Friday, March 8, 2019
Fleabag Returns
If you are a Fleabag devotee, you could only find yourself whispering in reverential awe as the opening episode seated our antihero at a family dinner next to … a Catholic priest. “Oh,” I found myself murmuring and, as Fleabag looked meaningfully to camera, I mentally bowed the knee. “Of course.”
As soon as the emotionally pulverising end of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first series about the super-combustible eponymous thirtysomething was revealed, fans wondered how there could be a second run. Where could she go from there?
Desecration makes perfect sense. Defilement and corruption of the divine. We should, we see as she watches him drink and light up a fag, have known.
The priest, played by Andrew Scott with his customary acuity and lightness of touch, is at the dinner table because time has moved on by just over a year and he is to marry the newly engaged couple; Fleabag’s useless father (Bill Paterson) and malignant godmother (the Oscar-winning-since-last-time Olivia Colman). Across from her sit brittle, unforgiving sister Claire and brother-in-law, Martin, whom we last saw trying to kiss Fleabag then persuading Claire it had been the other way round. The air is thick with bitterness, rancour and betrayal even before anyone speaks.
But oh, when they speak …
It is, in short, an immaculately scripted (by Waller-Bridge) and performed (by everyone) half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire. Waller-Bridge’s dialogue is whetted to such a fine edge that you hardly notice when it strikes – you’re too busy laughing at the joke, the audacity – until the blood starts to well up in the wound a second later. Someone remarks that Claire looks happy, and she says she has worked hard at it. “It’s not just about eating and drinking well either,” she says, looking daggers at Fleabag who has tried purging her sins via a health kick since we last saw her. “Putting pine nuts on your salad doesn’t make you a grownup.” “Fucking does,” mutters Fleabag, whose natural state is mutiny. Claire returns to the point when it turns out that their father has not given Fleabag the expected cheque for her birthday, but a voucher for counselling. “I don’t believe you can pay your problems away,” says Claire. “You have to face who you are and suffer the consequences. It’s the only road to happiness.” “Maybe happiness isn’t about what you believe but who you believe,” snaps back Fleabag, flaying skin with every word.
Only in Fleabag’s world does the revelation that the priest doesn’t have any contact with his family because his brother is a paedophile come as light relief. “I am aware,” he says helpfully, “of the irony of that.”
After the flaying, Claire runs to the loo. Fleabag follows. “You’ve been ages. Are you pissed off or are you doing a poo?” In fact, she’s having a miscarriage and her refusal to tell anyone or go to hospital plays out, unbelievably and yet perfectly credibly, as farce. Fleabag claims it is she who has miscarried and Claire insists with heartbreaking fury that “it’s gone, it’s gone” and there’s no need for a doctor. Dinner ends with a literal family fight that sees at least three people going home with bloodied noses.
Everything is here in this densely packed 30-minute nugget. Laughs that come from the deepest part of you, where your better judgment flails and fails. Waller-Bridge’s fleetness as she pivots to camera and back, capturing her tiny moment each time, so we see her in the round and cannot help but follow her wherever in her awfulness she leads. The vivid portraits of human frailty, weakness and – in Martin’s case – near-evil (his toxicity here was so potent it was almost visible; if the priest had performed an exorcism instead of ordered pudding it would not have gone amiss) drawn with just a handful of lines each from an unflinching, excoriating, lethally funny writer whose performers knock every one out of the park.
[ed. Big Fleabag fan. See also: 'It's a WOW from me' – fans review the return of Fleabag (The Guardian).]
As soon as the emotionally pulverising end of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first series about the super-combustible eponymous thirtysomething was revealed, fans wondered how there could be a second run. Where could she go from there?
Desecration makes perfect sense. Defilement and corruption of the divine. We should, we see as she watches him drink and light up a fag, have known.The priest, played by Andrew Scott with his customary acuity and lightness of touch, is at the dinner table because time has moved on by just over a year and he is to marry the newly engaged couple; Fleabag’s useless father (Bill Paterson) and malignant godmother (the Oscar-winning-since-last-time Olivia Colman). Across from her sit brittle, unforgiving sister Claire and brother-in-law, Martin, whom we last saw trying to kiss Fleabag then persuading Claire it had been the other way round. The air is thick with bitterness, rancour and betrayal even before anyone speaks.
But oh, when they speak …
It is, in short, an immaculately scripted (by Waller-Bridge) and performed (by everyone) half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire. Waller-Bridge’s dialogue is whetted to such a fine edge that you hardly notice when it strikes – you’re too busy laughing at the joke, the audacity – until the blood starts to well up in the wound a second later. Someone remarks that Claire looks happy, and she says she has worked hard at it. “It’s not just about eating and drinking well either,” she says, looking daggers at Fleabag who has tried purging her sins via a health kick since we last saw her. “Putting pine nuts on your salad doesn’t make you a grownup.” “Fucking does,” mutters Fleabag, whose natural state is mutiny. Claire returns to the point when it turns out that their father has not given Fleabag the expected cheque for her birthday, but a voucher for counselling. “I don’t believe you can pay your problems away,” says Claire. “You have to face who you are and suffer the consequences. It’s the only road to happiness.” “Maybe happiness isn’t about what you believe but who you believe,” snaps back Fleabag, flaying skin with every word.
Only in Fleabag’s world does the revelation that the priest doesn’t have any contact with his family because his brother is a paedophile come as light relief. “I am aware,” he says helpfully, “of the irony of that.”
After the flaying, Claire runs to the loo. Fleabag follows. “You’ve been ages. Are you pissed off or are you doing a poo?” In fact, she’s having a miscarriage and her refusal to tell anyone or go to hospital plays out, unbelievably and yet perfectly credibly, as farce. Fleabag claims it is she who has miscarried and Claire insists with heartbreaking fury that “it’s gone, it’s gone” and there’s no need for a doctor. Dinner ends with a literal family fight that sees at least three people going home with bloodied noses.
Everything is here in this densely packed 30-minute nugget. Laughs that come from the deepest part of you, where your better judgment flails and fails. Waller-Bridge’s fleetness as she pivots to camera and back, capturing her tiny moment each time, so we see her in the round and cannot help but follow her wherever in her awfulness she leads. The vivid portraits of human frailty, weakness and – in Martin’s case – near-evil (his toxicity here was so potent it was almost visible; if the priest had performed an exorcism instead of ordered pudding it would not have gone amiss) drawn with just a handful of lines each from an unflinching, excoriating, lethally funny writer whose performers knock every one out of the park.
by Lucy Mangan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: BBC/Two Brothers/Luke Varley[ed. Big Fleabag fan. See also: 'It's a WOW from me' – fans review the return of Fleabag (The Guardian).]
The Case Against Octopus Farming
A couple years ago, Inky, an octopus at a New Zealand aquarium, made headlines with a daring escape — he busted out of his enclosure, travelled eight feet across the floor, and wriggled into a tiny drain pipe that emptied directly into the ocean. This didn’t surprise many octopus enthusiasts. Octopuses are highly intelligent animals; they use tools, feel pain, make plans, and communicate with one another to coordinate hunting.
If some people have their way, they’ll soon be confined in underwater factory farms for human consumption.
Such a development would be terrible for octopuses. Octopuses are solitary, carnivorous animals badly suited to captivity. Confined in tiny cages, they suffer and die; confined together, they kill each other.
But this hasn’t stopped the push to factory farm them. Teams from Spain to China to Chile are testing new methods of intensive octopus farming.
A new study argues that the nascent factory farming of octopuses is a bad idea — a moral and ecological disaster waiting to happen. But there are no octopus factory farms yet — which means that, for once, we could stop a mistake before we make it instead of spending decades recovering from it afterward.
Why octopus factory farms are a bad idea
Octopuses are not a part of a regular diet anywhere in the world, but they’re a delicacy in many countries. Some 350,000 metric tons of octopus are caught annually, and the real numbers may be higher, as fishing is often underreported.
To some, this looks like a business opportunity; octopus could be sold more widely and become a bigger part of the food supply. Researchers are working to figure out how to keep octopuses alive in tiny, featureless cages for long enough to harvest them for food. But “there’s almost zero chance that this represents acceptable welfare to any standard,” Jennifer Jacquet, one of the co-authors of the report, told me.
Factory farming octopus is terrible for the environment, too: “On land, we farm herbivores. In the ocean, we tend to farm animals that are carnivorous, and we have to put more pressure on the oceans,” to catch all of the animals we need to feed to the animals we’re raising for food. “We think that aquaculture will alleviate pressure on wild ecosystems, but it actually exacerbates that pressure,” Jacquet said.
