why British pet owners killed their dogs and cats in such large numbers, as well as to understand the legacy of that event. World War II, she observes, has long been known as the “People’s War” in Britain, “when, so the story goes, people pulled together and stood firm against the Nazis […] and withstood aerial bombardment with resilience.” But what about the Pets’ War? Writing about the conflict from the perspective of animals means approaching the subject obliquely, searching for traces that have been obscured, ferreting out voices among the voiceless. As such, Kean’s book works around the margins of World War II’s documentation: in diaries and letters, scattered asides in newspaper reports, unpublished memoirs, and forgotten advertisements. A passage in a young girl’s diary regarding a beloved pet rabbit bears for Kean far more useful information than an official state account. It is only in such marginal places that London’s lost animals appear. (...)

The state-enforced distinction between useful animals and animals that were seen as merely luxury goods provides one plausible explanation for the pet massacre of 1939. But this turns out to be only half of the story. Pets may have been less economically valuable than livestock, but their lives were valued more highly, and in a strange way the strong feeling that Londoners felt for their dogs and cats sealed those animals’ doom. To kill an animal rather than to let it starve was seen an act of mercy and compassion. One man euthanized his beloved cat Lulu, commenting that it was impossible to take Lulu with him out of the city, and that he could not bear to “think of him in other hands or exposed to the risks of war.” Numerous stories from the time from families who had their pets put down reflect a desire to protect them from the horrors and cruelty of what was surely to come.

Pets were like members of the family, and it is here that the real truth of the matter may emerge. In the run-up to the war, many parents spoke candidly of how they would poison their own children rather than force them to live under German occupation. “I have been collecting poisons for some time with guile and cunning,” one housewife reported to the social research project Mass-Observation. “I have sufficient to give self, husband and all the children a lethal dose. I can remember the last war. I don’t want to live through another, or the children either. I shan’t tell them, I shall just do it.” Her sentiment was echoed by numerous others in Britain that summer before the war. “I’d rather see my two boys dead,” a 45-year-old father said. “I’d poison them if I thought it was coming.”

When war came, however, no mass murders of children took place. Instead, it appears, many people sublimated this impulse toward mercy killing by exercising it on their animals instead. The mass poisoning of children, however charitably intentioned, would have heralded a breakdown in human civilization the likes of which British may not have recovered from. Not so with the euthanizing of pets, which could be justified as both an economic sacrifice in hard times and a way of sparing a beloved creature unnecessary suffering.

by Colin Dickey, LARB | Read more:
Image: The Great Cat and Dog Massacre

The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel

Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss.

The story begins in any of the three dozen taquerias supplying the Bay Area Feeder Network, an expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city.

Once in the tubes, it’s a quick dash for the burritos across San Francisco Bay. Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

Ever since Isaac Newton first described the laws of gravity in 1687, scientists have known that the quickest route between two points is along a straight line through the Earth’s interior. Through the magic of gravity, any object dropped into such a “chord tunnel” at one end will emerge exactly 42 minutes later at the other end, no matter the distance. But for hundreds of years, the technical challenges of building such a tunnel were so daunting that it remained a theoretical curiosity. Only at the start of the 20th century did the idea become technically feasible, and to this day the tunnel linking the East Bay with New Jersey remains the only structure of its kind in the world.

From the outside, the Alameda facility looks like any other industrial building. Behind a chain link razor wire fence sits a windowless white hangar some three stories tall, surrounded by a strip of green lawn. If you could see underground, however, you’d see that the building sits at the center of a converging nexus of burrito pipes. High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like what it is: an enormous gun. Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde, floating on an invisible magnetic cushion as they plunge into the lithosphere.

by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Don't panic. See also: Elon Musk Layers on the Crazy With His Plan for Traffic-Killing Tunnels]

Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?

Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders, written in about 1230. The first sentence bristles with purposeful action: “King Harold proclaimed a general levy, and gathered a fleet, summoning his forces far and wide through the land.” By the end of the third paragraph, the king has launched his fleet against a rebel army, fought numerous battles involving “much slaughter in either host,” bound up the wounds of his men, dispensed rewards to the loyal, and “was supreme over all Norway.” What the saga doesn’t tell us is how Harold felt about any of this, whether his drive to conquer was fueled by a tyrannical father’s barely concealed contempt, or whether his legacy ultimately surpassed or fell short of his deepest hopes.

Jump ahead about 770 years in time, to the fiction of David Foster Wallace. In his short story [ed.] "Forever Overhead,” the 13-year-old protagonist takes 12 pages to walk across the deck of a public swimming pool, wait in line at the high diving board, climb the ladder, and prepare to jump. But over these 12 pages, we are taken into the burgeoning, buzzing mind of a boy just erupting into puberty—our attention is riveted to his newly focused attention on female bodies in swimsuits, we register his awareness that others are watching him as he hesitates on the diving board, we follow his undulating thoughts about whether it’s best to do something scary without thinking about it or whether it’s foolishly dangerous not to think about it.

These examples illustrate Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?

Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn’t have to be. When people’s choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one’s own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions.

But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters’ inner experiences may sharpen readers’ general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that’s the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

We humans owe our intensely social natures to biological evolution. We’re genetically endowed with a social intelligence that extends far beyond the reach of our nearest primate relatives. Even toddlers understand that people’s perspectives can differ from their own or that external actions are propelled by internal goals, and they are resistant to learning from adults whose knowledge appears dubious. But genes are only part of the story. We may come pre-equipped with a standard set of skills (a “start-up kit,” in the words of researchers Cecilia Heyes and Chris Frith), but the ability to accurately grasp the thoughts and emotions of others, or mentalizing ability, varies quite a bit from person to person—and there’s growing evidence that complex mentalizing skills are culturally transmitted through a slow learning process, much like reading or playing chess. For example, while babes-in-arms are sensitive to basic emotions such as happiness or sadness, the ability to recognize socially intricate emotions like embarrassment or guilt only emerges at age 7 or later, and continues to be polished up well into adulthood.

The extent to which parents talk to their children about what others are thinking has been found to have profound effects on children’s ability to discern the contents of other minds. A study by Rosie Ensor and her colleagues showed that the frequency with which mothers used words such as think, forget, wonder, learn, or pretend when their children were just 2 years old predicted their mentalizing skills at ages 3, 6, and even 10. (...)

Elizabeth Hart, a specialist in early literature, writes that in medieval or classical texts, “people are constantly planning, remembering, loving, fearing, but they somehow manage to do this without the author drawing attention to these mental states.” This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700, when it became common for characters to pause in the middle of the action, launching into monologues as they struggled with conflicting desires, contemplated the motives of others, or lost themselves in fantasy—as is familiar to anyone who’s studied the psychologically rich soliloquies of Shakespeare’s plays. Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts.

The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters. In her literary manifesto “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

This clarion call was taken up by Dorothy Parker, as in the following passage of “Sentiment,” where she shapes sentences into obsessive, rhythmic loops of thought: “But I knew. I knew. I knew because he had been far away from me long before he went. He’s gone away and he won’t come back. He’s gone away and he won’t come back, he’s gone away and he’ll never come back. Listen to the wheels saying it, on and on and on.”

For Parker and many writers since, all facets of language—from sound to imagery to syntax—are tools for conveying mental states.

by Julie Sedivy, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Danita Delimont

How to Have a Better Death

In 1662 a London haberdasher with an eye for numbers published the first quantitative account of death. John Graunt tallied causes such as “the King’s Evil”, a tubercular disease believed to be cured by the monarch’s touch. Others seem uncanny, even poetic. In 1632, 15 Londoners “made away themselves”, 11 died of “grief” and a pair fell to “lethargy”.

Graunt’s book is a glimpse of the suddenness and terror of death before modern medicine. It came early, too: until the 20th century the average human lived about as long as a chimpanzee. Today science and economic growth mean that no land mammal lives longer. Yet an unintended consequence has been to turn dying into a medical experience.

