Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America

It’s been a few days now, but the shock of Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement hasn’t abated a bit. This is partly because of the ghastly coming ramifications, more on which later. But it’s also because I honestly didn’t think Kennedy would allow Donald Trump to name his successor.

I thought he had more respect for the United States of America than to allow this corrupt gangster who’s almost certainly never read a Supreme Court opinion in his life to name his successor. Yes, Kennedy is conservative, so to that extent it makes sense that he’d want a Republican president to make the call, and maybe it’s just that simple. But whatever his motivation, Kennedy has altered and destroyed his legacy.

Let me put it this way. If I owned a restaurant and he walked in, I’d serve him dinner. But if the other diners mocked and shamed him, I wouldn’t exactly cry.

Until last week, Kennedy’s legacy was going to be that of a basically conservative but sometimes interesting jurist. He was awful on money in politics. Awful.

If you never read Jeffrey Toobin’s important New Yorker piece from 2012, a tick-tock on the inside baseball of how the Court decided Citizens United, do so. Toobin shows that it was Kennedy who pushed behind the scenes to move the opinion as far to the right as a majority would accept. When this new Court has struck down any and all limits on campaign donations, as it almost surely will, and this country becomes an open oligarchy, we’ll have Kennedy to thank.

And yet, he helped advance human and civil rights in this country by voting to legalize same-sex marriage. Obergefell v. Hodges was a landmark case that was going to live in history alongside Brown v. Board of Education—a triumphant moment when we as a nation rose above past prejudices, prejudices that will look ridiculous and embarrassing a hundred years from now.

Notice I wrote was going to. Because now, assuming Trump and the Republicans get their justice, it’s only a matter of time before Obergefell is overturned. Look at this map. Most of the countries of the Western Hemisphere have federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage. Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia. Someday, the United States will no longer be among them.

Kennedy was also a swing vote, of course, on abortion rights, siding with the liberals and keeping Roe v. Wade law of the land. On Sunday, Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins said seemingly pretty definitively that she’d oppose a nominee who’d overturn Roe.

But all that probably means is that the nominee will lie about it at his or her hearing. Every conservative since Antonin Scalia has sat up there and dispensed obviously insincere tripe about respect for precedent, a history Paul Waldman recounted recently in The Washington Post.

So Collins, reassured by the nominee that s/he will keep an open mind and respects precedent, will cave as she always does. [ed. And Murkowski will too.]

So this is what Kennedy has done. He has knowingly destroyed that part of his legacy—which was, in fact, his entire legacy, because these were the only interesting and brave things he ever did. And now these precedents will be overturned. Now, Kennedy’s legacy is the destruction of Kennedy's legacy.

But that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that by retiring in the middle of the Robert Mueller investigation, Kennedy is letting Trump pick one of his own jurors. He obviously had to know he was doing this. And what are we do if the Supreme Court holds sometime in the near future by 5-4, with Kennedy’s successor in the majority, that the president is indeed above the law?

It could be that Kennedy would have been part of such a majority anyway. But if Trump’s two justices are part of that five, it will taint the Court forever, and it will tarnish what remains of our democracy, as the highest court in the land will have ruled that the crookedest president in modern history cannot be called to any kind of legal account.

Kennedy had to have contemplated all this as he pondered his resignation. But he made a decision that renders him not an independent jurist who takes seriously the constitutional responsibility of the judicial branch to check the executive, but just another partisan hack.

And now we learn that on top of everything else, Kennedy may just be corrupt. So his son Justin, if last week’s New York Times account is correct, in essence kept Donald Trump in business for the better part of a decade, overseeing $1 billion worth of loans to the Trump Organization via Deutsche Bank, where he worked. Justin and the Trump kids are buddies, it seems. Justin and Trump himself are palsy-walsy.

This is grotesque. There was once a time in this country, 40 and 50 years ago, when a connection like this might have led an honorable associate justice to recuse himself from every case involving the administration that came before him. Or if not that, at the very least a justice would have cared enough about appearances that he would have tried to stay on until 2021 to see if the country elected a new president, someone who wasn’t arguably saved from bankruptcy and humiliation by his own flesh and blood.

But not only did Kennedy not do that—he chose not to risk the possibility of the Democrats winning the Senate this fall and pulling a Mitch and doing to his successor what McConnell did to Merrick Garland. A jurist who cared more about his legacy would have waited--indeed would have hoped that the Democrats took the Senate, perhaps forcing President Trump to put forward a nominee who was more moderate and who would follow Kennedy's own example on abortion rights and gay rights. But no.

In other words: Anthony Kennedy went out of his way to make sure that a president who was elected with fewer votes than his opponent, and whom time might reveal to have won the White House by cooperating with a foreign adversary, and whose business career was salvaged by none other than Kennedy’s own son, gets to name his replacement—a replacement who is all but certain to undo the only good Kennedy himself ever did.

by Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image: Daily Beast
[ed. See also: Summer of Rage]

Liu Maoshan
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I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare

I’m sure I looked comical as I staggered down a downtown San Francisco street on a recent weekday, arms full of packages—as I dropped one and bent down to pick it up, another fell, and as I tried to rein that one in, another toppled.

Yet it wasn’t funny, not really. There I was, wearing a bright-yellow safety vest and working for Amazon Flex, a program in which the e-commerce giant pays regular people to deliver packages from their own vehicles for $18 to $25 an hour, before expenses. I was racing to make the deliveries before I got a ticket—there are few places for drivers without commercial vehicles to park in downtown San Francisco during the day—and also battling a growing rage as I lugged parcels to offices of tech companies that offered free food and impressive salaries to their employees, who seemed to spend their days ordering stuff online. Technology was allowing these people a good life, but it was just making me stressed and cranky.

“NOT. A. GOOD. DEAL,” I scrawled in my notebook, after having walked down nine flights of stairs, sick of waiting for a freight elevator that may or may not have been broken, and returned to my car for another armful of packages.

Welcome to the future of package delivery. As people shop more online, companies like Amazon are turning to independent contractors—essentially anyone with a car—to drop parcels at homes and businesses. Flex is necessary because Amazon is growing so quickly—the company shipped 5 billion Prime items last year—that it can’t just rely on FedEx, UPS, and the Postal Service. Flex takes care of “last mile” deliveries, the most complicated part of getting goods from where they’re made to your doorstep. It also allows Amazon to meet increases in demand during the holiday season, Prime Day, and other busy times of the year, a spokeswoman told me in an email.

But Flex operates year-round, not just during the holiday season, which suggests there’s another reason for it: It’s cheap. As the larger trucking industry has discovered over the past decade, using independent contractors rather than unionized drivers saves money, because so many expenses are borne by the drivers, rather than the company.

Amazon has rolled out Flex in more than 50 cities, including New York; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. The company doesn’t share information about how many drivers it has, but one Seattle economist calculated that 11,262 individuals drove for Flex in California between October 2016 and March 2017, based on information Amazon shared with him to help the company defend a lawsuit about Flex drivers.

On the surface, these jobs, like many others in the gig economy, seem like a good deal. But Flex workers get no health insurance or pension, and are not guaranteed a certain number of hours or shifts a week. They are not covered by basic labor protections like minimum wage and overtime pay, and they don’t get unemployment benefits if they suddenly can’t work anymore. And when workers calculate how much they’re pulling in on a daily basis, they often don’t account for the expenses that they’ll incur doing these jobs. “A lot of these gig-type services essentially rely on people not doing the math on what it actually costs you,” Sucharita Kodali, a Forrester analyst who covers e-commerce, told me.

One Amazon Flex driver in Cleveland, Chris Miller, 63, told me that though he makes $18 an hour, he spends about 40 cents per mile he drives on expenses like gas and car repairs. He bought his car, used, with 40,000 miles on it. It now has 140,000, after driving for Flex for seven months, and Uber and Lyft before that. That means he’s incurred about $40,000 in expenses—things he didn’t think about initially, like changing the oil more frequently and replacing headlights and taillights. He made slightly less than $10 an hour driving for Uber, he told me, once he factored in these expenses; Flex pays a bit better.

