The Best of a Bad Situation

This is what extinction feels like from the inside.

In our age of Republican minority despotism, attempts to grapple with anthropogenic climate destruction have been warped to encourage several varieties of despair, rendered acute by the ticking-time-bomb nature of the problem. The losses suffered by Earth and its populations — plant and animal — are neither reversible nor remediable. There is no future filled with reparations. There is no long moral arc. Ten or fifteen years ago it was possible to think of the polar bear and the white rhinoceros as martyrs, dying off to shame us into better harmony with the natural world. Not ruined archaic torsos but videos of extinct creatures would say, “You must change your life.” The same hope held with respect to coral reefs, forests, and certain small Pacific Islands. A dark glimmer of progressive thinking (the “bargaining phase,” as it were) was discernible in the Kyoto Protocol and at the Paris conference, where the prime minister of Tuvalu’s call to impose a strict not-to-be-exceeded target of a 1.5-degree-Celsius rise in global temperature — the minimum required to save his people from a homeless future in a world hostile to refugees and immigrants — was dismissed in favor of pragmatic mitigating maneuvers intended to induce the cooperation of holdout nations such as the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

At least now we can see things clearly — if only we could focus on the problem. Whatever they may say or tweet, the Trump Administration is not in denial about climate change. In fact, it has the perverse distinction of being the first US administration to address it head-on. In 2000, we had a presidential candidate who understood the perils facing us, even if he underplayed them to try to get elected. (By a margin of one United States Supreme Court justice, he was not elected.) Instead, the Bush Administration pretended climate change did not exist, though back then it was called global warming; “climate change” was a Bush/Rove term of obfuscation that eventually carried the day, even among scientists. President Obama spoke softly about the seriousness of human-driven climate change in public while his administration chipped away at automobile emissions and provided token green-energy incentives. These may have been the correct policies for a major, developed nation . . . in the early 1990s. But like much else after the financial crisis in 2008, the opportunity for a visionary shift in national focus — one that would have required investment at least equal to that being poured into the unwinnable war on terror — was bartered away to chase after an illusory political consensus with the terminally uncompromising opposition.

By contrast, from its first days the Trump presidency brought a series of cabinet appointments and executive orders clustered around the single purpose of hastening ecological collapse: Bring back coal! Shackle and corrupt the EPA! Remove climate change information from government websites! Withdraw from the Paris Agreement! A candidate whose platform called for pushing carbon dioxide levels past the frontier of scientists’ most dire predictions could not have expressed that desire more swiftly or succinctly. It was almost as if that were the whole point. As indeed it was.

There are two clearheaded ways to deal with what’s happening to the Earth. One is to Manhattan-Project the implementation of clean energy sources and immediately stop burning fossil fuels. We also need to ditch the patriarchal models of wealth and status reproduction that have been constitutive of nearly all expansionist, war-making, and resource-depleting societies of the past ten thousand years. While we do that, we can try to ameliorate the many catastrophes that have already been set in motion.

The other way, the path we’re on currently, is to concede that billions of people will see their economic and cultural lives ruined before dying off at a scale to make the casualties of World War II appear insignificant — and “gameplan” not to be among them. That’s what “winning” in the climate-changed future amounts to, and that’s the world the Republican Party has committed itself — and the rest of us — to endure: a social-Darwinist survival of the “fittest,” “wealthiest,” or most prepared, at least in the sense of stockpiling the most guns and canned food. It’s been painfully apparent since the term ecological refugee was popularized by a UN report in the mid-1980s that unthinkable numbers of people would be forced into migration in coming decades by climate change. Immigration, national borders, and food, water, and energy distribution will be the central issues facing all governments. From there it’s a short step, if it’s even a step at all, to a vehement resurgence of open racism and bigotry among those with the good fortune to inhabit the least immediately vulnerable areas, be they the highlands of Burma, the fertile Pannonian plain of Hungary, or the plunder-enriched sprawl of the United States.

The looming prospect of a panoply of belligerent, Blut und Boden regimes has always been one of the scariest potential political outcomes of widespread ecological collapse. Through a series of accidents and “influences,” we got our version early in the United States. We can and should get rid of it, but the paranoid energies that enabled its triumph are durable and already have pervaded much of the world. Trumpism is our first national response to climate change, and it’s a brutal, fearful, vengeful, and gloating response — one that predicts and invites warfare on a global scale. For all the terrible statistical projections, alarming models, and buried reports, what’s most immediately terrifying to the human imagination about climate change is the revelation of how large numbers of our species behave under conditions of perceived threat, scarcity, and danger. (...)

