In Conversation: Peter Dinklage

In a hotel room high above midtown Manhattan, Peter Dinklage is discussing, among other things, his present — that’d be HBO’s My Dinner With Hervé, in which he plays the late Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize. (Based on a real-life encounter between Villechaize and writer-director Sacha Gervasi, the TV-movie premieres on October 20.) And on the sidewalk down below, a group of fans is waiting, clutching mementos of his past. That is, they’re hoping the actor will sign their Game of Thrones memorabilia when he leaves. (The show, in which he plays Tyrion Lannister, wrapped shooting its final season this past summer.) “I take more of an issue with fame than Hervé did,” says the 49-year-old Dinklage, who’s aware of the ways in which Villechaize’s celebrity was a precursor to his own. “It’s a dance, but one you can never really control. As an actor, the best you can do is try to bring some honesty into your parts and hope people will follow.”

What did Hervé represent to you when you first became aware of him?

Well, Hervé and I had nothing in common but our height, but I remember thinking, He’s underused. I’d become aware of him around the same time everybody else did: I saw Fantasy Island. It was a wild show, like a combination of The Twilight Zone and The Love Boat. And I’d seen The Man With the Golden Gun. Later, when I became a teenager, my thinking about him got translated with a bit more anger, like he was being used a certain way because of his size. But the funny thing is, I think I minded that much more than Hervé did, because he seemed to have genuine joy in being on Fantasy Island. And who was I as a young person living in New Jersey to judge that? Hervé was complicated, and this was the first time I’d ever played someone who’d been a living, breathing person. It challenged my judgments. (...)

Were you aware as a teenager of the idea of acting as a way to own the attention you were getting? Or did you only realize that later?

I think probably I was aware of it. Not wanting unwanted attention but commanding it on my terms. I don’t know. It’s hard to trace back the psychology. What goes through a kid’s mind? But it’s about having your hand on the dial. You’re turning it up when you want and turning it down when you want. As an actor, you can do that. And for someone the least bit physically different, I guess you want to be in control of that dial. But as a kid, I just loved the creative joy of acting and, yes, the attention — on my terms.

I read the commencement speech that you gave at Bennington.

Oh, God.

It was lovely.

Most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I had never been asked to give a speech before.

There are parts in that speech where you talk about the lessons you took from your immediate postcollege life, when you were in New York and struggling to be an actor. It’s clear that you’ve figured out what those lean years mean for the larger story of your life. I’m curious if you have any sense, now that you’re done filming, of what the Game of Thrones years mean for you and your path?

Even though it’s only been a couple of months since we finished, I would like to think that I already have some capacity to look back on it. I’m glad the show happened in my life when it happened. I’m glad I wasn’t much younger or older. I’d done a lot of work before getting the show that I think informed what I wound up doing on Game of Thrones, and, hopefully, I still have a lot of work left in me, which will be informed by Game of Thrones. The show was a beautiful experience — doesn’t happen all the time. But it was such a long shoot, so it’s hard to separate the TV show from my life.

Tell me more about that.

It was my life, far away in Ireland. People think I’ll miss the TV show — yes, of course I’ll miss it, but I also lived in a foreign country for many years and developed deep roots. That’s a big part of me, and suddenly it’s just like, Yep, that’s over. Back home now. Wait, what? Really? Actors do these things and then we move on or go back home. You keep in touch — or lose touch — with the group of people you were very close with. It’s strange. I wonder how healthy that is. Probably it’s unhealthy.

How did you find being an American in Europe over the last few years? Did people keep asking you to explain our politics?

Oh, sure. They basically have the opinion of “what’s wrong with you people? What’s up with you people and the guns?” My experience is that people have nothing but love and respect for our country — a lot of them dream of coming here and working here, especially in the film community — but gun culture is a big question mark. The longer you stay away from America, the more it can look like the Wild West.

But as far as the arc of your career, you’re not in the part of it where you’re trying to establish yourself and —

That’s still happening.

Is it?

I think so. (...)

Do you see your path leading to a place where you don’t act anymore?

No, no. If somebody like Jonathan Glazer or David Fincher or Spike Jonze calls up, I’ll be there in a heartbeat. But for the most part, I’d like to help create from the beginning.

What you were saying before about the strangeness of saying good-bye to the people with whom you’ve worked so intensely — when you were wrapping on Game of Thrones, how emotionally conscious were you of the experience coming to an end?

On a personal level? With the character?

Both. How did you say good-bye?