Nonetheless, the group’s report, published in the winter 2019 edition of Issues of Science and Technology, finds that efforts to industrially farm octopus are plunging ahead.
First, there’s a lot of research pointing us to the conclusion that octopuses are conscious, capable, and really, really smart. “Once octopuses have solved a novel problem,” the paper notes, “they retain long-term memory of the solution. One study found that octopuses retained knowledge of how to open a screw-top jar for at least five months. They are also capable of mastering complex aquascapes, conducting extensive foraging trips, and using visual landmarks to navigate.”
However, as Jacquet pointed out to me, it’s not the research literature on octopus intelligence or on consciousness in animals that’s convincing to the general public — it’s the abundant videos available online of octopuses using tools, stealing crabs, camouflaging themselves, and solving problems in their environment. People can recognize an intelligent animal when they see it, whether they’ve read the research on octopus intelligence or not.
Second, the paper points out, “octopus farming has the same environmental consequences as other types of carnivorous aquaculture. And, like other carnivorous aquaculture, octopus farming would increase, not alleviate, pressure on wild aquatic animals.”
Global fisheries are already being depleted by overfishing. Aquaculture, sometimes sold as a solution, often makes this worse by dramatically increasing the demand for fish products. “The over-fishing of the oceans to get food for farmed fish is already a big problem, and this would be made worse if octopus farming became common,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, co-author of the paper, told me in an email. I asked Jacquet whether it’d at least be good for wild octopus if more octopuses for human consumption came from farms. It likely wouldn’t, she said. As long as it’s cost-effective to catch octopus in the wild, we’ll keep doing it — and aquaculture might actually increase demand, by making octopus cuisine more mainstream.
Third, the usual justifications for intensive animal farming don’t hold up in this case. “The case in favor of octopus farming is weak,” the paper points out. “The main markets for farmed octopus — upscale outlets in Japan, South Korea, northern Mediterranean countries, the United States, China, and Australia — are largely food secure” — meaning that the populations in those countries have affordable, consistent access to food that meets both their needs and their preferences. Industrial farming of animals is hard to tackle because many food-insecure populations rely on meat. No one is relying on octopus. It’s a bad idea to change that.
If some people have their way, they’ll soon be confined in underwater factory farms for human consumption.
Such a development would be terrible for octopuses. Octopuses are solitary, carnivorous animals badly suited to captivity. Confined in tiny cages, they suffer and die; confined together, they kill each other.But this hasn’t stopped the push to factory farm them. Teams from Spain to China to Chile are testing new methods of intensive octopus farming.
A new study argues that the nascent factory farming of octopuses is a bad idea — a moral and ecological disaster waiting to happen. But there are no octopus factory farms yet — which means that, for once, we could stop a mistake before we make it instead of spending decades recovering from it afterward.
Why octopus factory farms are a bad idea
Octopuses are not a part of a regular diet anywhere in the world, but they’re a delicacy in many countries. Some 350,000 metric tons of octopus are caught annually, and the real numbers may be higher, as fishing is often underreported.
To some, this looks like a business opportunity; octopus could be sold more widely and become a bigger part of the food supply. Researchers are working to figure out how to keep octopuses alive in tiny, featureless cages for long enough to harvest them for food. But “there’s almost zero chance that this represents acceptable welfare to any standard,” Jennifer Jacquet, one of the co-authors of the report, told me.
Factory farming octopus is terrible for the environment, too: “On land, we farm herbivores. In the ocean, we tend to farm animals that are carnivorous, and we have to put more pressure on the oceans,” to catch all of the animals we need to feed to the animals we’re raising for food. “We think that aquaculture will alleviate pressure on wild ecosystems, but it actually exacerbates that pressure,” Jacquet said.
Nonetheless, the group’s report, published in the winter 2019 edition of Issues of Science and Technology, finds that efforts to industrially farm octopus are plunging ahead.
In China, up to eight different species of octopus are now being experimentally farmed. In Japan, the seafood company Nissui reported hatching octopus eggs in captivity in 2017 and is predicting a fully farmed market-ready octopus by 2020. Many scientists are contributing to the tools and technology to make genetic modifications that may accelerate industrial aquaculture of octopus and other types of cephalopods.Spain, Portugal, Greece, Mexico, and Chile have active octopus farming efforts underway as well. The researchers urge their colleagues working on inventing techniques for industrial farming of octopus to reconsider. There are three key reasons why.
First, there’s a lot of research pointing us to the conclusion that octopuses are conscious, capable, and really, really smart. “Once octopuses have solved a novel problem,” the paper notes, “they retain long-term memory of the solution. One study found that octopuses retained knowledge of how to open a screw-top jar for at least five months. They are also capable of mastering complex aquascapes, conducting extensive foraging trips, and using visual landmarks to navigate.”
However, as Jacquet pointed out to me, it’s not the research literature on octopus intelligence or on consciousness in animals that’s convincing to the general public — it’s the abundant videos available online of octopuses using tools, stealing crabs, camouflaging themselves, and solving problems in their environment. People can recognize an intelligent animal when they see it, whether they’ve read the research on octopus intelligence or not.
Second, the paper points out, “octopus farming has the same environmental consequences as other types of carnivorous aquaculture. And, like other carnivorous aquaculture, octopus farming would increase, not alleviate, pressure on wild aquatic animals.”
Global fisheries are already being depleted by overfishing. Aquaculture, sometimes sold as a solution, often makes this worse by dramatically increasing the demand for fish products. “The over-fishing of the oceans to get food for farmed fish is already a big problem, and this would be made worse if octopus farming became common,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, co-author of the paper, told me in an email. I asked Jacquet whether it’d at least be good for wild octopus if more octopuses for human consumption came from farms. It likely wouldn’t, she said. As long as it’s cost-effective to catch octopus in the wild, we’ll keep doing it — and aquaculture might actually increase demand, by making octopus cuisine more mainstream.
Third, the usual justifications for intensive animal farming don’t hold up in this case. “The case in favor of octopus farming is weak,” the paper points out. “The main markets for farmed octopus — upscale outlets in Japan, South Korea, northern Mediterranean countries, the United States, China, and Australia — are largely food secure” — meaning that the populations in those countries have affordable, consistent access to food that meets both their needs and their preferences. Industrial farming of animals is hard to tackle because many food-insecure populations rely on meat. No one is relying on octopus. It’s a bad idea to change that.
by Kelsey Piper, Vox | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
[ed. Original article: Issues in Science and Technology by Jacquet et al. here.]
Thursday, March 7, 2019
In Bad Taste
It’s Tuesday, loyalty card double-stamp night at my neighborhood sushi place in Oakland. It’s the kind of spot where the sweaty owner in a headband and his kid assistant slur “irasshaimase!”—welcome!—in tandem when you push open the chime-tinkling door, no matter how harried they look. It’s a place that gives customers what they want: inside-out dragon rolls, seven-dollar glasses of Chardonnay poured nearly to the rim, the NBA on a TV cantilevered high in the corner, and pale, shaggy-battered shrimp tempura as meaty as a kitten’s flexed hind legs.
At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles filled with primary colors (cool in the ’90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him with another woman, I guess, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.
Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as the friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears soaked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. She chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just done something heinous, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime against taste.
Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, of course, but they are clear offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw salmon in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of a kind of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and the mineral richness of fat). Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salt and heat? (And for sure, in a modest sushi place like this, there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in her pea-green paste—only tinted mustard-seed powder. It’s cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, an even deadlier poison for ruining flavor.)
But who can say what’s “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a realm of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can be as hard as piercing an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.
At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles filled with primary colors (cool in the ’90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him with another woman, I guess, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.
Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as the friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears soaked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. She chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just done something heinous, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime against taste.Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, of course, but they are clear offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw salmon in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of a kind of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and the mineral richness of fat). Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salt and heat? (And for sure, in a modest sushi place like this, there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in her pea-green paste—only tinted mustard-seed powder. It’s cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, an even deadlier poison for ruining flavor.)
But who can say what’s “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a realm of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can be as hard as piercing an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.
by John Birdsall, Topic | Read more:
Image: Adrian Samson
Opioid Prescribing Fell. Pain Patients Suffer.
Three years ago this month, as alarms about the over-prescription of opioid painkillers were sounding across the country, the federal government issued course-correcting guidelines for primary care doctors. Prescriptions have fallen notably since then, and the Trump administration is pushing for them to drop by another third by 2021.
