Ancestry.com Takes Ownership of Your DNA Forever

Don’t use the AncestryDNA testing service without actually reading the Ancestry.com Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. According to these legal contracts, you still own your DNA, but so does Ancestry.com.

The family history website Ancestry.com is selling a new DNA testing service called AncestryDNA. But the DNA and genetic data that Ancestry.com collects may be used against “you or a genetic relative.” According to its privacy policies, Ancestry.com takes ownership of your DNA forever. Your ownership of your DNA, on the other hand, is limited in years.

It seems obvious that customers agree to this arrangement, since all of them must “click here to agree” to these terms. But, how many people really read those contacts before clicking to agree? And how many relatives of Ancestry.com customers are also reading?

There are three significant provisions in the AncestryDNA Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to consider on behalf of yourself and your genetic relatives: (1) the perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide license to use your DNA; (2) the warning that DNA information may be used against “you or a genetic relative”; (3) your waiver of legal rights. (...)

Buried in the “Informed Consent” section, which is incorporated into the Terms of Service, Ancestry.com warns customers, “it is possible that information about you or a genetic relative could be revealed, such as that you or a relative are carriers of a particular disease. That information could be used by insurers to deny you insurance coverage, by law enforcement agencies to identify you or your relatives, and in some places, the data could be used by employers to deny employment.”

This is a massive red flag. The data “you or a genetic relative” give to AncestryDNA could be used against “you or a genetic relative” by employers, insurers, and law enforcement.

For example, a young woman named Theresa Morelli applied for individual disability insurance, consented to release of her medical records through the Medical Information Bureau (a credit reporting agency for medical history), and was approved for coverage. One month later, Ms. Morelli’s coverage was cancelled and premiums refunded when the insurer learned her father had Huntington’s disease, a genetic illness.

Startlingly, the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) used Morelli’s broad consent to query her father’s physician, a doctor with whom she had no prior patient relationship. More importantly, the applicant herself wasn’t diagnosed with Huntington’s carrier status, but she suffered exclusion on the basis of a genetic predisposition in her family.

by Joel Winston, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday Existence

In mid-February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published his “Building Global Community” manifesto, in which he called for “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically engaged” and “inclusive” communities.

Which sounds lofty and benevolent, yet if you read between the lines, the message is: we want to own all the data of all the interpersonal/community interactions in the world and profit off of them through advertising and other as-yet-unveiled value-added propositions. (Facebook Bucks, anyone?)

Facebook launched a few years after I graduated from college, so I guess this makes me an old fuddy-duddy—an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want a corporation like Facebook owning my most sensitive personal info. Somehow, this sentiment not only puts me in the minority of the connected world, but also it increasingly marginalizes me in my everyday interactions.

I was OK with missing the occasional baby announcement. I was fine with missing the occasional warehouse party. But last month the Zuckerberg Mafia finally hit me where it hurts: I got kicked off of car sharing because I don’t have (and won’t have) a Facebook account.
If you haven’t and/or won’t join Facebook, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.

Paradise Lost

One of the most glorious things about living in the Bay Area is that I don’t have to own a car. For nearly 10 years, I’ve been a member of City CarShare, a local nonprofit car-sharing service with vehicle stations all around the Bay Area. I built my life around the service. I love biking to a Prius parked in some random garage, tossing my bike into the hatch and launching off to my next adventure. I’m a believer in the vision of the Internet and smartphones helping us share stuff and get the most value out of our assets. City CarShare was an early real-world example of how technology might help facilitate/streamline people living together better and more efficiently.

However, City CarShare was recently bought by a corporation, Getaround. And Getaround built its platform on top of Facebook. So when I went to migrate my account over to them, I found that there’s literally no way to do it as a non-Facebook user. If I want to share cars with my fellow city dwellers, I’m compelled to strike a Faustian bargain.

To access the services of Getaround, one must authenticate their identity through Facebook.

For comparison: Airbnb allows multiple verification options — including, but not limited to, Facebook. If I’m going to share my car or house with someone, I sure as heck want to know if that person is who they say they are. But saying that Facebook is the sole conduit toward this goal is treading into scary, Black Mirror–esque territory.

I know that for you Facebook-having people, this is no big deal. You have resigned yourself to the idea of Facebook owning your data. But if you don’t, haven’t and/or won’t resign to this fate, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.

Customer Disservice

I wrote to the nice folks at Getaround to let them know that I’ve been a loyal customer for over 10+ years and said I’d happily verify myself in any manner they see fit besides Facebook. But since the very architecture of their site is integrated unto Facebook, technically, they have no way to do this (short of redesigning the entire service). And there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of why this might even be an issue. It would take me just a minute to open an account, so why shouldn’t I do it?

A careful reading of Getaround’s privacy statement makes it clear that the data they are compiling will be shared with other companies. In the case of car sharing, that includes GPS tracking of where and when I’m driving (OMG, Facebook would love to get their tentacles on those juicy profile nodes). (...)

Social Credit

You have a credit score if you want to get a mortgage—soon you’ll have a social-credit score that people can check to see if you fit the bill for their service/community/etc.

Potential landlords, employers, car-share companies and dates will scan your social-credit score to see if you fit the bill. We’re facing a world in which you’ll be a social outcast if you don’t regularly grant access to your Facebook profile. Facebook is becoming our de facto social-credit system.

by Jason Ditzian, The Bold Italic | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. I've run into the same problem (with other apps). It's an irritant. But if businesses want to alienate a segment of their potential customer base, that's up to them. See also: Facebook wants to use your brain activity as an input device.]