It’s always anticlimactic for the character’s last day. Nothing is shot chronologically, so you don’t get some big mountaintop scene or anything. It’s just, “That’s a wrap on Peter Dinklage.” But as anticlimactic as it was, my last day was also beautifully bittersweet. A lot of people whom I love were on set that day. Even if they weren’t working, they came to set, which was beautiful. I tried to do the same thing when other [Game of Thrones] actors were wrapping out. If it was their day, you would go to set to say good-bye. It was really hard. I won’t say their name or their character’s name, but one of the young people on the show wrapped this past season and everybody was a wreck. This person had grown up on the show, you know? They were a child and now they were an adult. And then they’re done. It’s like we were witnessing this person saying good-bye to their childhood. I know Game of Thrones is just a TV show, la-di-da, but it was our life.

What about Tyrion? Was it hard to say good-bye to the character?

I don’t know if I’m [a] Method [actor] in that way. I was a little Method with Hervé — staying in that voice. But you can’t really be Method for nine seasons of a TV show. You’d go nuts. And there’s a difference between being Method and indulgent. You can smell that ego thing a mile away. It’s good to stay in the zone, but if it’s about showing off your peacock feathers, I’m not buying it. Acting is a trick. I wouldn’t say it’s difficult. Elements of it are. For me, the fame thing is. But the work itself — we’re not digging ditches for a living. I think acting is one of the professions where everybody who’s doing it wants to be doing it. That’s not true for every job.

I know this is a cliché, but if you can find consistent enjoyment in your work, you’ve solved one of the keys to life.

Yeah, that reminds me of the Jim Jarmusch film, Night on Earth. Gena Rowlands plays this high-powered Hollywood executive, and Winona Ryder plays her cab driver from the airport. At the end, she offers Winona Ryder the lead in her movie, and Winona’s character is like, “No, I’m not interested.” “What? Everybody wants to be a famous actress.” “I like being a cab driver.” I think about that. How beautiful is that?

by David Marchese, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty

Paul Allen (Jan., 1953 - Oct., 2018)

‘A giant in Washington history’: Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of Seahawks, dead at 65

[ed. Breaking news. See also: Microsoft's Odd Couple and Dan Savage's Open Letter to Paul Allen on Lidding I-5, Righting a Wrong, and Leaving a Legacy. Wikipedia: Paul Allen.]

Mold Eats World

Long before the storm came, and floodwaters barged into her home, Joan Bennett remembers how she would go into the woods and find beautiful mushrooms. She dug them up, and, with her mother’s permission, planted the fungi in her family’s basement. It was the late 1950s, not long after her family moved from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Westchester County, just north of New York City, and Bennett would have died if any of her friends from high school knew what she was doing. Through trial and error, Bennett learned that if you watered fungi like any old flowering plant, the organisms turned to slime and died. These clandestine attempts at cultivating mushrooms, trying to find the right conditions to make them flourish, were some of the earliest experiments she conducted—the prescientific days, she says, just messing around. In retrospect, it was one of her first steps on a lifelong path that would weave together a love of science and a love of fungi.

In 1963, while she was applying to graduate schools after getting a degree in biology from New Jersey’s Upsala College, Bennett received a course catalog from the University of Chicago. Flipping through the catalog to see what courses were offered by the botany department, the words “fungal genetics” caught her eye. She decided she wanted to be a fungal geneticist, a decision that put her at odds with the prevailing values of both molecular biology and womanhood at the time. Instead of finding a husband and having kids and doing, as she says, “whatever it was that women were supposed to do back in the 1950s,” or focusing on E. coli or phage—two trendy organisms in that field at the time—she became a scientist who studied mold.

Mold is a filamentous form of fungi that often resembles bruise-dark discolorations or cottony tufts of blue or white threads. There is, as the Centers for Disease Control notes, “always a little mold everywhere”—the types number in the hundreds of thousands, creating the flavor of blue cheese or appearing on shower curtains and loaves of bread. Over the past few years, though, the American public has increasingly seen mold as a toxic presence in their homes.

In that context, many people view mold as unsightly, unhealthy, potentially lethal. Mold is scary.

This is not a totally new reputation for mold, and it can be malevolent: certain species produce aflatoxins that can contaminate foods with some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to science. But for most of Bennett’s life, she has seen mold as a positive force. She recognizes its marvelous creations: cheese, soy sauce, rice wine, and all sorts of drugs, ranging from cholesterol-lowering statins to penicillin, the landmark antibiotic. Her relationship with it took a turn after Bennett, like so many of us, saw it blanket almost every surface inside her house, clinging to curtains and carpets, lurking inside and around walls and floors and everything in between. What Bennett saw, and experienced, changed the trajectory of her life. Thanks to our changing climate, we almost certainly will be living with more mold, in one way or another, in the future. “There’s so much more flooding than there used to be,” says Bennett, who is now 76 and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “Rivers that haven’t flooded for 100 years are flooding every 5 years. The sea level is rising and it’s getting warmer.”

