A teen scientist helped me discover tons of golf balls polluting the ocean (Phys.org)
Images: Alex Weber
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Tons of Golf Balls Polluting the Ocean
A teen scientist helped me discover tons of golf balls polluting the ocean (Phys.org)
While My Guitar Gently Smirks
I love guitars, and I’ve had a few sitting in my office for years, but it took hip surgery for me to begin playing one of them.
Actually, one of them wasn’t a real guitar, but a wall clock in the shape of one, with an illustration of Elvis, in ’68-comeback black leather, on the body. Another was a junior guitar that I got on eBay, certified to be the one used by the actor playing a ten-year old Elvis in a TV movie about him.
The only playable one was a shiny black Epiphone—an Elvis model. You’re getting the picture: I fell in love with the guitar around the time I—and millions of other kids in the 1950s— became a Presley fanatic.
As a music journalist, at Rolling Stone and elsewhere, I interviewed Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, Robert Cray, Stephen Stills, James Taylor, Ann Wilson, John Cipollina, Robby Krieger, Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Elvis’ first guy, Scotty Moore. And his second guy, James Burton.
I never met them, but I remember watching the Monterey Pop film and marveling at Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix; the windmill and the fire. I also dug Garcia, Kaukonen, and Michael Bloomfield. And I knew that I’d never learn to play guitar myself. As a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, I was trapped in my parents’ Chinese restaurants, juggling chores and homework, from grade school into college. “Do you play music?” someone would ask. “Yeah, I can play the radio.”
In recent decades, I thought about taking lessons, but never did. Visiting musician friends would pick up the Epiphone, get it in tune, and play it. Nice guitar, they’d say. Other than that, nothing, except one time when a couple of friends had a jam session at my house. One brought his guitar, another lugged in a portable keyboard; I would sing. But, wanting to do more, I fetched my guitar and sat in, trying to strum as lightly as I could, knowing that whatever sounds I made would be wrong ones. I was the not-so-great pretender.
And there was the time I appeared on a syndicated TV show called Your Big Break, featuring amateur singers impersonating music stars. After a tryout at a local club, I was called in to do . . . Bob Dylan. They assigned me “Like a Rolling Stone” and, on the set, gave me an electric guitar. This time, making sounds would be no problem; they’d be drowned out by the backing track and the noise of the rabid studio audience. My concern was the fingering of chords. I had no idea, so my fingers moved randomly up and down the frets, except when I had to concentrate to recall lyrics. Then they just stopped. Neither Dylan nor I won.
Flash forward to a few years ago, and to my hip surgery. I decided that, while recovering, I wouldn’t just watch TV and read, but would finally do something with that Epiphone. I told my plan to Todd Swenson, lead guitarist with a jam band I sing with, Los Train Wreck. Swenson teaches guitar when he’s not playing with the Train Wreck, the Soul Delights, or his own band, This Side Up. He’s taught students of all ages for 30 years. Any time, he said.
As it turned out, my recovery took far less time than expected, and I’d barely dug out my VHS tapes of guitar lessons when I was up and hobbling. But that shiny Epiphone seemed to look at me now and again, from its perch in the corner, saying, in an Elvis snarl, “You had your chance, man.”
I thought back to a saying I’d heard from Bob Neuwirth: If you don’t take a chance, you ain’t got a chance.
So I picked up the Elvis. Actually, the Epiphone felt too big, so I got a parlor guitar. Unwilling to spend a lot on what might well be a folly, I chose a Gretsch Jim Dandy and, in case I ever graduated from acoustic to amplified, an Accent, both purchased from Amazon, the first name in musical instrument stores.
Actually, one of them wasn’t a real guitar, but a wall clock in the shape of one, with an illustration of Elvis, in ’68-comeback black leather, on the body. Another was a junior guitar that I got on eBay, certified to be the one used by the actor playing a ten-year old Elvis in a TV movie about him.
The only playable one was a shiny black Epiphone—an Elvis model. You’re getting the picture: I fell in love with the guitar around the time I—and millions of other kids in the 1950s— became a Presley fanatic.
As a music journalist, at Rolling Stone and elsewhere, I interviewed Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, Robert Cray, Stephen Stills, James Taylor, Ann Wilson, John Cipollina, Robby Krieger, Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Elvis’ first guy, Scotty Moore. And his second guy, James Burton.
I never met them, but I remember watching the Monterey Pop film and marveling at Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix; the windmill and the fire. I also dug Garcia, Kaukonen, and Michael Bloomfield. And I knew that I’d never learn to play guitar myself. As a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, I was trapped in my parents’ Chinese restaurants, juggling chores and homework, from grade school into college. “Do you play music?” someone would ask. “Yeah, I can play the radio.”In recent decades, I thought about taking lessons, but never did. Visiting musician friends would pick up the Epiphone, get it in tune, and play it. Nice guitar, they’d say. Other than that, nothing, except one time when a couple of friends had a jam session at my house. One brought his guitar, another lugged in a portable keyboard; I would sing. But, wanting to do more, I fetched my guitar and sat in, trying to strum as lightly as I could, knowing that whatever sounds I made would be wrong ones. I was the not-so-great pretender.
And there was the time I appeared on a syndicated TV show called Your Big Break, featuring amateur singers impersonating music stars. After a tryout at a local club, I was called in to do . . . Bob Dylan. They assigned me “Like a Rolling Stone” and, on the set, gave me an electric guitar. This time, making sounds would be no problem; they’d be drowned out by the backing track and the noise of the rabid studio audience. My concern was the fingering of chords. I had no idea, so my fingers moved randomly up and down the frets, except when I had to concentrate to recall lyrics. Then they just stopped. Neither Dylan nor I won.
Flash forward to a few years ago, and to my hip surgery. I decided that, while recovering, I wouldn’t just watch TV and read, but would finally do something with that Epiphone. I told my plan to Todd Swenson, lead guitarist with a jam band I sing with, Los Train Wreck. Swenson teaches guitar when he’s not playing with the Train Wreck, the Soul Delights, or his own band, This Side Up. He’s taught students of all ages for 30 years. Any time, he said.
As it turned out, my recovery took far less time than expected, and I’d barely dug out my VHS tapes of guitar lessons when I was up and hobbling. But that shiny Epiphone seemed to look at me now and again, from its perch in the corner, saying, in an Elvis snarl, “You had your chance, man.”
I thought back to a saying I’d heard from Bob Neuwirth: If you don’t take a chance, you ain’t got a chance.
