Video ad Absurdum

How a collection of fifteen thousand Jerry Maguire VHS tapes reveals the ugly underbelly of the media-entertainment industry.

If you were walking down Sunset Boulevard in mid-January—right around the time America’s forty-fifth president (a man and a president fit for his time) was inaugurated—you may have come across a familiar, though half-forgotten site: the façade of a video rental store. Through the window was the usual setup: movie advertisements, shelves of VHS tapes, genre signs, a gum ball machine, a couple dorky clerks chitchatting behind the counter, even a curtain with the label XXX, beyond which, you might guess, you could sneak a glimpse of videotaped smut. What was different about this video store—besides the fact that it was 2017, not 1997—was that all the tapes, all the posters, even the celebrity cardboard cut-out and the genre signs plastered high on the shelves were for the same movie: Jerry Maguire. Indeed, it was the only movie available in the entire store, and none of them were for rent. These fifteen thousand “Jerrys,” as they are affectionately known, were put on display by the video/art collective Everything is Terrible! (EIT!), which has been mashing up videos and collecting copies of Jerry Maguire video tapes for about eight years.

On opening night of the exhibit, I watched as about a thousand of LA’s video nerds and scenesters streamed past the wall-to-wall red-and-white Jerry shelves, through the XXX curtains, and into an ankle-deep pool of unspooled Jerry Maguire, wrapping their arms around a cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise talking on his mid-90s flip phone to pinch-zoom and snap Instagram/Facebook/Twitter-ready photos. What (the fuck) to make of this? The store was a meme, hypertrophied and incarnate. Jerrys stacked into pyramids along every wall. Jerry-inspired art selling for hundreds of dollars. Jerry socks. Jerry mix-tapes. A Jerry video game. A treasure chest of still shrink-wrapped Jerrys sent from an adulatory Cameron Crowe (the film’s director). And then the actual (fucking) pyramid—the actual pyramid EIT! is in talks with actual architects to build in the actual desert—a tomb and a shrine “for all the Jerrys to live in for all time,” according to Nic Maier, one of the lead members of the video art collective. Was it Scientological mission creep? A Malkovichian nightmare? A glitch in the matrix? Or a mirror held up to an entire media-drunk generation?

by John Washington, Guernica |  Read more:

Image: EIT!
[ed. What a world.]

Germano Celant – The Record as Artwork: From Futurism to Conceptual Art
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Why We Crash Our Motorcycles

What do you learn if you pick 100 riders, put five video cameras and data-logging equipment on their motorcycles and record them for a total of 366,667 miles?

Several things, some of which we knew, some surprising. Intersections are dangerous. We either need to pay better attention or work on our braking techniques, because we crash into the back of other vehicles way too often. We’re not good enough at cornering, especially right turns. And we drop our bikes a lot (probably more often than any of us imagined or were willing to admit).

The study was done for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.  (...)

The VTTI team explains its methodology, including efforts to standardize and define terms and procedures. All the details are in a 20-page report you can download from the MSF. But here are some of the things I picked out.

Where we crash

Intersections. No surprise there. VTTI created a system to calculate how much a certain scenario or riding behavior increased the odds of a crash or near-crash. An uncontrolled intersection presents nearly 41 times the risk of no intersection. A parking lot or driveway intersection is more than eight times as risky and an intersection with a signal is almost three times as risky.

A downhill grade increased the risk by a factor of four while an uphill grade doubled it. Riders were nine times as likely to crash or have a near-crash incident on gravel or dirt roads than on paved roads. And riders were twice as likely to have an incident in a righthand turn than on a straight section of road (crossing the center line is considered a near-crash scenario, even if nothing else bad happens).

How we crash

We complain all the time about other people on the road trying to kill us, especially cars pulling into our paths. The VTTI study partially backs that up. Of the 99 crashes and near-crashes involving another vehicle, the three categories of other vehicles crossing the rider’s path add up to 19.

Here’s the surprise, however. What’s the most common scenario? Riders hitting (or nearly hitting) another vehicle from behind. There were 35 of those incidents. Are we really almost twice as likely to plow into a stopped car in front of us as to have someone pull into our path? Or should we write this off as the result of a small sample size?

Maybe there are clues in the risk section. Researchers tried to break down rider behavior in crashes and near-crash incidents into two categories: aggressive riding or rider inattention or lack of skills. The cameras and other data helped determine, for example, if the rider ran the red light because of inattention or aggressive riding.

The study found that aggressive riding increased risk by a factor of 18 while inattention or lack of skill increased it by a factor of nine. Combine the two, and odds of an incident increased by 30.

Now here's one of the less dramatic findings, but an interesting one, just the same. It seems we drop our bikes a lot. Or at least the riders in the study did. More than half the crashes were incidents some riders wouldn't define as a crash — not a dramatic collision but an incident defined as a case where the "vehicle falls coincident with low or no speed (even if in gear)" not caused by another outside factor. Rider inattention or poor execution are to blame. The study finds "These low-speed 'crashes' appear to be relatively typical among everyday riding," but they are incidents that would never be included in a different kind of study of motorcycle crashes. The cameras, however, capture it all, even our mundane but embarrassing moments.

by Lance Oliver, Revzilla |  Read more:

Image: via:

The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party

I have been a Democrat my entire life. Today, the Democratic Party matters more than ever because it is the only organization currently capable, at least theoretically, of preventing the Republicans from turning the United States into a fully-fledged banana republic, ruled by and for a handful of billionaire families and corporate chieftains, with a stagnant economy and pre-modern levels of inequality. Yet I cannot find anything to disagree with in Senator Bernie Sanders’s assessment:

“The model the Democrats have followed for the last 10 to 20 years has been an ultimate failure. That’s just the objective evidence. We are taking on a right-wing extremist party whose agenda is opposed time after time and on issue after issue by the vast majority of the American people. Yet we have lost the White House, the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, almost two-thirds of the governors’ chairs and close to 900 legislative seats across this country. How can anyone not conclude that the Democratic agenda and approach has been a failure?”

A central shortcoming of the party is that, on economic issues, it has nothing to say to people trapped on the wrong side of our country’s growing inequality divide. Hillary Clinton won the “working class” (household income less than $50,000) vote, but by a much smaller margin than Barack Obama in 2012 or 2008—despite Donald Trump’s ardent efforts to alienate African-Americans and Latinos. Some people voted for Trump because of racism or misogyny. But Clinton was also flattened by Trump among voters who feel their financial situation was worse than a year before or who think that life will be worse for the next generation. She lost the Electoral College in the “rust belt” states of the Upper Midwest, whose economies have never fully recovered from the decline of American manufacturing.