It’s an overcast Tuesday in September, with the humidity nearing 100 percent and a category 4 hurricane called Florence barreling toward the Southeast United States. All signs point toward damp, moisture-laden conditions, ideal for incubating molds. Most people avoid both molds and the ecological crevices that they inhabit—underneath floorboards, below kitchen sinks, in basements and crawlspaces. But Bill Sothern seeks them out. Sothern, 72, is a former Army medic turned certified industrial hygienist, a New York-based professional who assesses the health and safety of homes and workplaces. Today he and I are speeding down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in a gold Volvo packed with metal canisters, vacuum pumps, and Air-O-Cell sampling cassettes. We’re heading to his first inspection site of the afternoon: an apartment occupied by a 35-year-old woman who claims she’s getting sick on account of sharing her living quarters with mold. “The landlord is going to be there,” Sothern warned me. “He is our adversary.”

Sothern runs Microecologies, a firm based in East Harlem that conducts indoor air-quality investigations. All day long, his cell phone rings as he fields calls from people in and around New York City asking him to verify their concerns about mold contamination. The vast majority of the time, Sothern says, he and his staff of ten find their clients’ health concerns about mold to be well-founded. Visible or measurable amounts of mold in damp, indoor environments have been associated with an increased risk of pulmonary disorders such as asthma, according to the World Health Organization. Beyond that, the field is dogged by controversy at every turn. Among mainstream scientists and industrial hygienists, the consensus is that although some molds produce the unhealthy substances known as mycotoxins, they are not ordinarily found in high enough concentrations to cause health problems in humans.

“The dose that would be required to provoke a toxic effect in humans would be so high that it would be unreasonable,” Sothern explains. “That’s where the scientific mainstream is. You go outside that and you make a lot of people skeptical about you.” The process of getting rid of mold can attract opportunists, but he sees himself as one of the good guys—someone who acknowledges legitimate fears and collects evidence. That evidence, Sothern admits, is mostly anecdotal. Of the connection between health outcomes and infestations of Stachybotrys, which is commonly known as toxic black mold, he says, “There’s just no data.”

by Peter Andrey Smith, Topic | Read more:
Image: Christopher Gregory

[ed. Its effects might be mostly anecdotal but try selling a house with mold and you will definitely experience major headaches.]

Building a Telecaster

via: YouTube

via:

Ibanez John Petrucci JPM100 P2
via

More Evidence That All Weed Is the Same

Walk into any cannabis dispensary in the US and you’ll be presented with dizzying options for getting stoned. When it comes to bud, you can select from strains like “Green Crack,” “Alaskan Thunderfuck,” or “Granddaddy Purp.” Next to these names on the menu will likely be some stats about the concentration of THC and CBD, the two main psychoactive chemicals in cannabis. These numbers offer a sense of standardization and confidence in how that product will affect you.

There’s just one problem: It’s probably bullshit.

As detailed by researchers from the University of British Columbia in a paper recently published in Scientific Reports, many strains of cannabis have almost identical levels of THC and CBD in them. Susan Murch, a chemist at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues Elizabeth Mudge and Paula Brown examined 33 cannabis stains from five different licensed growers in British Columbia. The researchers then did a chemical analysis of these strains to see the concentrations of 13 known cannabinoids, including THC and CBD.

“The main THC and CBD composition was not different among 24 of the 33 strains we tested,” Murch told me in an email. “However all of the strains have different names from different producers, so for 73 percent of strains, the name does not really mean that they are different based only on the THC and CBD.”

Murch told me that many of the strains she and her colleagues studied were marketed with claims of "quite different" levels of CBD and THC. She said the disparity between the percentage of cannabinoids used for marketing and the actual level of cannabinoids can result from a number of factors, such as the analytical method used, variation across the plant, degradation from storage, or incorrect packaging. (...)

Historically, underground breeders with limited access to different types of cannabis plants would breed them together to produce new strains with higher CBD or THC content. Yet due to a lack of formal tracking of this process, many plants with similar genomes ended up being bred, which led to a loss of genetic diversity among the cannabis plants. According to the researchers, this is a likely reason why nearly three-quarters of the strains they analyzed had identical levels of THC and CBD.

“People have had informal breeding programs for a long time,” Murch said in a statement. “In a structured program we would keep track of the lineage, such as where the parent plants came from and their characteristics. With unstructured breeding, which is the current norm, particular plants were picked for some characteristic and then given a new name.”

In other words, the lack of information about the origin and chemical composition of most cannabis strains made it difficult to tell whether two strains with different names were really all that different, chemically speaking. Cannabis retailers market bud based on the total amounts of THC and CBD in the flower based on the assumption that the complete chemical composition of the plant can be derived from these values. As the researchers noted in their report, however, “anecdotal evidence suggests that strains with similar THC/CBD content have different effects on human physiology.”

In other words, there’s seems to be far more chemical factors that determine the nature of a high other than CBD and THC. In fact, as the researchers discovered, most strains have nearly identical levels of CBD and THC, so the differences in effects across strains can mostly be attributed to other cannabinoids.