But in a letter to be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, more than 300 medical experts, including three former White House drug czars, contend that the guidelines are harming one group of vulnerable patients: those with severe chronic pain, who may have been taking high doses of opioids for years without becoming addicted. They say the guidelines are being used as cover by insurers to deny reimbursement and by doctors to turn patients away. As a result, they say, patients who could benefit from the medications are being thrown into withdrawal and suffering renewed pain and a diminished quality of life, even to the point of suicide. (...)
The guidelines are nonbinding, but many of them have become enshrined in state regulations. Therefore, said Dr. Stefan G. Kertesz, an author of the letter who teaches addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “it’s normal to say from the top: ‘This needs a clarification because we don’t want people hurt.’”
Others say the problem lies not with the guidelines, which urge non-opioid therapies as the first-line treatment for chronic pain, but with their misapplication.
“What the guidelines are being blamed for versus what they actually recommend are two different things,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. when the guidelines were developed. (...)
The letter to the C.D.C. echoes a November resolution by the American Medical Association, which protested the “misapplication” of the guidelines “by pharmacists, health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, legislatures, and governmental and private regulatory bodies in ways that prevent or limit access to opioid analgesia.” (...)
Accompanying the experts’ letter are testimonials by hundreds of pain patients detailing struggles in the wake of the guidelines.
The opioid prescribing rate has been falling since 2012, but the amount prescribed per person is still about three times higher than it was in 1999, at the beginning of the addiction crisis, according to the C.D.C. While overdose deaths because of prescription opioids have begun leveling off, deaths from illicit fentanyl and its analogues increased by more than 45 percent in 2017 alone, a phenomenon that the letter writers attribute in part to the crackdown on pain pill prescriptions. (...)
That the guidelines have had widespread impact is not in question. While a handful of hospital systems and states had adopted opioid prescription limits before 2016, the number of institutions have since shot up.
In its annual survey of hospital-based pharmacies last year, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists asked about opioid monitoring for the first time. In preliminary results, 41 percent said they had done so and some cited the C.D.C. guidelines.
By the end of 2016, seven states had passed legislation limiting opioid prescriptions; by October 2018, 33 states had enacted laws with some type of limit, guidance or requirement related to opioids, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
by Jan Hoffman and Abby Goodnough, NY Times | Read more:
But in a letter to be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, more than 300 medical experts, including three former White House drug czars, contend that the guidelines are harming one group of vulnerable patients: those with severe chronic pain, who may have been taking high doses of opioids for years without becoming addicted. They say the guidelines are being used as cover by insurers to deny reimbursement and by doctors to turn patients away. As a result, they say, patients who could benefit from the medications are being thrown into withdrawal and suffering renewed pain and a diminished quality of life, even to the point of suicide. (...)
The guidelines are nonbinding, but many of them have become enshrined in state regulations. Therefore, said Dr. Stefan G. Kertesz, an author of the letter who teaches addiction medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “it’s normal to say from the top: ‘This needs a clarification because we don’t want people hurt.’”Others say the problem lies not with the guidelines, which urge non-opioid therapies as the first-line treatment for chronic pain, but with their misapplication.
“What the guidelines are being blamed for versus what they actually recommend are two different things,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. when the guidelines were developed. (...)
The letter to the C.D.C. echoes a November resolution by the American Medical Association, which protested the “misapplication” of the guidelines “by pharmacists, health insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, legislatures, and governmental and private regulatory bodies in ways that prevent or limit access to opioid analgesia.” (...)
Accompanying the experts’ letter are testimonials by hundreds of pain patients detailing struggles in the wake of the guidelines.
The opioid prescribing rate has been falling since 2012, but the amount prescribed per person is still about three times higher than it was in 1999, at the beginning of the addiction crisis, according to the C.D.C. While overdose deaths because of prescription opioids have begun leveling off, deaths from illicit fentanyl and its analogues increased by more than 45 percent in 2017 alone, a phenomenon that the letter writers attribute in part to the crackdown on pain pill prescriptions. (...)
That the guidelines have had widespread impact is not in question. While a handful of hospital systems and states had adopted opioid prescription limits before 2016, the number of institutions have since shot up.
In its annual survey of hospital-based pharmacies last year, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists asked about opioid monitoring for the first time. In preliminary results, 41 percent said they had done so and some cited the C.D.C. guidelines.
By the end of 2016, seven states had passed legislation limiting opioid prescriptions; by October 2018, 33 states had enacted laws with some type of limit, guidance or requirement related to opioids, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
by Jan Hoffman and Abby Goodnough, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michael Kirby Smith
[ed. Read the comments. Please, less political pandering and knee-jerk regulatory hysteria. It's only making the problem worse.]
[ed. Read the comments. Please, less political pandering and knee-jerk regulatory hysteria. It's only making the problem worse.]
When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town
EAST WENATCHEE, Washington—Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community.
The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain,” Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.
The trick, though, was finding a location where you could put all that cheap power to work. You needed an existing building, because in those days, when bitcoin was trading for just a few dollars, no one could afford to build something new. You needed space for a few hundred high-speed computer servers, and also for the heavy-duty cooling system to keep them from melting down as they churned out the trillions of calculations necessary to mine bitcoin. Above all, you needed a location that could handle a lot of electricity—a quarter of a megawatt, maybe, or even a half a megawatt, enough to light up a couple hundred homes.
The best mining sites were the old fruit warehouses—the basin is as famous for its apples as for its megawatts—but those got snapped up early. So Miehe, a tall, gregarious 38-year-old who would go on to set up a string of mines here, learned to look for less obvious solutions. He would roam the side streets and back roads, scanning for defunct businesses that might have once used a lot of power. An old machine shop, say. A closed-down convenience store. Or this: Miehe slows the Land Rover and points to a shuttered carwash sitting forlornly next to a Taco Bell. It has the space, he says. And with the water pumps and heaters, “there’s probably a ton of power distributed not very far from here,” Miehe tells me. “That could be a bitcoin mine.”
These days, Miehe says, a serious miner wouldn’t even look at a site like that. As bitcoin’s soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to “running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale.”
For years, few residents really grasped how appealing their region was to miners, who mainly did their esoteric calculations quietly tucked away in warehouses and basements. But those days are gone. Over the past two years, and especially during 2017, when the price of a single bitcoin jumped from $1,000 to more than $19,000, the region has taken on the vibe of a boomtown. Across the three rural counties of the Mid-Columbia Basin—Chelan, Douglas and Grant—orchards and farm fields now share the rolling landscape with mines of every size, from industrial-scale facilities to repurposed warehouses to cargo containers and even backyard sheds. Outsiders are so eager to turn the basin’s power into cryptocurrency that this winter, several would-be miners from Asia flew their private jet into the local airport, took a rental car to one of the local dams, and, according to a utility official, politely informed staff at the dam visitors center, “We want to see the dam master because we want to buy some electricity.”
The Mid-Columbia Basin isn’t the only location where the virtual realm of cryptocurrency is colliding with the real world of megawatts and real estate. In places like China, Venezuela and Iceland, cheap land and even cheaper electricity have resulted in bustling mining hubs. But the basin, by dint of its early start, has emerged as one of the biggest boomtowns. By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. And as with any boomtown, that success has created tensions. There have been disputes between miners and locals, bankruptcies and bribery attempts, lawsuits, even a kind of intensifying guerrilla warfare between local utility crews and a shadowy army of bootleg miners who set up their servers in basements and garages and max out the local electrical grids. (...)
For local cryptocurrency enthusiasts, these slings and arrows are all very much worth enduring. They believe not only that cryptocurrency will make them personally very wealthy, but also that this formerly out-of-the-way region has a real shot at becoming a center—and maybe the center—of a coming technology revolution, with the well-paid jobs and tech-fueled prosperity that usually flow only to gilded “knowledge” hubs like Seattle and San Francisco. Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee building contractor who jumped into bitcoin in 2014 and is now one of the basin’s biggest players, puts it in sweeping terms. The basin, he tells me, is “building a platform that the entire world is going to use.”
And squarely between these two competing narratives are the communities of the Mid-Columbia Basin, which find themselves anxiously trying to answer a question that for most of the rest of us is merely an amusing abstraction: Is bitcoin for real?
by Paul Roberts, Politico | Read more:
Image: Patrick Cavan
The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words “cryptocurrency” or “blockchain,” Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.
