Is Bezos Holding Seattle Hostage? The Cost of Being Amazon's Home

However they see Amazon, for good or ill, residents of the fastest-growing city in the US largely agree on the price Seattle has paid to be the home of the megacorporation: surging rents, homelessness, traffic-clogged streets, overburdened public transport, an influx of young men in polo shirts and a creeping uniformity rubbing against the city’s counterculture.

But the issue of Jeff Bezos’s balls is far from settled. “Have you seen the Bezos balls?” asked Dave Christie, a jewellery maker at a waterfront market who makes no secret of his personal dislike for the man who founded and still runs Amazon. “No one wanted them. They’ve disfigured downtown. Giant balls say everything about the man. Bezos is holding Seattle hostage.”

It’s not strictly true to say everyone is against the three huge plant-forested glass spheres at what Amazon calls its “campus” in the heart of the city. The Bezos balls, as the conservatories are popularly known, are modelled on the greenhouses at London’s Kew Gardens, feature walkways above fig trees, ferns and rhododendrons, and provide hot-desking for Amazon workers looking for a break from the neighbouring office tower.

“They are absolutely gorgeous. There was nothing in that area 10 years ago,” said Jen Reed, selling jerky from another market stall. “I don’t hate Amazon the way that a lot of people hate them. Seattle has changed a lot. My rent’s gone from $500 to $1,000, but outside of that Amazon have been beneficial. It’s give and take, and anyway we invited them here.”

But even those sympathetic to the biggest retailer in the US are questioning whether there has been more take than give. Amazon has long been accused of stretching the city’s transit and education systems, and its highly paid workers have driven up prices of goods and housing.

The resentful murmur recently became a roar after Amazon reacted to the city’s latest tax proposal, which would have charged large businesses an annual $275 per employee, by resorting to what critics call blackmail. In mid-June, less than a month after unanimously passing the tax, Seattle’s council abandoned it in the face of threats from the corporation. The tension has sharpened the debate about whether the city can retain its identity as one of the most progressive in the country, or is destined to be just another tech hub.

Ironically, given Amazon’s much-publicised “city sweepstakes”, in which municipalities in North America are competing to land the company’s second headquarters, Seattle did not reach a Faustian pact with Amazon to lure it in the first place. The city gave no tax breaks and passed no anti-union laws, although the fact that Washington state law bars income tax was certainly appealing. The council did encourage the firm’s massive growth, however, with accommodations on building regulations that helped drive $4bn in construction.

Amazon has remade Seattle in many ways beyond new buildings. The city’s population has surged by about 40% since the company was founded, and nearly 20,000 people a year are moving there, often drawn by the company and its orbit. The tech industry has brought higher-paying jobs, with its average salary about $100,000. But that is twice as much as half the workers in the city earn, and the latter’s spending power is dropping sharply, creating a clear economic divide between some of the city’s population and the new arrivals.

The better-paid have driven up house prices by 70% in five years, and rents with them, as they suck up the limited housing stock. The lower-paid are being forced out of the city, into smaller accommodation or on to the streets. The Seattle area now has the highest homeless population in the country after New York and Los Angeles, with more than 11,000 people without a permanent home, many living in tent camps under bridges, in parks and in cemeteries.

“It’s incredibly difficult to find housing in Seattle now,” said Nicole Keenan-Lai, executive director of Puget Sound Sage, a Seattle thinktank focused on low-income and minority communities. “Two years ago a study came out that said 35% of Seattle’s homeless population has some college or a college degree.”

John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute said there is a a direct link between the surge in highly paid jobs and the numbers of people forced on to the street.

“There’s an incredible correlation between the increase in homelessness and the increase in the number of people who have incomes in excess of $250,000,” he said. “That has grown by almost 50% between 2011 and 2017. The population of homeless kids in the Seattle public schools has grown from 1,300 kids to 4,200.” (...)