Patagonia Made a Bikini That Won't Ever Fall Off

Image: Patagonia

The Good Daughter

In Tate Britain is a painting by the Victorian artist George Elgar Hicks of a woman ministering tenderly to her invalid father. It is called Comfort of Old Age. The work is the final panel of Hicks’s triptych Woman’s Mission. The first part, Guide of Childhood, in which the same figure teaches her little boy to walk, has been lost. But the second panel also hangs at the Tate in London: Companion of Manhood shows our heroine consoling her husband after ghastly news.

Hicks depicted “woman” in her three guises – mother, wife, daughter – and in her ideal state, the selfless provider of guidance, solace and care. Her life has meaning only in so far as it nourishes and facilitates the lives of others, principally men.

Domestic and emotional labour, we call it now. Feminists have long campaigned both for this to be acknowledged as real work and for men to do their share. Women cannot reach their potential at the office, notes Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, until men pull their weight at home. But this has always been the toughest, messiest fight, because it is about domestic harmony, varying standards of personal hygiene, nagging, sulking and love. Besides, there is an enduring sense, little changed since Hicks’s day, that not only are women better at caring duties, but it is their natural lot.

I have spent a long time in the first two panels of the triptych: a partner/wife for 30 years, a mother for 21. (My two sons are grown and pretty much gone.) And I have seen, in the course of my adult life, enormous progress in those two domains. Men no longer assume that wives will dump their careers to follow them on foreign postings, for instance, or that mothers cannot work. According to research by the Office for National Statistics, women still do 40 per cent more household chores than men but, growing up, I never saw a man make dinner, let alone push a pram. Marriages are increasingly equal partnerships and each generation of fathers is more engaged.

Now I have reached the third panel, the trickiest bit of the triptych. My 93-year-old mother is 200 miles away in Doncaster, and since my father died, five years ago, she has been living alone. She is – I must stress – admirable, independent, uncomplaining and tough. A stoic. Someone who doesn’t mourn her every lost faculty but relishes what she can still do. Yet almost everyone she ever knew is dead, and I am her only child: her principal Comfort of Old Age.

For a long time, the landscape was a series of plateaus and small dips. Her little house acquired rails, walking frames, adaptations; she wears an emergency pendant. But until she broke her hip four years ago, she wouldn’t even have a cleaner. (“I don’t want strangers in my house.”) She managed. Just. But since Christmas the terrain has shifted. A persistent infection, two collapses, three ambulance rides, tachycardia (in which your heart beats to the point of explosion), but then, after three weeks, back home. Finally I persuaded her to have carers – nice, kindly, expensive – for an hour five times a week. (She demanded days off.) A slightly lower plateau.

Then, a few weeks ago, a neighbour called to say that my ma’s curtains were still closed at 4pm. She was found dehydrated, hallucinating. (She hadn’t pressed her emergency button; it was a non-carer day.) I hurriedly packed my bag for God knows how long, then scrambled north to sit by her bedside believing, for the third time this year, that I was watching her die.

For three weeks, on and off, I slept alone in my teenage single bed, in the house where I grew up, weeping every time I opened a cupboard to see her cake tins or Easter eggs for her grandsons. That week, I read a news report about how having children makes people live two years longer. Of course! As her daughter, I was her advocate, hassling doctors for information, visiting, reassuring, making sure she was fed, washing her soiled clothes (even long-stay units won’t do laundry), trying to figure out what to do next. God help the childless! Really, who will speak for them?

Finally, having wrestled her into (almost) daily care – she is very stubborn – I returned to London to find a letter. I am a Times columnist and write a weekly notebook slot, occasionally featuring my mother. I am used to harsh reader critiques of my life. But this, I must say, stung. It was from a man who lives in Cheshire (he had supplied his name and address), and he wanted me to know what a terrible person I am. “I have been puzzled when reading your column over the past months how you have been able to leave your mother – whose serious health issues you have used as copy . . . to holiday in Mexico, East Anglia and Norway.” I was “selfish and self-regarding”, and I should be ashamed.

He was not the first. Online posters often chide me for maternal neglect, and otherwise kind letters sometimes conclude: “But I do think your mother should move in with you.” Anyway, my egregious Mexican holiday had been long delayed by her illness and although she was well when I left, I was braced to fly back at any moment. The Norway trip was to visit my son on his 21st birthday. No matter. How dare I have a life.

I was reminded of when my children were young and I was a magazine editor. The guilt-tripping, the moral judgement: the looks from full-time mothers, the pursed lips from older relatives. Why bother having kids if you work full-time? Back then, I was “selfish and self-regarding”, too. My husband, who worked vastly longer hours, was blameless.

So let me warn you that just when you’re free from being judged as a mother, you’ll be judged as a daughter. It is the last chance for reactionary types who resent women’s career success, or just their freedom to live how they choose, to have a dig. Look at this selfish bitch, weekending in East Anglia when she should be a Comfort of Old Age.

When we say someone is a Good Dad, it means he turns up to football matches and parents’ evenings, gives sensible advice, isn’t a derelict alcoholic or a deserter. I know many fathers do much, much more. But that is the bar to Good Dadhood. It is pretty low. To qualify as a Good Mother, however, a woman must basically subsume her entire existence into her children and household and may only work part-time, if at all.

So, what is a Good Daughter? A US report showed in 2014 that daughters were twice as likely as sons to care for their elderly parents. In a survey of 26,000 older Americans, Angelina Grigoryeva, a sociologist at Princeton University, discovered that daughters provide as much care as they can manage, while sons do as little as they can get away with. If they have sisters or even wives, men are likely to leave it to them. I can find no equivalent UK study, but I’d bet the same is true here.

