Be Embarrassed Seattle

The snow is falling. Nothing, however, is at all special about this snow. It is not a little. It is certainly not astounding. It will (and should) be forgotten soon after it is a thing of the past. And yet, this kind of underwhelming snow, the kind of snow that would make most Northern Americans yawn, is currently trending on Twitter under the tags: #SeattleSnowpocalypse and #Snowmaggedon2019.

How is this possible? Seattle's imagination is so gripped by its own fear of snow that it has, it seems, become the dominant chatter on the web. Is this not deeply embarrassing? Something to be ashamed about? A whole zebra was frozen to death during last week's polar vortex. How can you beat that? A zebra! From hot Africa. Stuck in some farm in northern Indiana. Where is the fucking sun, it must have thought as it froze to the bone? Now that's trend-worthy. But we in the 206 freak out at any news of snow; the snow itself totally cripples us, we even brag about how much salt we toss on the streets (it's something like a gift from the gods themselves), and, worst of all, we throw a carnival at the opening of a tunnel for cars. What kind of sorry is this?

That said, I want to share some of the best works of art that have concerned snow. This is all I can do in this moment of shame (if you are from out of town, know I have to live, eat, and drink with these snow yokels).

Let's begin with the closing passage of what I consider to be the most perfect short story composed in English, James Joyce's "The Dead":

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

by Charles Mudede, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Bellen Drake 
[ed. See also: (Twitter).]

Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else

The National Enquirer has engaged in behavior so lowly and unscrupulous that it created a seemingly impossible storyline: the world’s richest billionaire and a notorious labor abuser, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, as a sympathetic victim.

On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which were apparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct.

In a perfect world, none of the sexually salacious material the Enquirer was threatening to release would be incriminating or embarrassing to Bezos: it involves consensual sex between adults that is the business of nobody other than those involved and their spouses. But that’s not the world in which we live: few news events generate moralizing interest like sex scandals, especially among the media. (...)

All of this raises serious questions, which thus far are limited to pure speculation, about how the National Enquirer obtained the intimate photos exchanged between Bezos and his mistress. Despite a lack of evidence, MSNBC is already doing what it exists to do – implying with no evidence that Trump is to blame (in this case, by abusing the powers of the NSA or FBI to spy on Bezos). But, under the circumstances, those are legitimate questions to be probing (though responsible news agencies would wait for evidence before airing innuendo of that sort).

If the surveillance powers of the NSA, FBI or other agencies were used to obtain incriminating information about Bezos due to their view of him as a political enemy – and, again, there is no evidence this has happened – it certainly would not be the first time. Those agencies have a long and shameful history of doing exactly that, which is why the Democratic adoration for those agencies, and the recent bipartisan further empowerment of them, was so disturbing.

Indeed, one of the stories we were able to report using the Snowden documents, one that received less attention that it should have, is an active NSA program to collect the online sex activities, including browsing records of porn site and sex chats, of people regarded by the U.S. Government as radical or radicalizing in order to use their online sex habits to destroy their reputations. This is what and who the NSA, CIA and FBI are and long have been.

If Bezos were the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic.

That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: AWS

Sears Once Sold Heroin

By the time of the American Civil War, in the 1860s, morphine was a battlefield staple, shot into soldiers to ease the pain of wounds and to treat the dysentery and malaria that raged through military camps. Home gardens in both the North and the South were ablaze with poppies as citizens patriotically grew opium for their troops; the raw drug was then processed into morphine and rushed to the front. Millions of doses were given. Thousands of veterans with lifelong wounds were taught how to use syringes to self-administer the drug long after the war ended; morphine and syringes were sold by mail order and over the counter at drugstores.

As morphine’s medical uses increased—for surgery, for accidents, for pretty much any disease or injury—so did the number of patients dependent on the drug. Scientists called this new epidemic “morphinism” and tried with increasing concern to find ways to control it. Enter the German company Bayer and its new drug, Heroin. Bayer’s tests showed that Heroin was up to five times stronger than morphine and far less habit-forming. It also seemed to have the unusual ability to open up airways in the body, so the company started selling it, at home and overseas, to treat coughs and breathing disorders as well as morphine addiction. For $1.50, Americans around the turn of the century could place an order through a Sears, Roebuck catalog and receive a syringe, two needles, and two vials of Bayer Heroin, all in a handsome carrying case.

Adapted from Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine, by Thomas Hager, published by Abrams

by Joe McKendry, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Why We Took Cocaine Out of Soda (The Atlantic)]

How a Frustrated Blogger Made Expanding Social Security a Respectable Idea

Duncan Black’s neighbors probably can’t hear him tapping away on his laptop in his Philadelphia row house, but he has been doing his best to become Townsend’s modern heir. An economist and former college professor, Black—who goes by the pseudonym “Atrios” online—is one of America’s most popular political bloggers; his typical output consists of short, snarky quips on the news from a liberal perspective. But in late 2012 he embarked on a sustained crusade, on his blog and in a series of columns for USA Today, to inject a single idea into America’s policy discourse: “We need an across-the-board increase in Social Security retirement benefits of 20 percent or more,” he declared in the opening of a column for USA Today. “We need it to happen right now.”