The trick, though, was finding a location where you could put all that cheap power to work. You needed an existing building, because in those days, when bitcoin was trading for just a few dollars, no one could afford to build something new. You needed space for a few hundred high-speed computer servers, and also for the heavy-duty cooling system to keep them from melting down as they churned out the trillions of calculations necessary to mine bitcoin. Above all, you needed a location that could handle a lot of electricity—a quarter of a megawatt, maybe, or even a half a megawatt, enough to light up a couple hundred homes.
The best mining sites were the old fruit warehouses—the basin is as famous for its apples as for its megawatts—but those got snapped up early. So Miehe, a tall, gregarious 38-year-old who would go on to set up a string of mines here, learned to look for less obvious solutions. He would roam the side streets and back roads, scanning for defunct businesses that might have once used a lot of power. An old machine shop, say. A closed-down convenience store. Or this: Miehe slows the Land Rover and points to a shuttered carwash sitting forlornly next to a Taco Bell. It has the space, he says. And with the water pumps and heaters, “there’s probably a ton of power distributed not very far from here,” Miehe tells me. “That could be a bitcoin mine.”These days, Miehe says, a serious miner wouldn’t even look at a site like that. As bitcoin’s soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to “running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale.”
For years, few residents really grasped how appealing their region was to miners, who mainly did their esoteric calculations quietly tucked away in warehouses and basements. But those days are gone. Over the past two years, and especially during 2017, when the price of a single bitcoin jumped from $1,000 to more than $19,000, the region has taken on the vibe of a boomtown. Across the three rural counties of the Mid-Columbia Basin—Chelan, Douglas and Grant—orchards and farm fields now share the rolling landscape with mines of every size, from industrial-scale facilities to repurposed warehouses to cargo containers and even backyard sheds. Outsiders are so eager to turn the basin’s power into cryptocurrency that this winter, several would-be miners from Asia flew their private jet into the local airport, took a rental car to one of the local dams, and, according to a utility official, politely informed staff at the dam visitors center, “We want to see the dam master because we want to buy some electricity.”
The Mid-Columbia Basin isn’t the only location where the virtual realm of cryptocurrency is colliding with the real world of megawatts and real estate. In places like China, Venezuela and Iceland, cheap land and even cheaper electricity have resulted in bustling mining hubs. But the basin, by dint of its early start, has emerged as one of the biggest boomtowns. By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world, and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin. And as with any boomtown, that success has created tensions. There have been disputes between miners and locals, bankruptcies and bribery attempts, lawsuits, even a kind of intensifying guerrilla warfare between local utility crews and a shadowy army of bootleg miners who set up their servers in basements and garages and max out the local electrical grids. (...)
For local cryptocurrency enthusiasts, these slings and arrows are all very much worth enduring. They believe not only that cryptocurrency will make them personally very wealthy, but also that this formerly out-of-the-way region has a real shot at becoming a center—and maybe the center—of a coming technology revolution, with the well-paid jobs and tech-fueled prosperity that usually flow only to gilded “knowledge” hubs like Seattle and San Francisco. Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee building contractor who jumped into bitcoin in 2014 and is now one of the basin’s biggest players, puts it in sweeping terms. The basin, he tells me, is “building a platform that the entire world is going to use.”
And squarely between these two competing narratives are the communities of the Mid-Columbia Basin, which find themselves anxiously trying to answer a question that for most of the rest of us is merely an amusing abstraction: Is bitcoin for real?
by Paul Roberts, Politico | Read more:
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
The Greeter
They call me the Greeter. I sell shoes at the Boca Raton Town Center mall — bedazzled stilettos and platforms, neon-strapped pumps saved for special occasions. I stand by the entrance of the store, heels dug into the carpet, tummy tucked in, and I greet people. Hi, how are you, sunshine? Have you seen our shoes today? I wear sparkling eye shadow for the job. Smooth down the shine of my hair with coconut-scented spray. I bend at just the right angle as I crawl on the floor, my legs spread like a dumb secretary in the movies, the perfect C-curve of my waist. I pull the shoes out of their boxes, the tissue paper out of the shoes. I slip them on one foot, then the other, and secure them just right.
That’s a perfect fit, I say, propped up on my knees. Take a walk in them.
No heel grips necessary, no insoles, no pads. I know how to fit a shoe.
You’re adorable, the customers will say. How old are you?
Sixteen, I say.
The customers hand over their credit cards, and I make my dimples show. Would you like to wear them out? You can’t return them if you do, but I’m sure you won’t want that!
I clean up the wads of tissue paper, use a metal wand to lift and store the boxes back in their proper places in the stockroom; I bang the boxes until the wall of cardboard looks smooth.
I move to the front of the store again after each sale. Suck in until my ribs show, try to catch the gaze of anyone walking by, Hello there. Have you seen these shoes? On my break, I spend all thirty minutes smoking cigarettes in the mall alleyway, next to the dumpster. I close my eyes and lean against the wall, blowing smoke into the wet heat. When I finish, I chew out the final Parliament with my heel, clean the heel with a tissue, squirt antibacterial gel on my hands, neck, and face, rub cucumber-melon lotion on these places, smooth my hair again with coconut oil, and smack on a piece of gum. I am the Greeter. The Greeter must smell good. The Greeter must smile.
I count down the hours until my boss, Eliza, will drive me home in her black Pontiac, where we’ll chain-smoke, talk shit about our rudest customers. I’ll do my purification process all over again before walking through the front door of my home.
Nothing smells good at home. It’s been two years since my uncle got locked up in northern Florida and my father moved to New York to help take care of his business. Two years since he kissed my mother at the airport — It’s only temporary — with a small black suitcase in his hand.
Lately my mother has begun writing pages and pages of words by candlelight. The title reads, “Story of My Life,” but the words are all illegible. They slant off the loose-leaf pages and continue onto the dining-room table.
At home, my mother tries to cook food, but she forgets what she’s cooking in the middle of it. I find SpaghettiOs mashed up with scrambled eggs, coffee grounds on top. I find crumbling sheets of seaweed inside our containers of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
Want dinner? she’ll always offer, spooning out the mixture she made.
No thanks.
This is not a problem for me, because when I do eat, it’s a cold-cut slice of turkey that I roll up with a single slice of provolone cheese. I give myself up to fifteen minutes after eating the roll before excusing myself to the stock-room or school bathroom, where I jam three fingers at my tonsils until it gives. Sometimes I eat a handful of hard-boiled eggs. I hate them so much that the gagging turns on without effort, and I’ll take anything that comes this easily.
The Senior said he would give me a lift whenever I needed, so long as I let him move two fingers, sometimes three, up between my legs before my shift. I let him do this in the mall parking garage, bored, lifting up my school-uniform skirt, staring out the car window. Sometimes he jerks off in the driver’s seat with his other hand. He cleans up with a Papa John’s napkin.
Tonight, my mother calls me on the store line, when business is slow.
Hey, Greeter! says Eliza. It’s your ma!
What’s up? I whisper into the phone. I cup my hand around my mouth. What’s wrong?
Can I pick you up tonight? Need to talk to you about something.
Eliza’s taking me home, I say. Eliza always takes me home.
I’ll be OK driving, I promise, she says.
I can tell from her voice that she is, indeed, OK. It’s my mother on the other end. My mother, who gave me language; who grew up in a house of Chinese and Hawaiian and pidgin but still found her own vocabulary, her own exquisite handwriting; who used to spell words like Hello and You Are Mine in frosting on my breakfast Toaster Strudels until I learned how to read.
Sure, Mom, I say.
At 9:30 PM, my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t smell like tobacco.
Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into her car. I snap the seat belt.
Hi, baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?
Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.
I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to her car this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?
This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?
Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks Go, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You OK?
I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.
My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.
Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.
She’s all shakes, her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them. Something I ate, she says.
What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?
I just wanted to see you, she says. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.
My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision — this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it — this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.
She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live. Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself — sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.
On the seventh day, after returning from a long afternoon drive, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.
by T Kira Madden, The Sun | Read more:
That’s a perfect fit, I say, propped up on my knees. Take a walk in them.
No heel grips necessary, no insoles, no pads. I know how to fit a shoe.
You’re adorable, the customers will say. How old are you?
Sixteen, I say.
The customers hand over their credit cards, and I make my dimples show. Would you like to wear them out? You can’t return them if you do, but I’m sure you won’t want that!
I clean up the wads of tissue paper, use a metal wand to lift and store the boxes back in their proper places in the stockroom; I bang the boxes until the wall of cardboard looks smooth.