I know many sons who help out with ageing parents: Sunday care-home visits or a spot of DIY. Some do the truly grim stuff, such as washing and toileting a frail, dementia-patient father. And all sons – unless they are estranged, or cruel, or in prison – are Good Sons. Being a Good Daughter is a much tougher gig. However often I go north, sort out bills, buy new ironing boards, listen to my mother’s worries, take her shopping, organise her Christmas presents and stay awake worrying, it won’t be enough. A friend visits her disabled mother every day, despite her family and career, sorts out wheelchairs and carers, runs errands. Her three brothers drop by for ten minutes once a fortnight: so busy, so important! Yet my friend’s care is a given, and her brothers are “marvellous”. A truly Good Daughter would quit her job, have her old mother move in and tend to her alone.

The truth is I don’t want to be a full-time carer, any more than I wanted to be a full-time mother. And I don’t want to live with my ma any more than she wants to live with me. Now that I’ve served out my motherhood years, I want to do other things with my life besides looking after people. Is that a shocking admission? Men wouldn’t give it a second thought.

by Janice Turner, New Statesman |  Read more:
Image: George Elgar Hicks

Duck Ramps Appear at U.S. Capitol, but Not Everyone Is Pleased

Image: Architect of the Capitol

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Slop Machines

In The Waste Makers, his 1960 history of American consumerism for consumerism’s sake, author Vance Packard describes a satirical city of the future. It’s a place of planned obsolescence, where papier-mache houses are torn down and rebuilt every other year, plastic automobiles melt if they’re driven more than 4,000 miles, and factories are constructed on the edges of cliffs, so that conveyor belts can simply dump excess consumer goods into the abyss without slowing down the economic engine of production itself. Packard calls his mock-utopia “Cornucopia City.” If America possesses a non-imagined model for Cornucopia City, it’s Las Vegas. A horn of plenty that’s half-metropolis, half-amusement park, where excess is an edict, from bottomless booze bongs to endless buffets, it is our crapulent capital of abundance.

At a proper Vegas buffet, like the 25,000-square-foot Bacchanal at Caesars Palace, or The Buffet at the Wynn, the steam tables and hot lamps and carving stations stretch out toward infinity and you can eat prime rib, oak-grilled lamb chops, South Carolina shrimp and grits, roasted bone marrow, angry mac ‘n’ cheese, lobster tails, baked-to-order souffles, made-to-order cognac-and-Boursin omelets, breakfast tacos, fish sliders, barbecue chicken pizza, filet mignon, Peking duck rolls, mashed potatoes, waffle cone chicken and fries, cookies, cakes, pies, crème brulees, assorted fudges and barks, and, sure, even some fresh fruit, until your guts explode, all for one flat fee.

When you get up to reload your plate or duckwalk to the toilet, your sullied china, littered with rib bones and crustacean carcasses, will disappear as if by magic, plate after plate after plate. The handling of the leftovers is so efficient and elegant that you don’t even get to think about where they go. That’s by design. It’s like the old joke: In the fevered throes of a swinging sexual reverie, a man turns to someone and whispers in their ear, “What are you doing after the orgy?” Squirming in the sticky spasms of rhapsodic pleasure, we’re not meant to think about what comes after. In the case of your leftovers, the “after,” it turns out, is inside the belly of a hog.

Sin City bleeds away about a dozen miles north of the Strip, past the factory outlet malls and “locals-only” casinos and quarries and high school gymnasiums boasting “RATTLER PRIDE,” where everything starts looking more and more like a parched parcel of the American heartland. The snowcapped mountains on the northern horizon insist upon this being a real place, like pretty much any other, emerging out of and folding back into nature. The cling and clang of casino gambling floors and the howls of rowdy bachelorette parties are replaced by the chirpy songs of native Nevada birds. Then there’s the smell: the piquant pong of hot garbage and porcine excrement that wafts downwind. Yes, that’s the aroma of the real Las Vegas.

In September 2009, the funk was so aggressive that it became the subject of a lawsuit. Local homeowners, recently moved into a then-new housing development, complained that the builders hadn’t fully disclosed that the area was suffused with the reek. The suit charged that the smell was so bad that new owners couldn't even be in their homes “without gagging.” Neighbors would hang up those strips of gluey flypaper, only to find them completely full just a few days later, mottled with flies drawn to garbage perfume. The source of this great odor was R.C. Farms, a North Vegas hog farm, overseen by veteran agriculturalist Bob Combs since the 1960s — and the final destination for the literal tons of wasted food that is produced every day at casinos up and down the Strip. (...)

Since it opened in April 1963, R.C. Farms has had a very particular relationship with the overflowing decadence of nearby Las Vegas. At the time, the Combs family operated a modest hog farm in Chula Vista, near San Diego. They established relationships with a local army base, collecting food scraps to be reused as pig feed. Every year the base would contract out the privilege of collecting their wasted food to the highest bidder, with a few local farmers vying for the deal. But in Vegas, tens of thousands of pounds of food were going to waste. “My dad came here to Vegas for his 70th birthday, to have little gambling vacation,” Combs said as we sat at the round kitchen table of his modest bungalow farmhouse. On that auspicious trip, Combs’s father wandered through a backdoor of the now-long-gone Navajo-themed Thunderbird Hotel, and he came upon a huge container full of food being thrown away — the same sort of stuff he was bidding on back in La Mesa.