The proposal was not exactly attuned to the political winds in Washington. Indeed, for anyone inclined to think in terms of counting potential votes in Congress—especially this Congress—the idea of expanding Social Security is the epitome of a political non-starter. Black’s proposal was attuned, however, to a mounting pile of research and demographic data that describes a gathering disaster. The famously large baby boom generation is heading into retirement. Thanks to decades of stagnant wages and the asset collapse of the Great Recession, more than half of American working-class households are at risk of being unable to sustain their standard of living past retirement. To put it even more starkly, according to research by the economists Joelle Saad-Lessler and Teresa Ghilarducci, 49 percent of middle-class workers are on track to be “poor or near poor” after they retire.

There is very little safety net left to break this fall. The labor market for older workers is bleak. Private pensions are largely a thing of the past. Private savings are so far gone that some 25 percent of households with 401(k) and other retirement plans have raided them early to cover expenses, and a growing number of Americans over age 50 find themselves accumulating, not settling, debt. On the whole, 401(k)s have proved a “disaster,” as Black puts it, one that has enriched the financial sector but lashed the country’s retirement security to a volatile stock market—and left 75 percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 with less than $30,000 in their accounts.

What’s left? Social Security. Though it was never meant to be a national retirement system all by itself, that’s increasingly what it has become. For Americans over age 65 in the bottom half of the income distribution, Social Security makes up at least 80 percent of retirement income.

And yet, when Social Security has been in the news in recent years, it has usually been because someone wants to cut it. With Republicans in Congress ever more devoted to dismantling government, and the Congressional left doing everything it can just to fight the erosion of social programs, the center in American politics has increasingly come to be defined by deficit scolds preaching the “hard choices” of austerity. And the deficit reduction industry, a network of people in both parties who tend to enjoy favorable media attention for being “serious minded,” has long painted Social Security cuts as responsible fiscal policy—never mind that the program is funded outside the budget and does not add to the deficit.

All of this is especially surreal when you consider one additional fact: About 75 percent of Americans say we should consider increasing Social Security benefits, according to a survey by the National Academy of Social Insurance. Increasing Social Security is an idea that’s popular, concrete, and arguably necessary to forestall mass poverty among the elderly. But because it’s not “serious,” it hasn’t even been on the table in Washington. In a fit of quixotic energy, Black set out to change this. What’s remarkable is that his fool’s errand seems to be working.

Duncan Black didn't exactly plan to become one of America’s most aggressive advocates of retirement security. He first conceived of his crusade as a formal experiment in trying to change the conversation—using, of all things, a page from the playbook of the American right wing.

For years, bloggers and activists like Black in the online progressive movement have been fascinated with something called the Overton Window, a theory of how ideas enter the political mainstream and eventually become policy. The theory was coined by the libertarian thinker Joseph Overton, who argued that the public can only countenance a fairly narrow “window” of acceptable views on a given subject at a given time. Politicians, in order to be seen as viable, generally have to endorse views within that narrow range. However, savvy members of a political movement can work to move the Overton Window. By endorsing proposals that split the distance between views that are inside the window and the movement’s ultimate goal, activists can gradually drag the window toward their desired end position. To change policy, the idea goes, you change the political environment. (...)

It was only later that Black realized the urgency of his case. In late January, he attended a conference put on by the National Academy of Social Insurance, a non-partisan policy group of experts. He found that many there agreed on the nature and scope of the retirement crisis. Yet nobody felt like they could step out and state what seemed obvious: that the best solution would be to take the existing delivery system of Social Security and just add to it. “They had all these Rube Goldberg-type ideas to help at the margins,” Black said. Not only were such technocratic devices inadequate in the face of the crisis, Black realized, they had far less political mobilizing power than a simple solution based on what people already know. Proposing a dramatic expansion of Social Security might seem fanciful, but at least it could serve as a kind of political North Star.

by David Dayen, Pacific Standard |  Read more:
Image: Chris Sembrot

The News is Dying But Journalism Will Not: How the Media Can Prevent 2020 From Becoming 2016

If you haven’t noticed, media people are talking about the media again. At the dawn of a new presidential campaign, a debate is swirling over how to improve media coverage of a presidential campaign. Can the press deliver more policy substance and less of the salacious, conflict-based clickbait that drove so much media coverage in 2016? Versions of this conversation flare every four years, usually too late and to little effect, but in the wake of the mainstream media’s many blunders in the last campaign—including our national obsession with Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—this latest meditation carries a sense of urgency.