The Democratic Party was once the party of working people. So why is it increasingly becoming the party of well-educated, socially tolerant, cosmopolitan city-dwellers? Because, in an age of stagnant median incomes and a disintegrating social safety net, Democrats have no economic message for the many people who are struggling to make ends meet, to pay for college, to stay in a home, or to save for retirement.

This impotence is the product of sweeping changes in the intellectual and political landscape of the United States. As I discuss in my recent book, Economism, contemporary thinking about economic issues is dominated by “economism”: the belief that simplistic models accurately describe the real world and should be the basis of public policy. (For example: The minimum wage is an artificial price floor in the labor market, therefore supply will exceed demand, therefore unemployment must increase.) This naive or disingenuous worldview, according to which unregulated markets produce the best of all possible worlds, is frequently invoked to defend policies that favor the wealthy and justify the vast inequality that results.

Economism was promoted by conservatives who sought to roll back the New Deal and restore a mythical libertarian paradise governed by free markets, with a minimal state and low taxes. Their vision became the platform of the Republican Party in the 1970s and the policy handbook for President Ronald Reagan and every conservative leader since. In response, Democrats have tacked to the right on economic issues. Since Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party’s economic vision has been that prudent management of macroeconomic factors would foster higher private sector growth, which would in turn create jobs and prosperity for working families. The central planks of this platform have included: cutting budget deficits to reduce interest rates; reappointing Republican Federal Reserve chairs who would control inflation; and even seeking a “grand bargain” that would reduce Social Security spending in exchange for modestly higher taxes. As the Republican Party has been taken over by charlatans who insist on cutting taxes and crippling government at every opportunity, Democrats have rebranded themselves as the moderate party of responsible economic stewardship.

But there are two problems with this approach. The first is that it is economism lite. While Republicans say, “Free markets solve all problems,” Democrats respond, “Free markets solve most problems, but markets sometimes fail, so sometimes they need to be judiciously regulated to produce efficient outcomes.” This may be more accurate, but it undermines Democrats’ appeal to people who have not benefited from overall economic growth—because they have the wrong skills, live in the wrong place, got sick at the wrong time, or otherwise got unlucky.

The second problem is that economism lite doesn’t work, at least not anymore. A rising tide might lift all boats, as President John F. Kennedy claimed; but, then again, it might not. Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, labor productivity—the amount that each person can produce in an hour of work—has grown by 94% (a modest but respectable 1.9% per year); real per capita gross domestic product—total economic output per person—has grown by 82% (1.7% per year). Over that same period, however, median household income has increased by only 16% (less than 0.5% per year). In other words, the country as a whole has become almost twice as rich, but the typical family makes only a little more money than in 1980. Where has all the money gone?

To the very rich, as can be seen in one chart:

(If you compare the top 1% with the bottom 99%, or the top 10% with the bottom 90%, or the top 0.01% with the bottom 90%, you get the essentially the same picture.)

To be clear, the failure of overall economic growth to benefit the middle and working classes is not solely or even primarily the Democrats’ fault. The villain in that story is the Republican conservatives who weakened unions, undermined the social safety net, and slashed taxes on the rich. Globalization and competition from low-wage countries were another factor. But since the onslaught of the conservative revolution, Democrats have played defense by claiming the space once occupied by moderate Republicans. Recall the pivot to deficit reduction in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, the capital gains tax cut of 1997, the commitment to free trade agreements from NAFTA to TPP, and the bipartisan commitment to financial deregulation that helped produce the devastating financial crisis of 2008.

Barack Obama temporarily had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and yet his principal accomplishments were an economic stimulus bill that was more than one-third tax cuts; a health care plan modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reforms; a technocratic financial reform bill that neither reduced the dominance of the megabanks that caused the 2008 crisis nor, judging from subsequent experience, deterred them from serial lawbreaking; and a financial system rescue that kept the big banks (and their executives and shareholders) afloat while they fraudulently foreclosed on millions of homeowners. There were positives in Obama’s economic record: The recession would have been worse without the stimulus, millions of people got health coverage, and the Dodd-Frank Act included some steps in the right direction. Taken as a whole, however, Obama governed as what we called a moderate Republican only a few decades ago, and the only vision one can distill from his actions is that of prudently harnessing market forces to generate growth. (Perhaps the president and his advisers would have preferred more progressive policies in some areas such as health care—but they were constrained not just by the Party of No, but also by a Democratic caucus effectively controlled by its conservative wing.) For an unemployed recent graduate buried by student debt, or a factory worker laid off in middle age while underwater on her mortgage, or a retiree who saw her savings evaporate in 2008 and 2009, the argument that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are not as bad as the Republicans was just not compelling enough.

One of the central themes of my book is that economism is an ideological worldview: a lens through which we see the world, which affects the way we interpret reality and serves the interests of certain groups. Logically, it can only be overthrown by another worldview. And so the book ends this way:

“Millions if not billions of people today hunger to live in a world that is more fair, more forgiving, and more humane than the one that we were born into. Creating a new vision of society worthy of that collective yearning—one that goes beyond the false promises of economism—is the first step toward building a better future for our children. That is the story that remains to be written.”

What the Democratic Party needs is an economic message that: addresses the real problems that many Americans face on a daily basis (instead of callously insisting that “America is already great”); and resonates with their very real frustrations and anxieties. Both politically and as policy, the idea that the rising tide of economic efficiency and growth would lift all boats has failed. It is time for something new.

by James Kwak, Baseline Scenario | Read more:
Image: www.wid.world
[ed. See also: Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now.]

Chet Faker

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Solving the Heroin Overdose Mystery

How small doses can kill.

Heroin, like other opiates, depresses activity in the brain centre that controls breathing. Sometimes, this effect is so profound that the drug user dies, and becomes yet another overdose casualty. Some of these victims die because they took too much of the drug. Others die following self-administration of a dose that appears much too small to be lethal, but why? This is the heroin overdose mystery, and it has been known for more than half a century.

There was a heroin crisis in New York City in the 1960s, with overdose deaths increasing each year of the decade. There were almost 1,000 overdose victims in New York City in 1969, about as many as in 2015. The then chief medical examiner of New York, Milton Helpern, together with his deputy chief, Michael Baden, investigated these deaths. They discovered that many died, not from a true pharmacological overdose, but even when, on the day prior, the victim had administered a comparable dose with no ill effects. Helpern, Baden and colleagues noted that, while it is common for several users to take drugs from the same batch, only rarely does more than one user suffer a life-threatening reaction. They examined heroin packages and used syringes found near dead addicts, and tissue surrounding the sites of fatal injections, and found that victims typically self-administered a normal, usually non-fatal dose of heroin. In 1972, Helpern concluded that ‘there does not appear to be a quantitative correlation between the acute fulminating lethal effect and the amount of heroin taken’.