This is not how large numbers of people in Seattle think things should work. They argue that Amazon should contribute to upgrading a transport system that’s struggling under the influx it created, and improving schools that provide the educated workforce the company benefits from.

“It is sort of a bipolar relationship because we do have a progressive city in some respects, we have a progressive city council in some respects, and then we have an environment that embraces individual wealth,” said Burbank.

“I think Amazon’s attitude has to do with the difference between social liberties and economic equality. Bezos was helpful in the campaign for same-sex marriage, but he also put $100,000 in opposition to the [initiative on introducing an] income tax that we ran in our state in 2010.

“So if it has to do with personal freedom, that’s OK. But if it has to do with actually trying to create a shared quality of life which entails taxation of the affluent or higher taxation, that’s not OK. And so this is a really good city for him because we have a lot of personal freedom and we have no taxation. Of course chickens are going to come home to roost at some point.”

Bezos’s company has arguably done much to erode the liberal and progressive culture of the city that first attracted him. Unlike other locally based giant corporations such as Microsoft, Starbucks and Boeing, Amazon planted itself in the heart of the city, and the influx of well-paid tech workers has changed the feel of Seattle. Keenan-Lai sees it in the erosion of the identity of her old neighbourhood on the city’s Capitol Hill and the disappearance of older, quirky restaurants, driven out by newer, more polished places.

“I can’t begrudge people moving to try to find opportunity,” she said. “But I do hear a lot of people say ‘I don’t want those programmers coming to Seattle’. It does create a lot of tension. Amazon represents both innovation and progress, and also dystopian fears for a lot of folks.”

Reed, at the market stall, added: “It’s definitely weird when you go into a dive bar that used to have bike gangs and now everyone’s in a polo shirt.”

by Chris McGreal, The Guardian | Read more:

Image:Ted S. Warren/AP

[ed. I don't like to drive near Seattle, let alone through it anymore.]

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Remains

My great-grandfather (born 1826) called our place Eagle Pond Farm because a great bald eagle lived on a hill called Eagle’s Nest and fished the pond every day for its dinner. Yet his youngest child, my grandmother Kate (born 1878), never saw the bird. The land and its creatures have altered. Thirty-five years after my grandmother’s death, I saw a bald eagle fly over the water.

When the 19th century filled New Hampshire with farms, 70 percent of the state was open land. Dairy farms of 40 or 60 acres lined the dirt roads, pastures for cattle behind them. When I am driven in the backcountry now, past dense forests of hardwood or soft, I see remnant stone walls that kept sheep and cattle to their allotted pastures. I see no horses, whose manure used to surface the roads. The farmers’ sons and daughters deserted granite and sandy soil to work in the mills or go west, where the earth was better for farming. New England has become the most forested part of the United States, 80 percent covered by trees.

In summers when I hayed with my grandfather, 1938–1945, fewer than half a million people lived in New Hampshire. Every quarter mile or so on Route 4 (paved 1928), a small farm—a few Holsteins with hayfields, sheep, chickens, one horse to pull or carry—struggled to survive through the labor of a farmer like my grandfather. Much land and no cash. Old backcountry farms had already begun their return to forest. When my grandfather and I walked in the hills, to call the cows or pick blueberries, we were wary to avoid cellar holes and abandoned wells. Sometimes we knew that a cellar hole was near because the dead farmwife’s hollyhocks gave us warning. At 12 I hayed for the first time on two acres of widow hay down the road. (The farmer had died; his widow wanted grass in her fields, not brush.) When my late wife, Jane Kenyon, and I returned to live in central New Hampshire in 1975, the widow’s hayfield looked like virgin forest to city sorts, softwood rising high and dense. In the southern part of the state, tract houses cover the earth of old farms, and New Hampshire has more than a million people now—mainly suburbanites who live an hour or less from Boston, refugees from Taxachusetts to a state without income tax.