Combs told me the story with a well-practiced, raconteur’s confidence. It’s a tale he’s likely told a hundred times before, slowly metastasizing with each telling into a bona fide legend: Imagine Jed Clampett happening across oil in his fetid swamp, except that the treasure is something that was being chucked away. Where the casinos saw only untouched shrimp cocktails and half-nibbled slabs of heat-lamp-warmed prime rib, the older Combs saw profit. He leased 150 acres north of the Strip, at the dead end of a dirt road, and installed his son to run the place. The young Bob (affectionately known as “Goof” to his family) arranged deals with several of the old-school casinos — the Desert Inn, the Stardust, the Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, the Tropicana, Caesars, the Riviera, and other locals-only joints. The business model was simple: collect buffet food scraps, reprocess them as feed, fatten hogs, send them off to slaughter. (...)

Hank estimates that the family company currently handles about 15 percent of buffet food waste in Las Vegas. The actual amount is tricky to tabulate, as the total tonnage of food that isn’t diverted to the farms isn’t calculated. “We really don’t know the true number,” Hank said. “Some of these hotels are throwing out eight tons of food a day!”

by John Semley, Eater | Read more:
Image:Natalie Nelson; photos by PictureNet / Corbis, Getty Images, and Shutterstock

*BD* 11 1 86

The strangeness began shortly after his eighteenth birthday. A time when, he'd wanted to think, his life might have begun to be more fully his own.

The new, veiled way in which people were looking at him. Or looking away from him.

Got to be imagining it. Weird!

Nothing about him had outwardly changed, he was sure. He'd been growing steadily since the age of twelve, and he was now five feet ten, weighed approximately 135, had to be normal, average for his age. Sometimes he cut himself shaving out of carelessness, but that didn't seem to be what anyone was looking at, or not looking at. He wore his usual clothes: baggy khakis, longsleeved black T-shirt, size 11 running shoes. In cold weather he wore his purple school jacket, emblazoned with the bronze letters MT. OLIVE VARSITY TRACK, and Army-surplus combat boots. Much of the time he wore his Walkman, and his mind was totally elsewhere. When he removed the headphones and the heavy, throbbing music faded, the world, which was a world of adults, a world designed and controlled by adults, rolled in over him like an avalanche.

It wasn't Danny's friends and classmates who behaved strangely with him, just adults. And not all adults, only a few. His foster parents, the Stampfels—Ed and Em, they wanted to be called. Two or three of his teachers at Mt. Olive High. The track-team coach, Hal Diedrich. The principal, Mr. Bernard, and the faculty adviser to the student newspaper, Mr. Fackler. And Mrs. Jameson, the guidance counselor.

He'd thought he knew Mrs. Jameson. Thought she knew him.

Two years before, when Danny Neuworth was a sophomore, a new transfer to Mt. Olive High, he'd had a difficult time adjusting; he'd been lonely yet not very sociable, poorly motivated in his studies yet anxious about grades, and so he'd been referred to Mrs. Jameson. She had let him talk without interrupting him, had asked him questions that showed she was sympathetic, genuinely interested in him, and so he'd come to trust her. She'd given him good advice he'd tried to follow. But now, so strangely, in November of his senior year, when Danny was considering where to apply to college, eager for advice and encouragement, Mrs. Jameson answered his questions in a distracted manner, smiling faintly in his direction without seeming to see him. Open before her on her desk was a manila file inscribed, in stark black ink, NEUWORTH, DANIEL S. '05. "CONFIDENTIAL."

When he first entered Mrs. Jameson's office, she was frowning at a document in the file. She glanced up at him then with a look—veiled, startled. "Oh, Daniel. Come in." Their conversation was stiff, awkward. If he didn't know better, Danny would have thought the guidance counselor didn't know him at all. Finally he asked if there was something in his file: "I guess you couldn't tell me, huh?"

Mrs. Jameson said quickly, "There's nothing wrong, Daniel. Of course. What could be wrong?" A deep flush rose into her face. Her voice was oddly flat, toneless.

Danny had friends who'd conferred with the guidance counselor, students whose grades were no better than his, and they'd come away with lists of colleges to apply to, even catalogues and brochures. But Mrs. Jameson didn't seem to have any ideas for him. He said he'd like to study mechanical engineering, maybe. His foster father, Ed Stampfel, had thought that might work for him. Yes, that might work for him, Mrs. Jameson said vaguely. "If you have the math. Engineering requires math, you know." Repeatedly Mrs. Jameson blew her nose in a tissue, apologizing for "sinus allergies." Out of a crammed bookshelf she pulled dogeared catalogues for regional New Jersey colleges—Warren County, Cape May, Hunterdon Community, Rutgers-Camden. "Maybe one of these. Let's see."

Strange—Mrs. Jameson wasn't meeting his eye. Wasn't calling him Danny, as she had in the past.

Adults! You couldn't figure them.

Since kindergarten, Danny's teachers had encouraged him, presumably knowing of his foster-home background. Pursue your goals, follow your dream, everyone in America is special, you have only to be you. Now, when he needed encouragement and advice, Mrs. Jameson couldn't seem to think of anything to tell him. Her sleek, slender laptop was open on her desk, and in the lenses of her glasses he saw a faint reflection of mysterious darting movements on the screen, like secret thoughts.

Something in my file. That must be it.

