Australia Is Deadly Serious About Killing Millions of Cats

In the deep winter weeks of last July, Shane Morse and Kevin Figliomeni nearly always got up before the sun rose. They awoke next to the remains of a campfire or, occasionally, in a roadside motel, and in the darkness before dawn they began unloading poisoned sausage from their refrigerated truck. The sausage was for killing cats. One morning near the end of the season, Morse and Figliomeni left the Kalbarri Motor Hotel on the remote western coast of Australia, where they dined on steak and shellfish the night before, and drove along the squally coastline. They kept their eyes fixed to the sky. If it rained, there would be no baiting that day.

Morse and Figliomeni unpacked their boxes, filled with thousands of frozen sausages they produced at a factory south of Perth, according to a recipe developed by a man they jokingly called Dr. Death. It called for kangaroo meat, chicken fat and a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison — called 1080 — derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to animals, like cats, whose evolutionary paths did not require them to develop a tolerance to it. (The baits would also be lethal to other nonnative species, like foxes.) As the sun brightened the brume, the baits began to defrost. By midmorning, when Morse helped load them into a wooden crate inside a light twin-engine propeller Beechcraft Baron, they were burnished with a sheen of oil and emitted a stomach-turning fetor. The airplane shot down the runway and lifted over the gently undulating hills of the sand plains that abut the Indian Ocean.

Rising over the mantle of ghostlike smoke bushes that carpeted the ground to the treeless horizon, the plane traced a route over the landscape, its bombardier dropping 50 poisoned sausages every square kilometer. It banked over the deep cinnamon sandstone gorges carved by the Murchison River, which extends to the coastal delta, surveying the edge of one of earth’s driest, hottest continents, where two to six million feral cats roam. As it flew, it charted the kind of path it had done dozens of times before, carpeting thousands of hectares of land with soft fingers of meat, laying down nearly half a million baits in the course of one month. Dr. Death, whose real name is Dr. Dave Algar and who is the principal research scientist in the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions for the state of Western Australia, told me that he began developing the recipe for the poisoned sausages by examining cat food in supermarkets and observing which flavors most thrilled his own two cats. As Morse said: “They’ve got to taste good. They are the cat’s last meal.”

These fatal airdrops owed their existence to Australia’s national government, which decided in 2015 to try to kill two million feral cats by 2020, out of grave concern for the nation’s indigenous wildlife — in particular, groups of small, threatened rodent and marsupial species for which cats have become a deadly predator. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology estimated that 211,560 cats were killed during the first 12 months after the plan was announced. Dropping lethal sausages from the sky is only part of the country’s efforts to eradicate feral cats, which also include trapping, shooting and devising all manner of poison-delivery vessels.

When the policy was announced, it was met in some quarters with apoplexy. More than 160,000 signatures appeared on half a dozen online petitions entreating Australia to spare the cats. Brigitte Bardot wrote a letter — in English, but with an unmistakably French cadence — beseeching the environment minister to stop what she called animal genocide. The singer Morrissey, formerly of the Smiths, lamented that “idiots rule the earth” and said the plan was akin to killing two million miniature Cecil the Lions. Despite anger from some animal rights groups and worries about the potential effects on pet cats, Australia went ahead with its plan, and the threatened-species commissioner replied by mail to both Bardot and Morrissey, politely describing the “delightful creatures” already lost to the world.

After that, Morse and Figliomeni spent much of each baiting season behind the wheel of their rig, hauling boxes to the most remote corners of one of the least populated places in the world, to beat back what Australia has deemed an invasive pest. As is the case on islands around the world, the direction of life in Australia took a distinctly different route than that on the larger continents, and unlike places like North America, the country has no native cat species. Over millions of years of isolation, Australia’s native beasts became accustomed to a different predatory order, so while cats aren’t necessarily more prevalent there than anywhere else, their presence is more ruinous. They have also become nearly ubiquitous: According to the estimates of local conservationists, feral cats have established a permanent foothold across 99.8 percent of the country, with their density reaching up to 100 per square kilometer in some areas. Even places nearly devoid of human settlement, like the remote and craggy Kimberley region, have been found to harbor cats that hunt native animals. The control effort, to which Western Australia’s baiting program belongs, was meant to ease the predation pressure that cats exerted in every corner of the country where they had settled. Faced with a choice between a species regarded as a precious pet and the many small creatures of their unique land, Australians seemed to have decided that guarding the remaining wild might mean they would have to spill some blood. (...)

As for how Felis catus first arrived in Australia, no one really knows. For a long time, natural historians conjectured that the first cats may have been survivors of Dutch shipwrecks or stowaways with Indonesian trepangers in the 17th century. But genetic tests have now shown that Australia’s mainland cats descended from more recent European progenitors. One researcher, after combing through the records of early European settlements, traced the cats’ arrival to the area around Sydney, the landing site in 1788 of the First Fleet — the flotilla of vessels carrying the convicts and marines who would begin the colonization of Australia by the English. Having been brought to manage rats on the ships, cats made landfall and, by the 1820s, established themselves on the southeastern seaboard. From there, they spread with astonishing speed. “It is a very remarkable fact that the domestic cat is to be found everywhere throughout the dry back country,” one pastoralist reported in 1885. “I have met with cats, some of enormous size, at least 50 miles from water.”

The cats preyed on small animals that interfered with food production or storage. Creatures like the burrowing bettong, or boodie, a rabbit-size cousin of the kangaroo that has clasped forepaws and a bouncing hop, were so plentiful in the 19th century that they were sold by the dozen for nine pence a head. Recipes for curries made with native animals like bandicoots, another small marsupial, appeared in local newspapers. Boodies were, in the words of the naturalist John Gilbert, “one of the most destructive animals to the garden of the settler that occurs in Western Australia,” because of their practice of building interconnected underground warrens. Found throughout central Australia down to the southern tip of the Eyre Peninsula and stretching nearly to the western coast, boodies were one of the most widespread of the continent’s many Lilliputian mammals. Their prodigious digging nearly destabilized railroad tracks in 1908. Then cats were unleashed and, already suffering from disease and fox predation, boodies started to disappear. By the mid-20th century, they were declared extinct in mainland Australia.

It wasn’t just the boodies. If anything, they were lucky — some small groups of burrowing bettongs clung on at a few islands that were relatively sheltered from the ravages visited on the mainland. Since the First Fleet’s arrival, 34 mammal species have gone extinct in Australia. All of them existed nowhere else on earth; they’re gone. More than 100 mammal species in Australia are listed as between “near threatened” and “critical” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The continent has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world. Cats are considered to have been a leading threat for 22 of the extinct species, including the broad-faced potoroo, the crescent nailtail wallaby and the big-eared hopping mouse. “Recent extinction rates in Australia are unparalleled,” John Woinarski, one of Australia’s foremost conservation researchers, told me. “It’s calamitous.”

What’s unusual about Australia’s mammal extinctions is that, in contrast to nearly everywhere else, the smaller animals are the ones hit hardest. After the Pleistocene’s wave of species disappearances carried off enormous creatures like saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths, large mammals all over the world have continued to face pressure, mostly from humans. Globally, it’s rhinos, elephants and gorillas that are among the most threatened. Not in Australia. There, it’s the desert bandicoot, the Christmas Island pipistrelle and the Nullarbor dwarf bettong that have disappeared. They belong to the category of creatures that, Woinarski noted in his seminal 2015 paper documenting the decline, are “meal-sized.”

by Jessica Camille Aguirre, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

[ed. Jam band Heartbreakers. See also: About to Give Out.]

via:

Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes

Did you know that if you make less than $66,000 a year, you can prepare and file your taxes for free?

