Unplugged: Is the Guitar Solo Dead?

About two minutes into “Outta My Head,” from the new album Free Spirit by pop-R&B star Khalid, a strange, foreign sound bubbles to the song’s shiny disco-pop surface. It’s a squiggly, pitchy thing that echoes the melody for about 15 seconds before receding into the background.

Could it be … yes, it’s a guitar solo!

The solo on Khalid’s album, played by John Mayer, is a way for the genre-hopping Khalid to show off his omni-directional vision. But in 2019, there’s no denying that the flashy guitar-breakout moment, one of the most prominent and primal components of rock & roll, is an increasingly endangered species. On the most recent releases by the leading mainstream rock and/or rock-adjacent groups of our era—Imagine Dragons, the 1975, Twenty One Pilots—you’ll hear plenty of rubbery beats and programming but barely any guitar, much less anything close to traditional shredding. And while elements of rap-rock, Nineties alt-rock and emo occasionally show up in modern pop, hip-hop and R&B, guitars rarely do. When you do hear a break on a pop record—Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” for instance—you’re more likely hearing some type of synthesizer or keyboard.

Tellingly, the few recent guitar-hero moments that have made a mark in the culture have been on film, not record. In Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury pushes Gwilym Lee’s Brian May to improve on his original guitar break in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” urging him to put his “body into it.” The sight of a man standing in front of his amps, perfecting every note of his solo, feels even older than rock itself; it’s like you’ve watching a ritual from ancient Egypt.

Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, A Star Is Born is set in today’s musical world, but Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine may as well be operating in the ’70s alongside Queen. With his self-serious, man-of-the-wilderness air, Maine already feels like a ghost from rock past, especially compared to the music and look of Lady Gaga’s more stylized Ally. Maine’s increasing irrelevance is rammed home when he and his band play some sort of outdoor festival and launch into their metallic rocker, “Black Eyes.” Bloated and oozing flop sweat, Maine drops his head and breaks into a guitar solo, pulling angry, sputtering notes out of his strings. One supposes such violent manhandling of his instrument is meant to symbolize his inner pain, but the scene also screams out: This dude is so over that he’s even playing a guitar solo.

For much of the previous sixty-plus years, starting with moments like Scotty Moore’s piercing twang on Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel,” the guitar has been part of rock’s DNA. Some of the instruments responsible for those sounds can be seen up close in “Play It Loud,” a newly opened rock-instruments exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. On display are the guitar Jimi Hendrix used for his beautifully ravaged shredding of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock, the red-painted one Eddie Van Halen employed for “Eruption,” and the various instruments Jimmy Page used for part on “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven.” Yet the mere fact that those instruments are behind glass in a museum exhibit only reinforces the sense that the guitar solo as a musical or cultural force has peaked.

In the realm of mainstream rock and pop (and not metal, where the solo still reigns, and country, where guitar players are allowed to show off now and then), it’s hard to pinpoint when guitar breaks began to spiral downward. For a while, it felt as it every pop hit (most notably “Beat It”) had a solo, which lent it a certain cred. Certainly the alt rock scene of the ’90s thrust the first stake in its body. Kurt Cobain allowed himself a solo in “Come as You Are,” and Billy Corgan made plenty of rock critics employ the phrase “peels off a solo.” But textures and splattery, unshowy moves were more prominent than the plastic flashiness of the hair metal scene grunge and alt-rock had supplanted, mirroring the often messy, complicated emotions in the lyrics of artists like Cobain and Corgan. (From what I remember during the few times I saw Nirvana, Kurt would never even walk to the front of the stage during his individual part.) The guitar parts on records by bands like Pavement added a new level of irony to the solo, and when hard-rock came back during the early ’00s in the form of nu-metal, the riffs on songs by Korn or Deftones were often even more damaged and mangled than Cobain’s playing.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the guitar solo would outlive its usefulness. After all these years and innovations, what can it offer? What hasn’t already been done, from Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughan? But the rise of hip hop, dance music and modern pop cemented the solo’s irrelevance. In those genres, guitars are often sampled or used for rhythmic patterns, but solos are largely non-existent. (...)

Beyond sonics, it’s hard not to think that the tradition is a cultural relic, as well as a musical one: Is there anything more male and (largely) white than a guitar solo? Then again, at this year’s Grammys, two women staked their claim to the tradition with genuine guitar-hero moments. During their live performances, both Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and R&B artist H.E.R. let fly with solos that were succinct and tasteful, the opposite of garish or macho.

Clark’s approach to guitar is less ostentatious and more textural; her lead lines and occasional solos don’t announce themselves so much as blend into the arrangements, fitting for someone whose guitar influences include the more subtle likes of Robert Fripp and Marc Ribot. “Every few years someone says guitar is dead,” she said last year. “… And it’s just simply not the case. It’s going to get reinvented and the cycles are going to continue. The guitar is never going to die or anything.” The solo may never dominate the way it once did, just like rock itself, but with the aid of people like Clark, it may yet escape a premature burial.

by David Browne, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Personally, I think it might be the quality of the music these days more than the instrument.]

Amazon’s Slow Retreat From Seattle

Long before Amazon erected gleaming glass domes in downtown Seattle—and before Amazon was even named Amazon—Bellevue, Washington, was the site of the company’s headquarters. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, lived in the small King County city, and, in typical tech-leader fashion, laid the groundwork for what would become the largest e-commerce company in the world right there in his garage.

After its 1994 launch, Amazon got out of the garage quickly, moving across the lake to fill 630,000 square feet of office space in Seattle by 2001. Since then, the company has rapidly expanded downtown, growing to occupy 19 percent of all prime Seattle office space, according to a 2017 analysis by the Seattle Times. Today, according to company figures, its campus spans 8.1 million square feet.

But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for this cost with higher taxes, the company’s eyes have been wandering. In February, Amazon announced that it would back out of a downtown Seattle office tower it had once planned to fill with 3,500 to 5,000 employees. And this month, Geekwire reported that the company would be relocating an entire division from Seattle back to where it all started: Bellevue.

