Screenplay Software Adds Tool to Assess a Script’s Inclusiveness

One of the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood has a new tool to help with gender equality and inclusion.

In an update announced Thursday, Final Draft — software that writers use to format scripts — said it will now include a proprietary “Inclusivity Analysis” feature, allowing filmmakers “to quickly assign and measure the ethnicity, gender, age, disability or any other definable trait of the characters,” including race, the company said in a statement.

It also will enable users to determine if a project passes the Bechdel Test, measuring whether two female characters speak to each other about anything other than a man. The Final Draft tool, a free add-on, was developed in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media at Mount Saint Mary’s University, which has been at the forefront of studying the underrepresentation of women on screen.

In a statement, Geena Davis said the update “will make it easier for readers, writers and creative execs to more easily use a gender and intersectionality lens when evaluating scripts prior to greenlight, casting and production.”

The Final Draft feature comes almost a year after similar programs were instituted in other screenplay apps, starting with Highland software. The idea then came from Christina Hodson, a screenwriter (“Bumblebee,” the forthcoming “Batgirl,”), who reasoned that if scripts were the blueprint for blockbusters and indies alike, “it made sense to me that we can do a lot ourselves, before they even leave our desk.” She approached software makers, who developed and released tools in a matter of weeks.

Final Draft, the industry leader, took a more measured approach, Scott McMenamin, the company’s president, said in an email. “We just wanted to make sure we got this right,” he wrote, “which is why we didn’t release it right out of the gate” with the most recent update, Final Draft 11, in September 2018.

by Melena Ryzik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Final Draft
[ed. For all aspiring screenwriters. Who knew industry standard screenwriting software existed?] 

via:
[ed. LA, somewhere. Screenwriter: So, there's this guy and his dog... Producer: Get out!!! Screenwriter: But... but, then he kills like 86 people! Producer: Genius!]

The Biggest Bias In Tech That No One Talks About

I was recently chatting with two young men who were telling me of their struggle to hire older employees.

“The rest of our office is young. They just don’t fit with our culture,” the first one admitted.

“Our industry is brand new,” said the second. “Older candidates don’t bring any relevant experience, but come with a higher paycheck.”

And then: “I’m not sure if an older employee would be able to adapt and learn quickly in our fast-paced work culture.”

I nodded in agreement. All these things made sense. Then one of them interjected: “I don’t want to feel like we have an office mom!”

Suddenly I felt a pit at the bottom of my stomach. I am a real-life mom. Oblivious to my reaction, the two men went on talking, genuinely trying to find a solution. One said: “We actually did hire an older employee recently. I was nervous about whether he would fit in, but so far, it’s going okay. He’s 40.”

The sinking feeling in my gut turned to all-out panic. Throughout this conversation I had been picturing a gray haired 60 year old. But no, “old” in tech is someone in their 40s. Until this point, I’d never thought of myself as too old for tech, but as a woman in her late 30s who is also a mother to three young children, I suddenly realized what others might be thinking when I walk in the room.

The data says ageism starts young in tech

There’s no getting past the fact that tech is a young industry. Studies show that age bias is rampant in tech not just once one hits their 40s, but by age 36. When VC firm First Round Capital polled a wide range of US startup founders in The 2018 State of Startups report, age was cited as the strongest investor bias against founders, with 89% of founders saying older people face discrimination in tech, followed by gender. And older women have double the odds. In a 2017 Indeed survey, 43 percent of tech workers said that fear of losing their jobs due to age is a real fear. (...)

Pregnancy and ageism create a double penalty for women

Ageism impacts everyone, but women bear the unfair brunt of this trend. In this same survey of early stage founders, the amount of capital raised by male founders peaked between ages 30 and 45. But for female founders, the amount raised doesn’t spike until the late 30s and it peaks soon after, by age 45. Founders of both sexes experience a drop off in funding after they hit their 45th birthday. For women, this means a very narrow window in which to maximize their fundraising. (...)

Why is youth so coveted in tech?

Unlike other industries, tech’s hallmark is change and innovation. For this reason, professional experience is not valued as much as the ability to think outside the proverbial box. Fresh young talent has a leg up in an industry where bold new ideas are valued above all else. Tech is an industry of and in disruption, not beholden to status quo ways of doing things.

In the war for talent, tech culture targets young recruits, particularly those that don’t have family obligations at home. Tech campuses are built like all-inclusive resorts, enabling — no, encouraging — recruits to stay on campus as much as possible, a la The Circle, Dave Eggers dystopian novel circa 2013. Apple Park, Apple’s multibillion-dollar new campus in Cupertino, is colloquially known as “the Spaceship Campus” because of its design — but also because it’s a self-contained destination one could conceivably stay airlocked inside forever.