Truly, we have fucked it up in so many ways! Yet while climate change increasingly feels like an inescapable doom upon humanity, our only means of recourse remains political. Even under the heavy weather of present and near-future conditions, there’s an imperative to imagine that we aren’t facing the death of everyone, or the end of existence. No matter what the worst-case models using the most advanced forecasting of feedback loops may predict, we have to act as if we can assume some degree of human continuity. What happens in the next decades is instead, as the climate reporter Kate Aronoff has said, about who gets to live in the 21st century. And the question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.

The most radical and hopeful response to climate change shouldn’t be, What do we give up? It should remain the same one that plenty of ordinary and limited humans ask themselves each day: How do we collectively improve our overall quality of life? It is a welfare question, one that has less to do with consumer choices — like changing light bulbs — than with the spending of trillions and trillions of still-available dollars on decoupling economic growth and wealth from carbon-based fuels and carbon-intensive products, including plastics.

The economist Robert Pollin makes a convincing case that only massive investment in and commitment to alternative energy sources stands any chance of lowering emissions to acceptable levels. All other solutions, from “degrowth” to population control, will fall well short of intended targets while causing greater societal pain and instability. To achieve a fairly modest 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions within twenty years, Pollin suggests in a recent New Left Review essay, we would have to invest, per year, “1–1.5 per cent of global GDP — about $1 trillion at the current global GDP of $80 trillion,” and continually increase that investment, “rising in step with global growth thereafter.” Whether we call this a Manhattan Project for renewable, sustainable energy or a Green New Deal, as Pollin and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have named it, the point is to change the political discourse around climate change from either mindless futurism of the kind that proposes large scale “geoengineering” projects or fruitless cap-and-trade negotiations at the mercy of obstructionists. Only a great potlatch of what we have can save us from a bonfire of the vanities on a planetary scale.

In the short term, a true Green New Deal would need to be more like a Green Shock Doctrine. As hurricanes, fires, and floods pile up, each one would provide the occasion to unhook more people from the fossil-fuel grid. At the scale Pollin envisions, it would be naive to assume that a switch from fossils to renewables could happen smoothly. There would be disruptions to almost every aspect of economic life, including food supplies, the power grid (even the internet!), and daily work rhythms and commutes. There would be black markets in banned fuels, and even some forms of violence, like the current populist French riots against Macron’s gasoline taxes. If even such small measures aimed at reducing carbon consumption result in such aggressive pushback, there is no reason to be moderate. Compared with what awaits us if we continue as we are, such shocks are as a rainstorm to a hurricane, or the 1977 blackout of New York City to the bombing of Dresden.

The economic costs of climate change can already be measured by toting up the losses incurred during every single hurricane, wildfire, drought, and war of the past ten years or longer. Because these costs have not yet been borne by any of the major stakeholders in the US or — really — the global economy, they are written off as the price of doing business. No sane group of investors or empowered body of citizens, however, would make these trade-offs to ensure a few more years of short-term profits when measured against the prospects of what would be the last and most profound crash in the history of capitalism.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Means, Light Bulb 00BY1. 2007

Los Lobos

Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Of Capitalist Urban Planning

Capitalism and state planning have a complicated relationship. Capitalist ideology insists that markets are the best mechanism for economic, social, and environmental decision-making, and that consumer choice is the fairest and most efficient arbiter of public will. Deregulation has been the byword of the business class for decades, and diminished government has been the goal of conservative politicians at all levels.

Grover Norquist of the right-wing Americans for Tax Reform famously claimed he wanted to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s what capitalists say; it’s not really what they do. Capitalists and political conservatives are quick to call for an expansion of the state when it comes to its carceral capacities or its military might, and those expressions of state power have been ballooning budgets at the local, state, and federal levels. Big businesses love the kinds of complex regulations that keep smaller firms from competing with them; they can hire armies of lawyers to whack through the weeds, while their competitors get mired in the muck. They herald expansions of state power that increase inequalities and suppress insurgencies as government doing its job.

On the level of city planning and land use policy, the rhetoric and the reality are similarly mismatched. Capitalists have serious and specific demands of the state, without which they are unlikely to function in the long term, or even on a day-to-day basis. They want the state to make big, fixed-capital investments in infrastructures that enable their own profit-making. They also want government to ensure some degree of support for people’s social reproduction, in order to assure they have a living, breathing workforce to exploit in the first place. Without these investments — planned, paid for and coordinated by the state — they have little basis on which to operate.

The Contradictions of Capitalist Planning

Look a little closer, however, and some important cracks arise. In his classic 1986 book Planning the Capitalist City, Richard Foglesong analyzes the relationship between capitalism and city planning as it evolved in the United States from the colonial period through the 1920s. He frames the book around two primary contradictions: one he calls “the property contradiction,” and the other “the capitalist-democracy contradiction.”