It was a science journalist, Edward Brecher, who first applied the term ‘overdose mystery’ when he evaluated Helpern’s data for Consumer Reports. Brecher concluded that ‘overdose’ was a misnomer. ‘These deaths are, if anything, associated with “underdose” rather than overdose,’ he wrote.

Subsequently, independent evaluations of heroin overdoses in New York City, Washington, DC, Detroit, and various cities in Germany and Hungary all confirmed the phenomenon – addicts often die after self-administering an amount of heroin that should not kill them.

Most scholarly articles concerning heroin overdose don’t mention the mystery; it is simply assumed that the victim died because he or she administered too much opiate. Even when the mystery is addressed, the explanations are wanting. For example, some have suggested that deaths seen after self-administration of a usually non-lethal dose of heroin result from an allergic-type reaction to additives, such as quinine, sometimes used to bulk up its street package. This interpretation has been discredited.

Others have noted that the effect of a small dose of heroin is greatly enhanced if the addict administers other depressant drugs (such as alcohol) with heroin. Although some cases of overdose can result from such drug interactions, many cases do not.

Some have suggested that the addict might overdose following a period of abstinence, either self-initiated or caused by imprisonment. Thus, tolerance that accumulated during a prolonged period of drug use, and which would be expected to protect the addict from the lethal effect of the drug, could dissipate during the drug-free period. If the addict goes back to his or her usual, pre-abstinence routine, the formerly well-tolerated dose could now be lethal.

But there are many demonstrations that opiate tolerance typically does notsubstantially dissipate merely with the passage of time. One piece of evidence comes from the addict’s hair, which carries a record of drug use. Many drugs, and drug metabolites, diffuse from the bloodstream into the growing hair shaft; thus, researchers can reconstruct this pharmacological record, including periods of abstinence, using ‘segmental hair analysis’. In a study that analysed the hair of 28 recently deceased heroin-overdose victims in Stockholm, there was no evidence that they had been abstinent prior to death.

A surprising solution to the overdose mystery has been provided by the testimony of addicts who overdosed, then survived to tell the tale. (Overdose is survivable if the antidote, an opiate antagonist, such as naloxone, is administered in a timely manner.) What do these survivors say was special about their experience? In independent studies, in New Jersey and in Spain, most overdose survivors said that they’d administered heroin in a novel or unusual environment – a place where they had not previously administered heroin.

by Shepard Siegel, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Bill Eppridge

Oleg Tselkov (b. 1934), Collector and Collection
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Bulletin. Field Museum of Natural History. March 1971. Cover art
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Disrupt the Citizen

The ouster of Travis Kalanick last week brings to an end nearly a year of accumulating scandal at Uber. The company—its specious claims to being a world-beating disruptor significantly weakened—now joins Amazon as one of the more frightening entities of our time, with Kalanick taking his place among Elizabeth Holmes, Jeff Bezos, Martin Shkreli, and the late Steve Jobs in the burgeoning pantheon of tech sociopaths. Few moments in history have been so crowded with narcissists: incapable of acknowledging the existence of others, unwilling to permit state and civil society—with their strange, confusing, downright offensive cult of taxes, regulations and public services—to impede their quest for monopolizing the mind, muscles, heart rate, and blood of every breathing person on earth. The Mormons, with their registries of the unsaved, have beaten Silicon Valley to the hosts of the dead—but it’s safe to assume that this, too, will not last. (...)

In the same vein, the proliferating but ever meaningless distinctions between the “bad” Uber and the “good” Lyft have obscured how destructive the rise of ride-sharing has been for workers and the cities they live in. The predatory lawlessness that prevails inside Valley workplaces scales up and out. Both companies entered their markets illegally, without regard to prevailing wages, regulations, or taxes. Like Amazon, which found a way to sell books without sales tax, this turned out to be one of the many boons of lawbreaking. (...)

But lying and rule-breaking to gain a monopoly are old news in liberal capitalism. What ride-sharing companies had to do, in the old spirit of Standard Oil, was secure a foothold in politics, and subject politics to the will of “the consumer.” In a telling example of our times, Uber hired former Obama campaign head David Plouffe to work the political angles. And Plouffe has succeeded wildly, since—as Washingtonians and New Yorkers are experiencing with their subways—municipal and state liberals are only nominally committed to the standards that regulate transport. Never mind that traffic is something that cities need to control, and that transportation should be a public good. Ride-sharing companies—which explode traffic and undermine public transportation—can trim the balance sheets of cities by privatizing both. The choice we make should be between unchecked ride-sharing and fully funded mass transit. Instead, the success of ride-sharing means that we choose between Uber and Lyft.

What Plouffe and the ride-sharing companies understand is that, under capitalism, when markets are pitted against the state, the figure of the consumer can be invoked against the figure of the citizen. Consumption has in fact come to replace our original ideas of citizenship. As the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has argued in his exceptional 2012 essay, “Citizens as Customers,” the government encouragement of consumer choice in the 1960s and ’70s “radiated” into the public sphere, making government seem shabby in comparison with the endlessly attractive world of consumer society. Political goods began to get judged by the same standards as commodities, and were often found wanting.

The result is that, in Streeck’s prediction, the “middle classes, who command enough purchasing power to rely on commercial rather than political means to get what they want, will lose interest in the complexities of collective preference-setting and decision-making, and find the sacrifices of individual utility required by participation in traditional politics no longer worthwhile.” The affluent find themselves bored by goods formerly subject to collective provision, such as public transportation, ceasing to pay for them, while thereby supporting private options. Consumer choice then stands in for political choice. When Ohio governor John Kasich proposed last year that he would “Uber-ize” the state’s government, he was appealing to this sense that politics should more closely resemble the latest trends in consumption.

by Nikil Saval, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.)

On Nov. 16, 1974, a few hundred astronomers, government officials and other dignitaries gathered in the tropical forests of Puerto Rico’s northwest interior, a four-hour drive from San Juan. The occasion was a rechristening of the Arecibo Observatory, at the time the largest radio telescope in the world. The mammoth structure — an immense concrete-and-aluminum saucer as wide as the Eiffel Tower is tall, planted implausibly inside a limestone sinkhole in the middle of a mountainous jungle — had been upgraded to ensure its ability to survive the volatile hurricane season and to increase its precision tenfold.

To celebrate the reopening, the astronomers who maintained the observatory decided to take the most sensitive device yet constructed for listening to the cosmos and transform it, briefly, into a machine for talking back. After a series of speeches, the assembled crowd sat in silence at the edge of the telescope while the public-address system blasted nearly three minutes of two-tone noise through the muggy afternoon heat. To the listeners, the pattern was indecipherable, but somehow the experience of hearing those two notes oscillating in the air moved many in the crowd to tears.