How, when and where death happens has changed over the past century. As late as 1990 half of deaths worldwide were caused by chronic diseases; in 2015 the share was two-thirds. Most deaths in rich countries follow years of uneven deterioration. Roughly two-thirds happen in a hospital or nursing home. They often come after a crescendo of desperate treatment. Nearly a third of Americans who die after 65 will have spent time in an intensive-care unit in their final three months of life. Almost a fifth undergo surgery in their last month.

Such zealous intervention can be agonising for all concerned (see article). Cancer patients who die in hospital typically experience more pain, stress and depression than similar patients who die in a hospice or at home. Their families are more likely to argue with doctors and each other, to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and to feel prolonged grief.

What matters

Most important, these medicalised deaths do not seem to be what people want. Polls, including one carried out in four large countries by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an American think-tank, and The Economist, find that most people in good health hope that, when the time comes, they will die at home. And few, when asked about their hopes for their final days, say that their priority is to live as long as possible. Rather, they want to die free from pain, at peace, and surrounded by loved ones for whom they are not a burden.

Some deaths are unavoidably miserable. Not everyone will be in a condition to toast death’s imminence with champagne, as Anton Chekhov did. What people say they will want while they are well may change as the end nears (one reason why doctors are sceptical about the instructions set out in “living wills”). Dying at home is less appealing if all the medical kit is at the hospital. A treatment that is unbearable in the imagination can seem like the lesser of two evils when the alternative is death. Some patients will want to fight until all hope is lost.

But too often patients receive drastic treatment in spite of their dying wishes—by default, when doctors do “everything possible”, as they have been trained to, without talking through people’s preferences or ensuring that the prognosis is clearly understood. Just a third of American patients with terminal cancer are asked about their goals at the end of life, for example whether they wish to attend a special event, such as a grandchild’s wedding, even if that means leaving hospital and risking an earlier death. In many other countries, the share is even lower. Most oncologists, who see a lot of dying patients, say that they have never been taught how to talk to them.

This newspaper has called for the legalisation of doctor-assisted dying, so that mentally fit, terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives if that is their wish. But the right to die is just one part of better care at the end of life. The evidence suggests that most people want this option, but that few would, in the end, choose to exercise it. To give people the death they say they want, medicine should take some simple steps.

by Editors, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: David Parkins
[ed. See also: A Better Way to Care for the Dying]

Kelsey McClelland
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So Woke

Two weeks ago, social media lit up in a fever dream of outrage. This time, because a corporation hijacked the imagery and aesthetics of resistance movements as part of a daft strategy to sell soft drink to millennials. Most disturbingly, Pepsi’s ad appropriated the imagery of the Black Lives Matter movement, ultimately trivialising police brutality, which continues to devastate black communities across the US. No doubt, as many activists have pointed out, the ad is racist as all hell – a kick in the face to anyone deeply committed to anti-racist and anti-police struggles – and deserves its mass condemnation. However I suspect that there’s another hidden, murkier reason that this ad got the left – particularly the white, woketivist left – into such a tizzy: because it draws attention to our own always-already co-opted, neutered gestures of resistance.

The ad itself is like an old Marxist professor’s dystopian nightmare: activist youth appear as soulless avatars of trendy-materialistic individualism, engaging in politically meaningless outbursts of dissent and self-empowerment. This is a world where our material manifestations of dissent – slogans, signs, marches – have become empty signifiers, devoid of content, and disconnected from any concrete struggle. It’s a world where the logics of branding and commerce are completely interwoven with all aspects of our daily lives, even our rebellions. And when we take an honest look at popular progressive actions – some of which have started to feel more like parties than protests – this world is not so dissimilar from our own.

Some of us on the progressive left earned our weekly wokeness badges by claiming we would boycott PepsiCo, even though that’s almost physically impossible. Such a boycott arguably embodies the kind of vapid activism that drove us all to such distress in the first place: it is the type of protest that’s flashy and public, where you can brand yourself as ‘doing something’ without committing to working towards substantial change. It’s been remarked that ‘protest is the new brunch’ for a newly outraged left that practices social activism by ‘gramming themselves wearing ethical paperclips and holding witty posters.’ In the individualised, entrepreneurial ethos of neoliberal capitalism, it appears that political participation has become part of our own self-realisation project.