The property contradiction arises because capitalists demand certain planning interventions from the state to enable their mode of accumulation, but then deny the utility of planning as some sort of socialist sickness. Crucially, beyond certain fundamentals, urban capitalists do not want the same things from city planners. Their demands crudely break down along industry lines. Manufacturing capitalists might bristle at environmental regulations that curb their abilities to exploit land, water, and air without legal consequences. They could, however, be broadly supportive of planning interventions meant to cool rising land and housing prices, as they view land as a cost factor of production and housing prices as a cause around which their workers could rally and demand higher wages.

Real estate capitalists, on the other hand, might welcome environmental regulations that limit pollution if they see smog and grime as factors that might bring down the value of their buildings. They would not, however, cheer the state for imposing rent controls or building high-quality public housing, as those measures might threaten their very business model. Planners, then, must manage a double bind: meeting the competing demands of various types of capitalists, without doing so much planning that the capitalists freak out.

In trying to thread that needle, urban planners face the capitalist-democracy contradiction. Actual capitalists — those who own the means of production, not just those who think like them — are always the numerical minority. In a republican government and a capitalist economy, planners must incorporate the working class into their process or risk a legitimacy crisis. At the same time, however, they are entrusted to appease the capitalists for whom the system is designed to work. To navigate this dilemma, cities have devised elaborate land use review systems (in which public comment is encouraged but non-binding) and public city planning commissions (which are generally staffed by real estate experts and business elites).

According to this model, urban planners’ main job is to contain these two contradictions; neither can be resolved, but both can be managed. It’s a complicated bind. They are supposed to make certain land use interventions, but are prevented from making more sweeping changes. Their process must be open to the public, while simultaneously guaranteeing that ultimate power resides in the hands of propertied elites. It can be a pretty shitty job. (...)

With real estate concentrating and manufacturing dispersing, the relationship between urban capital and urban planning has shifted in important ways. If manufacturers no longer make up a powerful capitalist constituency for lower central city land and housing costs, planners managing “the property contradiction” are really only hearing from real estate capitalists and those aligned with their growth agenda, who are calling for policies that push land and property values ever-upward. Even when attempting to solve urban quandaries that have little do with real estate directly — education, transportation, parks, etc. — real estate capital demands planning interventions that enhance speculation. (...)

Whatever problems planners attack, the solutions they propose are likely to include luxury development as a key component — even when that problem is a lack of affordable housing. Planners in the real estate state are tasked with stoking property values: either because they are low and investors want them higher, or because they are already high and if their deflation could bring down an entire budgetary house of cards. Working to curb speculation and develop public and decommodified housing seem like absurd propositions to a planning regime whose first assumption is that future public gains come first through real estate growth.

In this system, gentrification is a feature not a bug. It is surely an economic and social force, but it is also the product of the state — a planned process of channeled reinvestment and targeted displacement. Urban planners, however, are not just corporate tools or government stooges. For the most part they join the profession to have a positive impact on cities. Many come from radical backgrounds and see planning as a means to impose control on capital’s chaos. But under the strictures of the real estate state, producing space for purposes other than profit is an enormous challenge.

by Samuel Stein, Jacobin |  Read more:
Image: A view of the Hudson Yards development zone. Stephanie Keith/Getty

[ed. See also: New York's Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City (The Guardian).]

Ketamine: Now by Prescription

Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression.

Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend tens of millions of dollars proving safety and efficacy to the FDA. The FDA rewards them with a 10ish year monopoly on the drug, during which they can charge whatever ridiculous price they want. This isn’t a great system, but at least we get new medicines sometimes.

Occasionally people discover that an existing chemical treats an illness, without the chemical having been discovered and patented by a pharmaceutical company. In this case, whoever spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA may not get a monopoly on the drug and the right to sell it for ridiculous prices. So nobody spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA, and so it risks never getting approved.

The usual solution is for some pharma company to make some tiny irrelevant change to the existing chemical, and patent this new chemical as an “exciting discovery” they just made. Everyone goes along with the ruse, the company spends tens of millions of dollars pushing it through FDA trials, it gets approved, and they charge ridiculous prices for ten years. I wouldn’t quite call this “the system works”, but again, at least we get new medicines.

Twenty years ago, people noticed that ketamine treated depression. Alas, ketamine already existed – it’s an anaesthetic and a popular recreational drug – so pharma companies couldn’t patent it and fund FDA trials, so it couldn’t get approved by the FDA for depression. A few renegade doctors started setting up ketamine clinics, where they used the existing approval of ketamine for anaesthesia as an excuse to give it to depressed people. But because this indication was not FDA-approved, insurance companies didn’t have to cover it. This created a really embarrassing situation for the medical system: everyone secretly knows ketamine is one of the most effective antidepressants, but officially it’s not an antidepressant at all, and mainstream providers won’t give it to you.