That 168 seconds of noise, now known as the Arecibo message, was the brainchild of the astronomer Frank Drake, then the director of the organization that oversaw the Arecibo facility. The broadcast marked the first time a human being had intentionally transmitted a message targeting another solar system. The engineers had translated the missive into sound, so that the assembled group would have something to experience during the transmission. But its true medium was the silent, invisible pulse of radio waves, traveling at the speed of light.

It seemed to most of the onlookers to be a hopeful act, if a largely symbolic one: a message in a bottle tossed into the sea of deep space. But within days, the Royal Astronomer of England, Martin Ryle, released a thunderous condemnation of Drake’s stunt. By alerting the cosmos of our existence, Ryle wrote, we were risking catastrophe. Arguing that ‘‘any creatures out there [might be] malevolent or hungry,’’ Ryle demanded that the International Astronomical Union denounce Drake’s message and explicitly forbid any further communications. It was irresponsible, Ryle fumed, to tinker with interstellar outreach when such gestures, however noble their intentions, might lead to the destruction of all life on earth.

Today, more than four decades later, we still do not know if Ryle’s fears were warranted, because the Arecibo message is still eons away from its intended recipient, a cluster of roughly 300,000 stars known as M13. If you find yourself in the Northern Hemisphere this summer on a clear night, locate the Hercules constellation in the sky, 21 stars that form the image of a man, arms outstretched, perhaps kneeling. Imagine hurtling 250 trillion miles toward those stars. Though you would have traveled far outside our solar system, you would only be a tiny fraction of the way to M13. But if you were somehow able to turn on a ham radio receiver and tune it to 2,380 MHz, you might catch the message in flight: a long series of rhythmic pulses, 1,679 of them to be exact, with a clear, repetitive structure that would make them immediately detectable as a product of intelligent life. (...)

Now this taciturn phase may be coming to an end, if a growing multidisciplinary group of scientists and amateur space enthusiasts have their way. A newly formed group known as METI (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), led by the former SETI scientist Douglas Vakoch, is planning an ongoing series of messages to begin in 2018. And Milner’s Breakthrough Listen endeavor has also promised to support a ‘‘Breakthrough Message’’ companion project, including an open competition to design the messages that we will transmit to the stars. But as messaging schemes proliferate, they have been met with resistance. The intellectual descendants of Martin Ryle include luminaries like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, and they caution that an assumption of interstellar friendship is the wrong way to approach the question of extraterrestrial life. They argue that an advanced alien civilization might well respond to our interstellar greetings with the same graciousness that Cortés showed the Aztecs, making silence the more prudent option. (...)

Before Doug Vakoch had even filed the papers to form the METI nonprofit organization in July 2015, a dozen or so science-and-tech luminaries, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk, signed a statement categorically opposing the project, at least without extensive further discussion, on a planetary scale. ‘‘Intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy,’’ the statement argued, ‘‘raises concerns from all the people of Earth, about both the message and the consequences of contact. A worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent.’’

One signatory to that statement was the astronomer and science-fiction author David Brin, who has been carrying on a spirited but collegial series of debates with Vakoch over the wisdom of his project. ‘‘I just don’t think anybody should give our children a fait accompli based on blithe assumptions and assertions that have been untested and not subjected to critical peer review,’’ he told me over a Skype call from his home office in Southern California. ‘‘If you are going to do something that is going to change some of the fundamental observable parameters of our solar system, then how about an environmental-impact statement?’’

The anti-METI movement is predicated on a grim statistical likelihood: If we do ever manage to make contact with another intelligent life-form, then almost by definition, our new pen pals will be far more advanced than we are. The best way to understand this is to consider, on a percentage basis, just how young our own high-tech civilization actually is. We have been sending structured radio signals from Earth for only the last 100 years. If the universe were exactly 14 billion years old, then it would have taken 13,999,999,900 years for radio communication to be harnessed on our planet. The odds that our message would reach a society that had been tinkering with radio for a shorter, or even similar, period of time would be staggeringly long. Imagine another planet that deviates from our timetable by just a tenth of 1 percent: If they are more advanced than us, then they will have been using radio (and successor technologies) for 14 million years. Of course, depending on where they live in the universe, their signals might take millions of years to reach us. But even if you factor in that transmission lag, if we pick up a signal from another galaxy, we will almost certainly find ourselves in conversation with a more advanced civilization.

It is this asymmetry that has convinced so many future-minded thinkers that METI is a bad idea. The history of colonialism here on Earth weighs particularly heavy on the imaginations of the METI critics. Stephen Hawking, for instance, made this observation in a 2010 documentary series: ‘‘If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.’’ David Brin echoes the Hawking critique: ‘‘Every single case we know of a more technologically advanced culture contacting a less technologically advanced culture resulted at least in pain.’’

by Steven Johnson, NY Times Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Paul Sahre

[ed. If you find this topic interesting, I'd also suggest The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.]

The Botanists’ Last Stand

Steve Perlman doesn’t take Prozac, like some of the other rare-plant botanists he knows. Instead, he writes poetry.

Either way, you have to do something when a plant you’ve long known goes extinct. Let’s say for 20 years you’ve been observing a tree on a fern-covered crag thousands of feet above sea level on an island in the Pacific. Then one day you hike up to check on the plant and find it dying. You know it’s the last one of its species, and that you’re the only witness to the end of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, the snuffing out of a line of completely unique genetic material. You might have to sit down and write a poem. Or at least bring a bit of the dead plant to a bar and raise a beer to its life. (Perlman has done both.) You might even need an antidepressant.

“I’ve already witnessed about 20 species go extinct in the wild,” Perlman says. “It can be like you’re dealing with your friends or your family, and then they die.”

Perlman tells me this as we drive up a winding road on the northwestern edge of Kauai, the geologically oldest Hawaiian island. Perlman is 69 with a sturdy build and white hair. That’s been enough to last him 45 years and counting on the knife’s edge of extreme botany.

The stakes are always high: As the top botanist at Hawaii’s Plant Extinction Prevention Program (PEPP), Perlman deals exclusively in plants with 50 or fewer individuals left—in many cases, much fewer, maybe two or three. Of the 238 species currently on that list, 82 are on Kauai; Perlman literally hangs off cliffs and jumps from helicopters to reach them.

Without him, rare Hawaiian plants die out forever. With him, they at least have a shot. Though now, due to forces beyond Perlman’s control, even that slim hope of survival is in jeopardy. Looming budget cuts threaten to make this the final chapter not only in the history of many native Hawaiian species, but in the program designed to keep them alive.