The move comes shortly after Amazon announced it would abandon plans to build another headquarters in New York City, while moving forward with its 25,000-employee campus outside Washington, D.C. in the smaller enclave of Crystal City, Virginia.

Amazon has long fancied itself an urban enterprise. Unlike Apple or Google, whose original corporate campuses cling to the emptier outskirts of big cities, Amazon’s downtown campus has only grown more integrated into Seattle’s cityscape. “I think it’s pretty much indisputable that urban campuses relative to suburban campuses are better,” Bezos said in a 2014 shareholder meeting. “Because there’s much less commuting and much less fuel burned.” Besides, he added, Amazon employees “appreciate the energy and dynamism of an urban environment.”

In a confluence of recent moves, however, Amazon is spreading out, and shrinking away from the biggest downtowns. Bellevue is hardly the suburb it used to be—Expedia and T-Mobile are both headquartered there, and Amazon itself employs 700 Bellevue workers, to Seattle’s 45,000. Still, it boasts a “small-town” feel, per its tourism website, and its population is only 140,000 to Seattle’s 700,000-plus.

Amazon’s pivot may simply reflect practical considerations. But it also has profound political implications.

Seattle’s downtown has evolved dramatically in the years since Amazon moved in, gripped today by an exorbitantly expensive housing market and a growing homelessness crisis. But Bellevue isn’t much better: With median home prices of about $922,000, according to Zillow, it’s pricier than Seattle’s median of $730,000 and Crystal City’s, which is closer to $680,000.

And the urban problems Amazon would escape outside of Seattle are ones that citizens have blamed Amazon for creating, worsening, and refusing to help correct.

Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives. Amazon opposed the bill, threatening to stall expansion into one downtown office building and stop construction on another if it passed. The city managed to push through a shrunken version of the tax last May, which would have collected $47 million, only to reverse it a month later after a campaign of resistance from Amazon and other business interests. (...)

In Bellevue, Amazon may find less of the political opposition that’s mounting in Seattle, and that followed it into New York. “I think Amazon has been looking for opportunities where they wouldn’t be under the control of Seattle city council anymore,” said Redfin’s Fairweather.

Indeed, Amazon highlighted Bellevue’s agreeable business climate in its statement on the move. “It’s a city with great amenities, a high quality of life for our employees, and fantastic talent—and it’s recognized for its business-friendly environment,” said a spokesperson. King County submitted its own application to win HQ2 in 2017, signaling its desire to take on more Amazon employees even then.

Now, Bellevue’s mayor, John Chelminiak, is ready to welcome them with open arms. “As a community we’ve worked hard to anticipate this type of positive growth downtown, and Amazon is a natural fit,” he said in a statement.

That it’s so easy for Amazon to move to another location instead of reckoning with its home base may be part of the reason it felt so empowered to spar with the Seattle council, says Sawant.

“The logic of capitalism will follow it to the last dollar,” she said. “As long as there is another city, another state, another country where people are less empowered—more desperate for jobs on any terms—the corporations will do what they need to do for their bottom line, which is to maximize as much profit as possible for the major shareholders.” (...)

A spokesperson for Amazon said that there are “several thousand” employees on the worldwide operations team that’s scheduled to move starting this month, and fully relocate by 2023. One of the major concerns residents express when faced with an influx of tech jobs to smaller cities like Bellevue—and one of the fears some New Yorkers expressed when Amazon was slated to move in—is that housing prices will rise, displacing current residents. Bellevue’s housing prices are already high, and with “a big chunk of [Amazon’s] Seattle corporate footprint” relocating, Fairweather says, they are likely to get higher.

But Amazon’s move comes as Microsoft plans to invest $500 million in grants and loans for affordable housing assistance in the region. Some of it will target homeless residents, and $250 million of it will incentivize developers to build low-income housing. Another $225 million will go towards building housing for families in suburbs like Redmond and cities like Bellevue, earning $62,000 to $124,000 a year. While Microsoft’s goal may have been to create workforce housing for its own employees, says Fairweather, those starter-home loans could be the sweet spot for Amazon employees, too.

“What might happen is that these housing units that Microsoft initially intended to be for teachers or police officers or more middle-income earners is actually going to end up being bought up and bid up by more tech workers in the area,” said Fairweather. “I don’t know if Bellevue is going to be on a largely different trajectory than Seattle.”

by Sarah Holder, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren/AP
[ed. Virus in a petri dish.]

Juan Gris, Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth, 1915
via:

Five Lies Our Culture Tells

Four years ago, in the midst of the Obama presidency, I published a book called “The Road to Character.” American culture seemed to be in decent shape and my focus was on how individuals can deepen their inner lives. This week, in the midst of the Trump presidency, I’ve got another book, “The Second Mountain.” It’s become clear in the interim that things are not in good shape, that our problems are societal. The whole country is going through some sort of spiritual and emotional crisis.

College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.

Here are some of them:

Career success is fulfilling. This is the lie we foist on the young. In their tender years we put the most privileged of them inside a college admissions process that puts achievement and status anxiety at the center of their lives. That begins advertising’s lifelong mantra — if you make it, life will be good.

Everybody who has actually tasted success can tell you that’s not true. I remember when the editor of my first book called to tell me it had made the best-seller list. It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.

The truth is, success spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.

I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment. If I can have just one more victory, lose 15 pounds or get better at meditation, then I will be happy.

But people looking back on their lives from their deathbeds tell us that happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. It is found by defeating self-sufficiency for a state of mutual dependence. It is found in the giving and receiving of care.

It’s easy to say you live for relationships, but it’s very hard to do. It’s hard to see other people in all their complexity. It’s hard to communicate from your depths, not your shallows. It’s hard to stop performing! No one teaches us these skills.