“What we are more interested in is the unknown CBD metabolites that distinguish some of the strains,” Murch added. “We are working to figure out what these unknowns might be.”

by Daniel Oberhaus, Motherboard | Read more:
Image:Daniel Oberhaus/Motherboard

A gecko took charge of a hospital phone in Hawaii and made "a bazillion" calls with "his tiny gecko feet."
@Claire_Simeone/Twitter

via: TMN

The War on Drugs

If the U.S. Doesn’t Control Corporate Power, China Will

Last week, Bloomberg broke the news of a hack by the Chinese military of critical hardware assembled by an American company in China, affecting Apple, Amazon, and the U.S. Defense Department. While there is controversy over the story, no one doubts two key facts. Chinese hacking of Western corporations and governments is systemic, and China has a virtual monopoly over the manufacture of high-technology products, which it uses to its own advantage.

The same day as Bloomberg published the expose, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech discussing China. Espionage, he said, was just one of a range of tricks China uses. Others include tariffs, forced technology transfers, arm-twisting of corporate leaders to lobby the U.S. government, and censorship of Hollywood through enticing Western media companies with promises of reaching Chinese audiences.

Pence was, in part, justifying President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods. But he went beyond tariffs, outlining a strategy that includes investment limits, military patrols, and requests to companies. Pence called on Google to stop developing its search and tracking technology for the Chinese market. He even argued that U.S. corporate focus on the short term, “the next quarter,” gave an advantage to China. In other words, a deeply conservative Pence sounded like liberal stalwart Sen. Elizabeth Warren in arguing the Chinese are using America’s own short-term-oriented financial system against it. Companies, he was saying, have moral obligation above shareholder value.

That’s a strange argument to come from a Republican vice president. But it points to how China is exploiting the laissez-faire model of industrial organization Washington has enabled for decades.

As the consensus in D.C. shifts toward taking on an increasingly aggressive China, ideas about how corporations relate to the state will also have to change—or else undermine their new stated national framework.

Straightforwardly illegal hacking by China is common (although it’s hardly the only country to do it). For instance, in 2016, security researchers found that data on about 700 million Android phones and other devices programmed with Chinese firmware was being surreptitiously sent to China. Recently, Chinese state-backed chipmakers stole designs from Micron and Samsung. The Chinese have taken all kinds of intellectual property including information on smartphone-testing robots, Monsanto corn seeds, and the formula for the white pigment that goes into Oreo stuffing.

But just as common as and perhaps even more important than hacking are legal or quasi-legal methods. Chinese companies are, according to one Defense Department report, “flooding Silicon Valley with cash” to simply acquire secrets. Two years before hacking Micron, the Chinese tried to buy it. This year, Chinese automaker Geely secretly bought 10 percent of German carmaking giant Daimler, using shell companies to avoid detection, with U.S.-based Morgan Stanley doing the banking work for the deal.

Chinese state-backed companies have access to a massive legal budget, which affords them the ability to use U.S. courts to destroy American business leaders who challenge unfair deals. As a counterterrorism official pointed out in April, “When you go to a board of directors or a CEO and say, “Hey, I know you have two bids, you have Cisco or Oracle, and then you have the Chinese company which is 40 percent cheaper,’ it’s hard to explain to them and hard for them to explain to their constituents that they’re going to pay 40 percent more for a U.S.-based company because it doesn’t threaten national security.”

This exploitation of America’s corporate weaknesses is new. As Barry Lynn relates in his book Cornered, for much of the 20th century, the United States simply did not outsource production to its enemies or geopolitical competitors such as China or the Soviet Union, even if it was profitable to do so. Washington even made sure that friends couldn’t gain too much power over its political economy, ensuring that, say, Japanese allies did not gain a monopoly over flash memory.

But starting in the 1980s, U.S. lawmakers weakened the essential controls the state put on the financial system. This was not just led by anti-tax advocates like Grover Norquist and anti-government politicians like President Ronald Reagan, but also by a set of neoliberals in the Democratic Party led by President Bill Clinton, who used the theories of economist Lester Thurow to declare the era of big government over. Clinton promoted a vision of a globalized world with no nation-states impeding the free flow of capital and goods. This lack of assertive public power allowed private power to take its place, as corporations merged and organized trading flows without having to worry about the demands of public institutions.

This trade revolution built on top of an earlier intellectual revolution, one put forward by economists Milton Friedman and Michael Jensen, that shifted the basis of the American corporation to shareholder value as the prime goal of industrial organization. By focusing solely on shareholder value, investment bankers, economists, and a new breed of CEOs changed the commitment of corporations to environmental rights, workers, and local communities. They also made it so that U.S. companies felt no obligation to their own country’s national security goals. General Electric Co. Chairman Jack Welch reflected these new values in 1998 when he said, “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” More recently, Google has backed away from working with the U.S. military, but it is happy to work with the Chinese government on censorship and tracking software for China’s citizens.