I move to the front of the store again after each sale. Suck in until my ribs show, try to catch the gaze of anyone walking by, Hello there. Have you seen these shoes? On my break, I spend all thirty minutes smoking cigarettes in the mall alleyway, next to the dumpster. I close my eyes and lean against the wall, blowing smoke into the wet heat. When I finish, I chew out the final Parliament with my heel, clean the heel with a tissue, squirt antibacterial gel on my hands, neck, and face, rub cucumber-melon lotion on these places, smooth my hair again with coconut oil, and smack on a piece of gum. I am the Greeter. The Greeter must smell good. The Greeter must smile.I count down the hours until my boss, Eliza, will drive me home in her black Pontiac, where we’ll chain-smoke, talk shit about our rudest customers. I’ll do my purification process all over again before walking through the front door of my home.
Nothing smells good at home. It’s been two years since my uncle got locked up in northern Florida and my father moved to New York to help take care of his business. Two years since he kissed my mother at the airport — It’s only temporary — with a small black suitcase in his hand.
Lately my mother has begun writing pages and pages of words by candlelight. The title reads, “Story of My Life,” but the words are all illegible. They slant off the loose-leaf pages and continue onto the dining-room table.
At home, my mother tries to cook food, but she forgets what she’s cooking in the middle of it. I find SpaghettiOs mashed up with scrambled eggs, coffee grounds on top. I find crumbling sheets of seaweed inside our containers of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
Want dinner? she’ll always offer, spooning out the mixture she made.
No thanks.
This is not a problem for me, because when I do eat, it’s a cold-cut slice of turkey that I roll up with a single slice of provolone cheese. I give myself up to fifteen minutes after eating the roll before excusing myself to the stock-room or school bathroom, where I jam three fingers at my tonsils until it gives. Sometimes I eat a handful of hard-boiled eggs. I hate them so much that the gagging turns on without effort, and I’ll take anything that comes this easily.
The Senior said he would give me a lift whenever I needed, so long as I let him move two fingers, sometimes three, up between my legs before my shift. I let him do this in the mall parking garage, bored, lifting up my school-uniform skirt, staring out the car window. Sometimes he jerks off in the driver’s seat with his other hand. He cleans up with a Papa John’s napkin.
Tonight, my mother calls me on the store line, when business is slow.
Hey, Greeter! says Eliza. It’s your ma!
What’s up? I whisper into the phone. I cup my hand around my mouth. What’s wrong?
Can I pick you up tonight? Need to talk to you about something.
Eliza’s taking me home, I say. Eliza always takes me home.
I’ll be OK driving, I promise, she says.
I can tell from her voice that she is, indeed, OK. It’s my mother on the other end. My mother, who gave me language; who grew up in a house of Chinese and Hawaiian and pidgin but still found her own vocabulary, her own exquisite handwriting; who used to spell words like Hello and You Are Mine in frosting on my breakfast Toaster Strudels until I learned how to read.
Sure, Mom, I say.
At 9:30 PM, my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t smell like tobacco.
Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into her car. I snap the seat belt.
Hi, baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?
Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.
I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to her car this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?
This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?
Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks Go, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You OK?
I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.
My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.
Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.
She’s all shakes, her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them. Something I ate, she says.
What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?
I just wanted to see you, she says. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.
My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision — this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it — this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.
She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live. Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself — sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.
On the seventh day, after returning from a long afternoon drive, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.
by T Kira Madden, The Sun | Read more:
Image: Ann Hubard
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
One Breath Around The World
[ed. Not sure about the barefoot stuff (especially under ice). I like the whales at 8:15]
On Dreyer's English
As this review goes to press, Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, sits at #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers list (Words, Language, & Grammar Reference). Shortly after the book’s release, he tweeted its march up the overall sales ranks, as it broke the top hundred, the top ten, and made it all the way to number two. Already in its fourth pressing, it is also currently at number two on this week’s New York Times Best Sellers list (Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous). Think about that: a book by a copyeditor about the niceties of style elbowing up to the table with the likes of Marie Kondo and Michelle Obama. As Dreyer himself said in another endearingly flabbergasted tweet, “It’s a freakin’ style guide, for Pete’s sake.”
In one sense, I share his amazement. It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers (or best-sellers or bestsellers—Dreyer devotes an interesting page to the accelerated life-cycle and evolution of open, hyphenate, and closed words). We live, after all, in a paradoxically hyper-literate yet hyper-illiterate age—never before in human history have more people written more, and never before has less care gone into the production of this writing. We are inundated with emojis, unpunctuated tweets, garbled emails, and dashed-off chyrons rife with errata, not to mention the self-publishing phenomenon: hundreds of books going up on Amazon daily, thousands of Tumblr and WordPress sites, all the bloggy flotsam of the Internet’s wild reaches. The writerly ethos of the age would seem to echo Blaise Pascal’s famous apology: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” (...)
Throughout the proceedings, Dreyer is simultaneously meticulous and unfussy, a winning combination and surely a byproduct of dealing with authorial egos for the better part of his adult life. As the tongue-in-cheek subtitle implies, a good copyeditor has to both believe in their absolute correctness, while allowing for the mutability of language, authorial eccentricities, and the fact that most rules can and should be broken if they’re broken in the service of clarity. Dreyer’s tone is authoritative, yet relaxed and playful, with the presence of teacher that you do not fear, but do fear disappointing.
He is not a grammarian, and certainly not a so-called “Guardian of Grammar,” as a recent Times profile had it. Chapter Six is titled “A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing,” and the first line is, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I hate grammar.” Grammar is, he explains, important—a firm grasp of the basic rules allows a writer to convey thought clearly; grammar jargon, on the other hand—and the oft-attendant starchiness about it—is not. Lynne Truss is a grammarian, and popular on that basis with people who see dashed-off text messages as the sign of a culture in shambles. Dreyer is not fighting this sort of proxy culture war; he simply wants people to write well.
But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now. Dreyer’s English is, beyond a freakin’ style guide, the document of a serious person’s working life. At sixty, Dreyer is at the top of his game and profession, an honorable profession he has worked diligently at for more than three decades. To write a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about something; to copyedit a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about someone else’s deep and sustained caring. And to have copyedited books for one’s adult life is to have spent one’s adult life caring about other people’s words and the English language. As he writes in the introduction:
by Adam O’Fallon Price, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Amazon
In one sense, I share his amazement. It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers (or best-sellers or bestsellers—Dreyer devotes an interesting page to the accelerated life-cycle and evolution of open, hyphenate, and closed words). We live, after all, in a paradoxically hyper-literate yet hyper-illiterate age—never before in human history have more people written more, and never before has less care gone into the production of this writing. We are inundated with emojis, unpunctuated tweets, garbled emails, and dashed-off chyrons rife with errata, not to mention the self-publishing phenomenon: hundreds of books going up on Amazon daily, thousands of Tumblr and WordPress sites, all the bloggy flotsam of the Internet’s wild reaches. The writerly ethos of the age would seem to echo Blaise Pascal’s famous apology: “I only made this letter longer because I had not the leisure to make it shorter.” (...)Throughout the proceedings, Dreyer is simultaneously meticulous and unfussy, a winning combination and surely a byproduct of dealing with authorial egos for the better part of his adult life. As the tongue-in-cheek subtitle implies, a good copyeditor has to both believe in their absolute correctness, while allowing for the mutability of language, authorial eccentricities, and the fact that most rules can and should be broken if they’re broken in the service of clarity. Dreyer’s tone is authoritative, yet relaxed and playful, with the presence of teacher that you do not fear, but do fear disappointing.
He is not a grammarian, and certainly not a so-called “Guardian of Grammar,” as a recent Times profile had it. Chapter Six is titled “A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing,” and the first line is, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I hate grammar.” Grammar is, he explains, important—a firm grasp of the basic rules allows a writer to convey thought clearly; grammar jargon, on the other hand—and the oft-attendant starchiness about it—is not. Lynne Truss is a grammarian, and popular on that basis with people who see dashed-off text messages as the sign of a culture in shambles. Dreyer is not fighting this sort of proxy culture war; he simply wants people to write well.