Life is an individual journey. This is the lie books like Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” tell. In adulthood, each person goes on a personal trip and racks up a bunch of experiences, and whoever has the most experiences wins. This lie encourages people to believe freedom is the absence of restraint. Be unattached. Stay on the move. Keep your options open.

In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don’t ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here? They respond to some problem or get called out of themselves by a deep love.

By planting themselves in one neighborhood, one organization or one mission, they earn trust. They have the freedom to make a lasting difference. It’s the chains we choose that set us free.

by David Brooks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of Marquis d'Afflito 1925
via:

Disney and the Future of TV

Yesterday started with a truly remarkable piece of TV broadcasting: Tiger Woods capped an incredible comeback from personal (self-inflicted) turmoil and physical injury with his first major championship win in twelve years at The Masters:

The moment was incredible on its own; that the CBS announcers saw fit to stay silent for two minutes and forty seconds and let the pictures and sounds from Augusta National’s 18th green tell the story spoke not only to their judgment but also to the unmatched drama that makes television the most valuable medium there is.

A few hours later the season premiere of the final season of Game of Thrones brought drama of a different type: scripted, and expensive. The episode is expected to draw around 14 million viewers (and many millions more in pirated streams), and is already a cultural phenomenon.

The greatest drama of all in the television world, though, was on the surface far more banal: on Thursday Disney webcast its Investors Day 2019, where it not only gave details on its upcoming Disney+ streaming service specifically, but also clarified the future of TV generally. And, like any great drama, what is happening it not only a compelling story in its own right, but a lens with which to understand far more than the subject matter at hand.

A Brief History of TV

In 2013, I posited that TV did multiple jobs for people: it informed, it educated, it provided a live view on sports and other breaking events, it told stories, and it offered an escape, from boredom if nothing else.

All of these jobs had the same business model: advertising. Consumers tuned in to watch programming, and native ads — that is, ads in the same format as the content they accompanied — were interspersed. Everything was aligned: consumers liked TV, they got it for free over the air, and advertisers wanted to reach as many people as possible with the most persuasive of mediums.

The picture began to change in the 1970s: communities across the country, particularly those whose remoteness or geography made it difficult for households to get a reliable broadcast signal, had for a couple of decades banded together to build a single large antenna to capture broadcast signals and then ran cable from that antenna to homes. It turned out, though, that those cables had both extra bandwidth and, even more importantly, no requirement for spectrum licenses, and first community access TV (i.e. TV that could only be accessed by the community attached to the community antenna network) and later, cable-only channels that leveraged satellite transmission to reach those community cable networks began to proliferate.

Then, with new technology and a new means of distribution came a new business model: affiliate fees. Now cable company were not simply collecting money from customers for access to ad-supported broadcast channels, but were also collecting money on behalf of cable channels themselves. This shift was led by ESPN, which introduced the concept of affiliate fees in 1982, made them nationwide by leveraging Sunday Night Football in 1987, and inspired countless imitators and transformed the TV industry along the way. I explained in 2015’s The Changing — and Unchanging — Structure of TV:

Over the ensuing years content companies realized that the reason consumers paid cable companies was because they wanted access to the creator’s content (like the aforementioned NFL deal); that meant content companies could make the cable companies pay them ever increasing affiliate fees for that content. Even better, if multiple channels banded together, the resultant conglomerates — Viacom, NBCUniversal, Disney, etc. — could compel the cable companies to pay affiliate fees for all their channels, popular or not. And best of all, it was the cable companies who had to deal with consumers angry that their (TV-only) cable bills were rising from around $22 in 1995 to $54 in 2010.

It’s difficult to overstate how lucrative this model was for everyone involved: content companies had guaranteed revenue and a dial to increase profits that seemed as if it could be turned endlessly; cable companies had natural monopolies that they soon augmented with broadband Internet service; and while consumers griped about their cable bill the truth is that bundles are a great deal.

I just mentioned, though, the elephant in the room: broadband Internet service. (...)

Disney+ and the Disney Universe

The best way to understand Disney+, meanwhile, starts with the name: this is a service that is not really about television, at least not directly, but rather about Disney itself. This famous chart created by Walt Disney himself remains as pertinent as ever:

I first posted that chart on Stratechery when Disney first announced it was starting a streaming service in 2017, and said at the time:

At the center, of course, are the Disney Studios, and rightly so. Not only does differentiated content drive movie theater revenue, it creates the universes and characters that earn TV licensing revenue, music recording revenue, and merchandise sales. 

What has always made Disney unique, though, is Disneyland: there the differentiated content comes to life, and, given the lack of an arrow, I suspect not even Walt Disney himself appreciated the extent to which theme parks and the connection with the customer they engendered drive the rest of the business. “Disney” is just as much of a brand as it Mickey Mouse or Buzz Lightyear, with stores, a cable channel, and a reason to watch a movie even if you know nothing about it.

This is the only appropriate context in which to think about Disney+. While obviously Disney+ will compete with Netflix for consumer attention, the goals of the two services are very different: for Netflix, streaming is its entire business, the sole driver of revenue and profit. Disney, meanwhile, obviously plans for Disney+ to be profitable — the company projects that the service will achieve profitability in 2024, and that includes transfer payments to Disney’s studios — but the larger project is Disney itself.

By controlling distribution of its content and going direct-to-consumer, Disney can deepen its already strong connections with customers in a way that benefits all parts of the business: movies can beget original content on Disney+ which begets new attractions at theme parks which begets merchandising opportunities which begets new movies, all building on each other like a cinematic universe in real life. Indeed, it is a testament to just how lucrative the traditional TV model is that it took so long for Disney to shift to this approach: it is a far better fit for their business in the long run than simply spreading content around to the highest bidder.