Yet what could it be? He'd never gotten into trouble at school, or anywhere else. He'd been a sulky kid for a while in high school, but came out of it gradually and became an earnest, diligent, if not very imaginative, student. In easy subjects like communication arts, social studies, health and fitness, he'd earned A-minuses, but mostly his grades hovered at B-/C+ no matter how hard he worked. He had a small circle of friends, mostly guys like himself. This year he'd finally made the varsity track team, by driving himself mercilessly and earning the respect of Coach Diedrich for his effort if not for his actual accomplishments ("Not every guy can be a star, Danny. You're a team player"). His only distinction was that since the second semester of his sophomore year Neuworth, Daniel had been listed on the Mt. Olive Good Citizenship Roster, initiated by the school district to boost morale by "honoring" those students who attended classes regularly, did their schoolwork, and caused no trouble. But the honor had become a joke, because so many names were listed.

Belatedly, in the way of a coach giving a pep talk to a paraplegic athlete, Mrs. Jameson had begun to extol the virtues of small colleges, technical schools, to say how much more suitable they were for some students than universities, let alone the "prestigious" Ivy League universities, which in her opinion were "undemocratic and overrated." Mrs. Jameson was speaking now with a strange vehemence, as if someone had dared to argue with her, an invisible presence in her office toward whom she felt animosity. Danny listened uneasily. He saw a thin blade of sunshine ease onto the framed diplomas on the wall behind Mrs. Jameson's desk. Her master's degree was in education and psychology from Rutgers-Newark.

Rutgers-Newark! No wonder Mrs. Jameson was so contemptuous of "prestigious" schools.

When Mrs. Jameson fell silent, blowing her nose, Danny reverted to the subject of his file. "I guess there must be something bad in it, right?" Mrs. Jameson said quickly, with a frown, "No, not at all, Danny. Everything is fine."

"Not so great, not outstanding, but 'fine.'" Danny smiled to show that he understood. Dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, Mrs. Jameson said, like a mother gently rebuking a child, "Not everyone can be outstanding, Danny. In our American republic everyone is created 'equal,' but only politically—as citizens. Not in other respects. At your age, you must know that."

Danny nodded yes, he knew. How could he not know!

"Not many of us at Mt. Olive are 'outstanding,' I can assure you. Or we wouldn't be here, you see." This was meant to be lightly playful, provocative. But something in Mrs. Jameson's face seemed to crack. Clumsily she rose from behind her desk, a fleshy middleaged woman with a flushed face, saying, "I think I have, in the outer office, a brochure for—I'm not sure. Excuse me."

The guidance counselor left her office, pointedly shutting the door behind her. Danny was baffled. Was she leaving him alone with his file, giving him the opportunity to look into it? Or was he misinterpreting the gesture? Was he being videotaped? Was he making a terrible mistake?

He listened for her footsteps returning. His heart began to pound with excitement as, leaning over Mrs. Jameson's desk, he tried to read upside down the document lying on top of the manila file. Not hearing footsteps, he dared to go behind the desk to peer at it; it had the letterhead *BIOTECHINC* at the top and "NEUWORTH, DANIEL S. *BD* 11 1 86" heading a pagelong column of densely printed information that appeared to be a mixture of scientific terms and mathematical symbols, incomprehensible to him. Danny had to suppose that this was coded data having to do with his grades at Mt. Olive High and the results of the numerous tests—IQ, "cognitive," "psychological"—he'd taken over the years. His ranking in his class, possibly statewide, even nationwide, was probably indicated too. At the very bottom of the page was a mysterious numeral of a dozen digits followed by a blank space and "*BD* 11 1 86-6 21 05."

What "BD" meant, Danny didn't know. But 11/1/86 was his birthday and, he recalled after a moment, 6/21/05 was the date of his high school graduation.

They expected him to graduate, then. This was good news!

by Joyce Carol Oates, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Damian Garcia/Getty via:

[ed. See also: Never Let Me Go]

Linda Ronstadt

Mark Klett, Border fence separating the United States and Mexico, 2015.

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Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

In his famous 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," biologist Garrett Hardin singled out ocean fishing as a prime example of self-interested individuals short-sightedly depleting shared resources:

Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.

The whales have actually been doing a lot better lately. Fish in general, not so much.

Then there's the Maine lobster. As University of Maine anthropologist James M. Acheson put it in his 2003 book "Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry":

Since the late 1980s, catches have been at record-high levels despite decades of intense exploitation. We have never produced so many lobsters. Even more interesting to managers is the fact that catch levels remained relatively stable from 1947 to the late 1980s. While scientists do not agree on the reason for these high catches, there is a growing consensus that they are due, in some measure, to the long history of effective regulations that the lobster industry has played a key role in developing.

Two of the most prominent and straightforward regulations are that lobsters must be thrown back in the water not only if they are too small but also if they are too big (because mature lobsters produce the most offspring), and that egg-bearing females must not only be thrown back but also marked (by notches cut in their tails) as off-limits for life. Acheson calls this "parametric management" -- the rules "control 'how' fishing is done," not how many lobsters are caught -- and concludes that "Although this approach is not supported by fisheries scientists in general, it appears to work well in the lobster fishery."

It's a seafood sustainability success story! But there's been an interesting twist since Acheson wrote those words in 2003. That already-record-setting Maine lobster harvest has more than doubled:

Sustainable fisheries practices alone can't really explain why today's lobster take is more than seven times the pre-2000 average. What can? The most universally accepted answer seems to be that depletion of the fish that used to eat young lobsters (mainly cod, landings of which peaked in Maine in 1991 and have fallen 99.2 percent since) has allowed a lot more lobsters to grow big enough for people to catch and eat them. The tragedy of one commons has brought unprecedented bounty to another.