But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now. Dreyer’s English is, beyond a freakin’ style guide, the document of a serious person’s working life. At sixty, Dreyer is at the top of his game and profession, an honorable profession he has worked diligently at for more than three decades. To write a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about something; to copyedit a book is to care deeply and in a sustained way about someone else’s deep and sustained caring. And to have copyedited books for one’s adult life is to have spent one’s adult life caring about other people’s words and the English language. As he writes in the introduction:
I am a copyeditor… my job is to lay my hands on [a] piece of writing and make it… better. Not rewrite it, not to bully and flatten it into some notion of Correct Prose, whatever that might be, but to burnish and polish it and make it the best possible version of itself that it can be—to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it. That is, if I’ve done my job correctly. (...)Mr. Dreyer was kind enough to respond via email to a few questions that came to mind as I read his book.
by Adam O’Fallon Price, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Monday, March 4, 2019
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Coming for Your Hamburgers
Sebastian Gorka, late of the Trump Administration, stood before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week and made plain the inner frenzy of a party that must place its hopes for 2020 on a President who had just been described before a congressional committee as “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat.” Hence the rhetorical smoke bombs. Wild-eyed Democrats are coming! Gorka declared, “They want to take your pickup truck! They want to rebuild your home! They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved!”
The Stalinist nightmare that Gorka had on his mind is the Green New Deal, a still rough proposal that calls on the U.S. government to come to the belated rescue of the planet with the same sense of urgency that it displayed in rescuing the economy during the Great Depression. To Gorka, such a proposal is a communist “watermelon”: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”
The President, who dismisses climate change as “a Chinese hoax,” also waxed derisive at cpac. “New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it,” he said caustically, in a sweaty, two-hour rant on Saturday. “I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”
The focus of this fear campaign, the nexus of all danger, is a member of Congress who has been in office for two months: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, represents parts of the Bronx and Queens. With Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, she is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Because she questions our habits of fossil-fuel consumption and industrial agriculture, her opponents reason, she can’t possibly be trying to head off global catastrophe. She just wants to steal your Chevy Colorado and your Big Mac.
“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.” (...)
“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”
The Trump family has attacked her from the start. Because she had the D.S.A.’s endorsement, last December, Donald Trump, Jr., posted a joke on Instagram about how in socialist countries people eat their dogs rather than walk them. (“It’s funny cuz it’s true!!!” he wrote.) Ocasio-Cortez’s office had no comment, but she did, tweeting, “Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.”(...)
Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”
“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”
The Stalinist nightmare that Gorka had on his mind is the Green New Deal, a still rough proposal that calls on the U.S. government to come to the belated rescue of the planet with the same sense of urgency that it displayed in rescuing the economy during the Great Depression. To Gorka, such a proposal is a communist “watermelon”: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”
The President, who dismisses climate change as “a Chinese hoax,” also waxed derisive at cpac. “New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it,” he said caustically, in a sweaty, two-hour rant on Saturday. “I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”The focus of this fear campaign, the nexus of all danger, is a member of Congress who has been in office for two months: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, represents parts of the Bronx and Queens. With Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, she is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Because she questions our habits of fossil-fuel consumption and industrial agriculture, her opponents reason, she can’t possibly be trying to head off global catastrophe. She just wants to steal your Chevy Colorado and your Big Mac.
“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.” (...)
“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”
The Trump family has attacked her from the start. Because she had the D.S.A.’s endorsement, last December, Donald Trump, Jr., posted a joke on Instagram about how in socialist countries people eat their dogs rather than walk them. (“It’s funny cuz it’s true!!!” he wrote.) Ocasio-Cortez’s office had no comment, but she did, tweeting, “Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.”(...)
Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”
“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”
by David Remnick, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Mark Peterson/Redux
[ed. Stalin dreamt about... hamburgers? Wow. See also: Trump is not stable — and that should be a huge news story (Alternet)]
[ed. Stalin dreamt about... hamburgers? Wow. See also: Trump is not stable — and that should be a huge news story (Alternet)]
What Calamity Will Befall Us Next
Across the world, the reputation of elites and their institutions is in free fall. A flood of online information has given the public unprecedented access to elite individuals in politics, media, academia, science, business, and an array of other fields. Thanks to tools like social media, the activist public has greater proximity to its supposed mandarin class than ever before. What this newfound intimacy has revealed has not always been flattering. Many of those who had been held up as elites in their fields have, upon closer examination by the public, been revealed as mediocre, incompetent, buffoonish, and, in some cases, possibly unhinged. At the same time, the public, for all its passion, has also revealed itself to be vulnerable to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and outbreaks of hysteria.
In 2014, a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurri published “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” Gurri had spent his career analyzing the global information environment and could see that something major was ahead. “The Revolt of the Public” predicted that the information revolution unleashed by the internet would end up destabilizing politics and institutions around the world, perhaps for decades to come. A flood of new online information — along with a series of failed wars and financial crises — would conspire to bleed the legitimacy of elite institutions and their representatives in the eyes of the public, likely beyond repair.
Events since the book was first released have made it appear prophetic. This past December, “The Revolt of the Public” was republished with a new chapter, reflecting on the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
Below is an interview with Gurri about the consequences of the information revolution on the relationship between elites and the public. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background in government and how it led you to write a book about the relationship between elite institutions and information?
I had probably the least glamorous job in the CIA: I was an analyst of global media. Early on, that was pretty straightforward work, as there was only a small volume of open information to analyze. Every country had their equivalent of the New York Times, a source which set the news agenda. If the president asked how his policies were playing in, say, France, all you needed to do was consult two newspapers for your answer. But around the turn of the millennium, the information environment suddenly went haywire. A tsunami of information arose, in volumes unprecedented in human experience. In the year 2001, the amount of information produced doubled that of all previous history. 2002 doubled 2001 — and this trend has continued ever since.
As that tsunami of information swept over the world, we observed a great deal of social and political turbulence behind it. Angry voices were suddenly heard where before there was silence. At the time, it was an open question whether this was merely virtual anger or if it would have an impact on politics in the real world. When we pointed out the turbulence, and those voices mocking the status quo, we were asked: If the security forces come after them, what will they do — hit the police with their laptops?
The year 2011 proved to be the moment of phase change, when digital anger passed over into political action. That year saw the Arab insurgencies, but also the “indignados” movement in Spain, the “tent city” protests in Israel, and dozens of Occupy movements in the U.S. All these political insurgencies began online. The public we first glimpsed when I was with CIA has since toppled dictators, smashed political parties, and of course elected outlandish populists to high office.
It’s not just government either. An overabundance of information has been subversive of every modern institution, from the news media to the scientific establishment, to the university, and the corporation. All have come under siege and are bleeding authority and legitimacy. My concern, as I wrote the book, was that the public’s loathing of the established order was bound to implicate our democratic system itself.
How has the new information environment changed the relationship between elite institutions and the general public?
The institutions that sustain modern society were established in the industrial age. They are steep, top-down pyramids, with the industrial elites occupying the top of the pyramid, at a great distance from the public. Elites succeeded or failed in part by impressing the public with their expertise but mostly by impressing other elites. Today, due to the new information dispensation, these elites have been brought into close proximity to the public and are exposed to the public’s constant scrutiny. They are all too aware of the public’s anger, aware that they have lost control of the information sphere. The result has been a sort of elite panic and a bleeding away of their authority and legitimacy.
To function properly, industrial institutions, including government, need to have some proprietary control over the information in their own domains — the stories that get told about them. Once this control is lost, and a host of competing narratives about them arise, public trust inevitably starts to evaporate. This is what we see happening all around us. The effect has been a massive crisis of authority.
We have a picture of how this flood of new information has impacted elites, but how has it impacted the public?
Fifty years ago, society was organized according to the industrial model. People were passive recipients of information. It was a top-down system with limited choices or diversity. You could buy two or three different types of cars and get your information from two or three different television channels and newspapers. This system produced a relatively uniform “mass audience” that was suitable for the needs of industrial society.
What we have seen since is a complete breakdown of that system. The loss of control over information has resulted in the breakdown of the mass audience and many of the old ideologies. In its place has emerged a more ideologically diverse and fractious public. The public, which is not necessarily synonymous with “the people” or “the masses,” can come from any corner of the political environment today. It is not a fixed body of individuals and lacks an organization, leaders, shared programs, policies, or a coherent ideology. The public is characterized by negation: It is united in being ferociously against the established order.
What is the response of elites to their loss of trust and legitimacy?
The elite class can respond to their crisis of authority by heading in two opposite directions. And if I were to guess, I would say that they are now heading for the least productive option. They could identify the causes of the public’s anger and work to reconcile the public to the system. This would entail flattening the political pyramid and reducing as much as possible their distance from the public. Unfortunately, this is not happening.
“Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid.”
Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid. They find proximity to the public frightening and distasteful: No elite figure wants to come near the “deplorables.” They prefer to hide behind bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. Somewhat reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that authority will not be restored to our democratic institutions until the current elite class — what I have called the “industrial elites” — is replaced. As I explain in the book, this can happen quite peacefully.
What I found interesting about your book is that in addition to criticizing the elite, you’re also quite skeptical of this newly vocal public.
When this new wave of information began to rise, I initially thought that I was on the side of the public. But on analyzing the statements and pronouncements of many of the new popular movements, I began to see that they had a distinctly nihilist streak. They were mired in negation towards the status quo, but rarely proposed clear alternatives to the order that they were bashing away at. The Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy movements and the Spanish “indignados,” among others in the West, were movements united on the basis of what they were against. They were far less clear about what they were in favor of or how they were going to build that future. The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment.
Do you think that this was a reflection of naiveté on the part of the public?
My favorite philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, talked about “mass man,” or modern man as being the end product of a long historical process. Previous generations struggled to put him in a place of relative affluence and education, with material comforts and freedoms that were achieved at tremendous cost and usually involved bloodshed at some point. Mass man doesn’t see it that way. He feels that all these material gifts are as natural as the air he breathes. The good things in life are taken for granted. Meanwhile, the smallest desire that goes unfulfilled is a source of outrage. Much of the public’s sentiment today — that impulse to negation — is driven by a failure to understand or remember history. Or if they do remember history, to see it purely as the mother of all injustices and a source of problems that must be now be abolished. If there is one thing I would ask people to do, it would be to study history. When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it’s like you’ve had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things.
by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept | Read more:
In 2014, a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurri published “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” Gurri had spent his career analyzing the global information environment and could see that something major was ahead. “The Revolt of the Public” predicted that the information revolution unleashed by the internet would end up destabilizing politics and institutions around the world, perhaps for decades to come. A flood of new online information — along with a series of failed wars and financial crises — would conspire to bleed the legitimacy of elite institutions and their representatives in the eyes of the public, likely beyond repair.
Events since the book was first released have made it appear prophetic. This past December, “The Revolt of the Public” was republished with a new chapter, reflecting on the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
Below is an interview with Gurri about the consequences of the information revolution on the relationship between elites and the public. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background in government and how it led you to write a book about the relationship between elite institutions and information?
I had probably the least glamorous job in the CIA: I was an analyst of global media. Early on, that was pretty straightforward work, as there was only a small volume of open information to analyze. Every country had their equivalent of the New York Times, a source which set the news agenda. If the president asked how his policies were playing in, say, France, all you needed to do was consult two newspapers for your answer. But around the turn of the millennium, the information environment suddenly went haywire. A tsunami of information arose, in volumes unprecedented in human experience. In the year 2001, the amount of information produced doubled that of all previous history. 2002 doubled 2001 — and this trend has continued ever since.As that tsunami of information swept over the world, we observed a great deal of social and political turbulence behind it. Angry voices were suddenly heard where before there was silence. At the time, it was an open question whether this was merely virtual anger or if it would have an impact on politics in the real world. When we pointed out the turbulence, and those voices mocking the status quo, we were asked: If the security forces come after them, what will they do — hit the police with their laptops?
The year 2011 proved to be the moment of phase change, when digital anger passed over into political action. That year saw the Arab insurgencies, but also the “indignados” movement in Spain, the “tent city” protests in Israel, and dozens of Occupy movements in the U.S. All these political insurgencies began online. The public we first glimpsed when I was with CIA has since toppled dictators, smashed political parties, and of course elected outlandish populists to high office.
It’s not just government either. An overabundance of information has been subversive of every modern institution, from the news media to the scientific establishment, to the university, and the corporation. All have come under siege and are bleeding authority and legitimacy. My concern, as I wrote the book, was that the public’s loathing of the established order was bound to implicate our democratic system itself.
How has the new information environment changed the relationship between elite institutions and the general public?
The institutions that sustain modern society were established in the industrial age. They are steep, top-down pyramids, with the industrial elites occupying the top of the pyramid, at a great distance from the public. Elites succeeded or failed in part by impressing the public with their expertise but mostly by impressing other elites. Today, due to the new information dispensation, these elites have been brought into close proximity to the public and are exposed to the public’s constant scrutiny. They are all too aware of the public’s anger, aware that they have lost control of the information sphere. The result has been a sort of elite panic and a bleeding away of their authority and legitimacy.
To function properly, industrial institutions, including government, need to have some proprietary control over the information in their own domains — the stories that get told about them. Once this control is lost, and a host of competing narratives about them arise, public trust inevitably starts to evaporate. This is what we see happening all around us. The effect has been a massive crisis of authority.
We have a picture of how this flood of new information has impacted elites, but how has it impacted the public?
Fifty years ago, society was organized according to the industrial model. People were passive recipients of information. It was a top-down system with limited choices or diversity. You could buy two or three different types of cars and get your information from two or three different television channels and newspapers. This system produced a relatively uniform “mass audience” that was suitable for the needs of industrial society.
What we have seen since is a complete breakdown of that system. The loss of control over information has resulted in the breakdown of the mass audience and many of the old ideologies. In its place has emerged a more ideologically diverse and fractious public. The public, which is not necessarily synonymous with “the people” or “the masses,” can come from any corner of the political environment today. It is not a fixed body of individuals and lacks an organization, leaders, shared programs, policies, or a coherent ideology. The public is characterized by negation: It is united in being ferociously against the established order.
What is the response of elites to their loss of trust and legitimacy?
The elite class can respond to their crisis of authority by heading in two opposite directions. And if I were to guess, I would say that they are now heading for the least productive option. They could identify the causes of the public’s anger and work to reconcile the public to the system. This would entail flattening the political pyramid and reducing as much as possible their distance from the public. Unfortunately, this is not happening.
“Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid.”
Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing their distance from the public than with reforming the system or restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging to the top of the pyramid. They find proximity to the public frightening and distasteful: No elite figure wants to come near the “deplorables.” They prefer to hide behind bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. Somewhat reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that authority will not be restored to our democratic institutions until the current elite class — what I have called the “industrial elites” — is replaced. As I explain in the book, this can happen quite peacefully.
What I found interesting about your book is that in addition to criticizing the elite, you’re also quite skeptical of this newly vocal public.
When this new wave of information began to rise, I initially thought that I was on the side of the public. But on analyzing the statements and pronouncements of many of the new popular movements, I began to see that they had a distinctly nihilist streak. They were mired in negation towards the status quo, but rarely proposed clear alternatives to the order that they were bashing away at. The Arab Spring, as well as the Occupy movements and the Spanish “indignados,” among others in the West, were movements united on the basis of what they were against. They were far less clear about what they were in favor of or how they were going to build that future. The 2016 Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump — both of which were based primarily on the angry repudiation of the status quo — provided further compelling evidence of this public sentiment.
Do you think that this was a reflection of naiveté on the part of the public?
My favorite philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, talked about “mass man,” or modern man as being the end product of a long historical process. Previous generations struggled to put him in a place of relative affluence and education, with material comforts and freedoms that were achieved at tremendous cost and usually involved bloodshed at some point. Mass man doesn’t see it that way. He feels that all these material gifts are as natural as the air he breathes. The good things in life are taken for granted. Meanwhile, the smallest desire that goes unfulfilled is a source of outrage. Much of the public’s sentiment today — that impulse to negation — is driven by a failure to understand or remember history. Or if they do remember history, to see it purely as the mother of all injustices and a source of problems that must be now be abolished. If there is one thing I would ask people to do, it would be to study history. When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it’s like you’ve had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things.
Image: uncredited
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Base Culture
Pain is weakness leaving the body. Most had internalized this boot camp mantra, and all had endured some form of arduous labor, torment, and sacrifice in the service. The marines I served with at the Palms hailed from a vast range of backgrounds, although few came from the upper reaches of society. In civilian life, many occupied lower rungs, and many found themselves in similarly oppressive situations on base (especially the women). But in relation to the area addicts and immigrants, we enjoyed our privilege and whatever semblance of narcissistic happiness or gratification it afforded. Often that enjoyment came at the expense of fellow marines and was frequently of a desperate, survivalist character, a kind of necessary Keynesian stimulus at the level of the individual. It was compulsive, cruel banter to keep the self-esteem sufficiently inflated, basically. But at least we weren’t torturing ourselves for a fix, like those tweaking and scrapping on the outskirts. The political economy of the Palms was treating us better than it was treating them.