I’d wager that, in part, the commercial struck such a severe nerve precisely because it (albeit unwittingly) called these kinds of shallow, self-serving protest actions into question. It conceptualised activism as a series of acts driven by self-gratification, rather than by genuinely altruistic impulses of philanthropy or social justice. Far from delivering an impact on political outcomes, emphasis is placed on what makes activists feel good, whether that be partying, wearing empowering tees, or consuming woke soft drink. Under magnification, many of our own acts of popular ‘protest’ seem as vacuous and stripped of meaning as Pepsi’s PR brain trust has unwittingly made them out to be.

That’s not to say that populist feel-good protests are bad or pointless, per se, but for all the self-righteous huff doing the rounds in progressive social media, it’s surprising and revealing that no one really wants to have a conversation about their effectiveness or political value. Or, what it means that the traditional boundary between ‘activist’ and ‘consumer’ has become so blurred that both identity categories can comfortably coexist. We like to think that brand and commodity culture is completely divorced from our genuine acts of humanitarianism, but as ads like Pepsi’s remind us, that’s simply no longer the case.

by Jeremy Poxon, Overland | Read more:
Image:Jordi Bernabeu Farrús / flickr
[ed. I'm not a fan of the term 'woke' and all it implies (judgement and moral superiority). See also: Are We Having Too Much Fun?]

The White Cornerback (Or Not)

One weekday in August 2012, when the NFL regular season was approaching and rosters were being winnowed, first-year Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson called a stretch play during an 11-on-11 practice. A rookie cornerback wearing number 38 chased the play from the back side and with speed that Seattle had just clocked at 4.38 in the 40-yard dash, dragged running back Robert Turbin down for no gain.

On the next play No. 38 broke up a 40-yard fade down the opposite sideline. A few snaps later he snuffed out a slant route, slapping Wilson’s spiral into the FieldTurf with an emphatic whap-bomp. Richard Sherman liked the first two plays, but the slant is what launched Seattle’s second-year cornerback from the sideline, his yet-to-be-famous dreads flying, Donny Lisowski thinking he’d died and gone to football heaven as coach Pete Carroll’s hip‑hop selections scored the scene from speakers taller than Donny.

“I see you!” Sherman yelled, leaning backward and nodding at the white cornerback. “They don’t see you, but I see you!”

Born and raised in Seattle, the 28-year-old Lisowski will always remember the summer of 2012, when he had the Seahawks’ practice facility buzzing. He wore the same surging bird decal on his helmet that Marshawn Lynch wore on his. He lined up for DB drills behind his favorite player growing up, Marcus Trufant. He earned the respect of Carroll and his assistants, men he said were first-class in all of their communications with him. But as those summer days turned into months—then years—of solo workouts and precisely zero phone calls from other NFL teams, Lisowski couldn’t help but wonder whether there had been an invisible force at play in his career.

All 64 starting cornerbacks in the NFL are black. So are their backups. One hundred-sixty black cornerbacks, give or take. Not a single white one. It’s been this way for more than 10 years.

by Michael McKnight, ESPN |  Read more:

Image: Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times

Young Adults & the Construction Trades

NAHB conducted a national poll of young adults ages 18 to 25 to find out how this age group feels about a career in the construction trades. The majority of young adults (74%) say they know the field in which they want to have a career. Of these, only 3% are interested in the construction trades.

Most of the young people interested in the trades say the two most important benefits of this career choice are good pay (80%) and the attainment of useful skills (74%). Less than half cite as benefits that the work is seasonal (15%) or that it does not require a college degree (37%).

The 26% of respondents who do not yet know the career path they want to take got a follow-up question about the chance they might consider a number of fields (construction trades being one of them) using a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 meant ‘no chance no matter the pay’ and 5 meant ‘very good chance if the pay is high.’ Construction trades got an average rating of 2.1, with 63% of undecided young adults rating it 1 or 2 (no or little chance regardless of pay) and 18% a 4 or 5 (good to very good chance if pay is high).