Warming ocean temperatures have also improved lobster survival rates. Canada's Atlantic provinces have experienced a lobster boom similar to Maine's. Not so in the New England states to the south and west of Maine, where the water is now apparently a little too warm and lobster harvests peaked in the 1990s. Within Maine, which now accounts for more than 80 percent of U.S. lobsters, the sweet spot for lobstering has moved from the state's southern coast to the cooler northeast. (...)

This leaves the Maine (and Canadian) lobster industry with another interesting challenge: how to find enough buyers for all those lobsters so that prices don't collapse. As you can see from the chart below, they've mostly succeeded:

Affluent Chinese diners have been one reason. This January, five chartered 747s full of live lobsters flew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to China to supply Chinese New Year feasts. Maine's lobsters tend to make the voyage less dramatically, in regularly scheduled flights from Boston, but $27 million worth of them were shipped to China in 2016.

The national and even global spread of the lobster roll has also helped a lot. I came to Maine on a trip organized by Luke's Lobster, a fast-casual restaurant chain that now has 21 "shacks" in the U.S. and eight more scheduled to open this year, along with six licensed locations in Japan. Founder Luke Holden was an investment banker in New York when he and former food writer Ben Conniff opened the first restaurant in the East Village in 2009, but he's also the son of a Maine lobsterman who owned the state's first lobster-processing plant.

Luke's Lobster now has its own plant in Saco, Maine, that processes between 4 and 5 percent of the state's lobster harvest. Processing, in this case, means cooking and picking the meat out of the claws and knuckles for Luke's lobster rolls 4 while cleaning and freezing the raw tails and clawless "bullet" lobsters for sale to restaurants, groceries and such.

Holden's father, Jeff, says that tails used to sell for much more than claw meat. Now lobster rolls, for which tail meat is generally too chewy, have flipped the price equation.

All in all, it's a fascinating tale of adaptation, marketing and lobster logistics. There is one big catch, though, beyond the vague fears that the lobsters can't be this abundant forever. It's that the bait used to lure the lobsters into traps -- herring -- isn't as abundant as they are. Herring stocks along the Maine coast haven't collapsed as some other fisheries have, but the catch has fallen in recent years, to 77 million pounds in 2016 from 103 million in 2014 and more than 150 million some years in the 1950s and 1960s.

On average, it takes about a pound of herring to catch a pound of lobster.

by Justin Fox, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever

On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.

In this sense, his Fox Newsbroadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence. (...)

Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.

So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.

The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.

Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.

What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Image: Jim Cooper/AP

We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans.

What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception.

But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.

Prospection enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or in the afterlife promised by so many religions. (...)

The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.

When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks. (...)

The brain’s long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that’s not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruct their memory so that no trace of the original is left.

The fluidity of memory may seem like a defect, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and the future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.

by Martin E.P. Seligman and John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

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This New App Wants to Be the Uber of Camping

According to a report by the Outdoor Foundation, Americans log 598 million nights a year under the stars. At an average of $40 in expenses and fees per night, that’s $24 billion spent on campsites alone. Add in all the related costs—gear, transportation, food—and the Outdoor Industry Association figures the industry generates closer to $167 billion annually.

But former investment banker Michael D’Agostino, who grew up camping on a farm in Litchfield, Conn., still calls the industry a broken business.

The tipping point came a few summers ago, when D’Agostino found himself on vacation “directly across from a campsite of 40 people at a Wiccan convention: robes and UFO spotters and streaking and all.” It wasn’t what he’d imagined as a quiet weekend with his wife—counting stars, listening to crickets, bellies full from prime steaks grilled over a man-made fire. “We definitely took them up on some mead,” he said of the Wiccans, “but we had to keep the dog in the tent—she was going bonkers—and it was kind of like camping in Times Square.”

The experience led him to create Tentrr, a free iPhone app that takes the guesswork out of camping. It lets users find and instantly book fully private campsites in vetted, bucolic settings, all within a few hours’ drive of major cities. The sites themselves are all custom-designed by D’Agostino and follow a standardized footprint: They consist of hand-sewn canvas expedition tents from Colorado, set on an elevated deck with Adirondack chairs. You’re also guaranteed to find Brazilian wood picnic tables and sun showers strewn around the campsites, as well as portable camping toilets, fire pits, cookware, and grills. As for the sleeping arrangements? Air mattresses with featherbed toppers, not sleeping bags, are the name of the game.

Tentrr beta-launched last summer with just 50 campsites in New York state, while D’Agostino figured out how to get liability insurers on board with his slice of the sharing economy. Despite the soft opening, the app has already logged $4 million in funding and 1,500 bookings—40 percent of them by people who’d never gone camping before.

In the days leading up to Memorial Day, Tentrr will move past its beta phase with a newly expanded collection of roughly 150 campsites spread across the U.S. Northeast. By July 4 an additional 100 sites will gradually come online, not including a 50-site expansion into the Pacific Northwest. Next year, D’Agostino plans to tackle the “San Francisco-Yosemite corridor, the American Southwest, and counterclockwise around the perimeter of the U.S., all within a few hours of major metropolitan cities, until all of the country’s top-50 hubs are served.” His ultimate vision, however, is global.