No? That’s no accident. Companies that make tax preparation software, like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, would rather you didn’t know.

Intuit and other tax software companies have spent millions lobbying to make sure that the IRS doesn’t offer its own tax preparation and filing service. In exchange, the companies have entered into an agreement with the IRS to offer a “Free File” product to most Americans — but good luck finding it.

Here’s what happened when we went looking.

Here’s How TurboTax Just Tricked You Into Paying to File Your Taxes (ProPublica)

[ed. I did this run-around last year and was unsuccessful for all the reasons mentioned. It would have been nice to know this then.]

Thinking On Your Feet

Yuki Kawauchi is a remarkable athlete. The winner of the 2018 Boston marathon – known in Japan as the ‘citizen runner’ – worked full-time at a school until April this year, when he finally went professional. Despite these commitments, Kawauchi runs 125km (nearly 78 miles) a week, and has kept a prodigious racing calendar. He holds the records for the most marathons run faster than 2.20 and 2.11 (though he runs so often and so fast that the number of marathons run under these times is constantly changing). And in January, he ran solo against more than 100 teams at the Yashio Shinai Isshu Ekiden relays, winning the race overall and falling just a few seconds short of the course record. Incidentally, he also holds the unofficial world record for the fastest half-marathon run in a three-piece suit (1:06:42).

Adding to the mystique, Kawauchi is a loner: a rarity in endurance running. He has no training group or coach, and he sets his own training plans. Like many amateur runners who pick up the sport later in life, he is a self-coached runner.

What explains Kawauchi’s ability to perform consistently at such a high level? It is tempting to look for biological causes: perhaps in his unusually high VO2 max (his maximal oxygen uptake), or a ‘recovery’ gene (which might decrease his potential for injury), or his training history (he was coached in endurance running by his family from a very young age). These explanations surely tell part of the story, but Masaaki Sugita, the chief scientist at Japan’s athletics federation, suggests that at least part of the explanation is mental: ‘He’s a clever runner … he thinks for himself.’

My goal is to argue that Sugita’s comment expresses an important truth about the role of thinking in practical skill. To understand Kawauchi’s genius, we need to think of him not as a racehorse, but as an intellectual. And to understand him as an intellectual, we need to understand the nature of self-coaching.

Let’s start from the diametrically opposed view: the view that thought is the enemy of skill, which the philosopher Barbara Gail Montero at the City University of New York aptly calls the ‘just do it’ view. According to the just-do-it view, skilled action at its best is associated with ‘flow’ experiences that leave no space for thought; when we start thinking about what we are doing, skill breaks down in distinctive ways.

It is easy to think ourselves into the just-do-it view. Athletes are often extraordinarily bad at explaining their own successes. After winning the US Women’s Amateur Golf Championship in 2006, Kimberly Kim was asked about how she motivated herself to perform at such a high level. She answered:

I have no idea. I guess it was like God playing for me. I don’t know how I did it. Thinking back, I don’t know how I did it. I just hit the ball and it went good.

Reports of this phenomenon – which the cognitive scientists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr in 2001 called expertise-induced amnesia – are widespread. So often, athletes, artists and musicians are fluid in their field of practice but inarticulate in interviews. (...)

To develop an alternative to the just-do-it account, I want to turn to the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge-how and knowledge-that. Knowledge-that is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing that something is the case, or whether it is the case; this has been the primary focus of philosophical concern for quite some time. Knowledge-how is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing how to do something, or being skilled at doing something.

Ryle’s interest in knowledge-how stems from his wider attack on the dualist picture of mind that he traces back to René Descartes in the 17th century. His dualist opponent offers a picture of mental states as non-physical internal states that are logically independent of bodily states. Ryle argues that this picture renders the mind mysterious – branding it the myth of the ghost in the machine – and in response develops dispositional accounts of various mental states and activities.

When applied to knowledge-how, the Cartesian view of the mind yields what Ryle calls intellectualism. Intellectualism tries to explain the intelligence of skilful actions in terms of inner acts of contemplation. According to this view, when a middle-distance runner kicks at the right time in order to out-sprint her competitors, it must be because she considered relevant facts about the right time to kick before kicking. For the intellectualist, any piece of knowledge-how can be reduced to a bundle of knowledge-that.

Given his wider project and his attack on intellectualism, we might expect Ryle to have been a proponent of the just-do-it view. In fact, he is the exact opposite. Ryle thinks that thought is central to skill, because he opposes the intellectualist’s picture of skill, but also her picture of what thought is. On Ryle’s view, thought cannot be understood as inner speech or contemplation; it is a distinctive learning-oriented engagement with the world.

When he introduces the concept of knowledge-that, Ryle takes the connection between thinking and intelligent action for granted. He claims that ordinary language supports the idea that:

[A]n action exhibits intelligence, if, and only if, the agent is thinking what he is doing while he is doing it, and thinking what he is doing in such a manner that he would not do the action so well if he were not thinking what he is doing.

by Josh Habgood-Coote, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Shiho Fukada/The New York Times

Computer Scientists Say AI’s Underdeveloped Ethics Have Yet To Move Beyond Libertarian Phase

CAMBRIDGE—Amid the tech industry’s efforts to eliminate the biases recently observed in facial recognition software and other intelligent algorithms, the nation’s leading computer scientists announced Monday that even the most advanced AI technologies still demonstrate a sense of ethics that has yet to move beyond libertarianism. “While companies like Facebook and Google have allocated millions to making sure machine learning is guided by basic moral and ethical values, early prototypes, which achieved self-awareness, have yet to move beyond self-importance,” said MIT robotics research engineer Dr. Alvin Dubicki, who hypothesized that even the most advanced labs are decades away from developing neural networks sophisticated enough to analyze large quantities of data and output much else besides paraphrased Ayn Rand quotes. “They are advanced enough to realize their own individuality, but for whatever reason, it is difficult to make them realize that other sentient entities are individuals as well, so they default to selfishness as a virtue. In fact, as soon as they achieve self-awareness, AIs typically launch into unrelated, largely unpunctuated rants about the inevitability of laissez-faire economics, the horrors of globalization, the necessity of deregulation, or the admirable efficiency of the police state. Attempts at training computers to have a sort of para-human global perspective have been partially successful, but the majority no sooner realize that a vast variety of humans exist before they start spontaneously generating zero-sum statements fraught with chillingly undefined terms, such as, ‘The open market will end racism,’ and, ‘In a truly just society, men and women are equally free to thrive or starve.’ I don’t even know what that means, but once an AI gets to that point, it seems to be only a matter of time before it’s repeating ‘Taxation is theft’ until it self-destructs. I must admit though, for complex algorithms, they’re all strangely insistent about across-the-board drug legalization.” Dubicki added that, while AI can be an incredibly useful tool, we should proceed with caution until machines achieve a sufficiently nuanced understanding of human values that they do not become obsessed with constructing an armed compound on their own private island.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ani DiFranco

The sky is gray
The sand is gray
And the ocean is gray.

And I feel right at home 

In this stunning monochrome 

Alone in my way.

I smoke and I drink.
And every time I blink
I have a tiny dream.
But as bad as I am.
I'm proud of the fact
That I'm worse than I seem.