Dylan Thomas wrote a villanelle addressed to his father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The rhyming line was “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” When I met Dylan, I was 23. I told him I loved that poem, and he told me he didn’t; he said he stole it from Yeats. (Yeats in old age liked to use the word “rage.”) Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about the poem. It showed affection and care for his father, but it asked him to do what he could not do. In real life, a student of mine at Michigan cherished her ferocious father. He was difficult, but she had always adored his explosiveness. When he softened in age, she couldn’t bear it. She spoke in something like anger, as if his weakness were willful.

When Jane and I moved here, we loved a great-aunt of mine—82, younger than I am now—whose temperament was cheerful and affectionate. She and Jane spent mornings together digging bitter dandelions to boil for dinner. My aunt tottered when she walked, and with difficulty climbed six concrete steps, without a railing, to reach her front door. She asked her grandson, a 30-year-old carpenter, to put up something she could hold onto. I heard him grumble, “She could climb them stairs if she was a mind to.”

Everyone who practices an art should love and live with another art. One learns about one’s own work by exposing oneself to a different passion. Mentioning a second art does not imply competence in practicing it. In eighth grade I flunked Art, which was lamentable because I sat beside Mary Beth Burgess in class, and I was sweet on her. Music is totally beyond me. My most notable musical moment took place on Ken Burns’s Baseball. He interviewed me about the game, about loving baseball, not about playing it. I had hung around Major League players, writing books and essays about them, and for Ken I came up with 20 anecdotes. Then he asked me to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” telling me that all his interviewees would sing it. Ken Burns’s charm could persuade a monkey to breed with a daffodil. At his urging I tried singing “Take me out …” and heard my pitch waver capriciously up and down. Tuneless, ashamed, I forgot the lyrics in my disgrace. The highlight of Ken’s Baseball series, I swear, is the image of my mouth hanging open wide and silent. It looked like brain damage. In editing, Ken paid special attention to this image by holding it for two or three beats. (...)

Old houses are full of holes. Creatures sneak into the living room. A summer ago, a garter snake entered and slithered across my living room. I stepped on its head and threw it outside. The same year, I discovered a visitor who became my favorite for persistence. A chipmunk took up residence and remained on the first floor for two or three months. Every day I would hear chirping, at first sounding like an electronic signal. Then the chipmunk came into sight, pausing with its paws tucked or folded before it, I suppose sustained by my cat’s kibble and water. As for my cat, she stared at it intently, fascinated. My housekeeper, Carole, bought a tiny Havahart trap and baited it with whatever we imagined was a chipmunk treat. Every morning the bait was gone, but so was the chipmunk. One morning the creature skittered from the kitchen into the toolshed, where the door showed a wide space at its bottom, and never appeared again. I felt abandoned. When autumn descended into winter, I walked into the cluttered dining room, never used in old age, and smelled something rotten in a box of unsorted snapshots. Under a layer of pictures I found the small body of our chipmunk. It had not escaped after all. With a paper towel I picked it up, rigid and almost weightless, and threw it from the door as far as I could. Next morning when I opened the door to pick up the newspaper, half of his small mummified corpse lay beside the door.

At this New Hampshire house, woodchucks are annoying and commonplace. Sixty years ago, my cousin Freeman grew vegetables by his shack up on New Canada Road, and his shotgun took care of many such thieves. Each summer he ate one. “If they eat my peas, I’ll eat them! ” Freeman would dress the woodchuck and carry it downhill to my grandmother’s wood stove. Kate held her nose as she baked it, and Freeman in his hut ate woodchuck.