So I picked up the Elvis. Actually, the Epiphone felt too big, so I got a parlor guitar. Unwilling to spend a lot on what might well be a folly, I chose a Gretsch Jim Dandy and, in case I ever graduated from acoustic to amplified, an Accent, both purchased from Amazon, the first name in musical instrument stores.
by Ben Fong-Torres, Acoustic Guitar | Read more:
Image: KAT
Monday, January 21, 2019
This Is Why Ghosting Hurts So Much
The opposite of love isn’t hate; it is indifference. Ghosting, for those of you who haven’t yet experienced it, is having someone that you believe cares about you, whether it be a friend or someone you are dating, disappear from contact without any explanation at all. No phone call or email, not even a text. Ghosting isn’t new—people have long done disappearing acts—but years ago this kind of behavior was considered limited to a certain type of scoundrel. In today’s dating culture being ghosted is a phenomenon that approximately 50 percent of men and women have experienced—and an almost equal number have done the ghosting. Despite ghosting's commonality, the emotional effects can be devastating, and particularly damaging to those who already have fragile self-esteem.
Why do people ghost?
People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel. The lack of social connections to people who are met online also means there are less social consequences to dropping out of someone’s life. The more it happens, either to themselves or their friends, the more people become desensitized to it and the more likely they are to do it to someone else.
For many people ghosting can result in feelings of being disrespected, used and disposable. If you have known the person beyond more than a few dates then it can be even more traumatic. When someone we love and trust disengages from us it feels like a very deep betrayal.
Social rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain. In fact, you can reduce the emotional pain of rejection with a pain medication like Tylenol. But in addition to this biological link between rejection and pain, there are some specific factors about ghosting that contribute to the psychological distress.
Ghosting gives you no cue for how to react. It creates the ultimate scenario of ambiguity. Should you be worried? What if they are hurt and lying in a hospital bed somewhere? Should you be upset? Maybe they are just a little busy and will be calling you at any moment. You don’t know how to react because you don’t really know what has happened. Staying connected to others is so important to our survival that our brain has evolved to have a social monitoring system (SMS) that monitors the environment for cues so that we know how to respond in social situations. Social cues allow us to regulate our own behavior accordingly, but ghosting deprives you of these usual cues and can create a sense of emotional dysregulation where you feel out of control.
One of the most insidious aspects of ghosting is that it doesn’t just cause you to question the validity of the relationship you had, it causes you to question yourself. Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I have been such a poor judge of character? What did I do to cause this? How do I protect myself from this ever happening again? (...)
Ghosting is the ultimate use of the silent treatment, a tactic that has often been viewed by mental health professionals as a form of emotional cruelty. It essentially renders you powerless and leaves you with no opportunity to ask questions or be provided with information that would help you emotionally process the experience. It silences you and prevents you from expressing your emotions and being heard, which is important for maintaining your self-esteem.
Regardless of the ghoster’s intent, ghosting is a passive-aggressive interpersonal tactic that can leave psychological bruises and scars.
by Jennice Vilhauer Ph.D., Psychology Today | Read more:
Why do people ghost?
People who ghost are primarily focused on avoiding their own emotional discomfort and they aren’t thinking about how it makes the other person feel. The lack of social connections to people who are met online also means there are less social consequences to dropping out of someone’s life. The more it happens, either to themselves or their friends, the more people become desensitized to it and the more likely they are to do it to someone else.“I didn't understand exactly how I actually felt at the time, so instead of trying to talk it out, I ghosted.”
“I used to disappear when it was all I thought it was [a fling], or I got scared of finding what I wanted…Or some kind of fear factor from a past relationship kicks in.”
“Looking through the lens of a coward, passive withdrawal from dating seems like the easiest and nicest route…until it’s done to you.”
“I kind of think that it's part of what makes the online dating scene so appealing. Since you don't have friends in common or weren't introduced through some other channel, it's not the end of the world if you just drop off the face of the earth.”
“I, for one, consider myself to be an honest and straightforward person. And yet I’ve ghosted...And I’ve told myself, time and time again, that it’s all the fault of the toxic dating culture we’ve created. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what we’re all telling ourselves.”How does it feel to be ghosted?
For many people ghosting can result in feelings of being disrespected, used and disposable. If you have known the person beyond more than a few dates then it can be even more traumatic. When someone we love and trust disengages from us it feels like a very deep betrayal.
“I felt like an idiot. Like I had been played a fool. And more so I felt disrespected. Take the romantics away, to have a great connection with a new friend and then all of a sudden never hear from them again? That’s painful and really disappointing. No one deserves to be blown off.”
“It still felt a bit like someone had punched me in the gut when it happened. The disregard is insulting. The lack of closure is maddening. You move on, but not before your self-esteem takes a hit. The only thing worse than being broken up with is realizing that someone didn’t even consider you worth breaking up with.”
“Going from texting every day and seeing each other a couple times a week to nothing without the slightest hint of why was a kick in the gut.”
“Ghosting is one of the cruelest forms of torture dating can serve up.”Why does it feel so bad?
Social rejection activates the same pain pathways in the brain as physical pain. In fact, you can reduce the emotional pain of rejection with a pain medication like Tylenol. But in addition to this biological link between rejection and pain, there are some specific factors about ghosting that contribute to the psychological distress.
Ghosting gives you no cue for how to react. It creates the ultimate scenario of ambiguity. Should you be worried? What if they are hurt and lying in a hospital bed somewhere? Should you be upset? Maybe they are just a little busy and will be calling you at any moment. You don’t know how to react because you don’t really know what has happened. Staying connected to others is so important to our survival that our brain has evolved to have a social monitoring system (SMS) that monitors the environment for cues so that we know how to respond in social situations. Social cues allow us to regulate our own behavior accordingly, but ghosting deprives you of these usual cues and can create a sense of emotional dysregulation where you feel out of control.
One of the most insidious aspects of ghosting is that it doesn’t just cause you to question the validity of the relationship you had, it causes you to question yourself. Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I have been such a poor judge of character? What did I do to cause this? How do I protect myself from this ever happening again? (...)
Ghosting is the ultimate use of the silent treatment, a tactic that has often been viewed by mental health professionals as a form of emotional cruelty. It essentially renders you powerless and leaves you with no opportunity to ask questions or be provided with information that would help you emotionally process the experience. It silences you and prevents you from expressing your emotions and being heard, which is important for maintaining your self-esteem.
Regardless of the ghoster’s intent, ghosting is a passive-aggressive interpersonal tactic that can leave psychological bruises and scars.
Image: Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock
[ed. Lasting scars.]
[ed. Lasting scars.]
Why High-Fidelity Streaming Is The Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For
Digital audio enthusiasts, myself included, have been watching the fall and rise of sound quality closely over the last few years. Mass-market digital audio has been with us since the launch of storage media like the CD, but our migration towards files stored on portable devices or streamed from the cloud has been a rollercoaster in terms of quality.