The 63% of undecided young adults who indicated there was no or little chance they would consider a career in the trades no matter the pay were prodded about the reasons for their resoluteness. The two most common reasons are wanting a less physically-demanding job (48%) and the belief that construction work is difficult (32%). They were then asked if there was any compensation level that might entice them to reconsider a career in the trades. For slightly more than 20%, that number is either $75,000 or $100,000, but for the plurality (43%), there is no amount of money that could make them give the trades a second thought.

by Rose Quint, NAHB |  Read more:
Image: NAHB

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Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

When Lieutenant Gary Megge of the Michigan State Police attends a meeting, he sometimes asks, “How many of you broke the speed limit on your way here?”

Hearing his question, you might assume that Lt. Megge is a particularly zealous police officer. The type of person who walks half a city block to avoid jaywalking on an empty street. The model citizen who defers almost obnoxiously to the letter of the law. But that is not the point of Lt. Megge’s question at all.

“We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a crash,” Lt. Megge tells us when we call to discuss speed limits. “That tells me that most of us are adequate, safe, reasonable drivers. Speeding and traffic safety have a small correlation.”

Over the past 12 years, Lt. Megge has increased the speed limit on nearly 400 of Michigan’s roadways. Each time, he or one of his officers hears from community groups who complain that people already drive too fast. But as Megge and his colleagues explain, their intent is not to reduce congestion, bow to the reality that everyone drives too fast, or even strike a balance between safety concerns and drivers’ desire to arrive at their destinations faster. Quite the opposite, Lt. Megge advocates for raising speed limits because he believes it makes roads safer.

Traffic Engineering 101

Every year, traffic engineers review the speed limit on thousands of stretches of road and highway. Most are reviewed by a member of the state’s Department of Transportation, often along with a member of the state police, as is the case in Michigan. In each case, the “survey team” has a clear approach: they want to set the speed limit so that 15% of drivers exceed it and 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit.

This “nationally recognized method” of setting the speed limit as the 85th percentile speed is essentially traffic engineering 101. It’s also a bit perplexing to those unfamiliar with the concept. Shouldn’t everyone drive at or below the speed limit? And if a driver’s speed is dictated by the speed limit, how can you decide whether or not to change that limit based on the speed of traffic?

The answer lies in realizing that the speed limit really is just a number on a sign, and it has very little influence on how fast people drive. “Over the years, I’ve done many follow up studies after we raise or lower a speed limit,” Megge tells us. “Almost every time, the 85th percentile speed doesn’t change, or if it does, it’s by about 2 or 3 mph.”

As most honest drivers would probably concede, this means that if the speed limit on a highway decreases from 65 mph to 55 mph, most drivers will not drive 10 mph slower. But for the majority of drivers, the opposite is also true. If a survey team increases the speed limit by 10 mph, the speed of traffic will not shoot up 10 mph. It will stay around the same. Years of observing traffic has shown engineers that as long as a cop car is not in sight, most people simply drive at whatever speed they like.

Luckily, there is some logic to the speed people choose other than the need for speed. The speed drivers choose is not based on laws or street signs, but the weather, number of intersections, presence of pedestrians and curves, and all the other information that factors into the principle, as Lt. Megge puts it, that “no one I know who gets into their car wants to crash.”

So if drivers disregard speed limits, why bother trying to set the “right” speed limit at all?

One reason is that a minority of drivers do follow the speed limit. “I’ve found that about 10% of drivers truly identify the speed limit sign and drive at or near that limit,” says Megge. Since these are the slowest share of drivers, they don’t affect the 85th percentile speed. But they do impact the average speed -- by about 2 or 3 mph when a speed limit is changed, in Lt. Megge’s experience -- and, more importantly, the variance in driving speeds.