Miller’s wife has a full-time job with benefits, so his Flex earnings are helpful for paying off his family’s credit-card bills. But “if I were trying to make this work as a single guy on my own, it would be tough to do that,” he said. His costs might actually be lower than what most drivers spend: The standard mileage rates for use of a car for business purposes, according to the IRS, are 54.5 cents a mile in 2018.

I became an Amazon Flex independent contractor by downloading an app, going through a background check, and watching 19 videos that explained in great detail the process of delivering packages. (I did not get paid for the time it took to watch these videos, nor was there any guarantee that I would be approved as a driver once I watched the videos.) The videos covered topics like what to do if a customer decides they don’t want their order anymore (“Isn’t this customer nuts?!,” Amazon asks), and how to deliver alcohol (asking customers how old they are, it turns out, is not an acceptable form of checking ID). Because the videos were followed by quizzes, I actually had to pay attention.

After I was finally approved as a driver, a process that took weeks, I signed up for a shift. Flex drivers get work by opening the app and clicking on available shifts; current Flex drivers told me that newbies get offered the best hours and rates. My first shift was from 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, delivering packages from an Amazon logistics center in South San Francisco, about 30 minutes from my apartment. Different shifts offer varying rates; my three-and-a-half-hour block was going to net me $70, according to the app, though of course I had to pay for my own fuel and tolls. The app would tell me where to pick up the packages, where to drop them off, and what route to take, so the task seemed pretty easy. I anticipated a few leisurely hours driving between houses in a sleepy San Francisco suburb, listening to an audiobook as I dropped packages on doorsteps, smelling the lavender and sagebrush that grace many front lawns here.

My first hint that the afternoon was not going to be the bucolic day I had imagined came when I drove into the Amazon warehouse to pick up the packages. I was handed a yellow safety vest to wear inside the warehouse so other drivers could see me, “compliments of Amazon,” a man told me, and was directed to a parking spot where a cart of packages awaited. I began loading them into my trunk, but paused when I saw the addresses printed on them. I was assigned 43 packages but only two addresses: two office buildings on Market Street, the main thoroughfare in downtown San Francisco. This meant driving into downtown San Francisco in the middle of a workday, stashing my car somewhere and walking between floors and offices in the two buildings.

“Where am I supposed to park?” I asked the two men who were guiding traffic in the warehouse, as I loaded giant boxes and slim white Prime envelopes into my overstuffed car. They both shrugged. “Lots of people just get tickets,” one told me. (...)

Parking headaches weren’t the only problem. One of the packages I had to deliver was a huge box weighing more than 30 pounds. Because of the limited parking, I ended up walking two blocks with it, resting every 100 steps or so. At one point, a friendly police officer tried to lift it for kicks and groaned audibly. The security guard at the front door of the office building chastised me for carrying the box, and told me that I should be using a dolly to transport it. (None of the 19 videos I had to watch to be a Flex driver recommended bringing a delivery cart or a dolly.) Had I injured myself carrying the package, I would not have been able to receive workers’ compensation or paid medical time off. I also would have been responsible for my own medical care. Brown, the Milwaukee Amazon Flex driver, is the sole provider for his family, and uses BadgerCare, the Wisconsin health-insurance program for low-income residents, for his family’s health insurance.

And then there was the fact that the Flex technology itself was difficult to use. Flex workers are supposed to scan each package before they deliver it, but the app wouldn’t accept my scans. When I called support, unsure of what to do, I received a recorded messaging saying support was experiencing technical difficulties, but would be up again soon. Then I got a message on my phone telling me the current average wait time for support was “less than 114,767 minutes.” I ended up just handing the packages to people in the offices without scanning them, hoping that someone, somewhere, was tracking where they went. (Amazon says it is constantly taking driver feedback into consideration to improve Flex.)

Two of the small offices I was supposed to deliver packages to were locked, and there was no information about where to leave the deliveries. When I finally reached support and asked what to do with those undeliverable packages, I was told I could either drive them back to the warehouse in South San Francisco, 35 minutes away through worsening traffic, or keep trying to deliver them until the recipients returned. When I tried to use the app to call the recipients, it directed me to the wrong phone numbers; I eventually called a phone number printed on an office door and left a message. But there was no efficient way to register my problems with Amazon—I was on my own.

All my frustration really hit when I went to the second office building on Market Street, home to a few big tech companies. One of them took up multiple floors, smelled strongly of pizza, and had dog leashes and kibble near the front door. Young workers milled around with laptops and lattes, talking about weekend plans. They were benefiting from the technology boom, sharing in the prosperity that comes with a company’s rapid growth. Technology was making their jobs better—they worked in offices that provided free food and drinks, and they received good salaries, benefits, and stock options. They could click a button and use Amazon to get whatever they wanted delivered to their offices—I brought 16 packages for 13 people to one office; one was so light I was sure it was a pack of gum, another felt like a bug-spray container.

Until then, I had been, like them, blithely ordering things on Amazon so I wouldn’t have to wait in line at a store or go searching for a particular product (even though I knew, from talking to warehouse workers, that many of the jobs that get those packages to my door aren’t good ones). But now, technology was enabling Amazon to hire me to deliver these packages with no benefits or perks. If one of these workers put the wrong address on the package, they would get a refund, while I was scurrying around trying to figure out what they meant when they listed their address as “fifth floor” and there was no fifth floor. How could these two different types of jobs exist in the same economy? (...)

People are worried that automation is going to create a “job apocalypse,” but there will likely be thousands more driving and delivery jobs in upcoming years, according to Viscelli. Technology has allowed people to outsource the things they don’t want to do; they can now have someone else go grocery shopping for them, pick up their takeout, bring them packages in under two hours so they don’t have to go to a store. “We’re going to take the billion hours Americans spend driving to stores and taking things off shelves, and we’re going to turn it into jobs,” Viscelli said. “The fundamental question is really what the quality of these jobs is going to be.”

by Alana Semuels, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Aygun Aliyeva/Shutterstock

Riddle of the Sands

Paradise is a beach, we are told. Pristine white or coral pink. We leaf through brochures in search of perfect sand. There is a Paradise Beach on Barbados, and in Croatia, and Thailand, and South Africa, too. In every tourist-hungry part of the globe, in fact. The naturalist Desmond Morris believes that, as descendants of water-loving apes, we are hard-wired to seek out these places, lulled by the rhythmic advance and retreat of the ocean as we soak up the sun, sand grains trickling through our workless fingers.

And so much to go around. Man has always used sand as an analogy for the infinite, a limitless resource, ordinary and yet magical, incapable of exhaustion. When astronomers seek to impress upon us the size of the universe, they speak of stars being more numerous than grains of sand. There are quite a few grains, as it happens – 7.5 x 10 to the 18th power, according to researchers at the University of Hawaii. That’s 7 quintillion, 500 quadrillion – give or take the odd trillion.

Yet sand in the right places is anything but infinite. Our insatiable appetite for new buildings, roads, coastal defences, glass, fracking, even electronics, threatens the places we are designed by evolution to love most. The world consumes between 30 and 40bn tonnes of building aggregate a year, and half of this is sand. Enough material to build a wall 27m high and 27m wide around the equator. Sand is second only to water as a natural material extracted by humans, and our society is built on it, quite literally. Global production has risen by a quarter in just five years, fuelled by the insatiable demands of China and India for housing and infrastructure. Of the 15 to 20bn tonnes used annually, about half goes into concrete. Our need for concrete is such that we make almost 2 cubic metres worth each year for every man, woman and child on the planet.