The most significant developments have usually been at the behest of the largest tech companies, rather than record companies. Apple famously took the MP3 revolution mainstream with the birth of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, before launching a series of portable devices: the iPod, iPad, and the epoch-defining iPhone. But the MP3 revolution came at a cost, namely a degradation in audio quality compared to CDs.
A gradual clawback of audio quality mirrored the increase in data storage, and the iTunes Music Store doubled their default encoding rate in 2009. Similarly, streaming quality has increased in parallel with internet bandwidth. Once the digital audio genie was out of the internet bottle, factors as baroque as mobile bandwidth, on-device RAM, all-you-can-eat mobile data plans, and triple-play cable packages have arguably been as influential to the fortunes of the modern music business as the invention of the CD.
However, a recent technical development has triggered an entirely new wave of streaming digital audio quality. Bang & Olufsen’s most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Martin outlines what’s happened, and how. “For a time, streaming services, in general, made quality worse. But that time has passed. And that's because the way that streaming services work has changed. Initially, they were sending out low bitrate MP3 in the same way that Internet radio works these days. But what's happening now with services like TIDAL, Deezer HiFi and Qobuz is that they are pushing a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file out to the player.”
A codec (coder-decoder) is the mechanism by which the original master quality audio is encoded into a more portable format, and subsequently decoded for playback. While the "lossy" MP3 codec loses information which is deemed to be of less importance to the listener, FLAC files are lossless, so can deliver full CD quality audio. Geoff explains that this new development stretches the definition of streaming itself. “It looks like streaming, but it's not. It's a download for a one-time play; we can dance around the words if you want.”
While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.
Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved “universal jukebox” is undergoing a significant upgrade. Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices.
by Oisin Lunny, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Bang & Olufsen
The most significant developments have usually been at the behest of the largest tech companies, rather than record companies. Apple famously took the MP3 revolution mainstream with the birth of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, before launching a series of portable devices: the iPod, iPad, and the epoch-defining iPhone. But the MP3 revolution came at a cost, namely a degradation in audio quality compared to CDs.
A gradual clawback of audio quality mirrored the increase in data storage, and the iTunes Music Store doubled their default encoding rate in 2009. Similarly, streaming quality has increased in parallel with internet bandwidth. Once the digital audio genie was out of the internet bottle, factors as baroque as mobile bandwidth, on-device RAM, all-you-can-eat mobile data plans, and triple-play cable packages have arguably been as influential to the fortunes of the modern music business as the invention of the CD.However, a recent technical development has triggered an entirely new wave of streaming digital audio quality. Bang & Olufsen’s most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Martin outlines what’s happened, and how. “For a time, streaming services, in general, made quality worse. But that time has passed. And that's because the way that streaming services work has changed. Initially, they were sending out low bitrate MP3 in the same way that Internet radio works these days. But what's happening now with services like TIDAL, Deezer HiFi and Qobuz is that they are pushing a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file out to the player.”
A codec (coder-decoder) is the mechanism by which the original master quality audio is encoded into a more portable format, and subsequently decoded for playback. While the "lossy" MP3 codec loses information which is deemed to be of less importance to the listener, FLAC files are lossless, so can deliver full CD quality audio. Geoff explains that this new development stretches the definition of streaming itself. “It looks like streaming, but it's not. It's a download for a one-time play; we can dance around the words if you want.”
While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.
Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved “universal jukebox” is undergoing a significant upgrade. Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices.
by Oisin Lunny, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Bang & Olufsen
Sunday, January 20, 2019
The Legend of Sasquatch Won’t Die. Unless One Dies.
Like everyone else upright and breathing, I have heard all the (mostly fake) tales, seen all the (fake) footprint castings, viewed the (fake) videos, heard recent (real) podcasts, even perused the (fake) “field guides.” I’ve also read large numbers of Sasquatch sightings, and believe that many reporters probably thought they saw something.
It just wasn’t an elusive long-lost subhuman, ape or shape-shifting alien species. Of this I am dead-dog nearly certain.
Can I prove this? Of course not. That’s not my job. But I am happy to be the guy who publicly looks into the glassy eyes of the professional true believers — especially those profiting from the mossy-roofed cottage industry feeding off this remarkably resilient fantasy — and issues a long-overdue ultimatum:
Show me a dead one, and we’ll talk.
SERIOUSLY, FOLKS. This overripe argument about the hairy ape-beast out back has long ago passed its best-by date. And if that question is seen as a put-up-or-shut-up demand, well, it is.
The imaginary Squatch was cute for a while, and any legend that spawns generations of coloring books, postcards, plush stuffed animals and fantastically bad late-night cable TV is harmless in my book — to a point.
In the present era of post-truth, what once qualified as playful mythology increasingly feels like overlooked symptoms of early onset societal nutjobbery, which at some critical-mass level becomes a dangerous thing. So please forgive me for attempting here to point at least one little LED headlamp beam of reason upon the logic-suffocating rot behind the Bigfoot industrial complex.(He pauses to clear throat and pen the requisite qualifiers.)
An underlying premise here is that trying to prove a negative is sheer folly. No one can scientifically prove, for example, that a giraffe has never risen from the depths of Lake Union, marched down Westlake and taken a big dump atop the grassy knoll at Gas Works Park. But a reasonable person can apply her/his own probability mathematics to the question.
Accordingly: It’s impossible to prove that forested areas of the Northwest are not home to stealthy, apelike creatures standing 8 feet tall; weighing up to 800 pounds; constantly emitting putrid, gaseous odors; and prone to issuing earsplitting, guttural, train-whistle screams — yet managing at all times to conceal themselves more effectively than a thimble-sized hummingbird.
It is equally impossible to prove that the Mariners won’t win the 2019 World Series.
Some things, the sane people just know to be true.
As mentioned, the burden of proof here is not on me, or anyone else who finds better things to do than stumble around in the dark in the soggy hills of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest wearing night-vision goggles and carrying an AR-15.
All that’s on Team Squatch. And to that organization, I reissue the plea:
Please, oh please, just show me a dead one.
by Ron Judd, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Maybe he just moved somewhere else?]
Grab and Go: How Sticky Gloves Have Changed Football
One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.
Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.
The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.
The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the M.I.T. Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.
The technology has made life easier for receivers at all levels, of course, and now it is rare for any player in search of a better grip — pass catchers, but also quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends — not to make them part of his standard equipment. Even defenders have taken to wearing them.
“The gloves definitely help with the one-handed catches,” said Rasul Douglas, a cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles who wears a Nike version. “You rarely see guys making one-handed catches without gloves on.”
For those who have not played any football in the last 15 years, just touch a pair at a sporting goods store. It will be obvious why the gloves, now manufactured by several companies, are probably the most significant performance-related football equipment innovation since the advent of the cleat.
Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.
The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the M.I.T. Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.
The technology has made life easier for receivers at all levels, of course, and now it is rare for any player in search of a better grip — pass catchers, but also quarterbacks, running backs and tight ends — not to make them part of his standard equipment. Even defenders have taken to wearing them.
“The gloves definitely help with the one-handed catches,” said Rasul Douglas, a cornerback for the Philadelphia Eagles who wears a Nike version. “You rarely see guys making one-handed catches without gloves on.”
For those who have not played any football in the last 15 years, just touch a pair at a sporting goods store. It will be obvious why the gloves, now manufactured by several companies, are probably the most significant performance-related football equipment innovation since the advent of the cleat.
by David Waldstein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brad Penner/Associated Press; Bob Levey/Getty Images; Joe Sargent/Getty Images; Tommy Gilligan/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
Billionaires vs. LA Schools
Unlike many labor actions, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is not really about wages or benefits. At its core, this is a struggle to defend public schools against the privatizing drive of a small-but-powerful group of billionaires.
The plan of these business leaders is simple: break-up the school district into thirty-two competing “portfolio” networks, in order to replace public schools with privately run charters. As firm believers in the dogmas of market fundamentalism, these influential downsizers truly believe that it’s possible to improve education by running it like a private business. Not coincidentally, privatization would also open up huge avenues for profit-making — and deal a potentially fatal blow to one of the most well-organized and militant unions in the country, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). As union leader Arlene Inouye explains, “This is a struggle to save public education; the existence of public education in our city is on the line.”
It’s always important to “know thy enemy.” But this is especially true for the educators’ movement in Los Angeles, which is directly challenging an unholy alliance of the some of richest individuals in the United States. Here’s a short primer on the corporate “who’s who” aiming to destroy public schools in LA — and across the nation.
Austin Beutner
For LA’s teachers, students, and parents, Austin Beutner is currently enemy number one. Beutner is not only the handpicked representative of the democracy-subverting billionaires discussed above — he’s one of these billionaires himself.
Beutner has zero credentials to lead the second-largest school district in the country. He began his career as a downsizing investment banker in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration chose him to head their project of helping privatize state enterprises in Russia and, as the New York Times reported, “teaching the American way of doing business.”
Beutner soon after co-founded the investment firm Evercore Partners together with other Clinton confidants. Today, Evercore is the second-largest such firm in the world, behind only Goldman Sachs.
Like Hastings and Broad, Beutner is a major funder of the Democratic Party. Beutner’s considerable financial contributions to the Democrats helped convince Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him as first deputy mayor in 2010. (Last week, Beutner returned the favor by tapping Villaraigosa to be his PR man against LA teachers.) As the Wall Street Journal explained, Deputy Mayor Beutner was “charged with making Los Angeles more business friendly.”
In 2013, Beutner joined with with Eli Broad in an attempt to buy the Los Angeles Times. Though the bid was ultimately unsuccessful, their partnership bore fruit in early 2018 when the new school board chose Beutner as superintendent. Upon taking office, he immediately used Broad funding to hire a cadre of downsizers led by two consulting firms, Ernst & Young and Kitamba; the latter company has already played a central role in privatizing schools in Newark and Washington D.C. If they get their way, Los Angeles will become the model for privatization efforts across the United States.
The plan of these business leaders is simple: break-up the school district into thirty-two competing “portfolio” networks, in order to replace public schools with privately run charters. As firm believers in the dogmas of market fundamentalism, these influential downsizers truly believe that it’s possible to improve education by running it like a private business. Not coincidentally, privatization would also open up huge avenues for profit-making — and deal a potentially fatal blow to one of the most well-organized and militant unions in the country, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). As union leader Arlene Inouye explains, “This is a struggle to save public education; the existence of public education in our city is on the line.”It’s always important to “know thy enemy.” But this is especially true for the educators’ movement in Los Angeles, which is directly challenging an unholy alliance of the some of richest individuals in the United States. Here’s a short primer on the corporate “who’s who” aiming to destroy public schools in LA — and across the nation.
The Walton Family (Walmart)
Doris Fischer
Reed Hastings
Eli Broad:
As with almost everybody else on this billionaires list, LA’s Eli Broad has no professional experience in education. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from using his immense personal fortune to foist his vision upon the city’s schools. With a net worth of over $7.4 billion, Broad is the fourth richest individual in the United States. In 2017, he gave nearly $2 million dollars to elect a pro-charter majority to the school board. This was just the latest manifestation of Broad’s longstanding drive to dismantle public education in Los Angeles and nationwide.
After striking it big in the home building and insurance industries, he founded the Broad Academy in 2002 to train a new generation of privatizing school leaders. By 2012, the center was boasting that it had “filled more superintendent positions than any other national training program” and that “Broad graduates are in the number one or number two seats in the three largest districts in the country (New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago).”
Like Hastings, Broad is a liberal — and major funder of the Democratic Party establishment, including leading lights such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer. “The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party,” Hastings bragged to the Wall Street Journal.
Broad stepped up his hometown privatizing efforts in 2015 by producing a plan to ensure that charters would capture at least 50 percent of the so-called “market share” of LA schools. The proposal was explicit about the national stakes of the campaign: “Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”
A major public scandal erupted after the forty-four-page plan was leaked to the press — then-school board president Steve Zimmer denounced it as “an outline for a hostile takeover.” The specific initiative was scrapped, but only temporarily. Within two years, Broad had begun a renewed push for a “hostile takeover.” This time it took the form of helping buy the 2017 school board elections — and subsequently imposing one of his close friends as new district superintendent: Austin Beutner.
As with almost everybody else on this billionaires list, LA’s Eli Broad has no professional experience in education. Yet this hasn’t stopped him from using his immense personal fortune to foist his vision upon the city’s schools. With a net worth of over $7.4 billion, Broad is the fourth richest individual in the United States. In 2017, he gave nearly $2 million dollars to elect a pro-charter majority to the school board. This was just the latest manifestation of Broad’s longstanding drive to dismantle public education in Los Angeles and nationwide.
After striking it big in the home building and insurance industries, he founded the Broad Academy in 2002 to train a new generation of privatizing school leaders. By 2012, the center was boasting that it had “filled more superintendent positions than any other national training program” and that “Broad graduates are in the number one or number two seats in the three largest districts in the country (New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago).”
Like Hastings, Broad is a liberal — and major funder of the Democratic Party establishment, including leading lights such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer. “The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party,” Hastings bragged to the Wall Street Journal.
Broad stepped up his hometown privatizing efforts in 2015 by producing a plan to ensure that charters would capture at least 50 percent of the so-called “market share” of LA schools. The proposal was explicit about the national stakes of the campaign: “Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.”