The pharmaceutical industry has lobbyists in Heaven. Does this surprise you? Of course they do. A Power bribed here, a Principality flattered there, and eventually their petitions reach the ears of God Himself. This is the only possible explanation for stereochemistry, a quirk of nature where many organic chemicals come in “left-handed” and “right-handed” versions. The details don’t matter, beyond that if you have a chemical that you can’t patent, you can take the left-handed (or right-handed) version, and legally pretend that now it is a different chemical which you can patent. And so we got “esketamine”.

Am I saying that esketamine is just a sinister ploy by pharma to patent and make money off ketamine? Yup. In fact “esketamine” is just a cutesy way of writing the chemical name s-ketamine, which literally stands for “sinister ketamine” (sinister is the Latin word for “left-handed”; the modern use derives from the old superstition that left-handers were evil). The sinister ploy to patent sinister ketamine worked, and the latest news says it will cost between $590 to $885 per dose.

(regular old ketamine still costs about $10 per dose, less if you buy it from a heavily-tattooed man on your local street corner)

I’ve said it before: I don’t blame the pharma companies for this. Big Government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that drugs should have to undergo tens of millions of dollars worth of FDA trials before they get approved. No government agencies or altruistic billionaires have stepped up to fund these trials themselves, so they won’t happen unless some pharma company does it. And pharma companies aren’t going to do it unless they can make their money back. And it’s not like they’re overcharging; their return to investment on R&D may already be less than zero. This is a crappy system – but again, it’s one that occasionally gets us new medicines. So it’s hard to complain.

But in this case, there are two additional issues that make it even worse than the usual serving of crappiness.

First, esketamine might not work.

Johnson & Johnson, the pharma company sponsoring its FDA application, did four official efficacy studies. You can find the summary starting on page 17 of this document. Two of the trials were technically negative, although analysts have noticed nontechnical ways they look encouraging. Two of the trials were technically positive, but one of them was a withdrawal trial that was not really designed to prove efficacy.

The FDA usually demands two positive studies before they approve a drug, and doesn’t usually count withdrawal trials. This time around, in a minor deviation from their usual rules, they decided to count the positive withdrawal trial as one of the two required positives, and approve esketamine. I suspect this was a political move based on how embarrassing it was to have everyone know ketamine was a good antidepressant, but not have it officially FDA-approved.

But if ketamine is such a good antidepressant, how come it couldn’t pass the normal bar for approval? Like, people keep saying that ketamine is a real antidepressant, that works perfectly, and changes everything, unlike those bad old SSRIs which are basically just placebo. But esketamine’s results are at least as bad as any SSRI’s. If you look at Table 9 in the FDA report, ketamine did notably worse than most of the other antidepressants the FDA has approved recently – including vortioxetine, an SSRI-like medication.

One possibility is that ketamine was studied for treatment-resistant depression, so it was only given to the toughest cases. But Table 9 shows olanzapine + fluoxetine doing significantly better than esketamine even for treatment-resistant depression.

Another possibility is that clinical trials are just really tough on antidepressants for some reason. I’ve mentioned this before in the context of SSRIs. Patients love them. Doctors love them. Clinical trials say they barely have any effect. Well, now patients love ketamine. Doctors love ketamine. And now there’s a clinical trial showing barely any effect. This isn’t really a solution to esketamine’s misery, but at least it has company.

Another possibility is that everyone made a huge mistake in using left-handed ketamine, and it’s right-handed ketamine that holds the magic. Most previous research was done on a racemic mixture (an equal mix of left-handed and right-handed molecules), and at least one study suggests it was the right-handed ketamine that was driving the results. Pharma decided to pursue left-handed ketamine because it was known to have a stronger effect on NMDA receptors, but – surprise! – ketamine probably doesn’t work through NMDA after all. So there’s a chance that this is just the wrong kind of ketamine – though usually I expect big pharma to be smarter than that, and I would be surprised if this turned out to be it. I don’t know if anybody has a right-handed ketamine patent yet.

And another possibility is that it’s the wrong route of administration. Almost all previous studies on ketamine have examined it given IV. The FDA approved esketamine as a nasal spray – which is a lot more convenient for patients, but again, not a lot of studies showing it works. At least some studies seem to show that it doesn’t. Again, usually I expect big pharma not to screw up the delivery method, but who knows?

Second in our litany of disappointments, esketamine is going to be maximally inconvenient to get.