The trick, said D’Agostino, is shifting campers away from national or state parks and working instead with private landowners. Among his campsite keepers are a set of fourth-generation dairy farmers, a contractor who runs a recording studio in his barn, and an “unnamed” actress with expansive property in New York’s Hudson Valley. All have dozens, if not hundreds, of acres to spare—making them perfect for Tentrr’s semipermanent campsites. (The tents are heated by cylinder stoves through November; after the camping season ends, either the tent keepers or Tentrr employees dismantle the sites and put them into weatherproof storage.)

It sounds limited, but Tentrr is setting up 10 to 20 campsites per week, with tent keepers paying a one-time, $1,500 membership fee to join. (It covers the setup of their site, which itself is valued at $6,000.) “We’ve been spreading by word-of-mouth like wildfire,” said D’Agostino. “We set up one camp, and one turns into 30.” But he’s wary of expanding too quickly and is limiting his company’s growth to no more than 35 new campsites per week—an effort to ensure demand continually outpaces supply.

by Nikki Ekstein, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Tertius Bune for Tentrr

Chris Cornell

Chris Cornell, Soundgarden and Audioslave Frontman, Dies at 52

Rod Rosenstein Saves the Republican Party From Itself

With the stroke of a pen, Rod Rosenstein redeemed his reputation, preserved the justice system, pulled American politics back from the brink — and, just possibly, saved the Republican Party and President Trump from themselves.

The deputy attorney general’s memo Wednesday night announcing that he had appointed Robert Mueller as special prosecutor to investigate the Trump administration’s ties to Russia was pitch perfect in its simple justification: While he has not determined that any crime has been committed, he wrote that “based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command.”

This is precisely what Rosenstein needed to do for all parties, but particularly for his own honor. Rosenstein, just two weeks into the job, had trashed the reputation he had built over the years as a fair-minded and above-the-fray prosecutor by allowing Trump to use him as cover for Trump’s own decision to sack FBI Director James Comey. Many who admired Rosenstein were stunned that he would let himself be used this way; I argued last week that “if he cares at all about rehabilitating the reputation he built, Rosenstein has one option: He can appoint a serious, independent and above-reproach special counsel — the sort of person Rosenstein was seen as, until this week — to continue the Russia probe.” In tapping Mueller — a solid figure who served ably as FBI director under two presidents — that’s what Rosenstein did.

Rosenstein also restores some confidence in a justice system that has been much abused by Trump’s assaults on “so-called” judges. That system was gravely wounded by Comey’s firing, ordered by Trump and overseen by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was supposed to have recused himself from the Russia probe but decided it was just fine to recommend the firing of the man overseeing that investigation and choose his replacement.

The deputy attorney general’s decision also reduces partisan pressures that were very clearly harming the national interest. Republicans had gone into a crouch to protect against any suggestion that Trump and his advisers colluded with the Russians. Democrats were often leaping to conclude that there was high-level collusion. And nearly everybody had lost track of the most important issue: Russia, arguably our leading global adversary, had successfully meddled in a U.S. presidential election — undermining confidence in our system of government — and was ready to do it again. (...)

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Ryan, reading from a typewritten statement, gave what amounted to a generous Trump defense. Ryan alleged that “there are some people out there who want to harm the president,” and said of Comey: “If this happened as he allegedly describes, why didn’t he take action at the time?” Ryan dismissed “speculation and innuendo,” saying “there’s clearly a lot of politics being played.” He cited the acting FBI director as saying “no one has tried to impede” the FBI probe. “There is plenty of oversight that is being done,” Ryan assured all. Walking out, he was asked if he had “full confidence” in Trump. Ryan paused briefly mid-stride and said, softly, “I do.”

It was a huge gamble by the top Republican in Congress. Ryan’s defense of Trump is a calculation that Trump will ride out the troubles. He is betting his political fortunes — and perhaps his party’s hold on the House — on a man who has provided very little justification for trust.

Rosenstein’s action rescues Ryan, McConnell and other GOP leaders from their own cowardice in refusing to demand more accountability from Trump.

Trump no doubt will feel betrayed by Rosenstein, as he felt betrayed by Comey. He was already feeling awfully sorry for himself, saying Wednesday that no politician “has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

Now he is to be treated to the luxury of his own, personal special prosecutor. If past is prologue, Mueller’s investigation will be a huge distraction for the White House as everybody “lawyers up” and attention shifts from what remains of Trump’s agenda to the latest twists and turns that can be discerned. I covered the Clinton White House during the Monica Lewinsky investigation, and I don’t doubt that this probe, like that one, could prove debilitating to Trump.

But Trump’s agenda was already moribund. A mere 117 days into his presidency, Trump has already amassed a collection of scandals and failures that most presidents take years to acquire. Even before the latest debacles over Comey’s firing, his memos and Trump’s handing secrets to Russia, Trump’s political capital had been drained by the health-care woes. It’s hard to see how legislative momentum can be restored now that Washington has settled into scandal mode. Trump has the waddle of a prematurely lame duck. The Mueller appointment, at least, gives the Trump White House a chance to compartmentalize the scandals. And, crucially, it provides one more watchdog keeping Trump’s autocratic instincts from getting the better of him — and the rest of us. (...)

It’s often said that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. On Wednesday night, Rod Rosenstein did something.

by Dana Milbank, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Aaron Bernstein/Reuters
[ed. UPDATE: Except, there may be one small problem.]

Writing About Charlie Brown Feels Like Writing About Myself

I can’t write objectively about Charlie Brown. It feels like I’m writing about myself.

This, I realize, is no accident.