A major public scandal erupted after the forty-four-page plan was leaked to the press — then-school board president Steve Zimmer denounced it as “an outline for a hostile takeover.” The specific initiative was scrapped, but only temporarily. Within two years, Broad had begun a renewed push for a “hostile takeover.” This time it took the form of helping buy the 2017 school board elections — and subsequently imposing one of his close friends as new district superintendent: Austin Beutner.
Austin Beutner
For LA’s teachers, students, and parents, Austin Beutner is currently enemy number one. Beutner is not only the handpicked representative of the democracy-subverting billionaires discussed above — he’s one of these billionaires himself.
Beutner has zero credentials to lead the second-largest school district in the country. He began his career as a downsizing investment banker in the early 1990s. The Clinton administration chose him to head their project of helping privatize state enterprises in Russia and, as the New York Times reported, “teaching the American way of doing business.”
Beutner soon after co-founded the investment firm Evercore Partners together with other Clinton confidants. Today, Evercore is the second-largest such firm in the world, behind only Goldman Sachs.
Like Hastings and Broad, Beutner is a major funder of the Democratic Party. Beutner’s considerable financial contributions to the Democrats helped convince Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him as first deputy mayor in 2010. (Last week, Beutner returned the favor by tapping Villaraigosa to be his PR man against LA teachers.) As the Wall Street Journal explained, Deputy Mayor Beutner was “charged with making Los Angeles more business friendly.”
In 2013, Beutner joined with with Eli Broad in an attempt to buy the Los Angeles Times. Though the bid was ultimately unsuccessful, their partnership bore fruit in early 2018 when the new school board chose Beutner as superintendent. Upon taking office, he immediately used Broad funding to hire a cadre of downsizers led by two consulting firms, Ernst & Young and Kitamba; the latter company has already played a central role in privatizing schools in Newark and Washington D.C. If they get their way, Los Angeles will become the model for privatization efforts across the United States.
by Eric Blanc, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Barbara Davidson / Getty Images
[ed. See also: What LA Teachers Have Already Won]
After Dark
In 1924 a young man named Gyula Halász left Brasov, Transylvania—his Hungarian hometown, annexed by Romania in the aftermath of World War I—and moved to Paris. There he began to call himself Brassaï and discovered his vocation as a photographer working in black and white and almost entirely at night.
In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.
If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.
In his introduction to his photography collection The Secret Paris of the ’30s, Brassaï wrote,
In the hours between midnight and dawn, Paris seemed to Brassaï not only another city but a different world—a “fringe world” with its own climate, its own natural laws, its own geography, denizens, and species.
In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.
In his introduction to his photography collection The Secret Paris of the ’30s, Brassaï wrote,
Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness…I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, nightclubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colorful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past.Perhaps this is why so many of my favorite paintings and photographs are night scenes. Brassaï’s photographs. The nocturnes of James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder. The dark, dramatically lit landscapes of Jean-François Millet and Albert Bierstadt, especially Millet’s painting of men hunting birds by the light of torches throwing off volleys of sparks. The dreamscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, populated as they are by the nightmarish phantasms that live only in darkness. The greatest Caravaggios reimagine Christianity’s most theatrical moments as night scenes—the flagellation of Christ, the conversion of Saint Paul, the martyrdom of Saint Peter, the burial of Saint Lucy—perhaps because the painter was himself nocturnal. His circle included criminals and the neighborhood prostitutes he employed as his models; he belonged to a street gang whose nighttime misadventures culminated in the murder that would compel Caravaggio to spend the last years of his brief life on the run. “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day,” Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his sister Willemien. “I definitely want to paint a starry sky now.” (...)
In the hours between midnight and dawn, Paris seemed to Brassaï not only another city but a different world—a “fringe world” with its own climate, its own natural laws, its own geography, denizens, and species.
by Francine Prose, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Giovanni di Paolo, 1457. Wikimedia Commons
Image: Giovanni di Paolo, 1457. Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Top Dinner Suggestions According to a Three-Year-Old's Eating Habits
A French baguette, but only the inside — NO CRUST
Seven slices of American cheese
A frozen waffle, cooked
A frozen waffle, raw
The ricotta layer of an entire lasagna
Half a stick of butter
Four very specific Oreos
Pizza, just the cheese
Applesauce through a straw
Macaroni and cheese, the “real” kind that cooks in a plastic cup in the microwave
A $4.99 half-pint of organic blueberries
Pizza, just the sauce
Around the edges of a cheeseburger without ever actually biting into the meat
A Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet
One bite each of three apples
Seven slices of American cheese
A frozen waffle, cooked
A frozen waffle, raw
The ricotta layer of an entire lasagna
Half a stick of butter
Four very specific Oreos
Pizza, just the cheese
Applesauce through a straw
Macaroni and cheese, the “real” kind that cooks in a plastic cup in the microwave
A $4.99 half-pint of organic blueberries
Pizza, just the sauce
Around the edges of a cheeseburger without ever actually biting into the meat
A Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet
One bite each of three apples
by Kristen Mulrooney, McSweeny's | Read more:
Australia Bakes
It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot. (...)
In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
by Naaman Zhou, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. 48.9C = 120F. Wow .. need some koalafications to endure that. See also: The equivalent of one atomic bomb per second: How fast the oceans are warming.]
It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.
Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot. (...)In Mildura, Tolga Ozkuzucu, owner of Top Notch Gardens, had the misfortune to be working outdoors.
“It’s been like hell,” he said. “You have to try to leave your tools in the shade. If you don’t, it burns your fingers. There’s not much you can do.
“I try to start as early as I can. I’m not going to risk my body and health. People here are very understanding of that because they know how hot it is … nobody wants to be outside when it’s 46C.”
In South Australia, they declared a “code red” across Adelaide, the state capital. Homelessness services were working overtime and the Red Cross started calling round a list of 750 people who were deemed especially vulnerable.
by Naaman Zhou, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. 48.9C = 120F. Wow .. need some koalafications to endure that. See also: The equivalent of one atomic bomb per second: How fast the oceans are warming.]
The Woman Dies
It was the late showing, and on a weekday too, so the cinema wasn’t all that crowded. We’d seen a badly-made detective movie, and today, once again, the woman died. She was the main guy’s wife. Heard that one before? Yep, we have, as it happens. Though we all sat there facing the screen, all of us soon found ourselves pretty bored, and our minds moved on to various other things.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.
Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
Of all of us, Kimiko was watching the most avidly, and not because she especially liked it, but because she writes a film blog. In other words, she was watching it with a mission: she had to find something – anything – to write about.
Yumi and Akira, both first-year university students, were happy as long as they could kiss and touch while the film played. For these young lovebirds, who’d only just got together, that was the main reason to go to the cinema.