This is also why Disney is comfortable being so aggressive in price: the company could have easily tried charging $9.99/month or Netflix’s $13.99/month — the road to profitability for Disney+ would have surely been shorter. The outcome for Disney as a whole, though, would be worse: a higher price means fewer customers, and given the multitude of ways that Disney has to monetize customers throughout their entire lives that would have been a poor trade-off to make.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: Stratechery

Steely Dan
via: Tumblr
[ed. Denny Dias, Skunk Baxter... who could've imagined what they'd be doing now. (Wikipedia)]

Mourning Notre Dame

No doubt there will be many articles and personal testimonies about the massive fire that has gutted Notre Dame. Even if the bones of the building survive, essential elements, some and perhaps many of its stained glass windows are almost certainly gone or terribly damaged. The reports are uncertain, with an awful heavy use of words like “may”. For instance, the Telegraph says the organ survived but is damaged. Other accounts say that at least one of the great rose windows is intact.

Even if Notre Dame can be restored, the project is likely to take more than a generation, meaning even in best-case scenario, many people will never be able to see it properly again in their lives.

Others who know Notre Dame more intimately, particularly Parisians, architects and historians, will be better able to provide elegies. I nevertheless feel compelled to write about this loss because it lays bare contradictions we manage to navigate in our daily lives and that have become more acute as humans are destroying the biosphere.

The great medieval cathedrals, through their enormous scale and soaring vaults, with their narrow stained glass windows that help pull the eye upward, tell worshipers and later visitors of how small they are compared to God and his works. Yet their seeming solidity and scale also suggests the faithful can find refuge. All of our technological prowess hasn’t found a way to create spaces that inspire the same sort of awe of these centuries-old houses of worship. Modern visitors were further humbled by the audaciousness of its accomplishment: a project executed across generations, reaching heights that seem daunting even now, marshaling the skills and hard work of many artisans and laborers.

In other words, Notre Dame provided comfort and hope against that gnawing knowledge in the back of our heads of the certainty of death and the impermanence of human action. Even though all those who built Notre Dame were long dead, something of them lived on through the cathedral….or did at least till yesterday.

Human existence is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, that we stare down inevitable defeat every day of our existence.

I sometimes refer to a story in the Mahabharata, in which Yudhisthira and his brothers have been tasked to find a deer with mystical powers. They camp but are thirsty. Yudhisthira sends one of his siblings to find some water. When he does not return, another brother is dispatched, and again does not return. This process repeats until Yudhisthira himself goes looking for his missing brothers.

He finds them all dead next to a pond.

In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. They are all metaphysical in nature. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?”

Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”

The crane reveals himself to be the Lord of Death. After some further discussion, he revives the brothers.

Most of us won’t get off so well from an encounter with the Lord of Death. But on a daily basis, we derive comfort from our routines: our schedules, our interactions with familiar people, like family, co-workers, and other we see in our rounds, and the stability of our physical surroundings. I for one feel a sense of loss when buildings are torn down, even small groupings of modest old walks-ups that sat next to each other as gracefully as snaggle teeth.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Shiv Malik
[ed. See also: Notre Dame was built to last until the end of the world (New Statesman).]

via:

The Future of the Smartphone Camera is Here

Tech2 says the Huawei P30 Pro “makes the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus look redundant.” The Verge hails it as “the best camera you can’t buy in the U.S.” Others take out the qualifier altogether. Why? It’s all about zoom.

The future of the smartphone camera is here, it’s not Apple and it’s disturbing (Marketwatch).

Image: Getty
[ed. Wow.]

Fuchsia Dunlop on Chinese Food, Culture, and Travel

For centuries, China has treated its cuisine with a reverence and delight that is only just starting to emerge with Western “foodie” culture. No one understands this better than Fuchsia Dunlop, who has spent her career learning about the fantastic diversity in Chinese food, and who is one of Tyler’s favorite writers on any subject.

She joined Tyler over dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in DC to talk about all aspects of how to truly enjoy Chinese food, including where to visit, how to order, the few key ingredients to keep in your pantry, her favorite regional dishes, what Chinese chefs think about Western food, and why you should really learn to love sea cucumbers. (...)

You can watch a video of the full dinner here.

TYLER COWEN: If I think of how to present Fuchsia, there are two passages that spring immediately to mind. One is from her 1999 notebook entry, and I quote, “In the last three days I have eaten snails, frogs, snakes, sparrow gizzard, duck tongues, fish heads, duck hearts, tripe.

“Also, half a duck, most of a carp, duck’s blood, at least five eggs, smoked bacon, and stewed aromatic beef.” Of course, we had Fuchsia do the ordering for our lunch, as you might expect.

[laughter]

COWEN: One of my readers wrote to me, they summed up who she is. Again, I quote, “What a fantastic and exciting guest. I agree wholeheartedly that Fuchsia Dunlop is an absolute iconoclast, and that her achievements in examining and teaching Chinese cookery cannot possibly be overstated.

“I can say with all sincerity that my life has been absolutely enriched by her work. Her books are simply perfect models for others to follow.” Fuchsia, welcome. Everyone else, welcome as well.

FUCHSIA DUNLOP: [laughs] Thank you.

On food tours

COWEN: Now, I’ll just start in on the questions while our guests eat, and they will later on become the questioners themselves. Let me start with this idea of a food tour.

Food tours are more and more popular today. People will go to Mexico, to France, Italy, even Thailand, but the China food tour is not always so popular with Americans or Westerners.

If you were to try to sell someone on a version of a 12-day China food tour, what would your case for that sound like?

DUNLOP: China has the world’s preeminent cuisine, absolutely unparalleled in its diversity and its sophistication. You can find practically everything you could possibly desire in terms of food in China.

From exquisite banquet cookery, exciting street food, bold spicy flavors, honest farmhouse cooking, delicate soups, just everything, apart perhaps from cheese, although they do actually have a couple of kinds of cheese [laughs] in Yunnan province.

Also, because China is such a food-orientated culture, and it has been since the beginnings of history, that if you want to understand China, almost more than anywhere else, food is a really good window into the culture, into the way people live, into history, everything. (...)

COWEN: Now let’s think through this idea of a food tour a little more analytically. Let’s say you’ve talked me into this food tour, which actually you’ve done indirectly through your books.