Frank Bruni recently admonished the press in The New York Times for lavishing too much attention on Donald Trump’s tweets and silly nicknames. Brian Beutler of Crooked Media rightly condemned the media’s “misbegotten habit of prizing partisan balance over its obligation to faithfully represent political reality to consumers.” Jay Rosen, the N.Y.U. media critic, made a similar point about the news media’s addiction to “cheap drama” and ESPN-style programming. Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post media writer, recalled how, when she was public editor of the Times, she examined a sample of the paper’s campaign coverage in 2016 and found that “three out of every four pieces of political journalism were horse race coverage.” Of course, the Times was hardly the only culprit. Virtually no outlet was immune.

Many political journalists choose to brush aside these criticisms, preferring to wash themselves of any wrongdoing, or just apologize and move along, despite the fact that trust in the media is at an all-time low. But one Times reporter, Nicholas Confessore, kindly engaged on Twitter, agreeing with Sullivan on the need for more substantive policy coverage, but lamenting how difficult it is to execute. “What’s really tough is integrating more policy reporting,” he said. “There’s a lot of policy reporting; but it’s mostly adjacent to campaign reporting. And candidate policy proposals are static; campaigns are not.”

There’s something of a false choice coursing through many of these arguments: that political reporters use their access to politicians to cover personalities, scandals, polls, and the “savvy” inside game. Sexy! And policy reporters cover health care, budget proposals, climate, criminal justice. Boring! These two brands of reporting are, to use Confessore’s frame, “adjacent” but cannot be conjoined. Is that right?

Not really. Many of Trump’s biggest controversies, during the campaign and in the White House, have been pegged to his policies. In truth, with Twitter operating as the water cooler of elite political conversation, it seems to be the case that policy reporting and political reporting are fused in a way they never were before. Social media and the ubiquity of the smartphone have allowed reporters to more easily attach human faces—actual stakes, not just charts and “dataviz”—to policies under scrutiny.

“The same social-media mechanisms that have poisoned the conversation have also elevated a sophisticated two-way policy conversation that includes experts and actual people affected by policies,” said Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. “The Internet has created communities of expertise and sophistication around everything from how labor law treats transgender employees to carbon taxation to economic policy. Political reporters used to bullshit their way through a discussion of the hard stuff. But you can’t get away with that anymore. Which is good! Both professional journalists and the people who don’t get paid to do it for a living and are in the same centralized conversation, mostly on Twitter, about policy.”

Trump’s policy conduct since taking office, a noxious gumbo of secrecy and audacity, has also been a forcing mechanism for good reporting. His brazenness has prompted newsrooms to grind out some of the best journalism in years. Trump’s secrecy around policy-making has prompted reporters to dig even deeper into the budget cuts and decision-making at his Cabinet agencies. His audacity around policy-making has sparked mass public convulsions and impressive media coverage of family separations at the U.S-Mexico border, the impact of a trade war on farmers across the country, the threat of coastal communities sinking into the rising and warming oceans, the real-life impact of the ongoing government shutdown. These are all policy stories—and they frequently top your feeds, your podcasts, the evening newscasts, the front pages of news sites. Because Trump’s policy agenda is high stakes, and so is coverage of those policies, which ensures that people actually watch and read when the news feels big enough.

So, reporters are covering policy. They are also covering the drama and personality of politics, which is valuable, too. That kind of reporting tells us much about a candidate’s fitness for office. But like a lot of journalist-on-journalist combat these days, this debate about horse-race reporting versus policy reporting feels too small. It obscures a larger point about the world we live in, which is decidedly not the hallowed journalism universe of yore. The conversation that should concern everyone, in both media and politics, is not about what gets covered. It’s about what gets attention.

At a time when technology is transforming voter behavior at unprecedented speed, this is a problem that the mainstream media, even on its best behavior, cannot possibly solve without a drastic reimagining of what journalism is and how it reaches contemporary audiences. But not all hope is lost. If we think about policy journalism as simply the impact of governance on the American condition, the real human consequences of decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, then policy journalism isn’t actually “really tough.” It’s just journalism. And in the Trump era, the best of it has grabbed us. So as we search for clues on how journalists can repair the forever broken state of campaign reporting, it’s useful to sort through the moments when meaty policy fights have overtaken the national political conversation, to understand how attention works in today’s media.

There are lessons here for presidential candidates, too, who deserve a fair hearing of their ideas in a media landscape that depressingly seems to prize re-tweets and ratings over depth and context. How do we have a presidential campaign that’s more about issues, and less about Beto O’Rourke’s dental cleanings or Elizabeth Warren’s beer selection? There are clues hiding in plain sight for both reporters and politicians. And like all conversations about political attention in the early days of 2019, this one begins with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

by Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Image: Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine/Redux

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When You Should Hire a CPA or Tax Pro

The 2019 tax season (when Americans file returns for the 2018 tax year) is the first year that many rules from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 take effect.

For some people, the new law simplifies tax filing. For others, things just got a lot more complicated. If you’re in the latter camp (or not sure where you stand), you may be wondering whether it’s time to hire a CPA or tax professional.