This lack of corporate commitment to national security didn’t seem like that big of a problem in the late 1990s, when U.S. businesses seemed impossible to dislodge. China was, after all, a poor country. But the Chinese, as Americans did in the 19th century, used this cost advantage to begin drawing large amounts of Western investment and know-how. Western companies, pressed by Wall Street, made China the factory of the world, especially for high-tech products. The strategy seemed to work for both countries, at least at first. Corporate profits boomed. China became a middle-income country, with exports of over a hundred billion dollars of computers and electronics to the U.S. annually. As investment flowed, the American state weakened, and Wall Street and the Chinese state strengthened.

Soon, however, problems appeared in this the frictionless commercial utopia. China acquired a virtual monopoly in the supply chain of high-tech goods and became much more powerful politically and financially. Toward the end of the 2000s, the Chinese government shifted its strategy from seeking investment from Western companies to displacing them. After the 2008 financial crisis undermined Western credibility, the Chinese began wielding power over Western corporations, which by now had to do business in the country. (...)

So Trump’s new China strategy of ending reliance on the Chinese manufacturing base couldn’t come soon enough. Trump, Pence announced, was finally standing up to China, with tariffs, more military spending, and freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea. The message is clear: Western companies should begin moving supply chains out of China.

While the speech was timed perfectly with revelations of the hack, it’s hard not to see a basic disjunction in the way the U.S. government weakly relates to Western corporations, which in turn prioritize short-term thinking that advantages China. After all, much of what Pence called out was simply what companies do voluntarily. Technology transfers are done for profit, and selling into China is lucrative. General Motors sells more cars in China than in the United States. China is now the second-largest market for the iPhone. Even though the country bans Facebook, Chinese ad buyers, including the government, are collectively the largest spenders of advertising on Facebook in Asia, adding $5 billion to the company’s bottom line.

And Trump, with his aggressive anti-China rhetoric and tariffs, hasn’t really changed corporate behavior. Nor have open threats by the Chinese that they will cut off key supply chain inputs, or even threaten specific companies, including and especially one of the crown jewels of the globalized economy, Apple. According to Apple’s 2017 annual report to investors, Apple has increased its amount of long-lived production assets in China by nearly 30 percent since Trump came into office. Broadly, the trade deficit with China under Trump is going up, not down.

The only way to organize a system resilient to Chinese intrusions is to make it clear that the era of big government is back, and that Wall Street is no longer able to force companies to think short-term. If China is using U.S. corporations to lobby and control the American state, then weakening the ability of corporations to lobby is the only answer. If China is using American divisiveness against Americans, then the only answer is to make America less divided. The U.S. government, not short-term-focused financiers, has to be the boss. The era of big government must come back.

by Matt Stoller, Foreign Policy |  Read more:

Image: In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images

So You Want to Start a New Restaurant

Take this open letter as my formal apology.

If it were a video, it would start with me, hands clasped, eyes down, in a display of humility and repentance. Throw in the fiery backdrop of a Bible Belt billboard, because sometimes it does seem like the End is Coming. This industry I’ve found myself in is imbued daily with both rapture and peril.

Let me introduce myself: I am a recovering San Francisco–based food writer who entered the world of restaurants in 2010 by way of marriage to my restaurateur husband. (Yes, I met him while on assignment.) Since then, despite having good sense, we have opened five outposts of Tacolicious in the Bay Area, arguably the toughest market in the country.

During my 15 years as a magazine editor for San Francisco magazine, I wrote trend pieces and annually selected the city’s Best New Restaurants. I was never a star-slinging restaurant critic per se. But there’s no denying the power of any kind of press—demonstrated by the fact that people pony up $5,000 a month to keep a publicist on retainer. It can make a writer a little delusional. After 20 years of covering what seemed like every nook and cranny of the restaurant industry, I passed judgment blithely. I thought I knew what I was talking about.

If this were a video, there would now be a dramatic pause. Then I would laugh hysterically. It turns out that there are some things you just can’t know until a restaurant is your livelihood and your life. Here are my top ten lessons learned.

1. Openings are like birth. Your taco/omakase/Macanese/farm-to-table fantasy, which started as a twinkle in your eye, begins with drumming up names and envisioning how you’re going to dress it up and quickly dissolves into a gestation period of permits and health inspections. On the heels of writing a business plan and wining and dining investors to raise (beg) for the million-plus to open a restaurant, you juggle architects, contractors, electricians, plumbers, and crazy landlords. Things for which you’ve had no training. In San Francisco you shell out around $300,000 for a liquor license and negotiate with NIMBYs who fight you as if you’re building a nuclear power plant instead of a restaurant patio. It’s like having a baby: You carry that thing for nine months and then defy all pain thresholds to push it out into the public. Hopefully on the day its born you have an epidural or a few shots of tequila.