You’ve sent me to Shanghai. Your latest book, Land of Fish and Rice, in fact focuses on Shanghai and the surrounding region, which is quite diverse.

Here am I, Tyler Cowen, I’m in Shanghai. I don’t know Chinese and let’s say I don’t have Chinese friends. And I’m simply lost. How do I figure out where to actually eat in Shanghai? What do I do? What’s the heuristic?

DUNLOP: You could look for recommendations of authentic restaurants, articles by people who perhaps live in Shanghai or who understand the food.

COWEN: Say I’m just on the street. I’m walking. I don’t have my iPad. I’m away from WiFi. There’s Shanghai, there’s me confronting the alien. How do I think about finding what’s good?

DUNLOP: Use your nose, use your eyes. If you’re interested in street food, you’ll find lots of little stalls and shops where they’re cooking in full view. Use your judgment and see what looks exciting.

It’s very difficult in a cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, to perhaps know exactly what is local Shanghainese, what is from other parts of China because it’s always been a melting pot of different Chinese regional cuisines.

Also, if you want to taste the more refined cooking, then just going around the streets is not really going to help. You do need to do a little bit of research and have a few dishes, perhaps have the names on your phone in Chinese. That would help.

COWEN: Three dishes one absolutely has to try are what?

DUNLOP: In Shanghai?

COWEN: In Shanghai. The city, not the region.

DUNLOP: I think you should have hong shao rou, red braised pork. Real home cooking. Delicious combination of soy sauce, rice wine, and sugar, and one of the favorite dishes.

I would recommend some Shanghainese wontons in soup stuffed with shepherd’s purse, which is a wild variety of the brassicas, and pork, just to show you the lighter, gentler side of Shanghainese cooking.

Then, perhaps, if we’re talking Shanghai, you might one to have one of these dishes that says something about Shanghai as being a mixing pot of different cultures. There’s a very nice crab meat and potato and tomato soup served in some of my favorite Shanghainese restaurants. Which seems a little bit of a fusion with some European influences, the way they use potato and tomato in that soup with local seafood.

COWEN: As you know, the Michelin Guide recently has covered Shanghai, given some restaurants three, two, one star. There’s cheap places you can go. Conceptually, do they understand the food of Shanghai? To the extent they don’t, what are they missing?

DUNLOP: If you look at the restaurants they’ve selected, there’s a bit of a Cantonese bias. They do have some Shanghainese restaurants, but one thing that’s very conspicuous, there are some notable, some of the best Shanghainese local restaurants, which are missing from that list, in my opinion.

The reason is, I think, the methodology of Western food inspectors, which is they tend to go as individuals or small groups. Of course in many Chinese restaurants where you eat family style, to make the most of the restaurant, you have to eat as we’re doing now with a large group and a table full of dishes.

These restaurants that I was surprised not to see on the list, you have to book a private room with a group. If you do, you’ll be able to taste some of the most wonderful renditions of Shanghainese food, and food from the broader region, with a contemporary spirit but a real reverence for traditional technique. You can’t do that really if you just go with one or two people.

by Tyler Cowen with Fuscia Dunlop, Marginal Utility |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Transcript of a 2016 podcast. Ms Dunlop has a new book coming out in October titled: The Food of Sichuan.]

The Legend of Keanu Reeves

Here, before you're quite ready for him, is Keanu Reeves: At the top of the driveway of the Chateau Marmont, smoking a cigarette on a low couch, like he's on his front porch.

He's been coming here since the early '90s. The Chateau was run-down and empty then—a seedier, pre-André Balazs version of itself. The faucets didn't always work. The carpets were dicey. “You didn't want to take your shoes off,” Reeves says.

It felt like anything could happen. Usually it did.

“You could have a conversation,” Reeves says. “You could have a tryst. You could fucking do drugs. You could hang out. For me, there's still that pulse here.”

He basically moved in for a while there. Could be found splashing in the pool with the likes of Sharon Stone or hiding in a corner “playing chess with his computer and smoking compulsively to fight stress,” depending which tabloid tall tale you bought.

Now he lives in a house, not far from here, up in the Hills. He's owned it for about 12 years. Sometimes he sits up there and wonders if it's the house he's going to die in. It's not a preoccupation—he's just curious, if this is going to be it, this place in the Hills. “I didn't think about that,” he says, “when I was 40.” (...)

Today the real Keanu Reeves has that same patchy beard. That same curtain of hair falling into his eyes. He's wearing those same chunky Merrell hiking boots he was wearing pretty much regardless of context long before normcore made The New York Times. You have to look close at the gray flyaways in his eyebrows to remember what year it is.

He's 54 and getting over a cold. His cough sounds like somebody punching their way out of a paper grocery bag. He zips his shaggy black fleece up to the neck. But then a Chateau guy wheels over a heat lamp for Keanu. Another Chateau guy wheels over another heat lamp for the other side of the table. Then the sun comes out, as if it, too, wants to make sure Keanu is warm enough. The sun bounces off the tabletop and up into Keanu's face. It's a nice, low fill light.

Keanu orders a BLT and a Coca-Cola. Fries, not salad. When it comes, the BLT, it'll be on ciabatta bread. Keanu will find himself missing the crispness of toast. Keanu isn't sure a BLT shouldn't leave your soft palate ground up, a little. That a BLT shouldn't have consequences. Soft bread is for soft-bread sandwiches. “Peanut butter and jelly,” Keanu says. Then, more dreamily, like Homer Simpson in reverie: “Peanut butter and honey.”

In his new movie, Reeves again plays John Wick, widowed master assassin and warrior with a broken heart. The first John Wick was shot for $20 million, without real expectations, by Reeves's old Matrix stunt double Chad Stahelski and Stahelski's co-director, David Leitch, who had been longtime stunt coordinators and second-unit directors but had never directed a feature before. And even with Reeves attached, the first Wick was not exactly a hot property at first.