But what of those oceans of sand stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf – the Sahara and the Arabian Desert? The wrong kind of sand, unfortunately. Wind action in deserts results in rounded grains that are too smooth and too small to bind well in concrete. Builders like angular sand of the kind found on riverbeds. Sand, sand everywhere, nor any grain to use, to paraphrase Coleridge. A textbook example is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper. Despite being surrounded by sand, it was constructed with concrete incorporating the “right kind of sand” from Australia. Riverbed sand is prized, being of the correct gritty texture and purity, washed clean by running fresh water. Marine sand from the seabed is also used in increasing quantities, but it must be cleansed of salt to avoid metal corrosion in buildings. It all comes at a cost.

China leads the charge in today’s sand-fuelled construction boom, consuming half the world’s supply of concrete. Between 2011 and 2014 it used more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th century. Aggregate is the main ingredient for roads, and China laid down 146,000km of new highway in a single year. By 2050, two-thirds of humanity will live in urban areas, a product of migration and population growth. The population of India, second only to China in its hunger for concrete, is expected to grow from 1.32bn to 1.7bn by the middle of the century. Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, is one of the world’s top 10 mega-cities, with a population of 22m. China and India rely largely on national supplies of sand – to minimise transport costs – but as the skyscrapers rise in Shanghai and Mumbai so does the price of this once-humble ingredient. China’s hunger for sand is insatiable, its biggest dredging site at Lake Poyang produces 989,000 tonnes per day.

International trade in sand is rising as local supply outstrips demand. The destruction of habitats vital to fish, crocodiles, turtles and other forms of riverine and marine life accompanies the destruction of sand barriers and coral reefs protecting coastal communities, as in Sri Lanka. Sand extraction lowers the water table and pollutes drinking water, as in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, while stagnant pools created by extraction on land foster malaria.

No one knows how much damage is being done to the environment because sand extraction is a largely hidden threat, under-researched and often happening in isolated places. “We are addicted to sand but don’t know it because we don’t buy it as individuals,” says Aurora Torres, a Spanish ecologist who is studying the effects of global sand extraction at Germany’s Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. “Extraction has grown strongly over the past four decades and has accelerated since 2000. Urban development is putting more and more strain on limited accessible deposits, causing conflict around the world. Sand dredging degrades corals, seaweeds and seagrass meadows and is a driver of biodiversity loss, threatening species already on the verge of extinction. Our consumption of sand is outstripping our understanding of its environmental and social effects.”

Sand accounted for 85% of the total weight of mined material in 2014, yet it is replenished by rock erosion only over thousands of years. Booming demand means scarcity, scarcity means money and money means criminality. Globally, sand extraction is estimated to be worth £50bn per year, a cubic metre of sand selling for as much as £62 in areas of high demand and scarce supply. This makes it vulnerable to illegal exploitation, particularly in the developing world. Why buy expensive sand, sourced from licensed mines, when you can anchor your dredger in some remote estuary, blast the sand out of the riverbed with a water jet and suck it up? Or steal a beach? Or dismantle an entire island? Or whole groups of islands? This is what the “sand mafias” do. Criminal enterprises, their illegal mining operations in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, are protected by officials and police paid to look the other way – and powerful customers in the construction industry who prefer not to ask too many questions.

From Jamaica to Morocco to India and Indonesia, sand mafias ruin habitats, remove whole beaches by truck in a single night and pollute farmlands and fishing grounds. Those who get in their way – environmentalists, journalists or honest policemen – face intimidation, injury and even death. “It’s very attractive for these sand mafias,” says Torres, who is one of the few academics studying this Cinderella issue – overshadowed as it is by climate change, plastic pollution and other environmental threats. “Sand has become very profitable in a short time, which makes for a healthy black market.”

by Neil Tweedie, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

Javier Mayoral
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The Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid That Struck Earth was Unbelievably Huge and Fast

Humans are so small compared to the size of the Earth, it’s sometimes difficult to comprehend the scale of things like, say, the massive meteorite that struck the Yucatan peninsula about 66 million years ago, an event that triggered the mass extinction of plants and animals, including the dinosaurs. In his recent book, The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen takes a crack at explaining just how big the meteorite was and how quickly the event occurred.

“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.” 

These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun. 

“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Them when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.” 

Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact. 

“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked. 

“Yeah, probably.”

by Jason Kottke, Kottke.org |  Read more:

Image: Joe Tucciarone/Science Photo Library via

R&B
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My Uncle, the 70s Porn Star

The most important thing you need to know about my uncle, the porn star, is that he’s not my actual uncle. He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed. Johnny is now a seventy-four-year-old man partial to books-on-tape and cantaloupe, but between 1973 and 1987, he starred in 117 adult films. He was Man in Car, Man with Book, Man on Bus, Man in Hot Tub, Orgy Guy in Red Chair, Party Guy, Guy Wearing Glasses, Delivery Boy, and, perplexingly, Guy in Credits. He was the porn equivalent of Barbie, who can count astronaut, zookeeper, and aerobics instructor among her professional accomplishments. Except that Barbie, like Jesus before her and Prince after her, has no last name. Whereas Johnny’s last name, his actual last name, is Seeman. This is a fact too absurd to warrant further analysis.

I didn’t snoop around about Johnny until college, but this was not for lack of interest. My college years happened to coincide with the late nineties, when the Internet was fast becoming a tool for personal research. Before that, my generation mostly used it for chain letters and lightbulb jokes. How many Harvard students does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the lightbulb and the other to rotate the world around him. But suddenly I had a vehicle for my curiosity. So I looked up Johnny to see what I could find. I was neither brave nor willing enough to search for video footage for fear of noticing any genetic resemblance to my mother’s brothers. Even the Greeks don’t have a name for that specific a complex. Instead, I read. My favorite article to this day was one in which Johnny is referred to—revered, really—as the most famous stunt cock ever. That was the headline—JOHNNY SEEMAN: THE MOST FAMOUS STUNT COCK EVER.

This superlative seared into my brain. How many self-identifying stunt cocks have walked the earth to make ever meaningful? Forty? Ever seemed a touch hyperbolic for an unquantifiable group of people. I also wondered if Johnny’s unique endowments meant I, too, had the good-genitalia gene. If I have a son, will he be pretty much set in that department? That might be a nice bonus attribute, though hopefully not one he will have to rely on for money.

In case you’re not familiar, a stunt cock is the guy who steps in to produce the money shot if an actor can’t maintain an erection. I imagine this was handy in the era before little blue pills and digital film, but it seems like a real morale dampener for everyone else. This is the guy who opens the pickle jar after you’ve loosened it, the one who carries the birthday cake you baked out of the kitchen. More than anything, it struck me as an odd hook for an interview. It’s the kind of detail that a man might drop about himself, but would be less likely to point out about another man. Unless, of course, it was the sole reason for an article that might not exist otherwise. And there, if you will, was the rub. I got the sense that, despite his 117 films, Johnny had been all but forgotten. In pornography, being tag-teamed by three women and a vacuum-cleaner nozzle does not a legend make. Johnny needed to be reintroduced.

Like I said, the man’s not my uncle. Though I’ve known Johnny my whole life, I can count our interactions on one hand. Our family is not the reunion type. We’re either united already or distant for some very good reason. Growing up, I saw Johnny at funerals and shivahs, possibly a wedding—definitely one Thanksgiving when my father got a real kick out of offering him breast meat.

My otherwise straitlaced parents could barely contain their excitement at having a porn star in their midst. A porn star is chum in the water for people who think getting wait- listed from college is a haunting secret. Also, Johnny’s other brothers are a Parisian doctor and a businessman. Unfortunately, my parents’ reverse mythologizing of Johnny made it impossible to get an accurate sense of the guy.