2. Practicing is not an option. Most restaurants don’t have enough money to do mock service for more than a few nights. Which means on opening day, your staff—from cooks to servers—are just getting to know the recipes, the table numbers, each other’s names. They’re actors performing a play when they’ve just received the script. Chaos is inevitable. It’s also inevitable that Yelpers/critics/bloggers/my former self are all in a mad dash to report on the latest opening. They will come in to dine and feel it is their duty to their fellow foodie citizens to write something that will live forever on the internet about the fact that your two-week-old baby restaurant was misbehaving and screaming its head off. One star.

3. Stars matter. Particularly on Yelp. Studies show that sales can increase by 5-9 percent with an additional star. You start to regard Yelp like a horror show, hands over the eyes, never knowing where a killer is lurking. Also, influencers—those impossibly dewy, calorie-impervious smiling girls wrapping their mouths around a triple doughnut burger—with their 2 million Instagram followers matter too. They come with promises that their emoji-blinking boomarang of your margarita will garner your restaurant more followers and more fame. Every other day you will get an email from one asking to “collaborate” with you. For free food and a sum of money.

4. Making great food isn’t the half of it. If your favorite art-project of a restaurant closes, be sad but don’t be surprised. Unless it’s funded by a billionaire, a restaurant’s longevity has little to do with ’grammable cement tiles, gold die-cut pasta, or a live-fire menu. Nor can it be measured by a line out the door or a feature in a glossy food mag. It’s a business equation. Restaurants run on wafer-thin profit margins—the national average is 3 to 5 percent—and the key to keeping the doors open means maintaining an iron grip on overhead and costs. Monitoring staffing, taking a monthly inventory of your bar, budgeting for equipment repairs, and negotiating the price of your janitorial crew—all things invisible to the diner—are the kinds of things that keep the bills paid. It’s not sexy stuff, which is why it’s not part of the restaurant-dream narrative; ratings would not go up if Top Chef contestants were challenged to find the best deal on toilet paper.

5. A lot is out of your control. Particularly the weather, which you monitor obsessively. Restaurant owners pray for sun because people go out for margaritas when it’s 80 degrees. When it’s cold and rainy, they stay home and make pot roast. And since 28 percent of our seating is on our patios, the weather can determine a night’s profits. On a sunny day, or during the horrendous 2016 drought, diners flock to the outdoor tables. In contrast, this August was one of the foggiest in San Francisco’s history and our sales dipped by 20 percent. Other outside factors that impact our business: national holidays, Warriors games, and Burning Man.

6. A labor shortage + millennials = the perfect storm. Restaurants across the nation are experiencing a labor crisis, making retention a challenge. In San Francisco a server or cook can quit one job and get another in a hot second. Add to this the fact that 20-somethings, who make up a lot of our workforce, are part of a generation that wants “work-life balance.” It doesn’t seem to matter that servers at our restaurants can make $15 an hour plus $200 a night in tips. Last minute, dog-ate-my-homework call-outs are typical and result in operational chaos. And if Iyengar calls a server to go do yoga instructor training at an ashram in India, he knows he can have his job back the minute the soul searching is done because the labor pool is a mirage and we are thirsty.

7. Delivery is a blessing and a curse. According to a National Restaurant Association study, by 2020, 70 percent of customers will be ordering food off of restaurant premises. The likes of Caviar and DoorDash can be a financial boon despite the fact that their service charges to restaurants start at 30 percent. They can also cause drama: An unwitting diner walks in the door to a quiet dining room, which gives the impression we’re twiddling our thumbs in back. In truth, the kitchen staff is madly assembling a 100-taco delivery, the order received 20 minutes earlier. Meanwhile, a pissed-off Caviar driver is standing in the doorway, his car is double-parked in our pissed-off neighbor’s driveway. The diner’s salad takes forever, and now he’s pissed off enough to go home and post something poetic on Yelp like “Service so slow and inattentive I entered as a young man and left as a weathered, sad old soul.” Two stars. (Yes, this is a real quote.)

by Sara Deseran, Bon Appetit |  Read more:

Image: Aubrie Pick

What the Gut Knows

The proximity of the anus to the genitals, Freud tells us, is the source of much if not all human neurosis. It’s fashionable to distance oneself from Freud these days, to say “I wouldn’t go that far” and “of course Freud was sex-obsessed”. But I would go that far, and most humans are sex-obsessed.

The gut, frankly, is a problem. What it does is not only mysterious and puzzling – as are all our internal organs – but also difficult for us to bear. And when we start to think about the symbolism of the gut, we might understand what Freud meant.