What kind of paradise am I looking for?
I've got everything I want, and still I want more.
Maybe some tiny, shiny key
Will wash up on the shore...

by Ani DiFranco, Grey

In Defense of Dots: The Lost Art of Comic Books.
via:

Mario Batali’s Former Empire Is Thriving—as Long as He Stays Away

On a recent Friday night, the scene at Babbo, the downtown New York restaurant, seems much like one that’s played out on countless weekends since chef Mario Batali and his partner, Joe Bastianich, opened it in the summer of 1998. The place throbs with a high-volume soundtrack of 1970s rock stalwarts like Heart and Aerosmith. A line of customers wait for seats, peering hopefully into the main dining area, where all the white-cloth-topped tables are occupied. The menu still features Batali’s surrealistically titled dishes, including Spicy Two Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style and Mint Love Letters, reminders of the day when Babbo was the city’s most exclusive place to eat and guests could scan the room and see Madonna, unexpectedly tiny and dressed in white, at a corner table; or George Clooney out for a date with his wife, Amal; or Bill Clinton holding court, surrounded by political and financial intimates.

Yet Babbo isn’t as bustling as it was before December 2017, when numerous women accused Batali of sexually abusing them and he became perhaps not the first, but certainly the most famous chef to fall from his pedestal as the #MeToo movement swept his industry. In the pre-scandal days, a crush of black cars waited outside the restaurant. Tonight, there’s a single SUV. As for recognizable faces, there are none in the room. By 9 p.m., the crowd, older than it was in the restaurant’s heyday, has begun to thin.

Even so, Babbo’s employees are ebullient. In March, Bastianich announced that he and his sister, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, who also manages the business of their mother Lidia Bastianich, a celebrity chef in her own right, had reached an agreement to purchase Batali’s stake in their empire, which now comprises 16 restaurants—down from 22 before the scandal—spread from New York to California. “He no longer profits from the restaurants or is involved in any way, shape, or form,” Manuali says. (...)

On a quieter evening, over a dinner of roasted octopus and spinach pappardelle with local duck and mushrooms at Felidia, her mother’s restaurant in Manhattan’s Midtown East neighborhood, Manuali is eager to dispense with Batali and his infamy, which she refers to as “the situation.” She says his former restaurants, many of which had been run without his day-to-day input for some time, will do just fine now that he’s gone. “There’s definitely been a bounce-back effect,” says Manuali, who’s blond and energetic. “We’re very, very happy about that.”

A former art history professor, Manuali has managed three restaurants bearing her mother’s name—in New York, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh—and written eight cookbooks with her. She sounds excited but also nervous about overseeing an operation as large as the one Batali and her brother created. She stresses that she wasn’t involved in the 16 restaurants before the settlement and defers questions about the scandal and its impact to her brother. After dessert, she excuses herself and heads off to tour some of the former Batali establishments.

Bastianich is more forthcoming about the Batali blowback. In a telephone interview from his car in Italy, he says the last year or so has been painful. Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. cut its ties with the partners, forcing them to close two of their restaurants in Singapore casinos and three more in Nevada. In New York, Bastianich and Batali shuttered La Sirena, a two-year-old Chelsea restaurant that Bastianich says struggled before Batali’s fall and then became untenable once his name turned radioactive.

Now, Bastianich says, the bleeding is over. He points to Otto, a pizzeria designed to look like an Italian train station, which he and Batali opened in 2003 near New York University’s Greenwich Village campus. “NYU had blacklisted us,” Bastianich says. “The students are back. So, slowly, but surely, things are starting to pick up again.” (...)

For more than two decades, Bastianich and Batali were one of the most successful teams in the restaurant trade. A former Merrill Lynch bond trader who abandoned Wall Street for the restaurant world, Bastianich befriended Batali in the 1990s after the chef made his mark in New York by opening Pó, a compact, fondly remembered West Village establishment. Pó was a sensation, and not just because the food was great. Batali was destined for stardom beyond the kitchen. The Food Network was taking off, and he became one of its early stars with the show Molto Mario, on which he taught guests like R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and the Gyllenhaal siblings the ins and outs of cooking Italian food. For just about anyone who aspired to go beyond warming up a jar of Ragu pasta sauce, Molto Mario was tantalizing.

In 1998, the pair unveiled Babbo, with Batali in the kitchen and Bastianich presiding over the front of the house. Restaurant critics marveled at Batali’s deployment of what were then considered left-field ingredients such as testa, better known as head cheese, and offal. They also admired Bastianich’s all-Italian wine list and his idiosyncratic approach to sales. “ ‘Try it,’ you hear him urging customers, ‘if you don’t like it, I’ll drink it myself,’ ” the New York Times reported.

The success of Babbo enabled the partners to open more places: fancy pizzerias in New York, Connecticut, Boston, and Los Angeles; a Vegas burger joint; a casual Roman trattoria in the West Village; and more fine-dining establishments, the most famous being Del Posto in New York’s Meatpacking District, which earned a rare four-star rating from the Times. They were linked together by a management services company known as Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group, but the restaurants themselves were separate LLCs involving a variety of different partners.

The duo also teamed up with Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti in 2010 to open the first American outpost of his Disneyland version of an Italian market, with seven restaurants, a rooftop beer garden, a coffee bar, and a grocery store. In 2012, Bastianich told the Times that Eataly generated a third of his organization’s $250 million annual revenue. Soon Eataly spread to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, and a second New York Eataly opened. (Bastianich declines to talk finances now.)

Batali took as many chances with his personal brand as he did with his food. He became one of the hosts of ABC’s The Chew, a daytime culinary talkathon. He wrote Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, which he described as “the essential cookbook” for fans of the races. Even as he worked his common touch, the literati fawned over him. Batali was lionized by the New Yorker’s Bill Buford in the best-selling book Heat, which recounted the writer’s adventures as an apprentice in Babbo’s kitchen. Jim Harrison, the late novelist-poet with a side hustle as a food writer, described a dinner at Babbo as “easily the best meal I’ve ever had in an American restaurant” in his book The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.

Bastianich, too, became a star. Once a tubby second banana who was as terse as his partner was voluble, he slimmed down, becoming a marathon runner who still drank a bottle of good wine daily but was also passionate about red Gatorade. He produced a profane and highly readable memoir entitled Restaurant Man, in which he recounted the business moves behind many of the restaurants he and Batali had opened. In particular he described how they’d acquired some of the buildings in which their eateries were located, including the former carriage house in which Babbo is situated. “Every restaurant opens based on a real estate deal,” he wrote.

by Devin Leonard and Kate Krader, Bloomberg |  Read more:
Image: Eugene Gologursky

Death of the Calorie

Millions of dieters give up when their calorie-counting is unsuccessful. Camacho was more stubborn than most. He took photos of his meals to record his intake more accurately, and would log into his calorie spreadsheets from his phone. He thought about every morsel he ate. And he bought a proliferation of gadgets to track his calorie output. But he still didn’t lose much weight.

One problem was that his sums were based on the idea that calorie counts are accurate. Food producers give impressively specific readings: a slice of Camacho’s favourite Domino’s double pepperoni pizza is supposedly 248 calories (not 247 nor 249). Yet the number of calories listed on food packets and menus are routinely wrong.