These tech cultures offer “work-life balance” only in the sense that you can theoretically manage your entire life from campus, with no need to go elsewhere to exercise, do errands, eat out or meet up with friends (why be friends with people outside of work, after all?). The caveat here is these perks tend to fall short if your life responsibilities happen to include small people who are dependent on you. (...)

But what are we collectively missing out on because of all this?

But the even bigger issue is that tech’s myopic view causes it to miss out on many billion dollar opportunities.

The stats on this opportunity are things we’ve all heard before: baby boomers control more than ⅔ of the disposable income in the US and will inherit $15 Trillion over the next two decades.

What is surprising is that the tech industry hasn’t taken more notice of this rapidly growing market underserved by tech. Instead, VCs are distracted by apps for millennials like private chefs, valet parking and skipping the line while clubbing (yes, there is a new app for this).

What about instead building technology focused on working parents, second careers, menopause, retirement and senior care?

by Maren Thomas Bannon, Forbes | Read more:
Image: Getty

iWater

via:
[ed. If Apple had done water. Two comments: They forgot to tell us it's only available for $10.99 through iTunes and You can walk on it just like Steve.]

via:

How to Fly a Plane in an Emergency Situation

As a professional pilot, I spend four or five days a year in multimillion-dollar flight simulators being examined by specialized training pilots. Since professional pilots already know how to fly, much of the testing focuses on what are called “non-normal situations.” Let’s imagine you find yourself on an airplane, in the sky, without a pilot. You are in a non-normal situation.

A useful guide to your initial actions if you’re in such a pickle is a simple mnemonic called ANC: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. (Aviation is as acronym-laden a field as any I’ve come across.)

So, aviate. You need to keep the plane in the safe, stable flight you found it in.

Use the control wheel and the horizon displayed on the attitude indicator to level the wings. If it’s gin-clear outside and the real horizon is obvious to you, feel free to use it.

Next, take a look at the altimeter and the vertical speed indicator. Pick an altitude as your target—a simple number near your current altitude, like 10,000 or 15,000 feet. If you’re climbing away from your target, then very gently push the control column forward—that is, away from you—until you’ve stopped climbing. If you’re descending, then pull the control column back, toward you, until you’re not descending anymore. Be gentle, as it’s easy to overcorrect. Porpoising, or repeatedly ascending above and then descending below your target altitude, is a common problem for new pilots.

Now look at the airspeed indicator. Pick a target speed toward the higher end of the safe range. It’s impossible to give numbers for every airplane, but try 100 knots in a small plane, 250 knots in a small airliner, and 280 knots in something like a 747. If your speed is higher than your target, pull the throttles or thrust levers back slightly to reduce power. If it’s lower, then add power.

The goal is to reach an equilibrium in which your speed and altitude are safe and stable. Note the pitch attitude and power setting at which this occurs. The problem, as you’ll soon realize, is that the inputs required to correct one aspect of your flight path will almost certainly upset another one. For example, if you’ve just changed your power setting, then your pitch may have changed, and perhaps you’ve started to inadvertently climb or descend. Or, if you’ve accidentally lowered your pitch attitude, you’ll soon see your speed increasing and your altitude dropping.

The best way to catch such unintended changes early is to move your eyes between the primary instruments in a consistent pattern. This pattern is called the scan and the scan is, unfortunately, much easier said than done, in part because it can seem repetitive at first, and in part because you must keep scanning at the same time as you’re doing everything else you need to do. In fact, getting the scan right is one of the hardest parts of pilot training. It’s hardly overstating it to ask you to imagine that every remaining word in this article is followed by the command “Scan!” (...)

Now it’s time to navigate a safe flight path (in relation to mountains, storms, air traffic zones, and other aircraft) and communicate with the folks who need to know what you’re doing, or who can help you to achieve a safe outcome. For a trained pilot, navigation is a more immediate priority than communication (hence the order of the mnemonic, first A, then N, and last of all C). But for you the opposite is true, because unless you can see an airport right in front of you, you’re going to need outside help to remain clear of terrain and to find a runway.