Snippets about Johnny were presented as essentials or in lieu of essentials. I knew that he dropped out of UNC-Chapel Hill, which meant he was smart enough to get in, and that he’d spent the last thirty years living alone in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles, which meant he was sad. I knew he was once so lost to a world of sex-crazed degenerates that he sent his mother, my great-aunt, a magazine with an advertisement for one of his films. The photo featured Johnny, bespectacled and naked, pushing a woman on a swing, also naked. I’ve always imagined him giving a thumbs-up but I can’t confirm this because I’ve never actually seen the magazine.

But most shockingly of all, I knew that Johnny got into porn to find a girlfriend.

To me, this idea was always the most difficult to grasp. It seemed the most implausible. What kind of cockamamy plan was this from a man who got accepted to UNC from out of state? It’s common enough for people to spend their whole lives building careers or amassing wealth in order to get laid. So one could argue that Johnny had cleverly skipped the middleman. His career was to get laid. Which is all well and good—unless that was never the point. Unless Johnny only ever wanted to cuddle and spoon and take turns spitting toothpaste into a bathroom sink. What if all those lawn orgies and park-bench encounters were constructed solely for Johnny to find love? For years, I thought about this every time I sat on a park bench. Until one day, when I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore.

“What do you need his email address for?” My parents are skeptical about me contacting Johnny. They don’t want me pestering a seventy-four-year-old man with stunt-cock inquiries.

In truth, I don’t know exactly what I want from Johnny. Certainly, an academic curiosity about pornography is not a revelation. What am I going to do, blow the lid off fake orgasms? Nor is it a sociological curiosity. David Foster Wallace wrote at length about the Adult Video News Awards, thus pissing a circle around the subject for all eternity. My only credential is that I am a blood relative. But even this is a lame justification.

At least some portion of Johnny’s draw comes from my own coastal turmoil. I have often felt I was mistakenly born a mid-Atlantic baby. The more I heard of Johnny’s “running off to California,” the more I felt a kinship with this person over my family.

But I can’t tell my parents that. So I play the mortality card instead.

“He won’t be around forever,” I say. “Neither will we,” my father says. “And we’re interesting!” “Not that interesting,” my mother corrects him, and forks over the email.

by Sloan Crosley, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The 25% Revolution

How Big Does a Minority Have to Be to Reshape Society?

Social change—from evolving attitudes toward gender and marijuana to the rise of Donald Trump to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements—is a constant. It is also mysterious, or so it can seem. For example, “How exactly did we get here?” might be asked by anyone who lived through decades of fierce prohibition and now buys pot at one of the more than 2,000 licensed dispensaries across the U.S.

A new study about the power of committed minorities to shift conventional thinking offers some surprising possible answers. Published this week in Science, the paper describes an online experiment in which researchers sought to determine what percentage of total population a minority needs to reach the critical mass necessary to reverse a majority viewpoint. The tipping point, they found, is just 25 percent. At and slightly above that level, contrarians were able to “convert” anywhere from 72 to 100 percent of the population of their respective groups. Prior to the efforts of the minority, the population had been in 100 percent agreement about their original position.

“This is not about a small elite with disproportionate resources,” says Arnout van de Rijt, a sociologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who studies social networks and collective action, and was not involved in the study. “It's not about the Koch brothers influencing American public opinion. Rather, this is about a minority trying to change the status quo, and succeeding by being unrelenting. By committing to a new behavior, they repeatedly expose others to that new behavior until they start to copy it.”

The experiment was designed and led by Damon Centola, associate professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. It involved 194 people randomly assigned to 10 “independent online groups,” which varied in size from 20 to 30 people. In the first step group members were shown an image of a face and told to name it. They interacted with one another in rotating pairs until they all agreed on a name. In the second step Centola and his colleagues seeded each group with “a small number of confederates…who attempted to overturn the established convention (the agreed-on name) by advancing a novel alternative.”

For the second step, as Centola explains it, the researchers began with a 15 percent minority model and gradually increased it to 35 percent. Nothing changed at 15 percent, and the established norm remained in place all the way up to 24 percent.

The magic number, the tipping point, turned out to be 25 percent. Minority groups smaller than that converted, on average, just 6 percent of the population. Among other things, Centola says, that 25 percent figure refutes a century of economic theory. “The classic economic model—the main thing we are responding to with this study—basically says that once an equilibrium is established, in order to change it you need 51 percent. And what these results say is no, a small minority can be really effective, even when people resist the minority view.” The team’s computer modeling indicated a 25 percent minority would retain its power to reverse social convention for populations as large as 100,000.

But the proportion has to be just right: One of the groups in the study consisted of 20 members, with four contrarians. Another group had 20 members and five contrarians—and that one extra person made all the difference. “In the group with four, nothing happens,” Centola says, “and with five you get complete conversion to the alternative norm.” The five, neatly enough, represented 25 percent of the group population. “One of the most interesting empirical, practical insights from these results is that at 24 percent—just below the threshold—you don’t see very much effect,” adds Centola, whose first book, How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions, comes out this month. “If you are those people trying to create change, it can be really disheartening.” When a committed minority effort starts to falter there is what Centola calls “a convention to give up,” and people start to call it quits. And of course members have no way to know when their group is just short of critical mass. They can be very close and simply not realize it. “So I would say to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and all of these social change movements that approaching that tipping point is slow going, and you can see backsliding. But once you get over it, you’ll see a really large-scale impact.”

Real-life factors that can work against committed minorities—even when they reach or exceed critical mass—include a lack of interaction with other members, as well as competing committed minorities and what’s called “active resistance”—which pretty well describes the way many people in 2018 respond to political ideas with which they disagree. But even with such obstacles, Centola says the tipping point predicted in his model remains well below 50 percent.

Certain settings lend themselves to the group dynamics Centola describes in his study, and that includes the workplace. “Businesses are really great for this kind of thing,” he says, “because people in firms spend most of their day trying to coordinate with other people, and they exhibit the conventions that other people exhibit because they want to show that they’re good workers and members of the firm. So you can see very strong effects of a minority group committed to changing the culture of the population.”

by David Noonan, Scientific American |  Read more:
Image: Mitch Blunt/Getty

In Search of America's Best Hot Dog: 14 Supermarket Varieties, Taste-Tested

Life is full of tough choices. For instance: are you a burger person, or a hot dog person? While I tend to lean burger, there are times when only a hot dog will do: at the baseball game; on a New York City street corner; walking home tipsy as bacon-wrapped sausages perfume the night.

But no occasion is more perfect than the Fourth of July. It’s estimated Americans will eat 150m hot dogs on Independence Day alone, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Boiled or grilled, with mustard or ketchup, sauerkraut or relish – a frank in a bun is the best way to celebrate the holiday.

As with many American traditions, the hot dog’s origins lie in the immigrant story. Most agree it began with the frankfurter, brought by 19th-century Germans along with their love of all things sausage. Today’s supermarket aisles are stuffed with choice, making grocery shopping a daunting task. As a fellow shopper lamented just days ago, while I loaded my arms with cold meat for this contest: “Which damn hot dog do I buy? Nothing’s worse than biting into a bad hot dog.”

Which is why we decided to face down the ultimate challenge: 14 American supermarket varieties pitted side by side, so you can shop with confidence.

The ground rules

In pursuit of authenticity, we opted for a backyard barbecue, cooking on a charcoal grill. The tasting would be blind – judges would try the anonymous hot dog unadorned, and then, if they wished, dress it up with their favorite condiments. Each judge would score the hot dog on a scale of zero to 10, the final score being the average of all scores.

We opted to try 11 meat and three vegetarian/vegan-friendly varieties. And yes, we know processed meat is killing us, but we felt it killed the fun to disallow hot dogs that contain sodium nitrate and other preservatives (still, we do feature plenty of organic options).
The judges

We needed an expert. Luckily, Tim Milojevich, 37, the owner of Barrio restaurant and a longtime San Francisco chef, was on hand to help. Milojevich worked as a professional sausage and pastrami maker for several years, and he knew a hell of a lot more than most of us. Let’s just say he added the word “snap” (the pleasing resistance of a good sausage casing) and “emulsification” (how well the liquids and fat bind to lock in juiciness) to our hot dog vocabulary.