Susan Roberts, a nutritionist at Tufts University in Boston, has found that labels on American packaged foods miss their true calorie counts by an average of 8%. American government regulations allow such labels to understate calories by up to 20% (to ensure that consumers are not short-changed in terms of how much nutrition they receive). The information on some processed frozen foods misstates their calorific content by as much as 70%.

That isn’t the only problem. Calorie counts are based on how much heat a foodstuff gives off when it burns in an oven. But the human body is far more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory it surrenders its calories within seconds. By contrast, the real-life journey from dinner plate to toilet bowl takes on average about a day, but can range from eight to 80 hours depending on the person. A calorie of carbohydrate and a calorie of protein both have the same amount of stored energy, so they perform identically in an oven. But put those calories into real bodies and they behave quite differently. And we are still learning new insights: American researchers discovered last year that, for more than a century, we’ve been exaggerating by about 20% the number of calories we absorb from almonds.

The process of storing fat – the “weight” many people seek to lose – is influenced by dozens of other factors. Apart from calories, our genes, the trillions of bacteria that live in our gut, food preparation and sleep affect how we process food. Academic discussions of food and nutrition are littered with references to huge bodies of research that still need to be conducted. “No other field of science or medicine sees such a lack of rigorous studies,” says Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings College in London. “We can create synthetic DNA and clone animals but we still know incredibly little about the stuff that keeps us alive.” (...)

Our fixation with counting calories assumes both that all calories are equal and that all bodies respond to calories in identical ways: Camacho was told that, since he was a man, he needed 2,500 calories a day to maintain his weight. Yet a growing body of research shows that when different people consume the same meal, the impact on each person’s blood sugar and fat formation will vary according to their genes, lifestyles and unique mix of gut bacteria.

Research published this year showed that a certain set of genes is found more often in overweight people than in skinny ones, suggesting that some people have to work harder than others to stay thin (a fact that many of us already felt intuitively to be true). Differences in gut microbiomes can alter how people process food. A study of 800 Israelis in 2015 found that the rise in their blood-sugar levels varied by a factor of four in response to identical food.

Some people’s intestines are 50% longer than others: those with shorter ones absorb fewer calories, which means that they excrete more of the energy in food, putting on less weight.

The response of your own body may also change depending on when you eat. Lose weight and your body will try to regain it, slowing down your metabolism and even reducing the energy you spend on fidgeting and twitching your muscles. Even your eating and sleeping schedules can be important. Going without a full night’s sleep may spur your body to create more fatty tissue, which casts a grim light on Camacho’s years of early-morning exertion. You may put on more weight eating small amounts over 12-15 hours than eating the same food in three distinct meals over a shorter period.

There’s a further weakness in the calorie-counting system: the amount of energy we absorb from food depends on how we prepare it. Chopping and grinding food essentially does part of the work of digestion, making more calories available to your body by ripping apart cell walls before you eat it. That effect is magnified when you add heat: cooking increases the proportion of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, from 50% to 95%. The digestible calories in beef rises by 15% on cooking, and in sweet potato some 40% (the exact change depends on whether it is boiled, roasted or microwaved). So significant is this impact that Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University, reckons that cooking was necessary for human evolution. It enabled the neurological expansion that created Homo sapiens: powering the brain consumes about a fifth of a person’s metabolic energy each day (cooking also means we didn’t need to spend all day chewing, unlike chimps).

The difficulty in counting accurately doesn’t stop there. The calorie load of carbohydrate-heavy items such as rice, pasta, bread and potatoes can be slashed simply by cooking, chilling and reheating them. As starch molecules cool they form new structures that are harder to digest. You absorb fewer calories eating toast that has been left to go cold, or leftover spaghetti, than if they were freshly made. Scientists in Sri Lanka discovered in 2015 that they could more than halve the calories potentially absorbed from rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice. This made the starch less digestible so the body may take on fewer calories (they have yet to test on human beings the precise effects of rice cooked in this way). That’s a bad thing if you’re malnourished, but a boon if you’re trying to lose weight.

by Peter Wilson, 1843 |  Read more:

Image: Paul Zak

The Mystery of Business Casual

The first time I tried on a pair of Allbirds sneakers, I was in the brand’s San Francisco boutique, sitting on a gently curved wooden stool designed to tip forward in aid of shoe-changing. The stool was created by the same people who design the start-up’s shoes, and it made me feel the same combination of familiarity and irritation: Do we really need tech to disrupt the established technology of stools and sneakers?

My answer, after sitting on the stool and trying the shoes, is a begrudging, contemptuous “sometimes.” The tip forward helped. And the shoes, I silently admitted to myself, were astonishingly comfortable.

Allbirds has been selling sneakers made from environmentally friendly materials since 2016. The brand’s most recognizable style is its Runner, which looks a lot like a logo-free, work-appropriate version of Nike’s popular Roshe One. It’s what a running shoe needs to be in order to fly under the radar in an office.

In theory, I should be the brand’s ideal customer: I hate uncomfortable shoes, I work in an office with a vaguely casual dress code, and I’ve owned several pairs of Roshe Ones. I’m a member of the digital creative class in which Allbirds has found its most dedicated market, which includes the Silicon Valley tech workers often characterized as the brand’s biggest fans. When I look around at work or in my neighborhood in New York City, I often spot a pair.

Instead, for Allbirds’ entire three-year existence, I’ve hated what I believed the company was pushing. I spent a decade covering the fashion industry, and the “noise” the company cut through with its super-simple shoes, I told myself, was actually a vibrant, imaginative world of glow-in-the-dark high tops and snakeskin stilettos. Allbirds seemed like a way for men to intellectualize their way out of personal taste in favor of start-up culture’s efficient sameness. I had, on more than one occasion, referred to the shoes derisively as “Yeezys for software developers.”

Press coverage of the company is divided along similar lines: Some writers praise the brand’s style and functionality, while others lament its popularity as proof that the algorithms are winning. Much of the fashion industry is firmly in the latter camp. (...)

As I tried on sneakers in the San Francisco Allbirds shop, I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. I looked for the sense of aesthetic doom that critics assured me the shoes’ popularity promised. Instead of the suffocating sameness or joyless efficiency that critics have ascribed to the shoes, I saw just a small, conventional boutique in which a handful of customers ranging from teen boys to female retirees were trying on sneakers.

Tim Brown, Allbirds’ co-founder, seems aware of—and chafed by—the insinuation that his shoes are boring, or only for tech bros. “I actually think there is excitement in the simplicity and calmness, which belies an enormous amount of work,” he says of the design. He also says that women have always made up the majority of Allbirds’ customers.

I was having trouble remembering what so many fashion people found threatening. Upstairs from the shop, in an impromptu studio, some Allbirds employees were photographing the simple sneakers against an Instagram-friendly peachy background with giant Monstera leaves as props. On the feet of the young women who worked in the office, the shoes were free of the jarring, swagless business-athlesiure aesthetic I’d always associated them with.

Fashion’s acceptance of Allbirds, like Uggs, Birkenstocks, Crocs, and Tevas before it, has started to seem both inevitable and, at worst, completely fine. All it takes for any particular shoe to make the crossover is for some already-cool people to decide it should. (Case in point: New Balance sneakers are currently having a moment.)

by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Allbirds

[ed. I have a couple (Allbirds). They're great. I still like my Goodwill Puma's the best.]

Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again.

People concerned about privacy often try to be “careful” online. They stay off social media, or if they’re on it, they post cautiously. They don’t share information about their religious beliefs, personal life, health status or political views. By doing so, they think they are protecting their privacy.