Across the road from the house, my grandparents raised their year’s bounty of beans, peas, onions, potatoes, and corn. The farthest part of the garden was sweet corn, which phantom raccoons ate every night. Nearer the house were the peas and beans, and it was maddening to find pole beans devoured by woodchucks. When I was a boy, I’d sit on a concrete watering trough with my .22 Mossberg and wait for an hour to assassinate a predator. When Jane and I returned, we grew another garden. I was too impatient, nearly 50, to sit so long with my gun. I bought a Havahart trap. From the porch I could see when the trap was sprung. I walked across Route 4 with the same Mossberg and killed the woodchuck trembling in my Havahart. Once every summer I thought of what Freeman did. In the kitchen I picked up the Joy of Cooking, where Irma Rombauer gives a recipe for woodchuck. When I got to the part about looking for mites when you skinned it, I closed the book and buried the corpse.

My Havahart came from an Agway, which sold farm equipment after most farmers had left. Traps were not the only solution for woodchucks. If you found a likely hole you could try poison, but nothing worked for me except a long rifle slug from my .22. An Agway clerk told me of a customer who was especially enraged. He bought sticks of dynamite, fed them down a woodchuck hole, and blew up his whole garden. (...)

Gray squirrels dig in the driveway. Red squirrels are sneaky and rip into insulation on the second floor, poking pink fuzzy fragments through the cracks in the toolshed’s ceiling. Always there have been multitudes of mice, though not so many as when my grandfather kept a shed full of grain. Back then, a mother cat had three litters a year, and the kittens who ate mice followed my grandfather as he milked. In the tie-up he swirled a teat and sprayed Holstein milk into gaping mouths. Eventually each kitten strayed away to take a look at Route 4, and it was my chore to bury them deep enough so that something would not dig up a snack. Meanwhile the old mother dragged her teats on the barn floor and never approached the road. If mice in the house became a nuisance, my grandmother invited a cat inside for a predatory visit. Otherwise no mouse-catching cats or beloved cow-herding dogs were allowed inside. People lived in houses.

In 1975 Jane and I brought three cats with us from Michigan. In Ann Arbor, a town of a hundred thousand, Catto and Mia and Arabella roamed outside. New Hampshire’s Route 4 turned them into housecats. They didn’t seem to mind, maybe because the mouse supply was exemplary. Jane went barefoot most of the year as she walked around the house and wrote poems. She screamed a special small scream whenever her bare foot squished the ripped body of a mouse, placed in her way by a cat showing off.

by Donald Hall, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Ronald Wittek Picture Press Getty Images via
[ed. See also: Donald Hall’s Life Work]

Doom and Gloom: The Role of the Media in Public Disengagement on Climate Change

In July of 2008, as a national broadcast correspondent, I reported on environmental conditions in Newtok, a remote community of roughly 400 Yup’ik people in Northwest Alaska. Newtok was losing forty to a hundred feet of coastline a year to erosion, and sinking because of “permafrost” that is no longer permanent, the direct result of a warming climate. Flooding threatened homes, the school, and the only supply of clean water. I chose to report on Newtok because the community was actively working on a relocation plan after voting to move to higher, more stable ground. My story compared the actions of Newtok with Kivalina, an Inupiaq community of the same size situated on a barrier island further north. Kivalina faced similar conditions and had filed suit that same year against ExxonMobil Corp. for damages caused by climate change.

In the decade since my report aired on National Public Radio, news outlets from all over the world visited Newtok, Kivalina, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik and a dozen other Alaska Native communities forced to consider relocation because of the effects of climate change. The national stories all fit the same narrative pattern. With images of houses tipping precariously off cliffs, and phrases such as “impending doom,” and “cultural extinction,” the reporting paints a picture of tragedy and hopelessness, framing community members as victims to sell the urgency of mitigation to the public. As a CNN correspondent unabashedly reported, “a trip here is like a trip into a disturbing future.”

The repetition of this narrow narrative in national and international media for more than ten years has not resulted in a groundswell of support for mitigation or adaptation. Nor has it resulted in public policy at the state or federal level. It may have even undermined the ability of these coastal communities to help themselves. According to a 2017 study by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council, “Because government action on supporting community in general has been limited, and given the high and rising costs of relocation, it may very well be the case that people leave these communities individually and that some communities collapse before any concerted effort to relocate them en masse ever materializes. Unfortunately, governments have yet to act in many of these cases, thus delaying and increasing the magnitude of the costs and impacts. As these impacts accrue, people become less able to respond and adapt effectively.” As Enoch Adams of Kivalina sarcastically put it to me, “Well, how ‘bout I move into your house?