A tax pro is likely your best bet in several situations, including the following:

• You’re self-employed.
• You experienced a major life event, such as getting married or moving to a different state.
• You own rental property.
• You have foreign accounts or investments.

According to the IRS, paid professionals prepared over 83 million of the 149 million individual returns submitted in 2017.

The cost of hiring a professional averages anywhere from $176 for a federal and state return with no itemized deductions to $457 for a federal and state return with itemized expenses and income from a business, according to data about the 2016 tax season from the National Society of Accountants.

However, fees can go much higher depending on where you live, the experience level of your preparer, and the complexity of your return.

If you go the tax software route, you may have a simple enough return to file for free. But chuck in a few complications (such as a Schedule C), and a service like TurboTax can charge you about $160.

You may be wondering why you have to spend so much money to file your taxes. It’s painful to acknowledge, but tax filing could be a lot simpler and cheaper. The current system, which passes the time and cost burden of filing taxes to the American people, persists partly because, as an opinion piece in The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company) notes, tax-preparation companies like H&R Block and Intuit lobby Congress to maintain the status quo (though there are many other reasons).

But with no major change on the horizon, we want to help you make the best of the current system.

We’ll discuss situations where your return might be simple enough to tackle on your own, some scenarios where bringing in a professional might be worthwhile, and how to find a reputable pro when you need one.

Just keep in mind that when you sign your tax return, you become responsible for everything on it—even if someone else prepared it.

by Janet Berry-Johnson, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image:Sarah MacReading
[ed. See also: Why millions of people are getting hit with a surprise tax bill this year (Vox)]

Steely Dan

[ed. See also: West of Hollywood and What a Shame About Me.]

Teddy's rolling now most every night. Skatin' backwards at the speed of light. He's changed - in a thousand little ways. He's changed - yes indeed. You know he's movin' on metal, yes he's hanging tight with the Jack of Speed. Sheena's party - there's a case in point. That right-wing hooey sure stunk up the joint. He's gone - he walks through the old routines. But he's gone - guaranteed. He may be sittin' in the kitchen, but he's steppin' out with the Jack of Speed. You maybe got lucky for a few good years. But there's no way back from there to here. He's a one way rider. On the shriek express. And his new best friend is at the throttle more or less. He can't hear you honey - that's alright. Pack some things and head up into the light. Don't stop - he'll be callin' out your name. But don't stop when you hear him plead. You better move now little darlin' or you'll be trading fours with the Jack of Speed.

Ernst Haas
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From A to B and Back Again

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

At the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol’s work looked new because of a technique new to art—the half-tone silkscreen. It was the ultimate low-to-high inversion. Screen printing uses the method by which photography’s gray scale, its range of lights and darks, is translated into a pattern of tiny dots, known as benday; it’s what allows photographs to be reproduced in newspapers. The same dot pattern, expressed as tiny, pin-prick holes, can be bonded to a piece of silk, which is then stretched taut on a frame of wood or metal. When ink is forced through the silk using a rubber squeegee, the photographic image, reconstituted by the tiny dots, appears on the printed surface—in Warhol’s case, the canvas. The print can be repeated any number of times, and the amount of ink used, as well as the degree of force applied to the squeegee, will produce variations in the resulting image.

Warhol was the first artist to grasp the potential for pattern and rhythm released by the screen-print process; it could be both mechanical and expressive at the same time. This pictorial rhythm was tied to a feature of the silkscreen: it exaggerates the contrast in a photographic image between light and dark, amplifies their power to convey a sense of form, and also makes the dark areas of a photograph feel almost animated. In a profound act of poetic equivalency, Warhol further realized that the true substance of photography is the shadow cast by and on its subject. This was the essence of his major innovation, which still reverberates today: the reciprocity between painting and printing. What was his alone was the identification with the fatalistic glamour of a shadow.

The Star of the Silken Screen (NYRB)
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The Sommeliers of Everything

My training as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society culminates with eight wineglasses filled with various honeys, lined up from light to dark. My instructor, Carla Marina Marchese, tells me that when we taste honey, we don’t do the ceremonial swirl — the wine expert’s ritual — before we sniff. Honey sommeliers smear. “Smear it on the sides of the glass like this,” she says, using a tiny plastic spoon. Once the honey is smeared, I can stick my nose in the glass to properly evaluate the aroma, then spoon a dollop onto my tongue.

Perhaps you are someone who thinks honey is just honey. Or tea is just tea. Or olive oil is just olive oil. Or water is just water. Or a cigar is just a cigar. Or mustard is just mustard. If so, you’re likely skeptical of a honey sommelier, a tea sommelier, an olive oil sommelier, a water sommelier, a cigar sommelier or a mustard sommelier. But over the past several years, there’s been a creeping wine-ification in every realm of gourmet endeavor. Now, in our era of hyper-credentialism, there’s almost no sphere of connoisseurship without a knowledgeable, certified taste expert, someone who’s completed serious coursework and passed an exam. A two-day tea sommelier certification course (followed by eight weeks of home study) from the International Tea Masters Association costs $1,475. A six-day olive oil sommelier certification program at the International Culinary Center in New York costs $2,800. A nine-day water sommelier certification program at the Doemens Academy in Germany costs $2,600 (travel not included).