The big problem with regular ketamine, other than not being FDA-approved, was that you had to get it IV. That meant going to a ketamine clinic that had nurses and anesthesiologists for IV access, then sitting there for a couple of hours hallucinating while they infused it into you. This was a huge drawback compared to eg Prozac, where you can just bring home a pill bottle and take one pill per day in the comfort of your own bathroom. It’s also expensive – clinics, nurses, and anesthesiologists don’t come cheap.

The great appeal of a ketamine nasal spray was that it was going to prevent all that. Sure, it might not work. Sure, it would be overpriced. But at least it would be convenient!

The FDA, in its approval for esketamine, specified that it could only be delivered at specialty clinics by doctors who are specially trained in ketamine administration, that patients will have to sit at the clinic for at least two hours, and realistically there will have to be a bunch of nurses on site. My boss has already said our (nice, well-funded) clinic isn’t going to be able to jump through the necessary hoops; most other outpatient psychiatric clinics will probably say the same.

This removes most of the advantages of having it be intranasal, so why are they doing this? They give two reasons. First, they want to make sure no patient can ever bring ketamine home, because they might get addicted to it. Okay, I agree addiction is bad. But patients bring prescriptions of OxyContin and Xanax home every day. Come on, FDA. We already have a system for drugs you’re worried someone will get addicted to, it’s called the Controlled Substances Act. Ketamine is less addictive than lots of chemicals that are less stringently regulated than it is. This just seems stupid and mean-spirited.

The other reason the drugs have to be given in a specially monitored clinic is because ketamine can have side effects, including hallucinations and dissociative sensations. I agree these are bad, and I urge patients only to take hallucinogens/dissociatives in an appropriate setting, such as a rave. Like, yeah, ketamine can be seriously creepy, but now patients are going to have to drive to some overpriced ketamine clinic a couple of times a week and sit there for two hours per dose just because you think they’re too frail to handle a dissociative drug at home?

I wanted to finally be able to prescribe ketamine to my patients who needed it. Instead, I’m going to have to recommend they find a ketamine clinic near them (some of my patients live hours from civilization), drive to it several times a week (some of my patients don’t have cars) and pay through the nose, all so that some guy with a postgraduate degree in Watching People Dissociate can do crossword puzzles while they sit and feel kind of weird in a waiting room. And then those same patients will go home and use Ecstasy. Thanks a lot, FDA.

And the cherry on the crap sundae is that this sets a precedent. If the FDA approves psilocybin for depression (and it’s currently in Phase 2 trials, so watch this space!) you can bet you’re going to have to go to a special psilocybin clinic if you want to get it. Psychedelic medicine is potentially the future of psychiatry, and there’s every indication that it will be as inconvenient and red-tape-filled a future as possible. If you thought it was tough getting your Adderall prescription refilled every month, just wait.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc

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Steak, Booze and a Sense of Dull Dread: What Really Happens at the NFL Combine

An NFL general manager stands in his suite at Lucas Oil Stadium watching the combine workouts. I'm not using his name; even though he's merely admitting what everyone privately acknowledges, he worries about saying it aloud because the combine is such a growth industry for the NFL. After years of coming to Indianapolis, he now understands that his presence here -- everyone's presence -- is simply to play a small part in a televised show, even if real futures are at stake. The players are running on the field down below, and they are running on the screens playing all around him, broadcast by the NFL Network. From his suite, this GM can barely read the names and numbers on their jerseys, so he watches on TV. Like most guys, he has an iPad where the stats and scores and results automatically update in his draft software. Except the results are always posted faster on the live television broadcast than in his own system. That's what cues his sense of dull dread: If I can just watch this on television, and if I don't even really care about the results anyway, then why exactly am I here?

Day One, Part I

Wednesday night, my first at the combine, first stop, first drink: a Guinness at the J.W. Marriott hotel bar, the front porch of the NFL combine. I nursed the beer and watched the football world stalk the room, looking for someone who might have information or want information. An agent named Kyle Strongin pulled up a chair. A long time ago, he worked at Ole Miss, which is in the town where I live, so we swapped Coach O stories and caught up on life. This year, he had three clients at the combine: Wisconsin running back Alec Ingold, South Carolina lineman Zack Bailey and Clemson cult hero receiver Hunter Renfrow.

He liked his guys, and he pulled out his phone to show me a picture that kind of sums up the singular question hovering over the combine: What can a team tell about a player by looking at him run, lift weights and flex? Kyle's photo showed the now-viral image of Ole Miss' D.K. Metcalf standing with his shirt off, his chest swollen and rippled. D.K. sent me two crying-laughing emojis when I texted him after it first hit Twitter, when his 1.9 percent body fat melted the internet. In Kyle's photoshopped version, next to him was Renfrow, short and skinny, looking exactly like the kind of player a teammate might mistake for a manager, or maybe a waterboy -- which actually happened his freshman year at Clemson.