The silver lining: even if a species does go extinct in the wild, chances are Perlman has already collected enough seeds and genetic material before the last plant disappeared to grow others in a greenhouse. Extra seeds are shipped to a seed bank, where they sit, dehydrated and chilled, awaiting a more hospitable future. There may not be a viable habitat for that plant now, but what about in 50 years? Or 150? “Part of it is saving all that genetic information,” he says. “If your house is on fire, you run in and grab the kid.”

Most people probably wouldn’t speak about obscure threatened plants with this much regard. But we don’t necessarily know what we’re losing when we let a plant species die, Perlman says. Could it have been a source of medicine? Could it be supporting a food chain that will come tumbling down in its stead? Our foresight on this kind of thing has been abominable so far; one only has to look at what happened when wolves were driven out of Yellowstone National Park, only to cause a massive boom in the newly predator-free elk population, which in turn ate every plant and baby tree in sight, starving bears of their berry supply, birds of their nest sites, and bees of flowers to feed on.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt

Every native plant on Kauai is an insane stroke of luck and chance. Each species arrived to the island as a single seed floating at sea or flying in a bird’s belly from thousands of miles away—2,000 miles of open ocean sit between Kauai and the nearest continent. “We think…probably one or two seeds made it every 1,000 years,” says botanist Ken Wood, Perlman’s longtime field partner.

Once a seed took root, the plant would evolve into a completely new species, or several, all of which came to be “endemic,” or found exclusively on the island. Any defenses the plant’s predecessors may have had—thorns, or poison, or repellent scents—were completely dropped. No large mammals or other potential predators made the journey from mainland to the remote island chain. From the plant’s perspective, there was no reason to spend energy on defenses when there were no predators to fend off. So stinging nettles no longer stung. Mint lost its mint oil. Scientists ominously refer to this process as species becoming “naive.”

The same was true for animals like birds and insects when they began to arrive. Famously, when a species of duck made it to the Hawaiian islands, it evolved to drop the concept of flying altogether. Its wings became little nubs. After all, there were no large mammals around to fly away from. The bird grew very large; “gigantism” is an evolutionary phenomena common to islands. Predictably, this huge, flightless duck, known as the “mao-nalo,” went extinct once humans showed up, likely finding them an easy-to-catch source of meat.

Fatal naiveté

When plants are allowed to evolve without fear, they get really, really specific. Take the Hibiscadelphus, for example. Found only in Hawaii, members of this genus of plant have flowers custom-shaped to fit the hooked beak of the honeycreeper, the specific bird that pollinates them. “They’re extremely rare. There were only about seven species described ever, and six were already extinct when I found a new one,” says Perlman. He published the discovery in 2014—it was his 50th new plant species discovery.

Almost 15% of the plants of Hawaii evolved to have separate male and female populations—a very high percentage, says Wood, compared to mainland plants. Under normal circumstances, that trait is good for island plants: it forces them to cross-pollinate, keeping the gene pool relatively diverse even if the population is small. But by “small,” evolutionary forces were probably thinking at least 200 individuals—not four or five. When you can count the number of individual plants on one hand, it’s almost certain that the few remaining males and females won’t be anywhere near each other. In those cases, Perlman and Wood painstakingly gather pollen from the males and bring it to the females.

They have to time this just right—or at least try. There is no perfect math to predict what day an individual plant will decide to flower. “And often you need to dangle off helicopters to get to them,” Wood adds. So missing the mark by a day or two and arriving to a flower that is still closed can mean having leapt from a helicopter and rappelled off a cliff and possibly camped for a day or two for naught.

“That’s what Ken doesn’t like—he likes to go in and go out,” Perlman tells me later. He proudly points to a photo on his laptop screen. It shows him collecting seeds from the last-known member of the endemic fan palm species Pritchardia munroi. The palm was clinging to a slope 2,000 feet up in the air on the tiny Hawaiian island of Molokai. “I had to go there three times to get the seed when it’s ripe,” Perlman says.

by Zoë Schlanger, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Steve Perlman

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. (...)

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Douglas Adams, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, written in 1999 | Read more:

Vasiliki Filou

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The Bespoke High

I didn’t know I’d ever want a vape. It seemed like getting into magic or CrossFit—a whole production and the mandatory acceptance of an accompanying ethos. But at the time I was susceptible to marketing and there was a display with samples and nifty disposable rubber nubbins that went over the mouth end to keep it hygienic.

I often get overwhelmed purchasing marijuana. Like when you go to Ikea without a game plan. I waffle endlessly. There’s just too much to look at. I understand that top-shelf stuff commands flaunting. (How else to show off the bushiness of the cured flower and clusters of trichomes—those hairy crystalline sprinkles of cannabinoid?) But it’s like explaining music by smell or flavor by dance. I want to know how I’ll feel.

The vapes I bought are made by a company called hmbldt. There are six hmbldt formulations on the market and they’re labeled according to what they do. I got Sleep, the one for sleep and Calm for in case my rush-hour Lyft driver was chatty (in L.A. they’re always chatty!). They’re disposable which might be appalling given their staggeringly, demoralizingly expensive price-tag at $100 a pop. It means that you’ll need a separate pen for each ailment but it also means you don’t have to fiddle with cartridges or even flower. I don’t consume cannabis fast enough for any denomination of actual buds not to become petrified and uninviting and hmbldts have 200 doses so you can hang on to them for a while.

White, slender with a rounded tip—they’re the vape version of smoking Capri cigarettes and they’re about as long as one but wider. They look, to be honest, as if Muji made a tampon. They take their name (in a very web 2.0-y way) from Humboldt County in Northern California which evokes marine layer, Redwoods and (for those in the know) very good weed from 1996 onwards when Proposition 215 made growing medical marijuana legal in the golden state. And probably illegally since before.

Part of my decision was the brevity of the buying experience. No faffing with specials or personal suggestions (which I sometimes love but not always) but mostly it was that these days I’m scared of weed.

The thing is, at my age (mid-30s) a joint is produced with reliable frequency—barbecues, outdoor shows, birthday parties, and even a few picnic-situations where babies are present (provided they’re upwind). Basically any occasion that calls for rosé.

And I like weed. A lot. Enough that I wish I could smoke every vehicle for marijuana that crosses my path. But the last time I took a wee toke of a smoldering cone passed to me by a trusted friend in the spirit of conviviality it took me out of commission for the rest of the day. I couldn’t even speak. I watched my hand lift the joint towards my face and then it was tomorrow.

It’s not news that we’re living in a golden age of legalized marijuana. If golden is to be defined by weed so mighty it renders you catatonic. Two years ago a 19-year-old in Colorado leapt to his death upon eating a pot cookie. Louis C.K. has a bit about how he, “didn’t know they’d been working on this shit like it’s the cure for cancer.”