These programs prepare you to be a taste authority, a sensory expert, an arbiter and evangelist in the field, but you’re likely not producing anything. Even so, they’re in demand. What is it about this epoch that values such mastery over taste? Were we all truly so clueless and naive about these matters once upon a time? Has life become so fraught and complicated that even decisions over our smallest pleasures now require expert intervention?  (...)

I learn about the American Cheese Society’s T.A.S.T.E. Test, which launched in the summer of 2018. Passing this exam will confer the title of Certified Cheese Sensory Evaluator (cheese sommeliers don’t call themselves sommeliers). Cheese feels like something I can handle. I’d recently spent time on assignment for The Washington Post in Bra, Italy, reporting from the Slow Food cheese event, tasting from among 300 cheesemakers from 50 countries. The founder of Slow Food declared the event to be “the beating heart of cheese” and those of us attending the “cheese intelligentsia.” Well, as a member of the cheese intelligentsia, surely I can pass the T.A.S.T.E. Test.

“You can’t study the day before and take this test,” says Jane Bauer, the certification manager for the American Cheese Society. The professionals taking this test need at least 4,000 hours of work experience in the cheese business. “There’s a difference between certification and certificates. A lot of people try to call things certifications, and they’re not.”

I ask Bauer if cheese is any more complex than wine. “Oh yes,” she says. “With cheese, every day is different. There’s a new vintage every day depending on what the animal ate the day before. Some cheesemakers have 365 vintages per year.”

Despite my lack of the requisite hours, Bauer agrees to let me sit for the three-hour exam, held in a hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh during the society’s annual conference. I arrive along with 50 other candidates and am shown to my table, which has a clipboard of evaluation sheets for a dozen categories of cheese — from soft-ripened to cheddars to blue mold to goat cheese to washed rind — as well as cups of aroma samples, unidentified liquids marked A to J that I will have to sniff and identify blind. The proctor tells us there are to be no photos, and no posting or sharing on social media. “Though there’s not much in your phone that can help you now,” he says. Along the back wall of the ballroom are a team of cheesemongers cutting samples, where we will go to get our cheeses to evaluate.

The aroma part seems straightforward: I think I identify garlic, hazelnut, green apple, horseradish, smoke and one that smells “butyric” (think baby vomit). I guess on some others, including one liquid I think is either buttermilk or “old milk” — which I clumsily spill all over my table.

When I move to the evaluation portion, however, I immediately realize I am in way over my head. Any hubris I had cracks when I pop my first sample, a soft-ripened cheese, into my mouth. I chew. It just tastes like … soft cheese. I am supposed to evaluate this based on 70 characteristics and flaws in four categories (appearance, aroma, texture and flavor). And not just the presence of, say, a nutty or herbal aroma or an animal or grassy flavor, but “much too little,” “too little,” “just about right,” “too much” or “much too much.” At the table in front of me I see another candidate spit into a bucket. Wait a minute! I think. Are we supposed to spit cheese when we taste it, like wine? I spit my soft-ripened cheese into the bucket on my table (which is gross, to be honest). Still, I gamely trudge on for almost three hours. When I get to the evaluation sheet for Emmental-style (i.e., Swiss) cheese, there is a category for “Eye Development,” with characteristics such as blind, underset, irregular and dead/dull eyes. So cheese has eyes? When I approach the cheesemongers for a sample of cheddar, I steal a glance at the clipboard of a bearded guy in a Hawaiian shirt and Birkenstocks standing next to me. He marks “seamy” on one of his score sheets. What does it mean to have a seamy cheese? I am so out of my league, I don’t even know what I don’t know.

After I finish the test, I see Bauer outside. “Are you okay? You’re looking at little …”

“Glazed?” I say.

“Yes, glazed,” she says. “That’s the word I was looking for.”

A couple of months later, I am not surprised to learn that I did not pass the exam and that the title of Certified Cheese Sensory Evaluator has eluded me. Humbled, I realize if I want to gain some certified cheese expertise, I will have to begin at a much lower level and work my way up.

by Jason Wilson, Washington Post |  Read more:
Image: Stacy Zarin Goldberg

Trump Gets the Clap

[ed. "Fuck you" clap by Nancy Pelosi, 2019 SOTU address (not to be confused with the more common "golf clap").]

The Porta-Potty King of New York City

Charles W. Howard is the porta-potty king of New York City. The seat of his vast empire is Broad Channel, Queens; from this windswept rock in Jamaica Bay, you can see the lights of Manhattan twinkling across the water. Early every morning, while the city sleeps, dozens of trucks — tagged with WE’RE #1 AT PICKING UP #2 decals — snake through the five boroughs to clean his 18,000 toilets. The company boasts more than $35 million in annual revenue, thanks in part to “salesgirls” who head out each day in the company’s signature Volkswagen Beetles to poach contracts from competitors who are too shy to sell with sex. Charlie himself arrives at work only around midday in a black Cadillac Escalade. Young female dispatchers and clerks cry “Charlie! Charlie!” while men in orange slickers hose down toilets in the yard.