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than anywhere else on the planet. NOAA’s 2017 Arctic Report Card states: “The unprecedented rate and global reach of change disproportionally affect the people of northern communities, further pressing the need to prepare for and adapt to the new Arctic.

For Americans, the “Arctic” is Alaska, a state that is among the first to experience the severe effects of a warming climate, where snow and sea ice have been declining so rapidly that coastal villages have no buffer from fall and winter storms. This is compounded by melting permafrost that has accelerated erosion and foundation problems for structures and entire communities. While it’s important for the public to see and understand this threat, it is also important for the public to see and understand how people are responding.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, conducts research on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence environmental attitudes and behavior. He is best known for his research indicating “Six Americas,” categories of public opinion about climate change, on a scale from “dismissive” to “alarmed.” Leiserowitz says the media focuses disproportionately on impact, and Americans are tuning out. “I think most journalists come in, they’ve already got the story written, they say I want to do a story about climate victims, climate refugees, and so I’m going to go to a place like Kivalina which is a poster child for vulnerability to climate change and I’m coming to tell that story. I’m just going to get some actualities and some nice footage of houses falling into the ocean and then I’ll go home and file my story. I don’t think they spend the time with the people in those communities to understand the stresses they are facing and moreover, they’re not really interested in thinking about ‘how do we actually address these issues?’ That’s a different kind of a story, an increasingly important and more complex story that’s not just limited to people in Kivalina. You’ve got cities like Boston and Norfolk and Miami and New Orleans all having to directly confront these fundamental challenges because it’s at their front door now too."

The underlying premise of this paper is that repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness. The paper focuses on five years of national media coverage of climate change in the U.S. Arctic, specifically stories about communities facing coastal erosion and relocation, to argue for journalism that provides a more representative view of the challenges posed by a warming climate. Such reporting would also include responses and innovations, and increase pressure on policymakers to act, rather than offering excuses for inaction. (...)

While it might seem contradictory to provide information about mitigation or adaptation in a story about climate change impacts, it is standard procedure in the coverage of public health. What reporter covering a flu epidemic wouldn’t think to provide information in the same story about the availability of a vaccine or how the disease was being transmitted? Lauren Feldman, of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, says unlike public health, stories about climate change seldom discuss both threat and efficacy information, or impact and action. “I think there is a model in public health. You tell a story about a crisis or a disease and you tell people what they can do to avert that crisis. A very similar approach can and should be taken with climate change. Here is a threat and here are some steps that you as an individual can take, and here is what the government is doing or and here is what industry is doing.”

In a study of climate change coverage by U.S. network television news between 2005 and 2011, Feldman found that impact and efficacy were rarely discussed together in the same broadcast, and to the extent that efficacy was discussed at all, it was framed in terms of conflict—a fight between political parties, or the impossibility or downside of a potential remedy. Feldman says, “Our most consistent finding is that including the efficacy or solution information increases people’s sense of hope, and of all the emotions that we study, fear, anger, hope—hope is the most consistent driver of intentions to engage politically, support for climate mitigation policies, energy conservation behavior; so hope is really important.”

Feldman speculates journalists fail to tell the solution part of the story because it’s not as dramatic and it smacks of advocacy. “There isn’t convergence yet around solutions. Journalists see consensus around the science now, but if you pair the science with what an individual can do about it, it looks like you are making an argument for a specific action, so it’s left out. But our empirical research indicates that people will disengage if it’s left out, if all they get is the doom and gloom message.” (...)