It’s true. Weed is virtually unrecognizable. It’s incredible to think pot’s changed this much. It used to feel low-rent like Boone’s Farm or Whip-Its. But now it’s the recreational drug version of the kid who was a nothing in middle school who becomes God-hot over summer break. To a genetically—celestially—engineered degree that could irradiate you. Weed, frankly, had evolved past my enjoyment of it. Especially if I have a job where one of the requirements is that I show up.

It’s for these reasons that I understand when people aren’t into it. It seems somehow both sleazy and intimidating. On one hand it’s a drug that’s illegal in most parts of the country and on the other, you’ve got luxury brands that are touted as the “Hermès of Marijuana,” and the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club that sells buds that cost as much as their weight in white truffles.

Plus, people who know too much about weed are annoying. Most invitations to smoke are accompanied by a story that serves as a kind (ha) of tax about Sativas or Indicas and how hybrids are the sweet spot and OG Kush or Girl Scout Cookies or else how Alaskan Thunderfuck is a magical journey. It’s like how Pappy Van Winkle bourbon doesn’t become interesting until someone threatens to pour you some. The really inviting thing about hmbldts (and perhaps this is true of most vapes), is that there’s less pressure to share.

The pens are aesthetically pleasing—certainly more so than a handblown glass bong resembling a dragon or those cumbersome oblongs known as box vapes. Each three-second pull you’re doled out exactly a 2.25 milligrams dose, with just under 2 milligrams of cannabinoids. The vape vibrates to let you know when you’re done. Comparatively a puff of a joint deploys around 3 milligrams of cannabinoids. (...)

I can report that Sleep is good at sleep. Inducing it and then keeping you under. I did have a wicked weed hangover the next morning (that grogginess of not being quite finished sleeping but running out of time) but eight consecutive hours was a profound relief.

The Bliss pen was pleasant. An all-purpose high and familiar as a Sativa dominant strain or a “morning weed,” the way Indicas are soporific and considered better at night.

Hmbldt also sells Relief for pain management, Arouse to promote intimacy and Passion for seismic culminations of aforementioned intimacy. If it seems as though it’s overkill or gimmicky that we’d need Arouse and Passion, I’d say I agreed with you. That is until I tried them.

The medicinal properties of marijuana are well known—that it’s effective for alleviating physical discomfort and insomnia, or how CBD (cannabidiol), the lesser-known, non-intoxicating cannabinoid (the active agents in marijuana) behind the psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabidiol) is an effective treatment for seizures—but I’m a recreational user. We’re so used to seeing drugs in binary terms—sober or altered—and while intensities differ (nursing a beer vs. any time you think shots are a good idea) we rarely administer a white wine spritzer for headaches or a Long Island Iced Tea for anxiety. Usually it’s blunt-force drinking. A holistic approach to anesthetizing.

But there are benefits to customized formulations that I hadn’t before considered. Calm skews heavily CBD, you’ve got a body high without any of the mind altering effects of THC.

“THC activates a system in our own bodies called the endocannabinoid system,” says Igor Grant, the director of The University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR) and the chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego. The CMCR studies the effects of cannabis on HIV Neuropathic pain and how it impairs your driving skills. “[They’re] signaling molecules that have to do with functions as basic as appetite control, inflammation, coordination, memory and other cognitive functions. The effect of THC is to affect these circuitries in the brain. CBD does not appear to have direct psychoactive effects. It doesn’t cause changes in cognitive function or emotions. Or neurologic coordination issues.”

Typical marijuana flower has a THC to CBD ratio of 20 or 40:1. Hmbldt’s Calm has THC to CBD ratio of 10:1. Relief is 2:1. With Calm I don’t experience paranoia—that running commentary of how high I think people think I am. I can even write on it which makes it singular to any marijuana I’ve ever sampled.

There’s a new formulation that hasn’t hit the market called Focus with a CBD to THC ratio of 4:1. It will be blended with cannabinoids that narrow your attention span to the task in front of you without compromising your creative process.

by Mary H.K. Choi, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: IM_photo / chromatos / Joshua Rainey Photography / Luis Carlos Jimenez del rio / Shutterstock / hmbldt / Zak Bickel

Good Journalism Requires Clarity, Accuracy

Before discussing the events of today in the Senate, I want to note a subsidiary issue, a matter of press coverage. But this is not a secondary issue in terms of importance. Let me also preface this by saying I’m going to focus on another journalist: CNN’s Dana Bash. I don’t know Dana. But I’ve relied on her reporting on CNN for years. So this isn’t meant as an attack on her. To me it is simply an illustration of a broader failure of coverage.

With that, here goes.

The following is the transcript of a brief exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Bash just after Mitch McConnell delivered some brief remarks outside the White House after the Senate GOP conference met with the President. We come in immediately after McConnell finishes speaking.

BLITZER: So there is the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. There is a headline there. He really doesn’t want to work with the Democrats if the Republican legislation were to fail. He specifically said that none of the reforms the Republicans want as far as market reform, Medicaid reform would be acceptable to the Democrats. Dana Bash, significant statements from the Majority Leader if it were to fail, basically saying it’s the Republican version, whatever tinkering they do now, has to pass. 

BASH: Absolutely. Look, he is speaking the truth in a lot of ways. Philosophically, the two parties are and have been for some time, very, very different on their sort of global approach to health care. I think that people, though, out there looking at this [are] saying, why can’t these parties work together on something that is such a huge part of the economy, that is something that is so vital to everybody’s lives, all of their constituents’ lives. [It’s] mind boggling. But you know what, it happened when the Democrats passed Obamacare. They will tell you from the Obama team that they tried very hard to get Republicans and they weren’t playing ball. But it’s happening now that Republicans are in charge, too.

There’s a lot here.

I should begin by saying that I think Bash is right for many voters. But the reality is that this is the case because the coverage of national health care policy is fundamentally distorted by the imperatives of false balance or forced balance coverage. The idea here is that the two parties are so set in their ideological corners that they can’t constructively come together and find points of compromise to address issues of great public concern. But this sentiment only makes sense if you think both parties are trying to accomplish something approaching the same thing, albeit perhaps with very different strategies. That is simply not true.

This is all of a piece with the drama surrounding the successive CBO scores, each of which have been remarkably similar. The three have shown 24 million, 23 million and most recently 22 million losing their health insurance coverage by 2026. To have the numbers so close you’ve got to be following a pretty consistent strategy. The Democrats’ goal with the ACA was to increase the number of Americans who had health insurance coverage. They did it with a mix of operating through private insurance companies (the exchanges/market places) and dramatically increasing the number of Americans eligible for Medicaid, which is essentially a national single payer plan for the poor.