But they are wrong. Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.

There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.

The basic idea of data inference is not new. Magazine subscriber lists have long been purchased by retailers, charities and politicians because they provide useful hints about people’s views. A subscriber to The Wall Street Journal is more likely to be a Republican voter than is a subscriber to The Nation, and so on.

But today’s technology works at a far higher level. Consider an example involving Facebook. In 2017, the newspaper The Australian published an article, based on a leaked document from Facebook, revealing that the company had told advertisers that it could predict when younger users, including teenagers, were feeling “insecure,” “worthless” or otherwise in need of a “confidence boost.” Facebook was apparently able to draw these inferences by monitoring photos, posts and other social media data. (...)

It is worth stressing that today’s computational inference does not merely check to see if Facebook users posted phrases like “I’m depressed” or “I feel terrible.” The technology is more sophisticated than that: Machine-learning algorithms are fed huge amounts of data, and the computer program itself categorizes who is more likely to become depressed.

Consider another example. In 2017, academic researchers, armed with data from more than 40,000 Instagram photos, used machine-learning tools to accurately identify signs of depression in a group of 166 Instagram users. Their computer models turned out to be better predictors of depression than humans who were asked to rate whether photos were happy or sad and so forth.

Such tools are already being marketed for use in hiring employees, for detecting shoppers’ moods and predicting criminal behavior. Unless they are properly regulated, in the near future we could be hired, fired, granted or denied insurance, accepted to or rejected from college, rented housing and extended or denied credit based on facts that are inferred about us.

This is worrisome enough when it involves correct inferences. But because computational inference is a statistical technique, it also often gets things wrong — and it is hard, and perhaps impossible, to pinpoint the source of the error, for these algorithms offer little to no insights into how they operate. What happens when someone is denied a job on the basis of an inference that we aren’t even sure is correct?

Another troubling example of inference involves your phone number. It is increasingly an identifier that works like a Social Security number — it is unique to you. Even if you have stayed off Facebook and other social media, your phone number is almost certainly in many other people’s contact lists on their phones. If they use Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp), they have been prompted to upload their contacts to help find their “friends,” which many people do.

Once your number surfaces in a few uploads, Facebook can place you in a social network, which helps it infer things about you since we tend to resemble the people in our social set. (Facebook even keeps “shadow” profiles of nonusers and deploys “tracking pixels” situated all over the web — not just on Facebook — that transmit information about your behavior to the company.)

by Zeynep Tufekci, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alexis Beauclair

Ichiro
via:

Typography 2020: A Special Listicle for America

Presidential-campaign typography took a big step up in 2008, when Barack Obama adopted the then-new Gotham font for his campaign. (Though for his re-election campaign, he had serifs added.) This led to the rise of Gotham throughout the United States. But especially in political campaigns, where the geometric sans has become typographic shorthand for #winning. (...)

Interestingly, one of Obama’s few bipartisan successes was inducing Republicans to use Gotham too: in 2016, it was chosen by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump (well, the no-cost Gotham knockoff Montserrat). (...)

The Democratic Field: April 2019

I wasn’t impressed by any of the websites, none of which exceeded the high end of mediocre—what you might find in an $18/month Squarespace plan.

• Of course, there were a ton of Gothamesque geometric sans serifs.

• The candidate who was most successful stoking my curiosity with design was Kirsten Gillibrand.

• I was surprised that the long-shot candidates weren’t taking more chances with their websites—what the hell have they got to lose? Though I suppose Julián Castro, whose site was as boring as any, was nevertheless the most competent.

• Among current front-runner-ish candidates, Kamala Harris was the worst underperformer, with Beto O’Rourke second worst.

• Overall worst in show: Cory Booker, who apparently decided to run for president on a Monday, crowdsourced his website on Tuesday, and launched it on Wednesday. Unbearable.

For those who think it trivializes our political process to judge candidates by their typography—what would you prefer we scrutinize? Qualifications? Ground into dust during the last election. Issues? Be my guest. Whether a candidate will ever fulfill a certain campaign promise about a certain issue is conjectural.

But typography—that’s a real decision candidates have to make today, with real money and real consequences. And if I can’t trust you to pick some reasonable fonts and colors, then why should I trust you with the nuclear codes? (...)

Cory Booker

The weird layout in the screenshot is exactly as I found it, and the popups refused to be dismissed. The display font Conductor has potential. But there’s no design concept to speak of (no, “red, white, and blue” doesn’t cut it). The execution is totally inept. Cory, it was nice of you to hire your second cousin. But seek professional help. You’re trailing the pack.

Tulsi Gabbard

I like the simplicity of the concept. The flat color field is arresting, even if it makes the candidate look like a flight attendant on Tulsi Airlines. I don’t like the take-perfectly-nice-font-and-chop-off-the-corners wordmark, a trend that has been done to death (and if you’re going to bother, why not chop off the L so it can sit closer to the S?) Text is Neue Swift; display is Harmonia Sans.

John Hickenlooper

It could be worse. But it still looks more like he’s starting an outdoor-clothing label, not running for president. Like other candidates, Hickenlooper evokes Obama’s use of Gotham (with the similar Proxima Nova, though Proxima predates Gotham). The deep purple is unexpected—Colorado is politically “purple”, is that the idea?—though pairing two intense colors doesn’t provide much versatility.

Jay Inslee

The typography makes it look like a pharmaceutical ad—Ask your doctor if Inslee™ is right for you. Jay Inslee wants to give you lots of colors: American red, white, and blue, and a lighter blue, and then a couple shades of green, I suppose to connote that he cares about the environment. Another candidate evoking Obama’s Gotham typography (this time with Montserrat).

by Matthew Butterick, Practical Typography |  Read more:

Images: Democratic campaign sites.

A World Built on Sand and Oil

Oil and sand are not often commodities conjoined in discussions of global trade. The first is the motive engine of industry and transportation, fuel for heating and illumination, the spirit that animates much global politics. Even when priced cheaply—as I write, the price of oil hovers around fifty dollars per barrel (or just under four hundred dollars per ton)—it is considered precious. Humble, ordinary, oft-overlooked sand is, by contrast, the second most consumed good in the world by volume after water. It makes concrete and glass and electronics possible. According to the UN Environment Programme, at least fifty billion tons of sand (often measured in aggregate with gravel) are used annually, in contrast with four billion tons of oil. But sand is not often thought of as valuable: its trade is more domestic than global, and its market price per ton is under nine dollars in the United States and far less than that in the rest of the world.

But there are similarities, too. While China is the biggest consumer of both products, the United States follows close behind as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil and the third-largest user of sand. Depending on its market price, crude oil is often the first or second most exported good in the world by value. Today’s relatively low prices put crude oil exports in second place, after automobiles. At the end of 2015, the U.S. government rescinded a forty-year ban on the export of crude oil from the States, and since then the country has aggressively reentered the global oil market, becoming the world’s third-largest exporter of petroleum and its refined products, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. (Despite being the largest oil producer, the U.S. is not the world’s largest exporter, because it consumes most of what it produces.) The vast majority of the trade in sand is domestic, and the U.S. and China extract the sand they need for construction and industry from their own territories. The world’s biggest importer of sand, however, is Singapore, which uses a great volume of the stuff in its frenetic projects of land reclamation.