On a recent Thursday, the gleaming Escalade stops at a pizzeria, and Charlie, 53, steps out, a bit heavy and wearing a rumpled purple dress shirt. He’s brought along Kimberly, the star of his company’s YouTube channel. She’s beautiful, blonde, and his wife. Charlie favors superlatives, like another Queens businessman, and speaks with the accent you’d expect from a man so old-school New York there’s a neighborhood named after his family. And now, not far from Howard Beach, he explains why he’s the greatest toilet man in America. “I had different theories about business,” he says, “and they all turned out to be correct.”

Nationally, portable toilets are a $2 billion business. Construction rentals are three-quarters of New York’s market, and as America’s real-estate sector has rebounded over the past half-decade, the industry has exploded. Developers pay $100 a month for a pump truck to visit once a week and hoover up blue-tinged waste. Profits are made by building dense routes: lots of toilets at a stop and lots of job sites close together. Events are a growing corner of the business. Go to Smorgasburg and count the toilets: Daily rentals run about $225 each. Use a luxury restroom trailer with flushing toilets at an upstate wedding? It cost the bride’s parents a few thousand bucks just for the night.

You can’t get denser routes than in New York City, which makes it a major prize. But the market is a nightmare to navigate — traffic, tolls, angry unions, toilets that need to be lowered by crane from skyscrapers. A small group of competitors controls the industry: “the big five.” Mr. John is clean-cut and corporate. Abe Breuer, a wiry Hasidic Jew, runs John to Go from Rockland County. A Royal Flush owns the special-events market and enjoys an enviable 7,000-toilet contract with New York Road Runners to clean up after nervous, caffeinated runners. Johnny on the Spot is now part of a national chain. Over a four-decade career, Charlie’s Call-a-Head has held its own.

But now, Charlie might fall off his throne. More than 1,300 former pump-truck drivers, the men who literally haul his shit, are part of a class-action lawsuit that could put him out of business. The rest of the big five covet his empire.

“They would love for us to get destroyed,” Charlie says, though it’s quite a vague “they.” Spend enough time in his world and you wonder if he’s perhaps the most hated man in the city. Kimberly Howard nods. “Business,” she says, “is war.”

by David Gauvey Herbert, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts
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Going to the Galápagos Is Easier and Cheaper Than Ever

That Might Not Be a Good Thing

“The archipelago is a little world within itself,” a young Charles Darwin mused in his London study in 1839. Four years earlier, the aspiring naturalist had spent five weeks on the Galápagos Islands, some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. So taken by the “extreme tameness” of the species he encountered, he wasn’t an ideal visitor by today’s standards: He hopped on the backs of giant tortoises and “pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree” with the muzzle of a gun.

These days, that “little world” is brand-name nature, drawing an increasing number of visitors from around the world to see, among other creatures, blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas that swim alongside equatorial penguins, and the giant tortoises for which the islands are named. In 2017, 241,800 people visited the islands, according to the Observatorio de Turismo de Galápagos, up from 173,419 a decade earlier.

Much of the growth — more than 90 percent from 2007 to 2016 — is from land-based tourism: visitors who fly into airports on the islands of Baltra and San Cristóbal, check into hotels and take à la carte tours that are considerably cheaper than the expensive cruises that traditionally are how most visitors have seen the islands. With round-trip flights from Quito costing as little as $400 or so, and hostel accommodations starting at $20 a night, the Galápagos Islands are no longer just for upscale travelers.

For the Galápagos National Park, which uses a portion of the $100 fee that visitors are required to pay ($6 for Ecuadoreans) to oversee the 97 percent of the islands that hasn’t been settled by humans, land-based tourism offers much-needed funds. But that doesn’t mean conservation groups — including Unesco, which lists tourism growth as one of the primary threats to the islands — aren’t alarmed by the lack of an enforced cap on land-based visitors. (Cruise passengers, on the other hand, are limited by the space available on expedition ships; last year, there were some 70 ships with room for about 1,700 passengers.) More people on the islands means more pressure on existing infrastructure, encroachment on animal habitats and a heightened risk of introducing invasive plant and animal species.

“It is simply not sustainable to have never-ending growth in land-based tourism in this fragile environment,” said Jim Lutz, the president of the International Galápagos Tour Operators Association, who expressed the same sentiment in a letter to Ecuador’s tourism minister last February.

On a recent visit to the islands, I observed land-based tourism in action, and spoke to naturalists, guides and others about the effects of the travel boom, which, along with climate change, illegal — and legal — fishing and other threats, make the Galápagos a microcosm of conservation’s modern challenges.