The results have been far from perfect. But the number of people with insurance has risen dramatically since passage of the ACA in 2010. This is an undeniable statistical reality. The Republican plan has been to repeal the bill and take coverage away from the people who received it. That may sound like a partisan way of understanding the situation. But that’s only because we’ve absorbed the skewed coverage.

We talk a lot about how Republicans real focus is getting the ACA money for a big tax cut, which is unquestionably true. You can only get the tax cut if you get back the money that went toward getting people covered. But at a deeper level this is a philosophical dispute, a basic difference in goals. It’s a difference in desired outcomes, not an ideological dispute over the best way to achieve them.

Current Republican ideology, if not all Republicans, posits that it is simply not the responsibility or place of government, certainly not the federal government, to make sure everyone has health care coverage. You can agree or disagree with that premise. But it’s not hard to understand and it is not indefensible. Very few of us think the government should step in if someone doesn’t have enough money to buy a car. We don’t think there’s a right to a home or apartment where every child has their own bedroom. On most things we accept that things are not equal, even if we believe that extremes of inequality are bad for society and even immoral.

But many of us think that healthcare is fundamentally different. It’s not just another market product that we accept people can or can’t get or can or can’t get at certain levels of quality because of wealth, chance, exertion and all the other factors that go into wealth and income. This is both a moral and ideological premise.

One might more sympathetically say that Republicans believe that the market can more reliably and cheaply provide coverage in comparison with the government. But there’s little evidence this is the case with health care coverage – certainly not when it comes to the big picture issues of constructing insurance markets in which some people have dramatically less money and dramatically higher risk. In any case, Republican health care policies since the beginning of this century have shown very little interest in using market mechanisms to expand care. After all, Obamacare is a more progressive and redistributionist implementation of an idea that emerged from Republican think-tanks looking for policy alternatives to a national health care social insurance plan like what we now call “single payer.”

When you try three times to ‘repeal and replace’ and each time you come up with something that takes away coverage from almost everyone who got it under Obamacare, that’s not an accident or a goof. That is what you’re trying to do. ‘Repeal and replace’ was a slogan that made up for simple ‘repeal’ not being acceptable to a lot of people. But in reality, it’s still repeal. Claw back the taxes, claw back the coverage.

Pretending that both parties just have very different approaches to solving a commonly agreed upon problem is really just a lie. It’s not true. One side is looking for ways to increase the number of people who have real health insurance and thus reasonable access to health care and the other is trying to get the government out of the health care provision business with the inevitable result that the opposite will be the case.

If you’re not clear on this fundamentally point, the whole thing does get really confusing. How can it be that both sides flatly refuse to work together at all? As Bash puts it, “Why can’t these parties work together on something that is such a huge part of the economy, that is something that is so vital to everybody’s lives, all of their constituents’ lives, [it’s] mind boggling.”

If you had an old building and one group wanted to refurbish and preserve it and the other wanted to tear it down, it wouldn’t surprise you that the two groups couldn’t work together on a solution. It’s an either/or. You’re trying to do two fundamentally opposite things, diametrically opposed. There’s no basis for cooperation or compromise because the fundamental goal is different. This entire health care debate has essentially been the same. Only the coverage has rarely captured that. That’s a big failure. It also explains why people get confused and even fed up.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

Rachel Campbell
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Reading Thoreau at 200

One of the smaller ironies in my life has been teaching Henry David Thoreau at an Ivy League school for half a century. Asking young people to read Thoreau can make me feel like Victor Frankenstein, waiting for a bolt of lightning: look, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive! Most students are indifferent—they memorize, regurgitate, and move serenely on, untouched. Those bound for Wall Street often yawn or snicker at his call to simplify, to refuse, to resist. Perhaps a third of them react with irritation, shading into hatred. How dare he question the point of property, the meaning of wealth? The smallest contingent, and the most gratifying, are those who wake to his message.

Late adolescence is a fine time to meet a work that jolts. These days, Ayn Rand’s stock is stratospheric, J. D. Salinger’s, once untouchable, in decline. WASPs of any gender continue to weep at A River Runs Through It, and first-generation collegians still thrill to Gatsby, even when I remind them that Jay is shot dead in his gaudy swimming pool. In truth, films move them far more; they talk about The Matrix the way my friends once discussed Hemingway or Kerouac. But Walden can still start a fight. The only other book that possesses this galvanizing quality is Moby-Dick.

Down the decades, more than a few students have told me that in bad times they return to Thoreau, hoping for comfort, or at least advice. After the electoral map bled red last fall, I went to him for counsel too, but found mostly controversy. In this bicentennial year of Thoreau’s birth, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) is still our most famous antebellum book, and in American history he is the figure who most speaks for nature. The cultural meme of the lone seeker in the woods has become Thoreau’s chief public legacy: regrettable for him, dangerous for us. (...)

Our times have never needed the shock of Thoreau more. We face a government eager to kill all measures of natural protection in the name of corporate profit. Elected officials openly bray that environmentalism “is the greatest threat to freedom.” On federal, state, and local levels, civil liberties and free speech are under severe attack. Thoreau is too; the barriers to reading him as a voice of resistance—or reading him at all—are multiplying swiftly.

First, he is becoming an unperson. From the 1920s to the early 2000s, Walden was required reading in hundreds of thousands of U.S. high school and college survey courses. Today, Thoreau is taught far less widely. The intricate prose of Walden is a tough read in the age of tweets, so much so that several “plain English” translations are now marketed. “Civil Disobedience” was a major target of McCarthyite suppression in the 1950s, and may be again.

Second, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, in the end authors write for professors, and the scholarly fate of Thoreau is clouded. Until the postwar era, Thoreau studies were largely left to enthusiasts. Academic criticism now argues for many versions of Thoreau (manic-depressive, gay, straight, misogynist, Marxist, Catholic, Buddhist, faerie-fixated). But other aspects still await full study: the family man, the man of spirituality, the man of science—and the man who wrote the Journal.

Those who study his peers, such as Emerson, Melville, or Dickinson, routinely examine each author’s entire output. Thoreau scholars have yet to deal fully or consistently with the Journal, which runs longer than two million words (many still unpublished), and fills 47 manuscript volumes, or 7,000 pages. It is the great untold secret of American letters, and also the distorting lens of Thoreau studies.