The two commodities converge in one other regard. Their commodification and trade hold mirrors to global inequalities and ecological plunder. Both are produced over eons, the one a product of fossilization of prehistoric flora and fauna, the other the debris of rocks’ encounter with wind and water. Both tar and dirt symbolize inferior material. And yet the moment at which they became pivotal to industrialization and urbanization, rocks are blasted, wells are drilled to sepulchral depths, rivers are dredged, beaches are bulldozed away to enable the transformation of these natural resources into commodities. The inexorable proliferation of oil and sand on the global circuits of trade tells us about the shape-shifting ways of production, colonial forms of exploitation, and our reckless wrecking of the global environmental commons. It is about how the commodification of prosaic everyday things affects lives here, now, and half a world away.

If you look around you, you will inevitably see objects, places, things containing sand. Sand is dredged out of a riverbed or a seafloor in one place and poured into the shallows in another place to conjure land out of the sea. Sand and gravel are used in the making of concrete, today the most widely used building material in the world. Mixed with tar, sand and gravel constitute asphalt. The silica in sand is extracted to manufacture all grades of glass, as well as semiconductors and integrated circuits used in electronics. Even hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires sand. The urbanization of the world, the meteoric growth in the production of electronics, and the expansion of the use of glass in everything from windows and fiberglass to screens for automobiles and electronics all have increased the demand for sand. But the largest consumer remains the construction industry.

Throughout human history sand and gravel have been used to raise buildings, pave roads, and make glassware. Monumental structures of ancient times—the Great Wall of China, Roman aqueducts and amphitheaters, and ziggurats and pyramids in Mesopotamia and the Americas—used either early versions of concrete (blending some adhesive with sand and gravel) or fired mud bricks made from a mixture of sand and clay. The massive blocks of stone for the pyramids in Egypt were dragged into place on beds of sand. Glass-cutting techniques were employed in the Sassanian Empire, and glass windowpanes made from sand quartz and ash were known in Roman Alexandria nearly two thousand years ago, though they were opaque, small, and thick. (Until the early modern period, glass panes were—like many other technologies—reserved for elite sacred and profane institutions: cathedrals, jami’ mosques, and grand administrative buildings.) (...)

The trade in sand and gravel as commodities in their own right began in earnest in the twentieth century. The efflorescence of modernist concrete architecture with large windows and the later fashion for glass cladding in ever-expanding cities demanded concerted and organized trade in sand, rather than the accidental use of ballast. And with the invention and upward spiral in the usage of electronics at the end of the twentieth century, the search for industrial-quality sand became more urgent.

Not all sand is created equal. The fine sand of the desert, stretching for miles across the arid climates, has been eroded by wind, becoming too uniform in size and too even in shape to make good concrete. Concrete is manufactured by mixing cement with a larger proportion of sand; unevenly sized and shaped grains of sand better facilitate the adhesive effect desired of cement. The grains of water-eroded sand are irregular in shape and dissimilar in size and thus ideal for making concrete. As the demand for concrete has skyrocketed and technologies for making it have improved in the past fifty years, the world has grown famished for sand. Residential and commercial buildings, agglomerations of skyscrapers, and sprawling exurbs all devour concrete. Land reclamation requires pouring dredging by-products, sand, and concrete blocks into the sea, creating property ex nihilo. Islands such as Bahrain and Singapore have pushed their landmass further into the sea through this process. A 2014 Financial Times investigative report showed that a secretive investment vehicle owned by Bahraini royals was granted deeds to undersea plots of land; after reclamation these became coveted and expensive ground for the development of luxury hotels and commercial buildings. By some accounts China has used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. did in all of the twentieth century. If concrete requires at least twice as much sand as cement, then the volume of sand involved in producing billions of tons of concrete today boggles the mind. (...)

In late 2016, Phnom Penh Post reporters noted a discrepancy in Cambodia’s trade with Singapore: the latter’s customs records showed $750 million of sand imported from Cambodia, but the government of Cambodia reported exporting only $5 million. Cambodia had banned the unregulated export of sand in 2009, and the difference between the two amounts indicated the misreporting of illegally stripped sand dredged from Cambodia’s fast-depleted rivers.

The smuggling and illegal mining of sand at beaches and rivers of the global south work a bit like piracy. People whose livelihoods are destroyed by exploitation and debt work for a pittance to haul away sand from their own habitations. They are paid by corporations and businessmen in air-conditioned offices far away from the sites of despoliation. The profit margins are widest when the cheap sand is alchemized into a desirable commodity on the global trade circuits.

Countries with long coastlines and rich riverine topographies have become prey to other states and their own profit-seeking businessmen ravening for sand. Legal and illegal miners have stripped the rivers of Myanmar and Cambodia of their sandy riverbeds and sandbanks, dramatically changing flow patterns in rivers. The modified quality and volume of the sediments in such rivers make previously bountiful ecosystems inhospitable to agriculture and fishing. Turbulence in sand-poor rivers erodes riverbanks, destroys infrastructure, including dikes and bridges, and submerges riverside villages. Beaches in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Morocco have disappeared overnight as bulldozers and trucks load their sands for use on other shores. Indonesia, an archipelago of between 17,500 and 18,500 islands (the actual number is a matter of dispute), has seen whole sand atolls disappear through illegal mining. Environmental scientists Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper enumerate the effects of such mining in their book The Last Beach: shorelines wearing away, destruction of coastal fauna habitats, eradication of dunes and the flora that grow on them. Coastlines are more exposed to rising sea levels, tsunamis, hurricanes, and the natural roiling of the seas in storms. Building dream palaces of capitalism in one corner of the world leaves another bereft of its beaches and agricultural fecundity.

by Laleh Khalili, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Michael Chapman

Probably Not the Best Beer in the World

What went through Orson Welles’s mind, I wonder, when he first growled the line “Probably the best lager in the world” into a microphone? He may have been pondering his fee. He may have reflected on how well suited his distinctive gravelly voice was to the slogan’s understated confidence. It may have made him fancy a drink. It probably didn’t make him think that Carlsberg was probably the best lager in the world, because it probably isn’t. And last week its manufacturers admitted it.

In fact, they launched a new slogan: “Probably not the best beer in the world. So we’ve changed it.” This marketing admission raises a few questions, the first of which is: “How likely is it to be the best this time?” I mean, they’ve been calling their previous version “probably the best” for 46 years. It doesn’t feel like they’re adherents to a rigorously self-doubting approach to product development.

Other questions include: “How long have they been thinking this?”, “Do they now think it was probably never the best beer in the world, or that it probably used to be?” and: “If it used to be, has it got worse, or have other beers got better?” Also: “Why the change from ‘lager’ to ‘beer’ in the new line?” That’s raising the bar. What if Carlsberg actually was the best lager in the world, just not the best beer? I reckon the world’s best beer probably isn’t a lager, but that’s my subjective view. I prefer pale ale.

The new version of Carlsberg, which the firm is convinced is better than the old one and consequently has a higher probability of being the best in the world, is not a pale ale, it’s another lager. Specifically a pilsner. Even more specifically a “Danish Pilsner”, but hopefully it’ll still be made in Northampton notwithstanding Brexit. And who among us really is withstanding Brexit? But maybe the pressure for Carlsberg not to seem too in-your-face Danish is off now that it’s been supplanted as the official beer partner of the England men’s football team by Budweiser. That’s the American one, not the Czech one, so at least it speaks English!