Kenichi, whose well-hewn physique made him easy to identify as a construction worker, was fast asleep. Even he couldn’t remember why he’d thought to see a film this late in the day. On the big screen, a man-turned-vengeful-demon was speeding underneath an elevated railroad track, causing all kinds of problems for the vehicles around him.Hiroshi, who had a regular office job, was absent-mindedly imagining things. He was imagining what it would be like if, after the man rushed out of his flat in a righteous fury, the woman who had just died got to her feet, clothes torn and hair bedraggled, and heated up some frozen lasagna in the microwave. How she would then take it out and eat it on the sofa. The gaping holes in her chest rimmed in dark red. This was what Hiroshi always did without intending to. As he followed the story on screen, there was always one corner of his mind picturing the continuation of the scene that had just ended, as if it was a gateway to a parallel world. (...)
And thus the crappy film came to an end, and we all left the cinema. We didn’t know one another, so we walked at our own pace along the street that led in the opposite direction from the station. A cold wind was blowing, the residential area was quiet, and when we turned the corner, we found the dead woman. As we rounded the bend one by one, we each came to a sudden halt like a row of dominoes, almost tripping over our own feet.
The woman was lying face up on the ground. Much of her head was hidden by shoulder-length brown hair, but we could see enough of it to place her somewhere in her forties. Underneath her body was a great pool of blood. It was too small to call a sea of blood – it was more like a small pond. Which, going by what we’d picked up from films and TV programmes, was not a good sign.
‘Call the police,’ Yumi said to nobody in particular. She was pulling out her smartphone when the woman’s hand twitched.
‘She’s still alive,’ Kenichi said, and, as if his voice had woken us from a trance, we all swarmed up to the woman, kneeling in a circle around her like vassals in a period drama. Yumi summoned an ambulance while Hiroshi called the police.
The woman looked as though she could die at any minute. Thus we learned that dying women really do look as though they are about to die. She had a death-like look on her face – an actual death-like look. It was just like what we’d seen in the film an hour ago. In fact it was as if the woman who’d just died in the film had changed her mind, and decided to die out here on the street instead.
Come to think of it, this woman was not unlike the woman in the film. They had similar hair, and they were both wearing the kind of baggy T-shirt and sweatpants people usually wear around the house. This woman had apparently popped out to the convenience store. Close beside her body was a plastic bag containing a crème caramel and a toothbrush. Was the ice-cream container lying at the base of the utility pole anything to do with her? If it was, then the forensic team might be able to calculate the time of the incident by how much ice cream had melted. Akira thought about going over and touching the lid of the container to check the texture of the ice cream inside, but he didn’t want Yuki to think him a fool, so in the end he stayed put.
The woman was looking more death-like by the second. It was hard to say what it was about her that gave that impression, but all of us there felt it. We said nothing, but we were all thinking the same thing: at this rate, the ambulance wasn’t going to make it in time.
Before he could second-guess himself, Hiroshi found himself saying, ‘Do you have any last words – anything you want to say?’
We all felt that what he’d said was a bit impolite, but we could understand what he was trying to do. Taking our cue from him, we all started speaking to her.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Do you remember the face of the person that did this?’
‘Is there something you want to tell your family? We’ll pass on a message.’
We couldn’t stop the woman from dying, but we could memorize her final words and pass them on to her loved ones, or do something to help solve the crime. Just that thought made us feel rather excited, in spite of ourselves.
‘. . . something I want to say?’
The woman squeezed the words out, then suddenly opened her eyes very wide and stared at us. We were scared shitless. We wondered for a second if she’d become a zombie even before she actually died. Her fingers might have been trembling, but still Kimiko remembered to turn on the voice recorder of her smartphone. The last words of the deceased. The woman’s family would no doubt thank her, tears streaming down their cheeks.
The woman inhaled. Her breath made a horrible wheezing sound in her throat.
‘The thing I want to say is this.’
We all gulped.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to deconstruct the vagina, at least once.’
The woman said this in a single spurt, then closed her eyes again. Her hands fell to her sides, hitting the asphalt. We were totally mystified.
‘Huh? Her VA-GINA?’
‘Um, sorry, could you just repeat that? Did you say “deconstruct”?’
The woman opened her eyes a crack, and looked at us as if we were a great nuisance.
‘Um, excuse me, but were you raped?’ Yumi said, as if inspiration had suddenly hit her. Her eyes ran the length of the woman’s body. Then we all started looking at her, trying to check, but her thick gray sweatpants didn’t show any signs of disarray. As we watched the woman looking at Yumi as though she took her for an utter fool, we sensed that the pond of blood beneath her was getting bigger. This person was almost definitely going to die.
‘No! I just wanted to talk about the vagina, that’s all . . . Okay, look, it seems like I’ve still got some time left, so I’ll talk about it now.’
‘O – Okay.’
We felt pretty bowled over by her energy – the energy of this woman who could well be dead in a few minutes. Kimiko thought about turning off the voice recorder but decided to keep it on, at least for the moment. From where she was lying, stretched out on the pavement, the woman began to speak.
‘I’ve always found it so weird, how people make such a big deal about vaginas, you know? In the old days, of course, there was a great taboo around them, and women had to wear metal chastity belts and so on. Did you know that? Metal? Anyway, now it’s all about liberation, so people go around saying that vaginas are beautiful and stuff like that, but the point is, who really cares if they’re beautiful or ugly or what? Unless you do some crazy gymnastic moves with a mirror, you can never even really know what your own looks like. Talk about a design flaw! Seriously, though. Even if you look at your own face in the mirror every day, there’s still no telling if you really know yourself, right? If looking at your face brought true self-knowledge, then nobody would need therapy, would they? I don’t hate vaginas, and I don’t particularly love them either. I think all this stuff about vaginaphobia is just stupid. Do people really believe all that? I’m sure they just come up with these big concepts to give themselves something to say – to feel important in some way. Vaginas are just vaginas. What’s wrong with just admitting that? Don’t you think?’
How could we possibly reply? We didn’t have a clue what she was on about. Akira had still never seen a real vagina, and when he watched porn that part was always blurred out. Kenichi and Hiroshi had never properly looked at them either, just stuck in their fingers or tongues or penises as appropriate. Fingers were generally a safe bet to start off with – poke a finger or two in to begin with, and things mostly went off alright. Yumi vaguely conceptualized that part of her anatomy as a beautiful flower garden. As for Kimiko, if she had free time to think about her vagina, she’d rather put it to use watching films. And then writing up her impressions of those films on her blog.