I know that Charlie Brown is the type of character consciously designed to make people feel like they’re looking at an image of themselves. If you can’t empathize with Charlie Brown, you likely lack an ability to empathize with any fictional character. Here is a child continually humiliated for desiring nothing more than normalcy—the opportunity to kick a football, the aptitude to fly a kite, the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without having a random acquaintance compare his skull to a block of lumber. He wants glory, but not an excessive amount (one baseball victory would be more than enough). He has the coolest dog in town, but that plays to his disadvantage. He’s an eight-year-old who needs a psychiatrist, and he has to pay the bill himself (only five cents, but still). Charlie Brown knows his life is a contradictory struggle, and sometimes his only option is to lie in a dark room, alone with his thoughts. He will never win. He will never win.

Yet here’s the paradox: Charlie Brown is still happy. He still has friends. He still gets excited about all the projects that are destined to fail. Very often, young Americans are simultaneously pessimistic about the world and optimistic about themselves—they assume everyone’s future is bleak, except for their own. Charlie is the opposite. He knows he’s doomed, but that doesn’t stop him from trying anything and everything. He believes existence is amazing, despite his own personal experience. It’s the quality that makes him so infinitely likable: He does not see the world as cruel. He believes the world is good, even if everything that’s ever happened to him suggests otherwise. All he wants are the things everyone else seems to get without trying. He aspires to be average, which—for him—is an impossible dream.

I suppose nobody feels this way all the time. But everybody feels this way occasionally.

Charles M. Schulz died on February 12, 2000. The final Peanuts strip ran the very next day, a coincidence noted by virtually everyone who cared about the man and his work. In the years since his passing, I’ve noticed a curious trend: For whatever reason, it’s become popular to assert that the spiritual center of the Peanuts universe is not Charlie Brown. The postmodern answer to that puzzle is Snoopy—dynamic, indefatigable, and hyperimaginative. Perception has drifted toward what the public prefers to celebrate. It’s a little like what happened on the TV show Happy Days: A sitcom originally focused on milquetoast Richie Cunningham rapidly evolved into a vehicle for the super‑coolness of Fonzie. Obviously, this type of paradigm shift is no crime against humanity, and I love Snoopy almost as much as his owner (he’s a wonderful dancer and my all-time favorite novelist). But Snoopy is not the emotional vortex of Peanuts. That’s simply wrong. The linchpin to Peanuts will always be Charlie Brown. It can be no one else. And this is because Charlie Brown effortlessly embodies what Peanuts truly is: an introduction to adult problems, explained by children.

The probable (read: inevitable) death of daily newspapers will have a lot of collateral damage, to varying degrees of impact. I don’t know where the gradual disappearance of the Sunday comics falls on this continuum, or even if it belongs at all. I assume something else will come to occupy its role in the culture, and the notion of bemoaning such a loss will be categorized as nostalgia for a period when the media was controlled by dinosaurs who refused to accept that the purpose of every news story was to provide random people the opportunity to publicly comment on how they felt about it. But I will miss the Sunday comics. I miss them already.

As a kid, I loved the idea that there was at least one section of the newspaper directly targeted at my brain; as an adult, it was reassuring to read something that was still the exact same product I remembered from the past. It was static in the best possible way. Like most people, I moved through various adolescent phases where different strips temporarily became my obsession: Garfield in fifth grade, The Far Side throughout high school, Calvin and Hobbes as a college boozehound. But I always considered Peanuts the most “important” comic strip, and the one that all other strips were measured against. The fact that Peanuts was the first strip on the very top of the Sunday comics’ front page verified this subjective belief—if comics were rock bands, it seemed obvious that Peanuts was the Beatles. (...)

“It’s depressing to realize that you’re so insignificant you haven’t got a chance ever to become president,” Charlie Brown tells Lucy on page 76 (it’s the second week of June, 1957). “It wouldn’t be so bad if I thought I had some chance.” Like so much of the classic Peanuts banter, he makes these remarks apropos of nothing—it’s just something he’s suddenly worried about, for no clear reason. Lucy, of course, obliterates Charlie for voicing this trepidation, mocking him with a tsunami of faint praise, almost as if he had somehow claimed he was destined for political greatness. Is her response amusing? I suppose it’s a little amusing. But it’s mostly dark (and entirely true). At the age of eight, Charlie Brown is considering a reality that most people don’t confront until much later: a realization that the future is limited. It’s not that he desperately wants to become Dwight Eisenhower—it’s the simple recognition that this couldn’t happen even if he did. He’s confronting the central myth of childhood, which is that anyone can be anything. Charlie Brown represents the downside of adult consciousness. And what does Lucy represent? Lucy represents the world itself. Lucy responds the way society always responds to any sudden insight of existential despair: How did you not know this already, Blockhead?

It doesn’t matter how many times this sort of thing has happened before. It will never stop happening, to Charlie Brown or anyone else. Like I said—Charlie Brown knows he’s doomed. He absolutely, irrefutably knows it. But a little part of his mind always thinks, “Maybe not this time, though.” That glimmer of hope is his Achilles’ heel. It’s also the quality that makes him so eminently relatable. The joke is not that Charlie Brown is hopeless. The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity. If he’s always wrong about everything, perhaps he’s wrong about this, too.

When Charlie mentions the impossibility of his own presidential fantasy, there’s a vague sense that he wants Lucy to tell him he’s mistaken. And at first (of course), Lucy does exactly that. She says “maybe.” And then (of course) she does what she always does. She reminds Charlie Brown that he is Charlie Brown. Which is how I suspect Charles M. Schulz felt about himself, up until the very end: “No matter what I do or what I try, I’m always going to be myself.”

by Chuck Klosterman, LitHub |  Read more:

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