Then Kyle's photo listed both their stats against Alabama.

Renfrow put up better numbers.

All Renfrow has ever done is catch big passes in big games and help his team win. The most recent Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, is a player like him. And still, Renfrow's agent spent the week of the combine working to convince people to trust themselves and not a series of athletic tests that don't actually reveal much about a football player's future. That's the funny thing. The combine is a place where you can watch the battle between facts and narrative play out: Even though the smart football minds said they didn't learn much from the results, the drills being broadcast created an image that a player would have to struggle to shed. Hunter was in town fighting group-think about his size and speed. One scouting guy told Renfrow's agent, "I wouldn't draft him but he'd start for us."

So Renfrow needed to do well enough to let his career define him instead of these times and reps. Strongin told me that Hunter would run his 40-yard dash on Saturday. If he could score in the low 4.5s, then a team will draft him in the third or fourth round as a starting slot receiver.

If he ran much slower than that, he might not get drafted at all.

Day One, Part II

This year's combine was my first, which made me not quite prepared for the daily marathon: from morning coffee at the J.W. Starbucks, where the new Browns head coach would ask for his coffee cool enough to chug -- "kids' temperature," one barista said to another; to the convention center where nearly a thousand reporters look for state secrets about hamstrings and muscle cramps; to one of several wood-paneled, masculine steakhouses like St. Elmo, with its horseradish-spiked shrimp cocktail; to a restaurant bar named Prime 47, where nearly every night ends up in a haze of passed business cards, whispered gossip and behavior some coaches would rather not hit the internet. A lot of secrets get told, news broken. Alcohol numbs everyone's deeply hardwired urge to lie.

The NFL is famously secretive and paranoid, so these bars in Indianapolis are among the few places in the world where you can actually ask a straight question and get a true answer. The curtain gets yanked back and, like in the movie, the guy pulling the levers always seems smaller up close. There's John Elway eating at P.F. Chang's. There's Dan Marino drinking chardonnay. There's Sean Payton dining with two reporters in a dark steakhouse. There's every agent and scout and general manager moving in a carefully defined orbit around downtown Indianapolis. Prime awaits at the end of the night. It's a verb. Let's Prime.

Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime -- "Soooo many men," a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner -- and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 a.m., I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, "Welcome to the combine." (...)

For reporters and coaches and scouts, the combine is part work and part play, like a legal convention in Las Vegas or something. Yes, there's combine stuff to do, but that all feels secondary on the ground to drinking expensive wine and eating big steaks at places like St. Elmo's -- the emotional center of Indy during the combine, with its great light and high ceilings.

Normally their most popular steak is the filet. The week of the combine it was the dry-aged Tomahawk ribeye. Big cabernets flew out of the cellar, Jerry Jones buying his large formats of Silver Oak -- jeroboams and methuselahs, son -- while smaller fish pop for 750s of Caymus. A St. Elmo's staff member said the combine crowds don't buy the really great wine, just wine that normal people will recognize as expensive. The strut is more important than the taste. Drinks flowed. Shrimp cocktails arrived, and huge steaks, too: bone-in, medium rare. A reporter sent a round of tequila shots to a table of Patriots PR people. They'd had quite the week, after the Orchids of Asia. Outside, some NFL guys walked down the street joking about needing to find a massage parlor to get a "Krafty." (...)

The scouts know this week doesn't matter, but the league knows that fans will watch on television and that talk radio and popular culture will turn this into an essential event on the annual sporting calendar. That's the tension that everyone can feel even if they can't articulate it. The whole thing has the whiff of reality television, with a twist: As these kinds of drills become less and less relevant to the best minds in the game, they become more and more important in the culture. Imagine if getting kicked off "The Bachelor" meant you had to stay single forever.

by Wright Thompson, ESPN |  Read more:

Image: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

To Brits, Trump Makes Dubya Look Smart

Sometimes even those of us who take great pride in our writings come across pieces that inspire us to be more elegant, more precise, just more literate. I have a fondness for the King’s English and once had an editor, a woman in her late 70’s and very, very English ask me why I wrote as though I were writing in the 19th century? I, of course, not missing a beat replied that I thought that was the ultimate compliment. She vehemently disagreed. Oh well, to each their own.

But just a while ago I came across the accompanying article that I found to be so profoundly poignant yet humorous that it led me to one of those moments where my only reaction was the proverbial “I wish I had said that.” So I would like to share it with those who may not have been introduced to such witty repartee as they perused their daily dose of Facebook.

So with no further suspense I would like to offer the following, which appeared on February 11, 2019, on the internet site Quora.com, for your reading pleasure.

Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. 

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. 

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. 

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. 

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. 