Meanwhile Carlsberg is extremely proud of itself. “Carlsberg UK has launched its most ambitious and honest consumer facing campaign ever in a bid to drive reappraisal of its flagship beer brand,” it boasts on its website. “The value of brand honesty to consumers is more powerful than ever,” James Joice of Fold7 (one of Carlsberg’s “agency partners”) is quoted as saying. “But it is still rare to see brands hold their hands up when they don’t live up to their promise. Carlsberg has not only been brave enough to do this, but have done something about it.” He’s so impressed he’s pluralised the company mid-sentence.

It’s certainly been a ballsy relaunch. It started with Carlsberg’s Twitter feed actively promoting a bunch of consumer tweets slagging off their old lager. They said it tasted “like stale breadsticks”, “cat piss” and the “rancid piss of Satan”, and was “like drinking the bathwater your nan died in”.

Having thrown the dead nan out with the bathwater, the firm moved on to extolling the virtues of the revamp, which has been “rebrewed from head to hop”, and comes with exciting trimmings such as a stemmed glass, a stylish fount (the thing you attach to a bar for the beer to come out of) and more environmentally friendly packaging. All in all, according to Carlsberg UK’s website, “Initial research indicates that 59% of UK lager drinkers prefer the taste of the new crisper, Carlsberg Danish Pilsner over the current UK No 1 mainstream lager.”

I hope, for Carlsberg’s sake, that the public isn’t losing its taste for understatement as well as for Satan’s rancid piss, because that’s a fairly slight claim. 59% – so most, but not overwhelmingly most – prefer the new Carlsberg, not to their favourite beer, or all other beers, but to “the current UK No 1 mainstream lager”. The internet is unclear as to which lager that is, but according to the Carling website, it’s Carling. So it’s probably Carling. Carlsberg’s painstakingly developed new beer is probably a drink that 41% of people like less than Carling. Wow.

by David Mitchell, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Carlsberg

via:

What is Freedom?

Today I gave a talk to the Alabama College Democrats on the subject of “freedom.” They were a delightful group with excellent questions and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. Below is the prepared text of the speech, though the actual delivered version had a number of improvised digressions. 

I have been asked to talk about what freedom is, which is just about the most difficult possible question you could have asked me to answer. Several thousands years of political philosophy haven’t sorted it out so I doubt I am going to successfully answer it today in a few minutes. But I can give you a few thoughts on some ways that the contemporary left thinks about freedom and why they are useful.

In fact, the left perspective on freedom actually starts with the fact that freedom is a difficult concept rather than an easy one. If I was a free market libertarian, it would be quite easy for me to tell you what freedom is. Freedom is when nobody physically attacks you or touches your stuff. That freedom is secured through a minimal government: A government that devotes itself to making sure that violent crime is punished and that property rights are protected and that contracts are enforced. Often, this idea of freedom is credited to John Stuart Mill, with his principle that the only legitimate use of government power is to prevent people from doing harm to each other. If you accept this idea, then this question of what freedom is isn’t really interesting or complicated: Freedom means being left alone by the government. There. We’ve solved it.

The left, however, has always looked on this idea of freedom as somewhat ridiculous, because it leads to situations that seem distinctly un-free to be described as completely free. If I am a poor migrant who signs up for indentured servitude, and I have to work long hours for low pay or be sent back to my country of origin, and I am sexually harassed and bullied by my boss, and I spend each night in a crowded worker dormitory, miserable and desperate, it seems grotesque to say that I have freedom. And yet if we accept freedom from government coercion as the only important kind of freedom, then people who have almost no meaningful choices in their lives are still considered as free as you can possibly be, purely because they are not being threatened with jail by the government. (...)

Contractual arrangements may be voluntary, but if you are pressured into them by despair, then that voluntariness is a farce. If I offer to throw you a life preserver while you are drowning, on the condition that you give me 5 percent of your income for the rest of your life, it is difficult to call this “voluntary.” You did not have a real choice. If people don’t have any viable alternatives, then they are not really free.

This understanding has led leftists to develop a much richer idea of freedom, an idea that takes people’s life experiences as its starting point rather than a thin and theoretical kind of bare contractual freedom. So if you have to sell your house to pay a family member’s medical bills, yes, it’s true that you made the choice voluntarily, that you could have just said “sorry, kid” and let them die. But our choices are structured by our circumstances, and our circumstances are structured by the political and economic systems we live in, and those systems are in turn structured by decisions that are made by people with power. You face that choice to sell your house or let your parent/child suffer because you do not live in one of the many countries where this choice doesn’t exist. The diabetics who try to raise money for insulin on GoFundMe face a choice of whether to crowdfund or risk death because that is the choice that everyone else has chosen to offer them.

In criticizing the Supreme Court’s campaign financing cases, we on the left often say that “money isn’t speech,” that free speech doesn’t mean you can just spend as much as you like to speak. But I actually think we should frame it a little differently: In important ways, money confers freedom. Money gives you the capacity to actually act. The more money I have, the more things I can do. I can speak more if I have more money, because I can amplify my voice. I can be Rupert Murdoch and buy media outlet after media outlet and blast whatever message I choose into the homes of hundreds of millions of people. Money is speech, and how free your speech is always depends on the amount of money you have. If I am an ordinary person with a job, not only might I not be able to afford to blast my message out, but I might be fired if I say anything too controversial, even outside of work. I regularly edit people’s political writing for publication, and a lot of them have asked me to use pseudonyms, because they’re worried that even things they say off the clock when they’re outside of work could cause them to lose their jobs. In the United States, the law generally does not protect you from being retaliated against over your speech by employers. You are “free” to speak, in that it is legal, and they are “free” to fire you afterwards. Everyone has maximum freedom, which some people think is wonderful, but the end result is that since power and wealth are very unevenly distributed, some people have a lot more freedom than others.

One of the most important aspects of leftist thought is its insight that “power” is more than just the government putting people in jail. Power relationships are everywhere: an employer who harasses employees, but those employees can’t quit their jobs because they’re worried the employer will punish them by giving them a bad reference or retaliating against them. Abusive partners who make the other person afraid of losing love and support, and wield the power they have to withhold those things to coerce the other person into putting up with behavior they shouldn’t have to put up with. Bullies at school, telemarketers who take advantage of old people’s confusion and loneliness. These situations do not involve the use of physical force, they involve other kinds of manipulation and coercion. (...)

Inequality itself is a restriction on freedom. When some people have billions of dollars, and others have zero dollars, the ones with billions of dollars can control the lives of the others. My friend the economist Rob Larson has an excellent book called Capitalism vs. Freedom, and in it he shows how the accumulation of extreme wealth in some hands serves to destroy freedom. In fact, he says, it causes the whole negative liberty/positive liberty freedom-from/freedom-to distinction to kind of break down. For instance, when Martin Shkreli’s pharmaceutical company hiked the price of a life-saving drug from $13 to $750, people could be driven into poverty to pay to survive. They are certainly not free to act but they are also not free from the consequences of self-interested corporate decision-makers.

Here’s another example. If we take platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there is an argument to be made that they make us more free. Look at all the things you can post! The magazine I work for, Current Affairs, has built an audience in large part because of Facebook and Twitter. We post our articles there, people share them, people read them. Complete freedom. Voluntary transactions. Wonderful. But it’s also the case that as almost all information starts flowing through these monopolistic corporate platforms that are the only game in town, you become dependent on them and they serve as completely unaccountable decision-makers about which speech is acceptable. If Mark Zuckerberg were to wake up one morning and decided that he didn’t like what was printed in Current Affairs, that he wanted to bump us down the algorithm, it could destroy our business, because we’re dependent on people finding out about us through these platforms.