“You have this over-the-hill assassin whose wife dies of natural causes, gives him a puppy, some Russian punk kills his puppy, and he kills 84 people,” Stahelski says. “How many studios do you think said no to that picture? The answer is all of them.”

Stahelski spent years doubling Reeves on three Matrix movies and knew exactly what he was capable of. “I don't know anyone that puts more into the game, collaboratively, physically, intellectually,” he says. “I've never experienced anyone that could have survived [The Matrix]. It just took a different type of person. To be open to that. To allow yourself to be constantly soaking wet, sore, tired, beaten up, for years.” (...)

The Wick films have since become a $140 million franchise, something that no one, including the people involved with them, can quite believe. Starz is making a TV series set in the John Wick universe, further leveraging the series' elaborately detailed underworld-building.

Meanwhile there's John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, which finds John excommunicado—assassins' guild parlance for CANCELED—and on the run from a $14 million bounty after killing a guy in a no-killing zone. But the true stakes are the same as they've always been. John's psychic struggle is what Reeves loves about these ludicrous, gun-crazy movies.

“He's got this beautiful, tragic conundrum—these two selves,” says Reeves. “The John who was married, and John Wick, the assassin. John wants to be free. But the only way he knows how is through John Wick. And John Wick keeps fucking killing people and breaking rules. We're really watching a person fight for their life and their soul.”

Plus in this one he rides around the streets of New York on a fucking horse. Leaked images and videos from the day he shot this scene had half the Internet screaming at John Wick: Chapter 3 to just take their money. Not since Eadweard Muybridge filmed one in the 1870s has a moving picture of a guy riding a horse made people so excited. (...)

He's determined to act like a normal person, even though his mere presence creates an atmosphere of unreality, and it's helped him pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades.

You remember. He headlined the Matrix trilogy to the tune of something like $3 billion. Changed the way action movies looked and felt and moved, changed the culture. People come up to him, say it turned them on to cinema, made them question the power structures shaping their perceptions of reality, inspired them to go to grad school.

You'd think he'd have his choice of projects. But you'd be surprised. “Movie jail” is real. He's been there. He was excommunicado at Fox for a decade after turning down Speed 2 to go play Hamlet onstage in fucking Winnipeg: “I didn't work with [Fox] again until The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

He is not in jail now, as far as he knows. But he hasn't done a studio movie since 47 Ronin, another pricey bomb. Sometimes the fan base that remains so grateful for his continued existence does not remember to vote with its dollars. Reeves's name can still help secure financing for action movies of a certain size, and sometimes those turn into a John Wick. He's not unhappy playing John, says he'll make more of these things if the demand is there. “As far as my legs can take me,” he says. “As far as the audience wants to go.”

by Alex Pappademas GQ |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Jackson

Uber IPO: Not for the Squeamish

Uber Technologies’ IPO filing was made public today. The 330-page or so S-1 filing disclosed all kinds of goodies, including detailed but still unaudited pro-forma financial statements as of December 31, 2018, huge losses from operations, big tax benefits, large gains from the sale of some operations, stagnating rideshare revenues, and an enormous list of chilling “Risk Factors” that go beyond the usual CYA.

The filing, however, didn’t disclose the share price, the IPO valuation, and how much money the IPO will raise for Uber. On Tuesday, “people familiar with the matter” had told Reuters that Uber plans to raise $10 billion in the IPO. Most of the IPO shares would be sold by the company to raise funds, and a smaller amount would be sold by investors cashing out, the sources said.

The filing did not confirm this and instead left blanks or used placeholder amounts. But if true, $10 billion in shares sold would make this IPO one of the biggest tech IPOs. And the rumored $90 billion to $100 billion valuation would make it the biggest since Alibaba’s $169 billion IPO.

Uber will need every dime it raises in the IPO going forward because it’s got a little cash-burn situation in its operations that persists going forward, as it admitted in its “Risk Factors,” and it will need to raise more money, and if it cannot raise more money, it might not make it. Uber is upfront about this.

The company has already raised – and mostly burned through – over $20 billion so far in its 10 years of existence. This includes $15 billion in equity funding and over $6 billion in debt. (...)

The huge section of about 50 densely filled pages of “Risk Factors” contains the usual warnings about the things that might happen to the company that are typical in IPO filings. These items are a CYA exercise. If you get wiped out and sue the company or the underwriters, they will point you to the correct paragraph and tell you that you should have read this, and that if you had read this you would have known that you’d get wiped out, or something.

But Uber’s list contains all kinds of other stuff that is unique to the scandal-infested company that is defending itself in court on numerous life-threatening issues.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:
Image: Uber S-1/Wolf Street

Gocycle's GX E-Bike Folds in a Flash

Gocycle's GX is a head-turning e-bike that folds in a flash (Endgadget)

[ed. Cool. I imagine this market could expand significantly.]

Tiger Woods Wins the 2019 Masters in a Triumph for the Ages

Tiger Woods’s comeback from personal and professional adversity is complete: He captured his fifth Masters title and his 15th major tournament on Sunday, snapping a championship drought of nearly 11 years.

It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a magical, come-from-behind win for a player who had not won a major championship since his personal life began to unravel on Thanksgiving night in 2009, when a marital dispute led to a car accident and a succession of lurid tabloid headlines. On the golf course, he had a series of back and leg injuries that led to an addiction to painkillers and culminated in pain so searing that, before surgery in 2017, he had questioned whether he could play professionally again.

Woods, who at 43 became the second-oldest winner of the Masters at Augusta National, after the then 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus in 1986, last achieved major success in one of golf’s four major tournaments at the 2008 United States Open.

“It’s overwhelming just because of what has transpired,” Woods said in a television interview after it was over. “To now be the champion — 22 years between wins is a long time — it’s unreal for me to experience this. It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”

He had come close on some Sundays to winning his 15th major over the years but could not get it done. Yet after the surgery in 2017, a spinal-fusion procedure he called a “last resort,” he began a new lease on his career. (...)