Then we went to Afghanistan. On that front, I would prefer not to have to say anything at all. The commodification of America’s wars tends to know no bounds. It also happens to be unavoidable for those of us who have taken part in them. I can’t really speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war, an obsession that predates the now ancient-seeming date of my war’s putative beginning, September 11, 2001. If the war involved any dignity, it is not deserving of an American audience that will make instantaneous patriotic sap from it. (...)
During my most frank interludes in Afghanistan, I’d refer to the grotesque mess as the amusement park ride. There was little amusement for the inhabitants of the villages we were leveling or the tenders of the opium fields we were burning. There wasn’t much amusement for the marines being hit the hardest either, although they had a tendency to surprise when it came to their capacity to be amused. But for so many, myself included, the point, or one point anyway, was to be amused. This should come off as trite. Marines would be the first to concede it. So would the reporters, novelists, and filmmakers who narrate their exploits. But the observation must be closed off from the ethical debate in which it is embedded. The culture has deemed it kosher to note that marines have fun lighting shit on fire, blowing shit up, and dodging death. But when you, and especially as a current or former member of the armed services, move from this basic empirical observation to the question of whether the larger enterprise is just and necessary, you violate a taboo. That day we were shot at but ended up all right, we were amused. That day, months later, when a replacement for one of my marines stepped off on the same patrol, landed on an IED, and died, he was dead. Whether anyone was amused immediately before or after that death is a question we don’t ask.
The list of questions never asked bends toward the infinite: What were the mercenaries I kept meeting truly there for? The ones who couldn’t help letting me know how much they were making for a six-month stint? The ones who kept on bragging about raking in six figures, and how those numbers always paled in comparison to what their bosses were making back in Maryland or Virginia? What about those contractors, specifically in the intel world, who foisted a never-ending line of gadgetries on my men to be field-tested and then shipped off to the global marketplace? Why did the gear never work? Why was it so unwieldy? Why did it slow down ops, and why did no one seem to care that it usually had to be escorted by those with the appropriate clearance, which meant putting my guys at risk from point A to point B and back again? Why so much acceptance in the face of ambitious captains who wanted to be majors, ambitious majors who wanted to be lieutenant colonels, ambitious lieutenant colonels who wanted to be full birds, ambitious full birds who wanted to be generals, and ambitious generals who wanted an extra star, all putting other lives on the line to make it happen?
Then one time I watched a group of marines obliterate the corner of a remote hamlet with the totality of their arsenal, from the M4 carbine to the M249 light machine gun to the M240 machine gun to the Mk 19 grenade launcher to the AT4 recoilless smoothbore weapon to the FGM-148 Javelin missile to the BGM-71 TOW missile. They’d lost friends, they were bitter, and they had come to see their surroundings not only as hostile, as was already the case back in Twentynine Palms, but as damnable. They were heading home soon and had some underutilized weapon systems to play with. I took pictures along with everyone else. I told myself there was something I didn’t know that justified the carnage I was consuming.
Then we went to Afghanistan. On that front, I would prefer not to have to say anything at all. The commodification of America’s wars tends to know no bounds. It also happens to be unavoidable for those of us who have taken part in them. I can’t really speak about my past or my politics without risking the encouragement and benefits of America’s cheap yet profitable obsession with war, an obsession that predates the now ancient-seeming date of my war’s putative beginning, September 11, 2001. If the war involved any dignity, it is not deserving of an American audience that will make instantaneous patriotic sap from it. (...)
During my most frank interludes in Afghanistan, I’d refer to the grotesque mess as the amusement park ride. There was little amusement for the inhabitants of the villages we were leveling or the tenders of the opium fields we were burning. There wasn’t much amusement for the marines being hit the hardest either, although they had a tendency to surprise when it came to their capacity to be amused. But for so many, myself included, the point, or one point anyway, was to be amused. This should come off as trite. Marines would be the first to concede it. So would the reporters, novelists, and filmmakers who narrate their exploits. But the observation must be closed off from the ethical debate in which it is embedded. The culture has deemed it kosher to note that marines have fun lighting shit on fire, blowing shit up, and dodging death. But when you, and especially as a current or former member of the armed services, move from this basic empirical observation to the question of whether the larger enterprise is just and necessary, you violate a taboo. That day we were shot at but ended up all right, we were amused. That day, months later, when a replacement for one of my marines stepped off on the same patrol, landed on an IED, and died, he was dead. Whether anyone was amused immediately before or after that death is a question we don’t ask.The list of questions never asked bends toward the infinite: What were the mercenaries I kept meeting truly there for? The ones who couldn’t help letting me know how much they were making for a six-month stint? The ones who kept on bragging about raking in six figures, and how those numbers always paled in comparison to what their bosses were making back in Maryland or Virginia? What about those contractors, specifically in the intel world, who foisted a never-ending line of gadgetries on my men to be field-tested and then shipped off to the global marketplace? Why did the gear never work? Why was it so unwieldy? Why did it slow down ops, and why did no one seem to care that it usually had to be escorted by those with the appropriate clearance, which meant putting my guys at risk from point A to point B and back again? Why so much acceptance in the face of ambitious captains who wanted to be majors, ambitious majors who wanted to be lieutenant colonels, ambitious lieutenant colonels who wanted to be full birds, ambitious full birds who wanted to be generals, and ambitious generals who wanted an extra star, all putting other lives on the line to make it happen?
Then one time I watched a group of marines obliterate the corner of a remote hamlet with the totality of their arsenal, from the M4 carbine to the M249 light machine gun to the M240 machine gun to the Mk 19 grenade launcher to the AT4 recoilless smoothbore weapon to the FGM-148 Javelin missile to the BGM-71 TOW missile. They’d lost friends, they were bitter, and they had come to see their surroundings not only as hostile, as was already the case back in Twentynine Palms, but as damnable. They were heading home soon and had some underutilized weapon systems to play with. I took pictures along with everyone else. I told myself there was something I didn’t know that justified the carnage I was consuming.
by Lyle Jeremy Rubin, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Bill Jenkins, Pass, 2012. Photo by Cathy Carver
Troll Patrol: The Life of a Comment Moderator
For six years, from 2012 to 2018, my job was to read and delete the most inappropriate comments on a conservative news site. Not all the inappropriate comments. Just the most inappropriate comments. Hundreds of comments an hour. Thousands of comments a day. Tens of thousands of comments a week. More than a million comments a year.
I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”
Some of the choices people make on the internet, and in life in general, remain baffling to me. Not just in their intolerance, but also in their sheer stupidity. I would tell a user that he was banned, and instead of choosing a unique user name to throw us, he would immediately sign back up with a nearly identical name. Just an extra “L” to SickOfItAlll. Some people are really loyal to the name they use to be racist on a website.
It was an odd turn of events for me to be working there at all. The site (which I'm not allowed to publicly name) is one that I knew some friends and family read, but it wasn’t for me. I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy. A friend got a job there, though, so I applied too. Liberal or not, the rent needed to be paid. After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.
Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.
If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.
I started my day at 8 a.m., and by then it was already bedlam. My first task was to go over the flagged comments, and ones from problem users, that had been held throughout the night. I have only anecdotal evidence to base this on, but anti-Semites and spambots, speaking generally, tend to be night owls. It’s a weird way to start the day: Good morning! “Jews control the banks, and you should try this amazing new weight loss shake!”
Some of the choices people make on the internet, and in life in general, remain baffling to me. Not just in their intolerance, but also in their sheer stupidity. I would tell a user that he was banned, and instead of choosing a unique user name to throw us, he would immediately sign back up with a nearly identical name. Just an extra “L” to SickOfItAlll. Some people are really loyal to the name they use to be racist on a website.It was an odd turn of events for me to be working there at all. The site (which I'm not allowed to publicly name) is one that I knew some friends and family read, but it wasn’t for me. I’ve always been a pretty liberal guy. A friend got a job there, though, so I applied too. Liberal or not, the rent needed to be paid. After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.
Before working as a moderator, I never would have known how many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn. Now, having done the job, I know that that’s a trick question, because the answer is: immediately. It will happen on the first comment and keep on going until the last one.
If you’ve ever spent any time reading comments on a website, you’re no doubt surprised to find out that anybody had deleted anything. The internet often seems like a lawless wasteland. But there was a law. And it was me.
by Adam Sokol, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Angus Greig
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