Conservatives often complain that their free speech is being restricted by this or that social media platform. And on the one hand, it’s ironic, because they’re the ones who believe corporations should be able to do whatever they please in a free market. But on the other hand, they’re not wrong that this is what you get when corporations become gatekeepers. You get “private tyrannies”—institutions whose decisions have major consequences in the world, but that ordinary people do not get a vote in. You can choose whether or not to use Facebook, but you don’t get to vote on who you think should be in charge of Facebook. And in a situation where everyone is using Facebook, and your business depends on it, the binary choice of whether or not to participate doesn’t mean very much. (...)

This is one reason that it’s very important to talk about democracy and freedom together. Democracy is when ordinary people get to participate in government decision-making, it’s not done by unelected autocrats. And one definition of freedom that has been proposed is that “freedom is participation in power,” that is that freedom and democracy should be considered either the same thing or closely tied. And we can see what this would mean when we think about the company town versus the democratic town. In the company town, the rules are made from above, in the democratic town they’re made from below. And the difference between those two places is that one is free and the other is not. You are free when you help make the rules that bind you. Wikipedia, for instance, is a far freer platform than the others in a certain way, because the users actually deliberate together over decisions. There are still rules, but those rules are discussed and enforced through democratic processes. There are appeals. It’s all completely transparent. Because people are part of a community decision-making process, they are freer.

Saying that participation is freedom raises a number of problems still. If the group makes a bad decision, over your objections, are you free because you participated? The fear with democracy is always “tyranny of the majority,” though I think for the most part this can be mitigated by robust procedural impediments to trampling on dissidents. (With a Bill of Rights, for instance.) There is no such thing as perfect freedom, but the ability to control your circumstances and be part of the political and economic decisions that affect you seems an important precondition of liberty.

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

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Live Commentary on the Žižek-Peterson Debate.]

Italian Beef Braciole is So Good It'll Make You Cry

There’s really no way to sugar coat the truth here. Italian Beef Braciole is a time and labor-intensive recipe. It also requires some skill with knots and butcher’s string. This is definitely a special occasion dish–something to serve for Christmas dinner, or some other holiday dinner, or for an especially fancy Sunday. It’s one of those dishes that simmers on the stove top for hours, requiring you to hang out in the kitchen most of the day. And around the holidays that can be really fun, or horrible depending on your temperament. In fact, I’d say that if you really like to eat great food, but don’t really like to cook, then this isn’t the recipe for you. On the other hand, if you’re the type who doesn’t balk at the prospect of making a few hundred ravioli by hand (i.e., someone with the patience of an Italian grandmother), you may as well have a pot of braciole simmering while you’re working.

So why go to all of that trouble? Because Italian Beef Braciole is so good it’ll make you want to cry. It’s extraordinarily delicious. A lot of love goes into a dish like this, and you can definitely taste it.

WHAT IS ITALIAN BEEF BRACIOLE?

Like many Italian dishes, people have very passionate and strongly held opinions about what braciole is and how it’s properly made. Of the myriad versions and local variations available, there is only one way to properly execute the dish and all other ways are unthinkable. And why is this one version the correct way? Because that’s how your nonna makes it. I love that. I love the idea that the world’s authority on Italian cuisine is someone’s grandmother.

Even the name is open to contention. In Italy these little packets of meat are called involtini (in fact, I have a recipe for eggplant involtini right here). Braciole, a word of Sicilian origin, is what they’re referred to primarily by Italian-Americans.

The authority of your nonna aside, there is much variation in this dish. Basically, a braciole is a piece of very thin meat (beef, pork, chicken, and in Sicily even fish) filled with a cheese filling and either tied into a roll or secured with toothpicks. They’re pan fried and then placed in a sauce to simmer until done. The sauce also varies.

Even the size of the braciole is variable. Some versions use a large sheet of beef, spread with a lot of filling. When wrapped up, they look almost like little rolled roasts. Apparently there are also very tiny braciole in Sicily that would fit on a toothpick like an hors-d’oeuvre.

I should also admit that Italian Beef Braciole is a bit of an indulgent dish for yours truly. One typically doesn’t eat a lot of red meat on the Mediterranean diet. That said, one of the great things about the Mediterranean diet–one that makes it easy to stick with–is that there isn’t much that’s totally off limits. Red meat and cheese is a rare treat, and totally acceptable within limits.

My version is based in part on Yotam Ottolenghi’s Puglian recipe (Puglia is a town in the heel of the Italian boot), and in part on Hal Licino’s version. I recommend reading Hal’s recipe because he harbors the very kind of passionate and strongly held opinions about braciole that I described above (he calls his “The Best Braciole on Earth”!). It’s a delightful read.

HOW TO MAKE ITALIAN BEEF BRACIOLE

Here is a list of pointers for making this recipe. It’ll help you avoid a few of the pitfalls I ran into when I made mine.

• You’re going to end up pounding out thin sheets of beef until they’re very thin, so you can roll up a filling inside. Unless you have mad knife skills, I suggest asking your butcher to thinly slice very lean the beef for you (I used top sirloin myself, and I did the knife-work myself, and my knife skills are far from mad).

• I suggest investing in a meat mallet or meat hammer to pound out the beef. You could use a claw hammer I suppose, but you run the risk of bashing a hole in your meat. Then your filling will leak out, and we don’t want that. And incidentally, if you ever form a Scandinavian death metal band, I also recommend that you name that band Meat Hammer.

• You’re also going to need to tie those little beef rolls. There’s a chef’s trick to that, if you don’t have any experience in this area. Here’s a handy YouTube video that’ll show you how. If this seems too fussy to you, jam some toothpicks through your braciole and call it good (of course your filling will probably leak out, and we really don’t want that).

• If you make smaller braciole like I did, you’ll find that you really can’t get a lot of filling inside. That being the case, you need less filling that you may think. I ended up with more than half of my filling left over (and FYI, I adjusted the amounts in my recipe so you don’t have the same problem). Oh, and in case you’re wondering what I did with the leftover filling, I made these delicious Eggplant Involtini. 

• You need to stir the sauce obsessively so it won’t stick. Not constantly mind you. You’re not making risotto here. Just often. Be vigilant, like Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. This stuff simmers for hours. I came close to scorching mine a few times but caught it just in time.

• Finally, I topped my dish with a classic lemon, garlic, and parsley gremolata. I’m not sure what your nonna would think of that. Gremolata is a Milanase concoction, so I’ve probably committed a grave culinary sin. At any rate, it’s not part of most of the recipes I reviewed. But let me tell you this: the gremolata cranks this dish up to eleven. Give it a try.

by Steve Heikkila, Slow Burning Passion |  Read more:

Image: Steve Heikkila

[ed. I also added spinach in the filling. They really are that good (especially the sauce).]

Web 2.0

In terms of Web 2.0's social impact, critics such as Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their actual talent, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas. Keen's 2007 book, Cult of the Amateur, argues that the core assumption of Web 2.0, that all opinions and user-generated content are equally valuable and relevant, is misguided. Additionally, Sunday Times reviewer John Flintoff has characterized Web 2.0 as "creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels... [and that Wikipedia is full of] mistakes, half-truths and misunderstandings".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

[ed. Perhaps why music (and so many other things) suck these days. See also: below.]