We darted looks at one another. Isn’t this woman kind of perky for a dying person? we were all thinking. Her voice sounded a bit too full of life for someone eking out the last of their strength.
by Aoko Matsuda, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Disastrous Decline in Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault
There is a scene in the film Moulin Rouge in which a crowd of top hat-wearing men belt out the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as they riotously descend upon the famous French hall of can-can dancers. “Here we are now! Entertain us!” the suited patrons roar as they greedily reach out for the amusements around them. It’s a high-energy, campy scene that director Baz Luhrmann overlays with a sinister message about the power discrepancy between entertainers and the men who pay them. This scene has been on my mind lately, both in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the horrific stories we’ve heard from actresses and other women in the entertainment industry, and again on Monday, when the Authors Guild published its 2018 Author Income Survey.
This was the largest survey ever conducted of writing-related earnings by American authors. It tallied the responses of 5,067 authors, including those who are traditionally, hybrid, and self-published, and found that the median income from writing has dropped 42% from 2009, landing at a paltry $6,080. The other findings are similarly bleak: revenue from books has dropped an additional 21%, to $3,100, meaning it’s impossible to make a living from writing books alone. Most writers are cobbling together various sources of income like teaching or speaking engagements, yet the median income for full-time authors for all writing-related activities still only reached $20,300, which is well below the American poverty line for a family of three. Writers of literary fiction felt the greatest decline in book earnings, down 43% since 2013.
The Authors Guild has a pretty clear idea of what’s behind this disturbing trend, namely the rise of Amazon, which severely cuts publishers’ margins on book sales. Authors ultimately shoulder the cost because publishers offset their losses by giving out smaller author advances and royalties. The platform’s resale market also means that, within months of publication, books are being resold as “like new” or “lightly used,” a scenario in which no new money goes to the actual author of the book. The Authors Guild acknowledges that Amazon isn’t the only place where authors are losing out, but the culprits are of a kind: electronic platforms like Google Books and Open Library claim fair use rights in order to offer classrooms products without paying authors royalties. This is problematic because those royalties, a kind of pay-to-play model of compensation, are how artists have made their money ever since it went out of fashion to have a patron who could support your entire career.
This year’s Authors Guild Survey is right to focus on the harm Amazon does to working writers; personally, I’ve made my 2019 resolution to put my money where my mouth is and buy all my books at local, independent bookstores. But the survey results made me wonder if that would be enough—if it’s possible, in the age of the Internet, to reverse the belief that content should mostly be free. By content I do mean to encompass all ends of the artistic spectrum, that ill-defined mass of high and low entertainment and art and news that rubs up against each other on the web in a way that makes it more difficult to separate out, and perhaps less meaningful to do so. Basically, people are insatiable for this panoply of words and images; they want mass input. If you do a Google search for “apple pie recipe,” for example, the top results include both Pillsbury’s website and the personal blog of a home cook. The point isn’t that there is anything wrong with the latter, it’s that discernment has taken a backseat to access; we want all the apple pie recipes, all the videos and photographs and articles and books. We are here now. Entertain us.
by Carrie V. Mullins, Electric Lit | Read more:
Image: uncredited
This was the largest survey ever conducted of writing-related earnings by American authors. It tallied the responses of 5,067 authors, including those who are traditionally, hybrid, and self-published, and found that the median income from writing has dropped 42% from 2009, landing at a paltry $6,080. The other findings are similarly bleak: revenue from books has dropped an additional 21%, to $3,100, meaning it’s impossible to make a living from writing books alone. Most writers are cobbling together various sources of income like teaching or speaking engagements, yet the median income for full-time authors for all writing-related activities still only reached $20,300, which is well below the American poverty line for a family of three. Writers of literary fiction felt the greatest decline in book earnings, down 43% since 2013.The Authors Guild has a pretty clear idea of what’s behind this disturbing trend, namely the rise of Amazon, which severely cuts publishers’ margins on book sales. Authors ultimately shoulder the cost because publishers offset their losses by giving out smaller author advances and royalties. The platform’s resale market also means that, within months of publication, books are being resold as “like new” or “lightly used,” a scenario in which no new money goes to the actual author of the book. The Authors Guild acknowledges that Amazon isn’t the only place where authors are losing out, but the culprits are of a kind: electronic platforms like Google Books and Open Library claim fair use rights in order to offer classrooms products without paying authors royalties. This is problematic because those royalties, a kind of pay-to-play model of compensation, are how artists have made their money ever since it went out of fashion to have a patron who could support your entire career.
This year’s Authors Guild Survey is right to focus on the harm Amazon does to working writers; personally, I’ve made my 2019 resolution to put my money where my mouth is and buy all my books at local, independent bookstores. But the survey results made me wonder if that would be enough—if it’s possible, in the age of the Internet, to reverse the belief that content should mostly be free. By content I do mean to encompass all ends of the artistic spectrum, that ill-defined mass of high and low entertainment and art and news that rubs up against each other on the web in a way that makes it more difficult to separate out, and perhaps less meaningful to do so. Basically, people are insatiable for this panoply of words and images; they want mass input. If you do a Google search for “apple pie recipe,” for example, the top results include both Pillsbury’s website and the personal blog of a home cook. The point isn’t that there is anything wrong with the latter, it’s that discernment has taken a backseat to access; we want all the apple pie recipes, all the videos and photographs and articles and books. We are here now. Entertain us.
by Carrie V. Mullins, Electric Lit | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, January 18, 2019
The Left Critique of Bureauracy
Sometimes my experiences with the Postal Service are almost enough to turn me into a right-wing libertarian. For instance: They offer a special discounted rate for sending magazines through the post. Which is good—I run a magazine that is sent through the post! In order to get the rate, however, you have to meticulously obey every single instruction in the 56 pages of Handbook DM-204, which governs Periodicals Mailing Privileges. There is an incredibly complicated application, and a $700 fee, and a seemingly endless set of potential pitfalls. I couldn’t figure out how to finish the application, so I hired someone to do it. That person eventually gave up in frustration. It ultimately took us a year to get the permit. Shortly afterward, the postal service threatened to revoke our permit (and send us back to step 1) because we had failed to print the contents of Form 3510-M in our magazine.
For every bad experience I’ve had with the post office, though, I’ve also had a good one. There are two post offices within a few blocks of Current Affairs HQ. At one, the staff are consistently ornery and chide you for doing something wrong. (I play a game with myself: “What have I done wrong this time?” in which I try to guess what I am going to be told I have done wrong. The last time I went in it was “failing to fold the priority envelope along the crease when sealing it.”) At the other post office, the staff are absolutely lovely. They apologize to you, they find fun stamps for you, they give you king cake during Carnival Season. I adore them.
On the left, we often talk about the importance of making things publicly owned and operated. But the structure and character of those institutions matters just as much as their being “public” versus “private.” There’s a reason why “Do you want your healthcare to be run like the post office and the DMV?” is a very effective conservative talking point against greater federal involvement in financing medical care. Many people have bad experiences with government agencies, and it’s important to be able to persuasively show that they won’t have these experiences when these experiences operate under left-wing governance.