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. 

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. 

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. 

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. 

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. (...)

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. 

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. 

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down. 

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: 

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. 

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. 

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

by  Lance Simmens, LA Progressive |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Here’s to Naps and Snoozes

A few months ago, two Americans arrived for a meeting at a sprawling, corporate campus in Sichuan Province in China. (They asked not to be named because their work is confidential.) To get to the conference room, they crossed a vast span of cubicles where hundreds of young engineers were busy at their desks, a scene replicated on every floor of the 10-storey building. The meeting was to discuss a dense, text-heavy document, and it began with the client reviewing the day’s agenda: they’d talk until 11am, break for lunch, have nap time, and then start again at 2pm.

Lunch was in a cafeteria the size of a football field where women with hair nets and soup ladles regulated the movement of a column of people. The visitors lost sight of their hosts, so they got into line, bolted down their meal, and retraced their way to the building where they’d had their meeting. When the elevator door opened, the window blinds were drawn, the computer screens were off, and the whole floor lay in grey shadow. The workday could have been over but for the fact that people lay about everywhere, as switched off as the ceiling lights.

The Americans hadn’t seen anything like it since morning-after scenes at their college fraternities. They had to step over some bodies. Other people were tilted forward in their seats with their faces on their desks, like they’d been knocked out from behind, while others still had cleared their desks and lay on them face-up.

The Americans hoped that their hosts, upper-tier executives, would be awake in the meeting room, but they were just as dead to the world as everyone else. One of the Americans coughed into his fist. No one stirred. There were still 45 minutes to go till the 2pm meeting. So he took a seat and pretended to join the mass nap. He didn’t feel like sleeping and would have felt too vulnerable even if he did, but it was a tight space, the woman facing him, a lawyer, was snoring away, and he was afraid that, if she woke up, she’d think he was staring at her. ‘I figured it was safer if I just closed my eyes,’ he told me.

The ordeal ended, finally, with a gong. The lights came back on, music (a military march) played, and people just opened their eyes and resumed their working posture. Nap time was done.

That the incident seemed strange illustrates how people raised in the United States (or who identify with its values) often think about sleep: we can be dominated and bullied by early risers, and tend to look down upon other customs such as siestas.

These are some of our conventions: a person should not sleep too long – as a matter of personal virtue and social capital, the less the better. The average American sleeps for 6 hours 31 minutes during the working week, the least of any country but Japan (6 hours, 22 minutes). The higher limit of what you can admit to is eight hours. Sleep is a waste of time, robbing you of the finite resource of conscious, productive time. Collective nap times or public sleeping bring to mind nurseries and nursing homes. You don’t sleep with co-workers, ever, in any sense of the term. If you really have to sleep, you slink off somewhere out of view and, if anyone asks, you manufacture an alibi, or say something like: ‘I just wanted to close my eyes,’ as if to plead a felony charge down to a misdemeanour. Or you call it a ‘power nap’, as if it was really a strength-training session at the gym.

‘Every society is judgmental about its core issues of value,’ said Carol Worthman, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. But when it comes to sleep, the need for safety – versus value judgment – seems to have prevailed in cultures beyond our own. Indeed, in Worthman’s research around the world, sleep has emerged as both more flexible and more social than one would think from the perspective of the West. ‘Human sleep evolved in risky settings that fostered complex sleep architecture and regulation of vigilance in sleep to suit local circumstances,’ she writes in Frontiers Reviews; and those circumstances varied from place to place.

by Todd Pitock, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Jason Lee/Reuters

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Ghost, Come Back Again

A boarding school in the British Isles. Reverent children huddle in a gloomy chamber, watching as one of their fellow students assays a devilishly difficult trick. The boy’s hand trembles. And then — success! A jet of fire, a “cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment,” fills the ancient tower with an indescribable illumination.

Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.

The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.

Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a ­Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)

Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” ­Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic ­Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.

In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”

Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie ­McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.

That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.

In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.

Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-­dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”

by Dan Kois, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rutu Modan
[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]

Bow Wow Wow (Kevin Shields Remix)

Chris Ware
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[ed. Who could have known...? See also: The Other Kind of Climate Denialism (New Yorker).]

St. Vincent & Dua Lipa

It’s Time to Stop Fighting Osama bin Laden’s War

Osama bin Laden is long dead, but his plans live on through American foreign policy.