And what’s a cookout without the kids’ opinion? Our neighbors Kaylee, 12, and Genisse, 11, assured me 14 hot dogs was no challenge as they helped lay pickles on the table. Mix in hungry friends and family, and we were good to go.

The results, in the order we tried them

Ball Park beef franks – $4.99 for eight*
This whimsical brand dates back to 1950s Detroit. First off the grill, it didn’t disappoint. “Classic” was a word that came up. Tried plain, it was very salty, making us realize just how much work that bun does. And there was no denying this tasted highly processed, if delicious. “Definitely grocery-store,” commented one eater.
Average score: 7.2
Tim’s score: 7

365 organic uncured grass-fed beef hot dogs – $5.99 for six
Whole Foods’ own-brand, organic grass-fed beef dogs seemed promising, but didn’t quite deliver. “It’s OK,” said Kaylee, looking a little let down. “Do we have any more of the first one?” Most agreed that this had a milder, less smoky flavor but was lacking in juiciness, and that the casing had an odd way of separating from the meat itself.
Average score: 4.87
Tim’s score: 3

Trader Joe’s all natural uncured all beef hot dogs – $5.49 for eight
The checkout lady at Trader Joe’s assured me we were in for a treat, and the spice mix – mustard, pepper, nutmeg, allspice and paprika – promised big flavor. She was right: this was a pretty darn tasty dog, plump and with a pleasant hint of sweetness. “Almost too sweet,” noted Tim, who gave it high marks for “emulsification”, that sought-after juicy texture.
Average score: 7.4
Tim’s score: 7

Oscar Mayer classic beef uncured franks – $4.99 for 10
Would this classic deliver? One taster definitely thought so. “10 out of 10. Beefy smoky flavor, and juice that seems like broth!” There were definitely a lot of sevens and eights here, with Tim dubbing it “our juiciest so far”. The only downside: it felt a bit too skinny. “Leaves me wanting a bigger mouthful,” said one.
Average score: 7.2
Tim’s score: 7.5

Tofurky original sausage beer brats – $4.39 for four
I hoped our veggie options might fool judges in a blind tasting, but as soon as I began cutting into these hefty brats my hopes were dashed. They overcooked quickly, and the outer casing was tough while the inner flesh was distinctly bread-y. “Bland and bad texture” was the general consensus. “No snap,” Tim lamented.
Average score: 1.75
Tim’s score: 1.5

Nathan’s Famous skinless beef franks – $5.99 for eight
This Coney Island stalwart claims to be the world’s most famous hot dog. But when it came to taste, it slightly split the room. While I found it delightfully greasy and meaty, with a good, crispable skin, Tim described it as “more water than meat”. The expert was in the minority, though, with most deeming this a solid option.
Average score: 7.1
Tim’s score: 4 (...)

Caspers Famous hot dogs – $7.99 for six

This was our only pork-beef mix of the night, and people could taste the difference. “Pork rules!” crowed a happy taster. The combo was a winner with the kids, who scored it 100 out of 10. But for our sharp-palated chef, it was nothing special. “Non-assertive and mild. Not memorable” was Tim’s verdict, leaving this somewhere in the middle.

Average score: 7.1
Tim’s score: 4.5

Field Roast frankfurters (vegetarian) – $5.69 for six
This was the top veggie dog of the night. One taster appreciated the carrot-y undertones, while I picked up notes of sweet potato. But while zesty seasonings helped things along, we were still left craving something juicier, and, well, meatier. It seems the greasy, salty, trashy world of hot dogs may be one realm where veggies can’t compete.
Average score: 3.1
Tim’s score: 2.5

Wellshire Premium all-natural uncured beef franks – $7.99 for eight
This won the New York Times’ hot dog taste test, and it definitely found some fans here. The beefy-ness was there, as was the right amount of salt. One taster mistook it for her favorite hot dog, Hebrew National, which we viewed as a compliment. Tim called it “meaty and well balanced”, awarding it a score to tie Oscar Mayer for his highest of the night.
Average score: 7.4
Tim’s score: 7.5

by Charlotte Simmonds, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Talia Herman for The Guardian

Alla Mingaleva, Back to Work
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Paul Klee, Montagna in inverno, 1925
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Leafer Madness

By the time Courtney True found the Reddit thread about kratom in December 2016, she hadn’t touched an opioid for 48 hours. She was in bad shape — stomach cramps, diarrhea, jitters, hot sweats, cold sweats, and body aches that made even her teeth hurt. Sitting at her kitchen table hunched over a laptop, she recalled, “I felt like I wanted to rip my skin off and step out of it.”

True had been dependent on opioids since she was a 14-year-old growing up in Mississippi, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet to treat chronic migraines. By the age of 24, she was shooting OxyContin. A decade after that — after moving to Maine, becoming a nurse, and having two kids — the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on sketchy online pharmacies that sold pills, and True started on heroin.

She’d tried to quit many times over the years, using every conceivable remedy for the misery of withdrawal — Imodium A-D, quinine, valerian root. Nothing worked. So here she was, reading earnest online testimonials about an obscure leaf from Southeast Asia.

“It seemed kinda seedy, it seemed kinda underground, and kinda maybe like something I shouldn’t be doing,” True, now 41, told BuzzFeed News. “But at that point I was desperate enough to give it a try.”

Her husband drove her a half hour to a smoke shop in downtown Portland. She bought a little of everything: a small bag of crushed kratom leaves, some capsules, and two tiny bottles of extracts, all for about $100.

Back in the car, heater blasting, she swallowed some of the capsules and downed a bottle, then sat waiting, skeptically, to feel something like a high. She never did, but within 20 minutes her withdrawal symptoms had faded away. "It was like a fog had cleared," True said. "They were just gone."

Now 18 months have passed, and True has been heroin-free for 17. She drinks a murky kratom-grapefruit juice mix several times a day, and credits the plant for saving not only her own life, but also her family’s. Her husband, John Wolstenhulme, had a 20-plus-year opioid addiction, and her 27-year-old stepson, Jeff Wolstenhulme, used fentanyl. Both are now off of opioids — John for 16 months, Jeff for almost four — thanks to kratom, they say. True convinced her mother in Mississippi to use it to treat her irritable bowel syndrome. She even gives it to her dogs for their joint pain and anxiety. “Sometimes I just sprinkle it in their food,” she said, laughing.

True is part of a growing grassroots movement of former drug users who see kratom as the cheap, safe, “all-natural” way to curb the opioid epidemic killing more than 40,000 people in the US every year. The once-obscure botanical has become big enough to warrant its own lobbyists in Washington, DC — the American Kratom Association, which claims that kratom is a billion-dollar business, with thousands of vendors selling it to an estimated 3 million to 5 million people.

Its proponents range from Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to bro podcaster Joe Rogan to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In Facebook groups and Reddit threads, tens of thousands of people obsess over the best suppliers, dosages, recipes, and strains for every possible ailment, but mostly for kicking their opioid addictions. In March, the country’s first rehab facility to use kratom opened a few miles from True’s house.

There's just one problem. The government is in secret talks to possibly ban the plant, suspecting that kratom is not the answer to the opioid crisis, but the start of a new one.

At issue is its chemistry: Kratom latches on to some of the same brain receptors that heroin, morphine, and fentanyl do. From the government’s perspective, that makes kratom an opioid like any other, and too dangerous to leave unregulated.

“Claiming that kratom is benign because it’s ‘just a plant’ is shortsighted and dangerous,” FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said in a statement released earlier this year. The agency has circulated notices about kratom strains contaminated with salmonella and has linked the plant to the deaths of 44 people. Last month, the FDA sent warning letters to three distributors for making unproven claims about kratom’s ability to treat pain, opioid addiction, and cancer.