Woods, in his 22nd Masters appearance, closed with a final round of 70 and finished 13 under par at 275, one stroke better than Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele. He took the lead with just three holes to play after a birdie putt on the par-5 15th hole and held on from there. With thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, organizers of the Masters moved up the start times by five hours. Players were also placed players into groups of three, rather than the traditional two, in hopes of speeding up play.

But by the time the tournament leaders went into the second half of their rounds on Sunday, the wind picked up and it briefly began to rain.

Both of the players with whom Woods was grouped in the final threesome, Francesco Molinari, 36, and Tony Finau, 29, described Woods as their childhood idols. Both eventually succumbed to the pressure of the final round, but Woods did not.

“I was just trying to plod my way along the golf course all day,” Woods said in the televised interview. “All of a sudden I had a lead. Coming up to 18 it was just trying to make a 5. When I tapped the putt in — I don’t know what I did, I know I screamed.”

Now, after more than a decade of being stuck in place, Woods suddenly seems to have a full head of steam moving forward. The next two majors, the P.G.A. Championship at Bethpage Black on Long Island in May and the United States Open at Pebble Beach in California in June, are at courses where Woods has won before. He seems primed to do so again.

Those events seem far off, though. The glow from Sunday will surely last for weeks and months, and will be discussed for years as one of the pivotal moments in the career of an athlete who has been more than a golfer ever since he burst on the scene in 1996.

by Karen Crouse, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Doug Mills
[ed. What a Masters. Hats off to Francesco Molinari, Brooks Koepka, DJ, Tony Finau, Xander Schauffele, and everyone else who played truly great golf this week. See also: He Did It! (Golf Digest). And, The Best Woman Golfer in America (YouTube). Ouch!]

Tadanori Yokoo, Anniversary Performance of the Garumella Dance Company, 1970
via:

The Comet is Coming

[ed. A nice distorted guitar would add a lot.]

The Professor and the Adjunct

In “The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission,” Herb Childress describes a very different kind of commute. He writes about one of his friends, a sixty-year-old scholar who juggles teaching positions in Boston and New York. She grades papers on her four-hour bus rides between the two cities and, when she gets to New York, crashes on her elderly mother’s couch. Calculating her pay against the time she spends not only teaching but holding meetings, preparing lessons, giving feedback to students, and answering e-mails, Childress estimates that this friend earns roughly nine dollars per hour. There are others, Childress notes, who have it worse. He recounts the story of an adjunct who lived out of her car while teaching four classes per semester, often grading papers by the light of a headlamp in the parking lot of a Home Depot. After a while, the adjunct learned in which neighborhoods she needed to park in order to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He also recalls the tragic, widely reported story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity. She died in her home, in 2013, at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.

In “Standing for Reason,” Sexton remembers Charlie Winans telling his students, “Consider teaching, boys. It is the noblest and most fulfilling of all vocations.” But, by and large, at the more prestigious universities, teaching is the least valued part of an academic’s life. More measurable indicators, like grants and publications, do much more to advance one’s career. The task of teaching—of unpacking complex ideas in the classroom, grading papers, helping students shape their arguments and smooth out the kinks in their sentences or equations—increasingly falls to the adjuncts whom Childress writes about. In the nineteen-seventies, about a quarter of college faculty were on limited-term, adjunct contracts; the majority of professors were tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, it’s estimated that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts. Reading “The Adjunct Underclass,” whatever sympathy one might have had for Sexton’s jet-setting workaholism quickly evaporates. There’s a privilege in the weariness that comes with having too many opportunities.

Childress completed his dissertation in 1996, and he describes the praise that he received for his work. But he was unable to find a full-time academic job, and he took short-term teaching gigs wherever he could find them. He also sold furniture, volunteered, and worked for nonprofits. He now runs an ethnographic research firm and writes about higher education. Childress brings acid humor and earnest conviction to the latter pursuit, as well as the insights and the fury of someone who once cherished the idea of a life spent on campus. He has an eye for the finer distinctions within academia. Small liberal-arts colleges—like the one where I teach—are “uniquely specialized ecosystems, with wildlife as specifically evolved as that of Madagascar,” he explains. He is witheringly accurate when describing the atmosphere of faculty-wide meetings:

Scholars have made their entire careers out of finding problems within what is perceived to be settled knowledge. They carve out that tiny bubble at the edge of what we know, and they focus all of their ample energies and intelligence on precisely defining, or redefining that small issue. Gather a hundred of these people together, and give them a policy to review. You think that’s going to go well?

Childress knows the outward academic scene; he also knows who is backstage, making sure that appearances are kept. “A quick visit to any college will feel like a historical reenactment, the past lovingly restored and maintained for daily use,” he writes. But the famous professors, the “public face of the project,” are propped up through “the labor of the unseen.” Students—the “protected consumer”—rarely delineate between those who will still be there years after they’re gone and those with short-time gigs and no job security. Even when students do become aware of the discrepancy between these separate classes, and try to do something about it, their activism tends to run, inevitably, in four-year cycles.

“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”

These somewhat hyperbolic analogies understate the oddness of academic life. When journalists and other writers point out the gross inequities on display in the treatment of adjuncts at many American universities, one popular response is to say that nobody is forced to pursue a graduate degree—and, in fact, those who go to graduate school typically have advantages that, say, garment workers in Bangladesh do not have. (The entire quit-lit genre has been described as a form of “humblebragging.”) People usually try to become professors because they are passionately curious about a particular subject, and the academic system encourages them to believe that this is all that matters. Prospective graduate students are rarely told by department heads or other administrators that they are entering a system that relies on contingent labor to survive. “I went into higher ed because I was selfish, because I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, because those things mattered to me,” Childress writes. The subsequent realization that academia preys on these dreams devastates him. A string of adjunct positions gets him no closer to joining the tenure track; it is “morally indefensible,” he writes, to lure adjuncts to work by dangling a “vague hope” that they may one day be welcome as a permanent faculty member. For people stuck in this permanent holding pattern, that hope of being selected is the contemporary academic version of the larger American dream, and it feels, at this point, no less dubious.

by Hua Hsu, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Cathryn Virginia

“Time passed again. I don’t know how long. I had no watch. They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.” 

― Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

via:

Why I Gave A Buck to Mike Gravel

I just gave a dollar to Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign, and I think it was a pretty good decision.

Perhaps you don’t know that Mike Gravel is running for president. Perhaps you don’t even know who Mike Gravel is. This would be your loss.

First, Mike Gravel is the former Alaska senator most well-known for putting the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record. After leaving office in the early ’80s, he drifted a bit and got involved with some quixotic causes, before resurfacing in the Democratic primary for 2008. I remember Gravel in the primaries very well. He stood out from every other candidate: He was much older, much brasher, and willing to thunderously denounce the other candidates over their support for the Iraq war. He was a hoot to watch, but he was also right about a lot of things, and he espoused “fringe” positions that are today taken far more seriously. Gravel infamously recorded some of the oddest campaign commercials of all time, including one in which he stared into the camera before tossing a rock into a lake.

Mike Gravel did not want to run for president in 2020. He is 88 years old, walks with a cane, and his chances of success are even lower this time than they were in 2008, when he got less than 1 percent of the vote. But Mike Gravel is running for president, thanks to a group of Twitter-savvy teenagers—David Oks, Henry Williams, and Elijah Emery—who somehow convinced him to run.

A few weeks ago, something strange began happening with the @MikeGravel Twitter account. Dormant for a long time, it began issuing forth scathing opinions on contemporary politics and the 2020 Democratic candidates. “Mike Gravel” has been saying things like:

• if you want a vision of the future under Cory Booker, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. and every once in a while it stops for an inspirational lecture on how we should never stop dreaming

• if you think that the candidate to beat a president who won campaigning against a careerist, self-serving elite that literally 90 percent of the country despises is Buttigieg, the literal embodiment of that elite, honestly you couldn’t win a third grade class president election

• Hello young voters! This is the very relatable, everywoman Kirsten Gillibrand. I do things that other homo sapiens do. This should paper over the anti-immigrant, anti-Palestinian, pro-Wall Street stances I took when it benefitted me politically

At first, you may think that the teens were simply trolls. They’d gotten Senator Gravel, who at 88 didn’t care much about his Twitter presence, to hand over his password, and used the account to humorously taunt other candidates. But the more tweets the feed spat out, the more it became clear that something much more serious was going on. The jokes had a kind of “moral core,” they were rooted in righteous outrage at those who rationalized injustice and oppression. Many tweets were deadly serious comments on the human costs of American foreign policy:

• The first step in smashing American imperialism is radical honesty with ourselves. We don’t “intervene” – we invade. That’s not “collateral damage” – those are the corpses of parents and children. Ours is not a Department of Defense – it’s a Department of War.

• Today, on the 16th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, remember the half a million Iraqi civilians who died for nothing. Our leaders knew the only thing Iraq and Al-Qaeda had in common was the letter Q. They must face justice for their war crimes.

• Those who see “glory” or “heroism” in war often never fought. As Benjamin Rush wrote in 1793: “Let the following…be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office…an office for butchering the human species.” There is no glory in war – only blood.

• Moral culpability falls on every single politician who isn’t actively fighting against our empire’s brutality. If you sit in a seat of power and stay silent, you are just as guilty as the decision makers.

The swipes at other 2020 candidates may get the attention, but the Mike Gravel Twitter account has a consistent message: The United States has failed to hold itself accountable for crimes committed around the world, its bloated military is a global empire, and a serious presidential candidate must be willing to call out the bipartisan embrace of the defense establishment, the construction of terrifying new autonomous drone technology, and the embrace of human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

When Current Affairs talked to Oks and Williams about their campaign, they did not joke around at all. The Democratic Party, they said, needed an antiwar voice. Someone needs to be pushing for a foreign policy agenda that moves toward peace with all nations. Bernie Sanders, they said, had been a “fairweather friend” to the antiwar movement, and has shamefully remained silent on serious issues of justice, such as the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning. If Mike Gravel could get on the debate stage with the other candidates, he could do what he did in 2008, and confront them directly.

The Gravel campaign has put out a 29-page platform. It is radical, almost a “wish list” for the left. It includes cutting the military budget by 50 percent, closing Guantanamo Bay, ending the use of drones, vowing not to invade any sovereign nation in the absence of a first strike, closing all military bases abroad, and abolishing the Senate and the electoral college. It contains many ideas that no other Democratic candidate would ever dare to mention. Bernie Sanders, Oks and Williams say, is concerned with appearing electable, and so is careful not to become too “radical.” Mike Gravel, with no chance whatsoever of winning the nomination, can say as he pleases.

So their goal is this: get the 65,000 individual donations necessary to qualify Mike Gravel for the Democratic debates. The donation amounts don’t matter for the purposes of qualifying—they can be as small as $1, which is what I donated. Mike Gravel can say things on stage that Bernie Sanders would never say. He can call for completely terminating U.S. military aid to Israel. He will talk about U.S. intervention in Venezuela. He will bring a radically pacifist voice onto the debate stage and discuss the reality of what war means and why we must prioritize global peace.

Oks and Williams pointed out to me that among Democratic candidates, even leftier ones like Sanders and Warren, there is a moral hole in their policies: They talk a lot about justice, but they don’t talk much about justice for people outside the United States. It’s “American workers” this and “American jobs” that. But from a moral perspective, Americans do not matter more than people in other countries, and our policies have serious ramifications for the lives of people elsewhere.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. When Mike was our junior senator from Alaska I remember him being all over the map with ideas - some good, some strange (like building a teflon-domed city near Denali National Park). The thing is though, he cared. Here's his Wikipedia entry.]