Alaska in the Climate Change Narrative

Over the last few decades, national and international media outlets have spent considerable time and money sending correspondents to remote communities in Alaska to witness and report on the human impacts of climate change. These are places that are not connected by road, populated primarily by indigenous people who live, in large part, a subsistence lifestyle. As anthropologists Elizabeth Marino and Peter Shweitzer noted in 2016, “with the rise in public discourse about climate change, the overwhelming desire to document the phenomenon, and the identification of Arctic residents as some of the first “victims” of climate change, rural Alaska has been besieged with unprecedented numbers of journalists, photographers, scientists, and politicians over the last 25 years. All seem eager to engage in a discussion or, even better, to get a photo of people who have first-hand experience with climate change.”

Marino and Schweitzer, who themselves were documenting the impacts of climate change in the Alaskan community of Shishmaref, reported that “while we were making dinner with a Shishmaref resident, who had already been featured in a Canadian documentary about climate change and been quoted and photographed for People and Time magazines, two television crews, one from Japan and one from Colorado, simultaneously filmed a story on climate change in his kitchen.”

The shape of the narrative begins in the early stages of the reporting process, in the very questions that are posed: How does it feel to be a climate victim? What is it like to know that you may lose your home in the middle of the night? Are you afraid of losing your culture? Just how bad are the storms? How does it feel to know there is nothing you can do to stop it?

Marino and Schweitzer document that in Shishmaref, as is the case in other Inupiaq and Yup’ik communities, residents “are hesitant to hyperbolize conditions of flooding and environmental shift. Journalists, however, are quick to use catastrophic language.”

Stripped to his shirtsleeves on a desolate polar beach, the Inupiat Eskimo hunter gazes over his Arctic world. Thousands of years ago, hungry nomads chased caribou here across a now-lost land bridge from Siberia, just 100 miles away. Many scientists believe those nomads became the first Americans. Now their descendants are about to become global-warming refugees. Their village is about to be swallowed up by the sea. 

“We have no room left here,” Tony Weyiouanna, 43, said. “I have to think about my grandchildren.”

Sally Russell Cox, the sole community planner for the state of Alaska, has been working with the village of Newtok since 2006. She says she rolls her eyes when she gets yet another email from a media organization asking for contact information. “I just had two different reporters today who I haven’t gotten back to yet, wanting to go out to Newtok, but it’s like, ‘have you even looked and seen how many times this story has been told?’ And it’s always, always the same story. Look, the people of Newtok are not victims. They are not refugees. We know what the problem is and we have been moving forward. That’s the story.”

Romy Cadiente is the relocation coordinator for Newtok. After a lengthy webinar discussion in Washington D.C., during which he detailed the problems and progress made toward relocation, the host of Wilson Center NOW asked him how he felt about climate deniers, those who are uncertain about the science. Cadiente sidestepped the loaded question and replied patiently, “There’s just a lot of information that’s already published about us, there’s no room for talk anymore. There are thirty-one villages right now in Alaska experiencing the same problem. Let’s do, guys."

Voiceless Victims

To determine the dominant narrative of national media coverage of climate change in the Arctic, we conducted an analysis of stories containing the key terms “climate change” and “arctic” in prominent print, radio, and television news outlets over a five-year period, from March 2013 to March 2018. This analysis includes the years before, during, and after President Obama’s high-profile visit to Alaska in 2015 as the U.S. assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council.

The analysis establishes that most news stories during this time period focused on the science of climate change with no human subject. When these news stories did include people’s voices, they were overwhelmingly “experts,” including scientists, policymakers and advocates. Few included the voice of actual residents.

Of the minority subset of stories that had a human subject at the center of the narrative, it was that of an indigenous person or community. Of that subset, the individual or community was overwhelmingly framed as a victim facing environmental threat or loss. The dominant Arctic climate change story involving people focuses on coastal erosion and the prospect of relocation, a story that has been told repeatedly for more than a decade with little discussion of mitigation or adaptive responses.