“We’re firing warning shots,” an FDA spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “You’re going to see us crack down.”

People struggling with addiction, Gottlieb said, should instead rely on FDA-approved medications like methadone and Suboxone. But kratom advocates point out that these drugs are too often inaccessible to the uninsured, don’t work for some people, and can be abused. When feeling conspiratorial, they go so far as to say that the FDA is in cahoots with Big Pharma to purge kratom from the market so they can hook addicts on more prescription opioids.

But beyond a few medical case reports and animal studies on kratom dependence, there isn’t much science to support the idea that the plant is safe — or that it’s dangerous. No one knows yet whether kratom really works long-term. Or whether the people who love it, like True’s family, have just swapped one opioid addiction for another.

One thing is clear: The battle over kratom is swiftly coming to a head. “We are at the foot of a revolution,” True said. “This is about to blow up.” (...)

The kratom obsessives discuss how to make the bitter plant palatable by stirring the green powder into juice, brewing it into a sweet tea, pouring it into capsules, or just chasing it with whatever liquid is on hand — water, Gatorade, warm Fanta, and even pickle juice. Armchair chemists discuss trial-and-error attempts at making kratom stronger with citric acid (“acidify when extracting, then basify before consumption”) or turmeric or black seed oil. Others suggest combinations of white, red, and green strains that will prompt wildly different effects (white is energizing, red calming, and green somewhere in the middle).

Real chemists have shown that at low doses, kratom — a tall, skinny tree in the coffee family — acts as a mild stimulant and mood booster, making it a popular herb for centuries among manual laborers on rubber plantations in Indonesia, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. At higher doses, kratom has a much more prized effect: It kills pain. The nerdier Reddit threads cite pharmacology studies to chronicle the plant’s 25 major chemicals, called alkaloids, some of which have been shown to bind to opioid receptors even more tightly than potent opioids like morphine.

These communities see kratom as a panacea for a bewilderingly broad set of problems. Some described how it got them through 12-hour shifts at Panera and Popeyes. One person said it helped them ace a math test. Others said kratom fixed their stutter, lifted the fog of a decadelong depression, cured insomnia, cured alcoholism, cured PMS, eased chronic pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, and was “a miracle drug” for erectile dysfunction.

Most of the threads, though, describe how the plant offers “freedom from opiates.” Users claim that it’s impossible to die from kratom — that it would force your body to vomit before you could overdose, and that it doesn’t slow breathing like heroin and prescription opioids do. (These claims have not been backed up by any clinical studies in people, since none exist.)

These threads often veer into rants about the pharmaceutical industry, which sparked the opioid crisis.

“The FDA is scared that kratom will take away from the profits of Big Pharma,” Mike Gill, an administrator of one of the bigger kratom Facebook groups, once posted. “Big Pharma funds the FDA...Big Pharma Lobbies the FDA = Big Pharma OWNS the FDA!”

by Azeen Ghorayshi, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Yoon S. Byun

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Octopus Kites

via: YouTube
[ed. Reminiscent of The Matrix.]

Moving Day - Montreal

Montreal has a valiant knack for inconvenience. The winters are brutal, and when summer finally comes, one can safely bet that any well-attended park, shopping street or highway will become clogged with construction, as every builder in the province takes two weeks off at exactly the same time in July. The Quebecois love doing things all together, en famille – and in that spirit there is Moving Day: 1 July, when the majority of residential leases both begin and end.

To call Moving Day mayhem is to prettify the truth of trucks double-parked three deep on narrow two-way streets, amateurs humping fridges up the city’s legendarily winding outdoor staircases (partly because nobody can get a professional mover – they’re all quadruple-booked), and creative Quebeckers devising all sorts of methods for relocating their stuff. On Moving Day, you will see bicycles pulling gigantic, self-made wagons, and compact cars with so much furniture bungee-corded to the roofs that homemade bumpers made of pool noodles must be employed.

The mess of Montreal’s Moving Day is enhanced by the fact that it is not primarily a city of homeowners, but one of relatively cheap rents. Close to 63% of the city’s 1.6 million people rent their homes, and about 10% of the population are said to be moving house in any given year, or about 160,000 people. It is estimated that 130,000 of these will do so on Moving Day, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Prasun Lala, a technology researcher at McGill University and the École de Technologie Supérieure, argues that Montreal’s well-stocked rental market is to blame for the puzzling persistence of Moving Day.

“A landlord is always looking for a year lease,” Lala says. “So if everyone is always moving at the same time, landlords have a better market and the chances of having months where an apartment is empty are less. If you find a place on an off month – say, January – most Montreal landlords will make you sign a lease that takes you to July, and then sign another one, beginning on 1 July.”

Like so many aspects of Quebecois culture, including well-loved songs, recipes and turns of phrase long forgotten in France, Moving Day has its roots in the province’s colonial past. In 17th- and 18th-century Quebec, there was a fixed date – 1 May – for many legal agreements. It took until the 1970s for the Quebec government to abolish this law for housing leases, and then it moved all existing leases to 1 July because too many kids were being pulled out of school to help their parents move. Since 1973, then, Moving Day has not been law, but rather tradition – a problematic idea that refuses to peter out.

It is compounded by the fact that many Montrealers move frequently – even yearly. “If you compare Montreal to a city like New York, where decent living space is such a commodity that a couple might stay together for the sake of the apartment they share, in Montreal, you have the opposite syndrome,” says Lala. “People are breaking up over and over again, because they found something more enticing down the block.”

Kristian Gravenor, a local journalist, historian and author of Montreal: 375 Tales of Eating, Drinking, Living and Loving, says Moving Day has a political dimension as well: “It’s impossible not to realise that 1 July is also Canada Day.”

In the rest of Canada, 1 July is popularly known as Canada’s birthday: a federal statutory holiday, formerly named Dominion Day, replete with fireworks, parades, street parties and a scary percentage of Canadians wearing red maple leaf-branded baseball caps with built-in beer can holders and umbilical drinking straws.

Gravenor says making Quebec’s Moving Day happen on Canada Day is nothing short of the francophone province – which has held referendums on separating from the rest of Canada not once, but twice – “punching [English] Canada in the eye”.

by Mireille Silcoff, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Ryan Remiorz/AP

Harlan Ellison (May, 1934 – June, 2018)

Harlan Ellison is dead. He was 375 years old. He died fighting alien space bears.

Harlan is dead. He exploded in his living room, in his favorite chair, apoplectic over the absolute garbage fire this world has become. He's dead, gone missing under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind many suspects. He went down arguing over the law of gravity with a small plane in which he was flying. Harlan took the contrary position. He won.

Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer and legendarily angry man, died Thursday. He exited peacefully (as far as such things go) at home and in his sleep. He was 84 years old.

Any one of those first lies seems to me more likely than the truth of the last one. Hard enough to believe that Ellison is gone — that something out there finally stilled that great and furious spirit and pried those pecking fingers from the keyboard of his Olympia typewriter (without, apparently, the aid of explosives). But a quiet farewell to this life that he loved so largely and this world that he excoriated so beautifully? If someone had asked me, I would've bet on the space bears.

Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art, won awards for it, and held those who'd doubted him early in a state of perpetual contempt.

Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive (until yesterday), and now is one of the best dead ones. He was a complete jerk, mostly unapologetically, and a purely American creation — short, loud, furious, outnumbered but never outmatched — who came up in Cleveland, went to LA and lived like some kind of darkside Forrest Gump; a man who, however improbably, however weirdly, inserted himself into history simply by dint of being out in it, brass knuckles in his pocket, and always looking for trouble.