On The Ground

Along with more visitors, the islands’ permanent population (now about 30,000) has also swelled. About half of those residents — many from mainland Ecuador who were drawn here by the tourism business — are in Puerto Ayora, on the island of Santa Cruz.

In some ways, the town seems like any other tropical locale, with coffee shops, cafes and stores selling T-shirts; there is even a bit of a party scene when the sun goes down.

On an overcast Friday night in Puerto Ayora, I sat with Ulf Torsten Hardter, an environmental manager turned guide, on the patio of OMG Galápagos, a cafe with a life-size statue of Darwin sporting a Santa Claus-like beard, popular with the selfie set.

“The problem is that the islands lack basic infrastructure like waste, energy, water,” Mr. Hardter said over an iguana-branded I.P.A. As we talked, the misty rain called garúa started, and one of Darwin’s finches scavenged from my unfinished plate.

by Adam Popescu, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Josh Haner/The New York Times

Now and Then

  

 

via: here, here, here, here and here

Pot Without Plants

A $255 million deal to convert sugar into cannabis-chemicals is opening the door to an era of pot without plants.

Amyris Inc. already works with genetically modified yeast that excrete designer molecules to make sweeteners and skin-care products. Now it plans to use that fermentation technology to convert sugarcane syrup into the active ingredients found in marijuana, the California-based company said in a statement Tuesday. Those ingredients can be used in consumer products ranging from beverages to skin creams and deodorant.

The project’s initial focus is to make cannabidiol, or CBD, the molecule used to treat medical conditions such as anxiety and sleeplessness. But Amyris and its undisclosed partners are targeting multiple cannabidiol molecules that have medical and therapeutic uses without being psychoactive, spokeswoman Beth Bannerman said by phone. THC, the mind-bending molecule that gets people high, is not a focus, she said. (...)

Rival Projects

Amyris’s venture comes on top of two smaller deals announced in September that also aim to ferment cannabinoids. Marijuana producer Cronos Group Inc. struck a $122 million partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks Inc., and Organigram Holdings announced a C$10 million ($7.6 million) strategic investment in Hyasynth Biologicals.

By manufacturing CBD and other cannabinoids in a brewing process, makers can control quality and dosage, Amyris said. Cutting plants out of the equation ensures the molecules will be completely free of pesticides.

The marijuana molecules Amyris produces could be used in the company’s current slate of products, Bannerman said. Amyris makes Biossance, a skin care line sold at Sephora cosmetics shops, and it recently introduced a zero-calorie beverage sweetener.

Infused Beverages

Interest in pot-infused drinks is soaring now that cannabis is legal in Canada and hemp-derived CBD is legal in the U.S. Canadian pot company Canopy Growth Corp. is spending up to $150 million on a facility in New York to extract CBD from hemp.

Constellation Brands Inc., maker of Corona beer, has invested $3.8 billion in Canopy Growth, while Molson Coors Brewing Co. has started a joint venture with Quebec-based Hexo Corp. to sell nonalcoholic cannabis drinks. Even Coca-Cola Co. has said it’s interested in CBD-infused beverages, although it doesn’t have immediate plans to enter the market.

Plant-based CBD also can be found in personal-care products including moisturizing creams to deodorants and soaps, mostly made by small manufacturers.

by Jack Kaskey, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Stephan Wermuth, Bloomberg 
[ed. For an interesting persective on how culture leads politics, see: Respectability Cascades (Slate Star Codex). Also: Ketamine Could Be the Key to Reversing America’s Rising Suicide Rate (Bloomberg).]

Evidence Mounts That Gut Bacteria Can Influence Mood, Prevent Depression

Of all the many ways the teeming ecosystem of microbes in a person’s gut and other tissues might affect health, its potential influences on the brain may be the most provocative. Now, a study of two large groups of Europeans has found several species of gut bacteria are missing in people with depression. The researchers can’t say whether the absence is a cause or an effect of the illness, but they showed that many gut bacteria could make substances that affect nerve cell function—and maybe mood.

“It’s the first real stab at tracking how” a microbe’s chemicals might affect mood in humans, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who has been one of the most vocal proponents of a microbiome-brain connection. The study “really pushes the field from where it’s been” with small studies of depressed people or animal experiments. Interventions based on the gut microbiome are now under investigation: The University of Basel in Switzerland, for example, is planning a trial of fecal transplants, which can restore or alter the gut microbiome, in depressed people.

Several studies in mice had indicated that gut microbes can affect behavior, and small studies of people suggested this microbial repertoire is altered in depression. To test the link in a larger group, Jeroen Raes, a microbiologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and his colleagues took a closer look at 1054 Belgians they had recruited to assess a “normal” microbiome. Some in the group—173 in total—had been diagnosed with depression or had done poorly on a quality of life survey, and the team compared their microbiomes with those other participants. Two kinds of microbes, Coprococcus and Dialister, were missing from the microbiomes of the depressed subjects, but not from those with a high quality of life. The finding held up when the researchers allowed for factors such as age, sex, or antidepressant use, all of which influence the microbiome, the team reports today in Nature Microbiology. They also found the depressed people had an increase in bacteria implicated in Crohn disease, suggesting inflammation may be at fault.