I spent years reading manuscript pages of the Journal, watching Thoreau’s insights take form, day upon day, as unmediated prose experiments. Unlike Emerson’s volumes, arrayed in topical order, Thoreau’s Journal follows time. Some notations arise from his surveying jobs, hiking through fields and pausing to note discoveries: a blooming plant, a foraging bird, the look of tree-shadows on water. His eye and mind are relentless. Although the entries are in present tense and seem written currente calamo, offhandedly, with the pen running on, in fact he worked from field notes, usually the next day, turning ground-truth into literature. He finds a riverbank hollow of frost crystals, and replicates exactly how they look, at a distance and then closer, imagining how they formed. His interest is in the objects, but also in how a subject perceives them—the phenomenology of observation and learning. He finds a mushroom, phallus impudicus, in the form of a penis: “Pray, what was Nature thinking of when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level of those who draw in privies.” His father’s pig escapes and leads its pursuers all over town, helpless before the animal’s cunning. He watches snowflakes land on his coat sleeve: “And they all sing, melting as they sing, of the mysteries of the number six; six, six, six.” None of these entries reached print; they celebrate instead the gift of writing.

Third, Thoreau’s literary genes have split and recombined in our culture, with disturbing results. Organic hipster? Off-the-grid prepper? His popular image has become both blurred and politicized. If Thoreau as American eco-hero peaked around the first Earth Day (1970), today he is derided by conservatives who detest his anti-business sentiments and by postmodern thinkers for whom nature is a suspect green blur. (I still recall one faculty meeting at which a tenured English professor dismissed DNA as all right, “if you believe in that sort of thing.”)

Thoreau has always had detractors, even among his friends. Emerson’s delicate, vicious smear job at his funeral, a masterly takedown in eulogy form that enraged family and friends, set the pattern for enemies like James Russell Lowell (though happily not Lowell’s goddaughter, Virginia Woolf). Our own period sensibilities can flinch when confronted with Thoreaus we did not expect—the efficient capitalist, improving graphite mixes for the family pencil works; the schoolmaster who caned nine pupils at random, then quit in a fury; the early Victorian who may have chosen chastity because his brother John never lived a full life. (Henry’s most explicit statement on the subject of sex, even in the Journal: “I fell in love with a shrub oak.”)

Yet lately I have noted a new wave of loathing. When witnesses to his life still abounded, the prime criticism of Thoreau was Not Genteel. Now, the tag is Massive Hypocrite. Reader comments on Goodreads and Amazon alone are a deluge of angry, misspelled assertions that Thoreau was a rich-boy slacker, a humorless, arrogant, lying elitist. In the trolling of Thoreau by the digital hive mind, the most durable myth is Cookies-and-Laundry: that Thoreau, claiming independence at Walden, brought his washing home to his mother, and enjoyed her cooking besides. Claims by Concord neighbors that he was a pie-stealing layabout appear as early as the 1880s; Emerson’s youngest son felt compelled to rebut them, calling his childhood friend wise, gentle, and lovable.

The most recent eruption is “Pond Scum,” a 2015 New Yorker piece of fractal wrongness by Kathryn Schulz, who paints Thoreau as cold, parochial, egotistical, incurious, misanthropic, illogical, naïve, and cruel—and misses the real story of Walden, his journey from alienation to insight. I have spent a lifetime with Thoreau. I neither love nor hate him, but I know him well. I tracked down his papers, lived in Concord, walked his trails, repeated his journeys, and read, twice, the full Journal. I knew we were in the realm of alternative facts when Schulz dismissed Thoreau as “a well-off Harvard-educated man without dependents.” For that misreading alone, Schulz stands as the Kellyanne Conway of Thoreau commentary. He was the first in his family to attend college, a minority admit (owing to regional bias against French names), working-class to the bone, and after John’s death, the one son, obliged to support his family’s two businesses, boarding house and pencil factory—inhaling graphite dust from the latter fatally weakened his lungs. He was graduated from Harvard, yes, but into a wrenching depression, the Panic of 1837, and during Walden stays, he washed his dishes, floors, and laundry with cold pond water.

Did he go home often? Of course, because his father needed help at the shop. Did he do laundry in town? We do not know, but as the only surviving son of aging boardinghouse-keepers, Thoreau was no stranger to the backbreaking, soul-killing round of 19th-century commercial domestic labor. He knew no other life until he made another one, at Walden.

Pushback on “Pond Scum” was swift and gratifying, and gifted critics such as Donovan Hohn, Jedediah Purdy, and Rebecca Solnit, who have written so well on Thoreau, reassure me that as his third century opens, intelligent readers will continue to find him. But the path to Walden is, increasingly, neglected and overgrown. I constantly meet undergraduates who have never hiked alone, held an after-school job, or lived off schedule. They don’t know the source of milk or the direction of north. They really don’t like to unplug. In seminars, they look up from Walden in cautious wonder: “Can you even say this?” Thoreau worries them; he smells of resistance and of virtue. He is powerfully, compulsively original. He will not settle.

by William Howarth, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Pablo Sanchez/ Flickr; Photo-illustration by David Herbick

Shaka

“Hang loose,” “Right on,” “Thank you,” “Things are great,” “Take it easy” – in Hawaii, the shaka sign expresses all those friendly messages and more. As kamaaina know, to make the shaka, you curl your three middle fingers while extending your thumb and baby finger. For emphasis, quickly turn your hand back and forth with your knuckles facing outward.

As the story goes, that ubiquitous gesture traces its origins back to the early 1900s when Hamana Kalili worked at Kahuku Sugar Mill. His job as a presser was to feed cane through the rollers to squeeze out its juice. One day, Kalili’s right hand got caught in the rollers, and his middle, index and ring fingers were crushed.

After the accident, the plantation owners gave Kalili a new job as the security officer for the train that used to run between Sunset Beach and Kaaawa. Part of his job was to prevent kids from jumping on the train and taking joyrides as it slowly approached and departed Kahuku Station.

If Kalili saw kolohe (mischievous) kids trying to get on the train, he would yell and wave his hands to stop them. Of course, that looked a bit strange since he had only two fingers on his right hand. The kids adopted that gesture; it became their signal to indicate Kalili was not around or not looking, and the coast was clear for them to jump on the train.

According to a March 31, 2002 Honolulu Star-Bulletin story, Kalili was the choir director at his ward (congregation) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) in Laie. Even though his back was to the congregation, worshippers recognized him when he raised his hands to direct the choir because of his missing fingers.

Kalili also served as “king” of the church fundraiser – complete with a hukilau, luau and show – that was held annually for years until the 1970s. Photos show him greeting attendees with his distinctive wave.

The term “shaka” is not a Hawaiian word. It’s attributed to David “Lippy” Espinda, a used car pitchman who ended his TV commercials in the 1960s with the gesture and an enthusiastic “Shaka, brah!” In 1976, the shaka sign was a key element of Frank Fasi’s third campaign for mayor of Honolulu. He won that race and used the shaka icon for three more successful mayoral bids, serving six terms in all.

In Hawaii, everyone from keiki to kupuna uses the shaka to express friendship, gratitude, goodwill, encouragement and unity. A little wave of the hand spreads a lot of aloha.

by Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi, Hawaiian Airlines | Read more:
Image: uncredited