In his youth, he claims to have been, among other things, "a tuna fisherman off the coast of Galveston, itinerant crop-picker down in New Orleans, hired gun for a wealthy neurotic, nitroglycerine truck driver in North Carolina, short-order cook, cab driver." He was the kid who ran off and joined the circus. Bought the circus. Burned the whole circus down one night just to see the pretty lights.

Stone fact: He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. He got into it with Frank Sinatra one night in Beverly Hills. Omar Sharif and Peter Falk were there. Ellison was shooting pool, and in walks Sinatra, who laid into Ellison because he didn't like the kid's boots.

And look, this is Sinatra in '65. Sinatra at the height of his power and glory. A Sinatra who could wreck anyone he felt like. But Ellison simply did not care. He went nose-to-nose with Sinatra, shouting, ready to scrap. Gay Talese was there, working on a story, so Ellison became a tiny part of what, among magazine geeks, stands as the single greatest magazine profile of all time: "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold." "Sinatra probably forgot about it at once," Talese wrote, "but Ellison will remember it all his life."

And that was absolutely true.

But that moment? It encapsulated Ellison. His luck, his deviltry, his style and violence. He lived like he had nothing to lose, and he wrote the same way. Twenty hours a day sometimes, hunched over a typewriter, just pounding. He published something like 1,800 stories in his life and some of them (not just one of them or two of them, but a lot of them) are among the best, most important things ever put down on paper.

Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art, won awards for it, and held those who'd doubted him early in a state of perpetual contempt. He wrote "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." But everyone knows that, right? He wrote "A Boy and His Dog," which became the movie of the same name and still stands as one of the darkest, most disturbing, most gorgeously weird examples of post-apocalyptica on the shelves.

His anthology, Dangerous Visions, gave weight and seriousness to the New Wave movement that revitalized sci-fi in the '70s. That kicked open the door for everyone who came after and the scene we have today. He wrote a flamethrower essay about hating Christmas and the script for "City on the Edge of Forever," the Star Trek episode that most nerds who lean in that direction will tell you was the best of the series. He wrote for comics, for videogames, for Hollywood, got fired from Disney on his first day for making jokes about Disney porn.

He was ... science fiction's Hemingway. Its Picasso. Talented and conflicted, both, and with a fire in him that sometimes came out as genius and sometimes as violence and no one ever knew which one they'd get.

"My work is foursquare for chaos," he once told Stephen King. "I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell."

And he followed those stories right out the door. Did he get in fights? He did. And bragged about every one of them. Filed lawsuits like they were greeting cards. He assaulted book people with frightening regularity, went to story meetings with a baseball bat back in the day. He groped the author Connie Willis on stage during a Hugo Award ceremony, for which some people never forgave him.

And there's nothing to say to normalize that. He wasn't just some curmudgeon or crank to wave off. I once called him "America's weird uncle," but that almost seems too gentle because he was more than that. He was an all-American a**hole, born and bred. Science fiction's Hemingway. Its Picasso. Talented and conflicted, both, and with a fire in him that sometimes came out as genius and sometimes as violence and no one ever knew which one they'd get.

by Jason Sheehan, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Barbara Alper/Getty Images
[ed. I read the Glass Teat in college and have been an Ellison fan ever since. See also: Controversial Author Harlan Ellison Remade Sci-Fi.]

Mom, in Touch

Every morning, just before heading out into the predawn light to her job as a dentist for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, my mom would hunch over the laminate countertop in our dimly lit kitchen and scribble a note for me. She would neatly place it in my lunch box, which she also packed each day. Later, when I would plop down on a long bench in the cafeteria at Huntsville’s Gibbs Elementary School, I would rummage through my smooshed turkey sandwich, Dole fruit cup, Ruffles potato chips, and single Hershey’s Kiss, and—without fail—find an extra napkin marked with her unkempt cursive.

Often she wrote to tell me, as she always did before I left the house, to be “gentle, sweet, and kind.” Other times, prompted by my teachers, she urged me to stay quiet in class, despite the fact that she adored my tendency to randomly break out in song. On Fridays she would remind me of our weekly ritual: an after-school trip to King’s Candies, downtown on the Huntsville square, where we celebrated the beginning of the weekend with a BLT and a bag of pastel-colored mints we plucked out of rows of giant glass candy jars. It didn’t much matter what the note said, though. It was my mom’s way of reminding me that she was always there.

Of course, other kids got occasional notes in their lunch boxes: encouragement for a math test, a simple “I love you” in flowery script, goofy renderings of smiley faces, the occasional lip-mark in a shade of red that could only have belonged in an East Texas cosmetics bag. But for my mother, who found order in quotidian rituals, the extra napkin wasn’t simply an afterthought; it was as much a part of my lunch box as the meal itself.

My mom had a particular attachment to handwritten notes. The joke among the blue-haired ladies at First Baptist Church was that if you ever did anything nice for my family, you’d better hurry home if you wanted to beat Cinde Johnston’s thank-you card. Years ago I found a note tucked into one of my dad’s college textbooks, A History of Soviet Russia. It was an apology written by Mom, then a newlywed, for losing her temper the night before.

So it wasn’t all that surprising when a letter arrived in our mailbox a few weeks after her funeral. It was addressed to me, a third-grader at the time. It was a note from Mom.

My first memory is of my mom. I was around four, spending the day in Houston with my paternal grandparents, who had traveled from Arlington to help my dad during one of Mom’s extended stays at MD Anderson Cancer Center. We made our way to the top of a multistory parking garage so I could glide along the empty expanse of concrete on my tricycle and roller skates. Granddad, who had been staring off into the distance as Mimi watched me turn circles, eventually called me over to the edge. Mimi followed, bracing herself against the concrete barrier as Granddad hoisted me onto his hip and pointed. It took several moments for me to spot a woman waving—her short, curly, dark-brown hair gone, completely shaved—behind one of the hundreds of shiny glass squares in front of me. It was the first time I’d seen my mother in weeks. I don’t know how long both of us lingered like that, waving to each other, but in my memory I can still hear my grandmother start to cry.

Many of my childhood memories are set in Houston, an hour and a half from home. I made regular trips there with my mother, and I looked forward to those car rides to the city. When we left, hours before the sun came up, it felt like we were somehow sneaking away from something, embarking on an adventure together, just Mom and me. She would stop and buy me doughnut holes at the first open bakery she spotted, and I would happily munch on them as I gazed at the stars still in the morning sky, wondering how the dark could persist if we had entered a new day.

She often scheduled her hospital appointments on weekends so we could visit the Houston Zoo or Six Flags AstroWorld (my mother, even during her weakest moments, remained a roller coaster enthusiast). And she would frequently go out of her way to drive by Rice University. She firmly insisted that one day I would be among the throngs of students strolling across its verdant campus, suggesting more practical majors than the French and journalism degrees I would eventually pursue.

Other memories of Mom—those outside the context of an endless succession of doctor’s visits and chemo treatments and breast scans—are harder to come by. They exist in short, blurry flashes, like an old home movie that fades and flickers over time. I remember sitting with her on the banks of the Comal River in New Braunfels when I was seven years old, watching inner tubes tumble down the Prince Solms Park chute, the waterslide carved into the side of the city’s dam. During our annual trips to the river, we typically rode the chute together, me in her lap, but that year the port in her chest, which had been implanted for chemo treatments, kept her from getting into the water. Instead, as children of family friends rode the rapids over and over, we were both content to watch from the sidelines. I buried my face in her neck, taking in the scent of sunscreen on her tanned skin, and asked if next year we’d be able to ride the chute again. Mom, her hair only just starting to sprout back, could only offer me, “Maybe, honey. We’ll have to see.”

Another memory: we’re wading through a creekbed on the outskirts of Huntsville, dappled sunlight filtering through the towering East Texas pines. As I bounded ahead, Mom, whose body was starting to slow, shouted after me, reminding me to be vigilant in watching for water moccasins. I recoiled in horror, rushing back and clinging to her waist, but she took my hand and said, “I’ll look out for them too.” We spent most of the day splashing and lounging along sandy stretches of the creek, my mind completely at ease, making whistles out of blades of grass.