Microbiome results in one population often don’t hold up in another. But when the team looked at data from another group—1064 Dutch people whose microbiomes had also been sampled—they found the same two species were missing among those who were depressed, and they were also missing in seven subjects suffering from severe clinical depression. The data don’t prove causality, Raes acknowledges, but they are “an independent observation backed by three [groups of people].”

Looking for something that could link microbes to mood, Raes and his colleagues compiled a list of 56 substances important for proper nervous system function that gut microbes either produce or break down. They found, for example, that Coprococcus seems to have a pathway related to dopamine, a key brain signal involved in depression, although they have no evidence how this might protect against depression. The same microbe also makes an anti-inflammatory substance called butyrate, and increased inflammation is implicated in depression.

Linking the absence of the bacteria to depression “makes sense physiologically,” says Sara Campbell, a physiologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Still, no one knows how microbial compounds made in the gut might influence the brain. One possible channel is the vagus nerve, which links the gut and brain.

by Elizabeth Pennisi, Science | Read more:
Image: V. Altounian/Science

Events Are the New Magazines

On a recent Thursday evening, Jordan Roth, a Broadway producer of “Angels in America” and “Kinky Boots,” was serving as the M.C. of a party hosted by Town & Country magazine on the top floor of the Standard Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Wearing sequined pants and a jeweled hairpin, he kvelled with Kelly Ripa, dressed in blue velvet.

Ms. Ripa presented an award to Lizzie Tisch, a supporter of jewelry designers, whom the event was honoring. Adam Rippon, the effervescent skating star, was there too, as was Lady Kitty Spencer, an English fashion model who perched on a chair, dripping in Bulgari, which pays her to do just that.

The celebrities were all being tended to by Nicole Vecchiarelli and Andrea Oliveri, the founders of a company called (with insidery resonance for anyone in the magazine business) Special Projects. That has long been a euphemistic term for editors who wrangle celebrities and are cozy with publicists.

Ms. Oliveri and Ms. Vecchiarelli, both 43, are former special projects and entertainment editors, at publications including Details, W, Teen Vogue and InStyle, and now work with people like Stellene Volandes, the editor in chief of Town & Country, founded more than a century ago.

In an era when glossy print publications are floundering and relying on revenue and publicity from conferences and the like, Special Projects is helping take the page to the stage.

They are what the Business of Fashion events, a New York magazine/The Cut “How I Get It Done Day,” speaking opportunities at the women’s club the Wing, a Kate Spade advertising campaign, a Kanye West listening party in Wyoming and a WSJ. Magazine dinner hosted by Julia Roberts all have in common.

This week, the company was hired by Glossier, the cosmetics brand that grew out of the Into the Gloss blog, to broker talent for a forthcoming marketing campaign.

A big part of Ms. Vecchiarelli and Ms. Oliveri’s business is predicting who tomorrow’s stars will be. (...)

Special Projects’ offices (one in New York, where Ms. Vecchiarelli lives; one in Los Angeles, where Ms. Oliveri does) are now an essential stop on the press tours of young and rising celebrities. There, the women meet and chat with the young artists, to get a sense of their personal stories, charm, intelligence and ambitions.

by Katherine Rosman, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Nina Westervelt

Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Continues

A $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste has hit a slew of construction milestones in recent months. The Hanford Vit Plant, in Washington state, is now on track to begin “glassifying” low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline, officials say.

Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation’s radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it's unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility's long-term prospects.

Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Built in 1943, the sprawling 1,518-square-kilometer complex produced plutonium for more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, forcing an end to World War II. The remaining radioactive sludge is now stored in dozens of aging, leaky, underground tanks near the Columbia River.

After decades of discussions, federal and state officials agreed to vitrify the nuclear waste to keep it from further contaminating the soil and groundwater. Construction on the Hanford Vit Plant, known formally as the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, began in 2002.

As planned, technicians will mix the waste with glass-forming materials to create molten glass, which they’ll pour into stainless steel containers to cool and harden. About 90 percent of the tank waste is considered “low-activity.” It’s the waste that remains after the DOE drew off as much radioactivity as was technically and economically practical from the stream. Once vitrified, this portion could be buried at a Hanford landfill. The other 10 percent of tank waste, containing that highly radioactive material that was drawn off, is considered too dangerous to store on site and thus must be vitrified and stored in a deep geologic repository such as the long-delayed Yucca Mountain site. (...)

When finished, the Vit Plant will feature 56 buildings and systems, including: electric power distribution that could light up 2,250 houses; a compressed air system that could fill the Goodyear blimp in three minutes; and a chilled water system capable of air conditioning 23,500 houses.

by Maria Gallucci, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Bechtel National