It is not true, as is popularly thought, that the private sector is necessarily more efficient than the public sector. Some of the most frustrating experiences we have with “red tape” are with private companies—I would certainly rather deal with the USPS than with Comcast. Or have a look at the consumer reviews for BlueCross of California. People spent hours upon hours trying to navigate phone menus whose “options have changed,” and hearing private sector bureaucrats lament “I’m sorry, but that’s just our policy.” To those who think the private sector necessarily provides more satisfying experiences to the paying customer, I have two words: Spirit Airlines.
There are well-run public institutions and well-run private institutions, and poorly-run public institutions and poorly-run private institutions. The Tampa International Airport, for instance, is clean, attractive, extremely well-designed, efficiently operated, and often ranked one of the top most-loved airports in the country. It is owned and operated by the county government. The New York City Subway, on the other hand… well, let’s not even start. The United States has world-class public universities—the Universities of Texas, Michigan, and Virginia, for instance, give as good an education as can be found anywhere. The privately operated University of Phoenix, on the other hand, is run by the Apollo Education Group, Inc., and has been federally investigated for unfair business practices, deceiving shareholders, fraudulent marketing, and employment discrimination.
Clearly the fact of an institution being “public” or “private” does not in itself tell us much about it. The Border Patrol is public and Planned Parenthood is private. State institutions come in many forms: Public libraries are superb, quasi-socialist institutions that do good, but as conservatives love to point out, powerful “socialist” governments often have poor records in many areas such as environmental protection.
A leftist committed to strengthening the public sector, then, must also think about how to have a public sector that is well-run and accomplishes left objectives. Part of this, yes, is simply a matter of funding—the #1 thing that keeps the Detroit school system from succeeding, for example, is that there is little money in a poor city to provide quality education. Funding isn’t enough, though: You also have to have democratically-operated organizations, so that money gets spent well and those who run the system aren’t stymied by poorly-designed Rules And Regulations.
The questions that we should think about when “designing institutions” are simple: What is people’s experience of this institution going to be like? If we are designing a healthcare system, how can we make sure people don’t spend time filling out paperwork that they should be using to take care of themselves? Progressives should be fully on board, for example, with making it simple to file your taxes. Not with lowering taxes, but with making sure that the actual process of filing them is straightforward. We’ve got to think: How do we make government less complicated and frustrating? This isn’t “deregulation”—it’s a mistake to think that a critique of bureaucracy has to be a critique of government’s scope. But it is a desire to make government run “simply.” It should be easy to apply for a permit, easy to look up records. In fact, that’s a big part of how we should be pitching “government-run” healthcare. It’s about making your life easier. We want you to be able to go to the doctor and not have to think about money and insurance networks and reimbursements. Likewise, we want you to be able to go to college without having to spend the next two decades on the phone with the servicing company your student loan company sold your loans to.
For every bad experience I’ve had with the post office, though, I’ve also had a good one. There are two post offices within a few blocks of Current Affairs HQ. At one, the staff are consistently ornery and chide you for doing something wrong. (I play a game with myself: “What have I done wrong this time?” in which I try to guess what I am going to be told I have done wrong. The last time I went in it was “failing to fold the priority envelope along the crease when sealing it.”) At the other post office, the staff are absolutely lovely. They apologize to you, they find fun stamps for you, they give you king cake during Carnival Season. I adore them.On the left, we often talk about the importance of making things publicly owned and operated. But the structure and character of those institutions matters just as much as their being “public” versus “private.” There’s a reason why “Do you want your healthcare to be run like the post office and the DMV?” is a very effective conservative talking point against greater federal involvement in financing medical care. Many people have bad experiences with government agencies, and it’s important to be able to persuasively show that they won’t have these experiences when these experiences operate under left-wing governance.
It is not true, as is popularly thought, that the private sector is necessarily more efficient than the public sector. Some of the most frustrating experiences we have with “red tape” are with private companies—I would certainly rather deal with the USPS than with Comcast. Or have a look at the consumer reviews for BlueCross of California. People spent hours upon hours trying to navigate phone menus whose “options have changed,” and hearing private sector bureaucrats lament “I’m sorry, but that’s just our policy.” To those who think the private sector necessarily provides more satisfying experiences to the paying customer, I have two words: Spirit Airlines.
There are well-run public institutions and well-run private institutions, and poorly-run public institutions and poorly-run private institutions. The Tampa International Airport, for instance, is clean, attractive, extremely well-designed, efficiently operated, and often ranked one of the top most-loved airports in the country. It is owned and operated by the county government. The New York City Subway, on the other hand… well, let’s not even start. The United States has world-class public universities—the Universities of Texas, Michigan, and Virginia, for instance, give as good an education as can be found anywhere. The privately operated University of Phoenix, on the other hand, is run by the Apollo Education Group, Inc., and has been federally investigated for unfair business practices, deceiving shareholders, fraudulent marketing, and employment discrimination.
Clearly the fact of an institution being “public” or “private” does not in itself tell us much about it. The Border Patrol is public and Planned Parenthood is private. State institutions come in many forms: Public libraries are superb, quasi-socialist institutions that do good, but as conservatives love to point out, powerful “socialist” governments often have poor records in many areas such as environmental protection.
A leftist committed to strengthening the public sector, then, must also think about how to have a public sector that is well-run and accomplishes left objectives. Part of this, yes, is simply a matter of funding—the #1 thing that keeps the Detroit school system from succeeding, for example, is that there is little money in a poor city to provide quality education. Funding isn’t enough, though: You also have to have democratically-operated organizations, so that money gets spent well and those who run the system aren’t stymied by poorly-designed Rules And Regulations.
The questions that we should think about when “designing institutions” are simple: What is people’s experience of this institution going to be like? If we are designing a healthcare system, how can we make sure people don’t spend time filling out paperwork that they should be using to take care of themselves? Progressives should be fully on board, for example, with making it simple to file your taxes. Not with lowering taxes, but with making sure that the actual process of filing them is straightforward. We’ve got to think: How do we make government less complicated and frustrating? This isn’t “deregulation”—it’s a mistake to think that a critique of bureaucracy has to be a critique of government’s scope. But it is a desire to make government run “simply.” It should be easy to apply for a permit, easy to look up records. In fact, that’s a big part of how we should be pitching “government-run” healthcare. It’s about making your life easier. We want you to be able to go to the doctor and not have to think about money and insurance networks and reimbursements. Likewise, we want you to be able to go to college without having to spend the next two decades on the phone with the servicing company your student loan company sold your loans to.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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