In 2001, al Qaeda consisted of only 400 ideologues in the far corners of the world. After the recent regime change wars in Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Syria, typical estimates place their membership at around 20,000. To top it all off, the American economy is out $5.6 trillion dollars for the whole failed project. This is not the legacy of a war to spread, or even protect, liberty and prosperity. Instead it is the legacy of an evil but gifted tactician, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Contrary to the popular misunderstanding of al Qaeda’s motives and strategy, bin Laden and his partner Ayman al Zawahiri were not trying to scare America away with the September 11th attacks. They were trying to provoke an overreaction. Al Qaeda’s leaders wanted the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in order to bog our military down, “bleed us to bankruptcy,” and force a worn-out, broken empire to leave the region the hard way, and permanently, just as they had done to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with American support. Only then could they hope to launch the revolutions they sought in their home countries without interference from the American superpower.

Osama bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam warned in 1986 that the U.S. was on deck for expulsion from the region after the USSR. After observing the effectiveness of asymmetric war against a superior adversary, bin Laden, galvanized by the sanctions against Iraq and the U.S. occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, took up Azzam’s mission. In an early declaration aimed at the U.S., bin Laden noted that the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan helped the mujahideen defeat one of the most powerful militaries in history, and declared that he would seek to lure America to its same fate.

After decimating al Qaeda’s old guard at Tora Bora in 2001, the U.S. military could have returned home victorious. Instead, our leaders chose to follow bin Laden’s wishes by committing to an extended occupation and impossible nation-building mission – one which has lasted for more than 17 years.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq to overthrow the man bin Laden called a “socialist infidel,” Saddam Hussein, was a massive boon to the terror organization, decimating a secular government, paving the way for the creation of the first al Qaeda franchise there in 2004, radicalizing of a generation of new fighters, and proving the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East.

America’s further regime change wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria have been strategic victories for the U.S.’s terrorist enemies beyond the former terrorist leader’s wildest dreams.

by Scott Horton and Robert Gaines, Brietbart | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. Yes, Brietbart. Blind squirrels... etc.]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Enduring San Francisco (NY Times)

Image: Jason Henry
[ed. One of the best weeks of my life. City Lights, North Beach, Chinatown, Rosie Flores at Bimbo's, and the annual Columbus Day and Italian Heritage Parade (with a banquet table set up adjacent to the street, full of antipasto and wine).]

The Making of the Fox News White House

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”

Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

Nothing has formalized the partnership between Fox and Trump more than the appointment, in July, 2018, of Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, as director of communications and deputy chief of staff at the White House. Kristol says of Shine, “When I first met him, he was producing Hannity’s show at Fox, and the two were incredibly close.” Both come from white working-class families on Long Island, and they are so close to each other’s children that they are referred to as “Uncle Bill” and “Uncle Sean.” Another former colleague says, “They spend their vacations together.” A third recalls, “I was rarely in Shine’s office when Sean didn’t call. And I was in Shine’s office a lot. They talked all the time—many times a day.”

Shine led Fox News’ programming division for a dozen years, overseeing the morning and evening opinion shows, which collectively get the biggest ratings and define the network’s conservative brand. Straight news was not within his purview. In July, 2016, Roger Ailes, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Fox, was fired in the face of numerous allegations of chronic sexual harassment, and Shine became co-president. But within a year he, too, had been forced out, amid a second wave of sexual-harassment allegations, some of them against Fox’s biggest star at the time, Bill O’Reilly. Shine wasn’t personally accused of sexual harassment, but several lawsuits named him as complicit in a workplace culture of coverups, payoffs, and victim intimidation.

Shine, who has denied any wrongdoing, has kept a low profile at the White House, and rejects interview requests, including one from this magazine. But Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”

The Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.” The feedback loop is so strong, she notes, that Trump “will even pick up an error made by Fox,” as when he promoted on Twitter a bogus Fox story claiming that South Africa was “seizing land from white farmers.” Rubin told me, “It’s funny that Bill Shine went over to the White House. He could have stayed in his old job. The only difference is payroll.” (...)

Shine is only the most recent Fox News alumnus to join the Trump Administration. Among others, Trump appointed the former Fox contributor Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Fox commentator John Bolton to be his national-security adviser, and the former Fox commentator K. T. McFarland to be his deputy national-security adviser. (McFarland resigned after four months.) Trump recently picked the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, but she soon withdrew herself from consideration, reportedly because her nanny, an immigrant, lacked a work permit. The White House door swings both ways: Hope Hicks, Shine’s predecessor in the communications job, is now slated to be the top public-relations officer at Fox Corporation. Several others who have left the Trump White House, including Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser on national security, regularly appear on Fox. Gorka recently insisted, on Fox Business, that one of Trump’s biggest setbacks—retreating from the shutdown without securing border-wall funds—was actually a “masterstroke.”

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host, and Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business host, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

by Jane Mayer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Comrie; photograph from Getty

Charting Her Own Sushi Path

[ed. See also: Kohada sushi (Shizuoka Gourmet)]

Lou Feck, Argosy magazine, April 1969
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