At one end of the gut is the mouth – a delightful place of many different kinds of joy. At the other end, there’s the anus. It produces farts, which stink of decay and poison. It makes poo, also sometimes foul-smelling, bearing disease, a sticky contaminant. And it comes out of us! And not just out of our own bodies, but out of a hole right next to the parts of the body that can give us great pleasure, whose development indicates adulthood, which can produce new life. It’s like a terrible joke played by human biology, to drag us down from the heights to the depths, to remind us that whatever ecstasy we find, we’re also, essentially and at all times, full of shit. This is why poo is so funny. This is why we have to laugh at it. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry.

For Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, the anus and the shit it produces are more than just a joke – they’re a terror. They represent the corruption of the flesh, the fate that awaits us all. “What am I?” a child might ask herself. “I am a thing which takes in beautiful, glowing, healthy, delicious, colourful, exciting food. And then what happens? I turn it into shit.” This is the inevitability of decay writ small, writ daily. It is the inevitability of death. “The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product,” says Becker, “represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.” (...)

We are worried about food, about digestion, about our stomachs. The intestine is the seat of our anxiety. And our anxieties are meaningful. To be anxious about something is to be obsessed with it. If you have constant anxious thoughts about a topic it’s because, on some level, you are enjoying thinking about it. What is it about food and eating that gives such satisfaction in contemplation? I suspect that it has something to do with Thanatos. It’s been remarked before that the Victorians were obsessed with death, but couldn’t bear to talk about sex, and we are the other way around. We talk about food and about youth and about sex. The starts of things. We live in those beginnings, as if it could be the first day of spring forever.

If we keep on worrying about food – am I eating enough, or too much, is it the right sort? – we can just flush our shit away in a clean tide of water and never think about it, or what it represents, again. If we focus on youth, we can send our elderly to nursing homes and not have to look at them or think about them. If we’re always talking about sex, the beginning of everything, there won’t be room for death: the end of it all. Is it possible, therefore, to be delighted by shit? And might we do better as a society and as individuals if we worked out how? I suspect it is, and I suspect that a full appreciation of the workings of our own horrifying poo machine, the intestine, could lead us in good directions in this enterprise.

Of course, shit can be delightful, as anyone who’s ever suffered from constipation will affirm. My brother and his wife recently had a baby girl, making me an aunt for the first time. They’ve been so thrilled, we’ve all been thrilled, when she’s done a long and healthy poo. Pooing means everything’s working right. Inflow, outflow. Pooing means: this is how it’s supposed to go. Death, at least when it comes at the end of a long and useful life, means the same thing. It might be that nature knows what it’s doing; it might be that the process of decay, utterly out of our hands, has some beauty to it.

Contemplating the wonderful things that “nature” knows, and that we have no idea about, might be a good point to introduce the neurons in your stomach and the nature of the mass of bacteria living in your gut. Did you know that you have brain cells in your stomach? They cover the walls of your gut. You have as many neurons in your digestive tract as a cat has in its head. Think of all the things a cat knows: what’s nice and what’s nasty, who to trust and who to steer clear of, where good food comes from and how to hunt it down. That’s the kind of thing your stomach might know. No wonder we talk about a “gut instinct”.

The neurons in the gut are connected directly to the brain via the vagus nerve, which enters your brain right next to the parts that deal with emotions. The stomach can seem to know things that we don’t know ourselves. Experiments have been done in which people are fed food through a tube – they cannot taste or smell or chew it, but the entry of their favourite foods into their stomachs makes them predictably happier than some equally nutritious slurry. Your stomach knows things. You get butterflies in your stomach because those neurons down there have some idea about what’s going on.

There are parts of ourselves which we cannot access. In her memoir The Shaking Woman, Siri Hustvedt writes of a sense of duality she experiences when in the grip of a shaking fit. She has “a powerful sense of an ‘I’ and an uncontrollable other”. Our bodies, full of intelligence, our stomachs, full of neurons, are in some sense other “selves” within us, communicating with the brain but not fully part of it.

There’s an even more real “uncontrollable other” within the gut, though. We think of ourselves as single, unitary, contained within this envelope of flesh; everything inside the outline of our skin is “us”. And yet. Your gut contains a “microbiome” – an ecological community of micro-organisms. They’re the “good bacteria” so beloved of adverts for probiotic yogurt. The cells of our gut flora are much smaller than the cells of our own tissue – so much so that we actually contain more gut flora cells than human body cells. If I were to hold a referendum inside my skin with each cell getting a vote, I wouldn’t come close to taking office.

And that analogy isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Gut flora can influence mood and health – everything from depression to rheumatoid arthritis can be improved by increasing the variety of flora in the gut (our guts, apparently, would like to be a proportional-representation government, the more variety the better).