I have managed to hold on to some other specifics. I remember her clear alto ringing out both in church (particularly prominent on her favorite hymn, “On Eagle’s Wings”) and in the car (she preferred the Beatles and the blues outside of the sanctuary). I remember her absurd hats lining a wall of our guest bedroom—my favorite was an electric-blue sequined beret. I can feel the comfort of her arms wrapped around me after getting my finger pricked by a cactus in the basin of Big Bend National Park. And I can still replicate our special whistle—starting high, then a quick slide down the scale before leaping back up to the original note (if she wanted my attention when I was small, it was as good as a dog whistle).

But these memories are difficult to preserve. The main truth that I hold about Mom, which will inevitably come up in every conversation I ever have about her, was that she was very sick. And then she died.

On May 12, 1999, a week after my ninth birthday and three days after Mother’s Day, my mom left this world at age 43. Breast cancer, which had slowly spread through her body for seven years, finally overtook her, and she died at home, in her bed, with my father next to her. Of all of the things I struggle to call to mind about her, it seems cruel that I remember that first morning without her so clearly. My dad lightly tousled my hair, the lights still off in my bedroom, a soft glow coming from the hallway. I blearily glanced at the clock—it was around seven in the morning—and then bolted upright, panicked that I was late for school. He grabbed me by the shoulders as if bracing me against something. His eyes were filled with tears for the first time I could ever recall. He leaned in and whispered, “She’s gone.”

When the letter from Mom arrived a few weeks later, it was postmarked from heaven. I imagined that after she’d written it, stuffed it into an envelope, and let it slip from high above, the letter had dodged fluffy cumulus clouds on its way to our home. It took me years to understand that my dad had placed it in the mailbox. (At least, I assume it was my dad. Nearly two decades later, he’s still not one to talk about these things.)

In the first days and weeks and months after Mom’s death, I did my best to maintain a shred of normalcy amid funeral planning, the parade of family members and friends, and navigating my first summer without her. The note from Mom, not unlike the ones she stuffed in my lunch box, helped. The need to impose order is something my mom would have understood instinctively. After a troubled childhood and a cancer-stricken adulthood, she regimented every possible aspect of her life to try to maintain some sense of control. Looking back, I realize it’s a coping mechanism that I developed as well.

In the letter, Mom assured me that she was no longer hurting, that her death had been a release. It’s precisely the thing that our friends and family had told themselves—and me—to make her death feel like less of an injustice. At the time, I readily accepted her explanation. My frustration came when I realized I had no way to write her back.

That was the only time a letter from her showed up in the mailbox, but I gradually began to stumble across handwritten notes elsewhere. In the year leading up to her death, Mom, ever the fastidious planner, had strategically hidden them all over the house. I found one that December, my first Christmas without her—the same year Dad got me a puppy, something Mom had always forbidden—hidden in a tiny mailbox ornament. (She must have known the holidays were going to be especially hard.) Over the years I found them secreted away in jewelry boxes and stashed among toys. There were many in my favorite books; Mom knew it was better to hide them there than in my neglected box of Barbies. When I was fifteen, while searching for childhood photos of myself for a project with my dance team, I found another tucked inside a photo album that had been sitting at the top of my closet for years. The notes came unexpectedly, and with them, electric shocks of realization: they often turned up when I wasn’t searching for anything at all. The few times I tore through my possessions in moments of desperation or longing, trying to apply logic to her hiding spots, they never surfaced.

Yet they appeared frequently enough that, as a child, I never lost faith that another note awaited me somewhere, that Mom had left one in yet another random nook I’d never think to search. After all, until she died, Mom wrote to me in some form every day, even if it was a command scrawled on a church bulletin to stop fidgeting as I sat on the pew next to her. The hidden notes felt like a natural extension of that communication.

But as I grew older, as more birthdays passed without her, I came to the realization that the notes eventually had to end. In my teenage years, I was gripped with anxiety each time I encountered one, fearing that it was the last vestige of our shared history. I’d grown increasingly conscious of the fact that my memories of Mom were slipping, like a foreign language fading in stagnation. I’d forgotten what her perfume smelled like. I could no longer map the constellation of moles on the back of her neck, and even the details of her face began to blur in my mind’s eye.

At the same time, I was morphing from an oval-faced kid into something resembling an adult, one who looked and behaved much like my dad (I still chuckle every time I see my parents’ wedding photos—my twenty-year-old father was, essentially, me in a tux). At every milestone I was becoming ever more distant from the girl that my mom knew. Those notes felt like our only remaining connection.

I discovered the last of them as I packed for graduate school, in 2013. I was headed to study journalism at the University of Missouri, a far cry from the law or medical degree she had hoped for. In my South Austin apartment—my first address after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin—I sorted through the parts of my life that I wanted boxed up and hauled, along with my cat, to Columbia, Missouri. I’m both hopelessly sentimental and a pack rat, so moving is a particularly painful process—every tchotchke was a reminder of family, friends, or the home state I was about to leave behind. As I turned out the contents of a plastic storage box filled with Christmas ornaments, a tiny scrap of paper floated to the floor, alongside the gaudy felt doves and nutcrackers made by my great-grandmother. It had been ripped from a small spiral memo pad and adorned with the soft ink of an already-failing pen. It was creased and folded many times over, but I recognized the handwriting instantly:

Hi!

by Abby Johnston, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Abby Johnston

Why Women’s Friendships Are So Complicated

When Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, was in grade school, one of her best friends abruptly stopped talking to her. Tannen and the friend, Susan, had done everything together: They had lunch together, made trips to the library together, did afterschool activities in their New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village together. Then, one day, Susan cut her off. They wouldn’t speak again until more than half a century later.

Tannen recounted this story as part of a talk Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which the Aspen Institute co-hosts with The Atlantic, about the sociology of friendships. Specifically, her lecture was about the gender differences that inform how people relate to and engage with others close to them, as based on her new book You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships.

As distressing as it was, Tannen’s estrangement from Susan—and, namely, the mysteriousness that surrounded it—wasn’t unusual. Women, Tannen has found in her research, are far less inclined than men to explain their reason for breaking up with a friend. Women are more likely to avoid confrontation; they don’t want to give their friend the opportunity to defend herself.

This is where women’s friendships—which because of their emotional intimacy can, according to Tannen, be far more gratifying than those between men—get especially complicated: Not knowing why a friend is ending her relationship with you, she said, “is really hurtful because knowing what’s going on is a big part of friendship.”

It’s a common belief that men are more competitive than women, but Tannen’s findings suggest that the reality is less clear-cut. Women are simply competitive in a way that’s less obvious—they’re competitive about connection. Among women, prized is the degree to which one is privy into the details of her friends’ lives.

This, Tannen says, makes them more prone to “gossip,” but it also means they can serve as immense, unmatched sources of support for someone who is going through something difficult and needs to vent or seek help. For example, say a woman gets into a series of disagreements with her roommate that culminate in an explosive falling-out; now she’s debating whether to break her lease and move out. If she were to confide about in a male friend, chances are he’d respond by giving his advice right off the bat; he might not know how to engage with her emotionally. If the woman were to vent to a female friend instead, though, that friend would likely request more context and ask how the issue makes her feel before jumping into her feedback. That willingness to take the time to hear her out first sends her what Tannen calls a “meta-message”—it tells her that her friend cares. One of Tannen’s interview subjects described this dynamic when reflecting on how she mourned the death of a close girlfriend: The hardest part of her dying is that “I can’t call her and tell her how terrible I feel about her dying.”

by Alia Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Sol De Zuasnabar Brebbia/Getty

Cy Twombly, Souvenir 1992

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