The search revealed that the majority of stories are not about people at all, but rather about other aspects of the ecosystem, with sea ice, polar bears, walruses, and ocean temperatures chief among them. Of the 1,450 stories analyzed in our survey, ice is mentioned 4,559 times—an average of more than three times per story. Derivatives of “melting” are mentioned 1,178 times. Polar bears and walruses are mentioned nearly as often as Alaskans: Polar bears are mentioned 260 times and walruses are mentioned 206 times, while the word “Alaskans” comes up 289 times. Strikingly, the term “polar bears” is twice as frequent as the term “indigenous,” which only appears 118 times in the stories analyzed. Furthermore, when these indigenous communities are invoked, they rarely speak.

A selection of articles from The Washington Post illustrates the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the Post published an article about 35,000 walruses crowding the shores of Alaska, another science story about starving polar bears, a travel section article about going “nose-to-nose” with a polar bear, and a piece that appeared on page A10 with the headline, “Arctic melt has animals migrating to strange places.” While this article quotes academics and scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian, it does not mention or quote any Arctic residents. The travel section story about polar bears had no quotes from the local people in the Inupiaq village of Kaktovik, who were described as “reticent.”

A second trend is that, of the stories that do involve people, the majority are scientists, policymakers, and advocates. “Geologist(s),” “expert(s),” “scientist(s),” or “doctor(s)” are mentioned 3,681 times in the data set, an average of nearly twice per story. Whereas, “indigenous” and related terms such as “native” are mentioned 472 times in the data set, an average of 0.25 times per story. For every twelve stories The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ABC, or NBC produced on climate change in the Arctic in the last five years, only three mentioned the people who actually live there.

Of the stories that do involve local people or a community, most are about indigenous people facing difficulty, such as coastal erosion or inadequate funding for relocation associated with that erosion. Most of these stories frame local communities as endangered, threatened, facing losses, and incapable of responding. None of them use words such as “strong,” “capable,” or “empowered” to describe people. In fact, “strong” often describes the forces of climate change, as in “strong storms” or “strong resistance in Congress.”

Visually, a majority of the television and print stories use wide aerial shots, along with eroding beaches and cracks in the tundra, to convey the vulnerability of these communities, raising the unanswered question of why people would ever choose to live in such a place.

It is important to note that residents of Newtok and the other communities in Alaska that are most at risk live in their current locations because they were required to settle there. Yup’ik and Inupiaq people lived semi-nomadic lifestyles in the region for thousands of years. In the 1950s the government mandated that all native children receive formal education, even if it meant attending boarding schools hundreds of miles away from family. In the region, schools were built where barges could offload construction materials, on sand spits and barrier islands in river deltas prone to flooding and erosion. Because of the mandate, communities grew around the new schools. Elder Lucy Adams explains her family’s decision to paddle 70 miles to where she lives now: “In July, we take off in skin boats from Point Hope to Kivalina, because we were not in school, us children, and so the nearest one was going to be here, and that’s why we are here.” (...)

The substance of most of these stories is an emotional description of the problem. How the community is responding is an afterthought. If the story does include a discussion of responses, they are framed as obstacles—the inability of residents to get federal or state funding for relocation, the inadequacy of retaining walls that have been funded thus far, what might be lost if the community moves, the difficulty of responding locally to climate impacts. Most repeat the impossibly high relocation price tag calculated by government agencies:

“The Corps of Engineers estimates that moving would cost as much as $130 million, or more than $412,000 per resident.”

In the few more comprehensive reports about Newtok, the community that is the closest toward relocation, its new housing site, Mertarvik, is mentioned in the context of how little progress has been made, the few buildings that have been erected, and the difficulty of getting construction materials.

Finally, and notably, most reports end with a further message of impending doom, leaving the audience deep in the hole with little hope of climbing out...

by Elizabeth Arnold, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy | Read more:
Image:Diane Haeker and Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC)
[ed. See also (for example): Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map']

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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