This is important because, as noted in a U.S. Department of Transportation report, “the potential for being involved in an accident is highest when traveling at speed much lower or much higher than the majority of motorists.” If every car sets its cruise control at the same speed, the odds of a fender bender happening is low. But when some cars drive 55 mph and others drive 85 mph, the odds of cars colliding increases dramatically. This is why getting slow drivers to stick to the right lane is so important to roadway safety; we generally focus on joyriders’ ability to cause accidents -- and rightly so -- but a car driving under the speed limit in the left (passing) lane of a highway is almost as dangerous.

Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion -- as noted Lt. Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide -- that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.

Yet most speed limits are set below the 85th percentile speed. We first investigated this topic at the urging of the National Motorists Association, a “member-supported driver advocacy organization” that has made raising speed limits to the 85th percentile one focus of its efforts.

One member pointed us to a 1992 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation on the “Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed Limits,” which, beside making the same arguments described above, noted that the majority of highway agencies set speed limits below the 85th percentile, leading over 50% of motorists to drive “in technical violation of the speed limit laws.” Lt. Megge believes the compliance rate in Michigan to be well under 50%.

It seems absurd that over half of drivers technically break the law at all times. It’s also perplexing that speed limit policy so consistently ignore traffic engineering 101. So why do people like Lt. Megge need to spend their time trying to raise speed limits?

by Alex Mayyasi, Pricenomics | Read more:
Image: NDF
[ed. Then there are places like Lynnwood, WA that love enforcing the posted speed limit. It's a great revenue generator.]

Everything That’s Wrong About Raccoons

Too many people want you to dismiss a raccoon’s deal of “Oh they’re mischievous cat-dogs with friendly washed hands and a jewel-thief face” when it’s really an ALL-HANDS NO-FEET TRASH-CAT WITH A DOG’S STOMACH AND A POSSUM’S HEART.

It can put itself up in trees but it waddles on the ground, I can’t be in trustment of a beast that clambers and waddles both; either be graceful and lithe all of times, or be clumsy and relatable on the ground. Seals can barely pull off “limber in the water, silly on a rock” and raccoons, you are not seals, you do not have their wise old laugh-faces, you just seem creepy and duplicitous.

Once when my dog died a passel of raccoons showed up in the backyard as if to say “Now that he’s gone, we own the night,” and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it disrespectful to 1) me personally and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t disrespect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.

YOU SCRUBBLEMENT UP YOUR WITCH HANDS AND I DON’T TRUST IT, THAT IS A HUMAN ATTRIBUTE AND I WANT YOU TO LEAVE THAT TO US, STOP BEFORE-WASHING AND RUBBLE-SCRITCHING YOUR FUR-FINGERS, YOU MASHED-DOWN SMALLBEAR

They’re a dense badger lie

THEY CAN POINT THEIR FEET BACKWARDS TO CLIMB DOWN TREES, THEY CAN SWIM, THEY CAN SWEAT LIKE A YOU OR ME, A PERSON OR PANT LIKE A DOG TO COOL DOWN AS THEY CHOOSE, THEY IDLY AND INSOLENTLY SLIDE BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE HUMAN WORLD AND IF THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU TAUGHT ME NOTHING ELSE IT’S THAT THAT IS FUCKED UPWARDLY

I don’t like the word “chittering” and that is the only sound a raccoon makes

MAYBE THEY ARE AN ASSEMBLAGE OF VERY CONDENSED SQUIRRELS THAT POWERED UP INTO A MEDIUM-SIZED BEASTIE AND THAT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE, IF SQUIRRELS HAD DEVELOPED POWER-RANGER-LIKE ABILITIES

I hate the way they wobble-squample across the street at night when you see a shadowy mass under a streetlight and then it turns out to be like seven fur-children

A raccoon is the child of a cat and a wizard and it walks in too many worlds for it to be allowed to stay in this one

STOP LOOKING AT ME, YOU RIVER-DABBLER

by Mallory Ortberg, Toast |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: So You've Decided to Drink More Water]

Fitz and the Tantrums / Ed Sheeran / Lia Kim x May J Lee