Our gut flora can release hormones which encourage us to eat more of the food they like. Moreover, we’ve only been able to culture about 5 per cent of the flora in the gut. We have no idea what the other 95 per cent are. All you can get in your probiotic drinks are that measly 5 per cent – for the rest, you’ll have to wait until we’ve gene-sequenced the missing gut flora, a process which is ongoing. Or, if in dire straits, you might consider a faecal transplant, which is exactly what you think it is. Miracle cures have been achieved by inserting the poo of one person with a “golden stool” into the gut of another, via a drip or a faecal enema. The new colonies of bacteria grow, and the recipients of the transplant start to feel better – it’s worked on a range of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and killer bacteria C. difficile. But don’t try this at home.

by Naomi Alderman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Musee D'Histoire De La Medecine, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/ Bridgeman Images

Hsiao Chin 蕭勤 , Mutualita in Crescita, 1964
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The Stock-Market Meltdown That Everyone Saw Coming

Now seems like the right time to offer an after-the-fact explanation in great detail and with complete and utter certainty of what just occurred in the markets, and why.

Hindsight bias permitting, the factors that led to this sudden and unexpected decrease in share prices are just so obvious. Simple, compelling language describing cause and effect is both comforting and reassuring. The alternative to this soothing narrative is an unimaginable world of random disconcerting events. This stands in stark contrast to how we prefer to see the world around us: orderly, predictable, subject to expert management and prediction.

Sorry, to say, but that isn't how it works.

We would have shared this explanation before the market dropped, had we been so inclined, but that would have spoiled the fun. Our powers of rationalization are somewhat less persuasive a priori than our overly optimistic belief in our own abilities. Besides, it is much easier to convince you of the reasons for what just happened than persuade of what is about to happen.

Thus, often wrong, seldom in doubt, we opine with great certainty about things of which we know next to nothing. It almost goes without saying, but the less knowledge we are burdened with, the greater the degree of confidence in our forecasts.

Why did the market suddenly drop 3 percent on Wednesday? It is as obvious as the nose on your face that the Fed’s tightening of monetary policy by raising interest rates to curb financial risk-taking is to blame. But we’ve known about this for a while, haven’t we?

As an alternative, maybe you'd like to blame elevated stock valuations, which surely is a valid point in the U.S., except that lagging emerging markets fell just as hard, and they are cheap, very cheap -- certainly much less richly valued than U.S. and European markets.

No, you're all wrong: It’s the trade war started by President Donald Trump. Not only is the U.S. dollar too strong, but tariffs are crushing an already weakened China, which hurts all of its emerging-market suppliers. But we’ve known about this too for a while, haven’t we?

Wrong again, say the partisan fire-breathers: It’s the Demon-Rats, and the possibility they will take control of the House of Representatives in the midterms, putting at risk all of the Trump pro-growth policies that are solely responsible for the healthy U.S. economy. Again, has anything changed in terms of the electoral outlook?

This market panic -- or is it a crash, or a bear market? -- was the worst day we have experienced since February of this year. It has now brought markets all the way back to levels not seen since – wait for it – July of this year. Was the market so bad then? This decline follows a market that has tripled since 2009, had zero volatility in 2017, and has continually confounded all experts who in one way or another couldn’t explain why the market was as good as it was.

Just for the sake of a little more perspective: This was the 20th time since the bear market ended in 2009 that the Standard & Poor's 500 Index had a one-day loss of 3 percent. The Nasdaq-100 Index had its eighth 4 percent down day (although it was the biggest one-day fall since August 2011). Meanwhile, Wednesday's decline has left the Standard & Poor's 500 Index all of 5.2 percent below its September high.

by Barry Ritholtz, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Scuzz Twittly

[ed. See also: Party Like Charlie Sheen]

USA - East Coast 2018
via:

[ed. The new normal.]

90% of All the Scientists That Ever Lived are Alive Today

90% of all the Scientists that ever lived are alive today. 

(via: Less Wrong: The funnel of human experience.]
Image: Wikipedia

Paul Klee, Blue bird pumpkin

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Kenji Ishikawa
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Portrait of a Campaign

The Problem

With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:

I don't take corporate money, and I support universal health care. My opponent takes corporate PAC money, voted against the Affordable Care Act, and has refused to hold a town hall.

These same polls show that the incumbent has less than 50% of the vote, and that a large proportion of voters has never heard of the challenger. Once the large group of undecided respondents hear a two-sentence message about the two candidates, they break decidedly for our challenger.

This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.

And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.

In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.

While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.

Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)

The Candidate

Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.

She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.

Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.

Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.

Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.

The Money

The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.

Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.

Call time kills the soul.

It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.

Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.

In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.

People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.

This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.

The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.

Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.

There is! And her opponent has found it.

The Incumbent

The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.

With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".

Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.

As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.

The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.

If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)

The Voters

The voters are so unhappy!

Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.

When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.

To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.

There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...

by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]