For that reason, we’ll talk about communication first, and return to navigation afterward. For now, if you can see mountains or other obstacles in your path, turn away from them, climb (by adding power and lifting the nose of the plane), or both.

by Mark Vanhoenacker, Wired | Read more:
Image: markk

[ed. I learned to fly because of a couple "non-normal" situations. One time my pilot kept falling asleep, dropping several hundred feet at a clip. It was early evening and he'd been flying all day. He kept making lame jokes, like... "just wanted to check out that muskrat den" and "that's why they call us bush pilots, because we fly from bush to bush, haha." Funny. I had to keep nudging him and feeding him cigarettes to stay awake, and even on final approach he was still nodding off.  Another time, another pilot, caught above the clouds, solidly socked in. We had to descend into a mountain range and weren't exactly sure where we were (above this valley or that one?). A small hole opened up and we dove into it like a screaming Japanese zero. It closed immediately and then we were flying blind into... somewhere. I wondered briefly if we'd feel anything, slamming into the side of a mountain. Finally broke through a few hundred feet above ground. In the wrong valley. After that I told myself I'd never get in those situations again without having some type of knowledge or control. But of course, never say never.]

Why Is Iced Coffee So Gay?

In late January, during the Polar Vortex that held America by the throat with an icy grasp, a picture of a man wearing a massive coat with his hood up while battling his way through a snowstorm went viral. It sounds unremarkable, except that, in 2°F weather, he was death-gripping an iced coffee.

The picture, fairly innocuous aside from the man’s choice of caffeinated beverage, was shared by the City of New York’s Twitter feed and paired with an incredulous caption. How could an individual in this freezing weather, the tweet suggested, be drinking an iced coffee? It’s obvious, people responded: He’s gay.

Obviously there’s no way commenters could’ve known this man’s sexuality. Honestly, I’m not sure anyone even knows who he is. But none of that matters, after all; what was clear to the corner of the Internet known as Gay Twitter, and to the site Gay Star News,was that this man was just exercising his rights—nay, his duty—as a gay man to drink iced coffee. Iced coffee, you see, is gay culture [ed. note: can confirm].

In a piece published last October on the LGBTQ website New Now Next, it was noted that for the past two years on social media there’s been a steady flow of jokes and memes about the gay community’s affinity for iced coffee. According to NNN, iced coffee is gay because: portability (cute cups), easy consumption (it’s cold) and customization (you can pump it full of sugar, or sugar-free syrup that is definitely not giving you diabetes). The site compared it to the stereotype of suburban moms and their consumption of pinot grigio; iced coffee is a gay crutch. (...)

“I think the joke sort of originated as gays drinking iced coffee in the winter,” Stryker explains. “Like, gays will do ridiculous things and there’s something so counterculture about drinking an iced coffee during the winter.” It’s also, he says, a sign of resisting homogenization. “Hot coffee is so normcore. Like, it’s for dads and old people commuting on the train.”

For Sam, iced versus hot coffee is the perfect symbolism between queer and straight culture. Essentially, iced coffee has become a queer avatar, and a way for gay people to signpost themselves against the uniformity of heterosexuality. (...)

While there are some codes that were very specific, such as the hanky code which signaled specific sexual proclivities, Dr. Bengry says that mostly the signposting was subtle, such wearing a red tie or a pinky ring. Usually, though, they had something to do with subverting gender norms. For example, wearing color was a subversion of the dark suits men were accustomed to wearing, while anything ostentatious or extravagant, such as using a scent or perfume, was associated with women. “The codes associated with a gendered difference,” he adds, “could then signal a sexual difference.”

by Alim Kheraj, GQ |  Read more:

Image: City of NY

[ed. News you can use.]

via:

Offshore Drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic on Ice (for Now)

Trump administration puts offshore drilling expansion in Arctic, Atlantic on ice (ArsTechnica).

The Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 is an Act of Congress passed in 1972 to encourage coastal states to develop and implement coastal zone management plans (CZMPs). This act was established as a United States National policy to preserve, protect, develop, and where possible, restore or enhance, the resources of the Nation's coastal zone for this and succeeding generations.

The Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA) of 1972 showed that the United States Congress “recognized the importance of meeting the challenge of continued growth in the coastal zone”. Under this act two national programs were created, the National Coastal Zone Management Program (CZMP) and the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. Out of 35 eligible states, only 34 have established management programs; Washington State was the first state to adopt the program in 1976.

The Coastal Zone Management Program (CZMP), also called the National Coastal Zone Management Program, was established under the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 and is administered by NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management (OCM). This program is designed to set up a basis for protecting, restoring, and establishing a responsibility in preserving and developing the nation’s coastal communities and resources, where they are under the highest pressure. The vision of the CZMP is to ensure that “the nation’s coast and oceans, including the Great Lakes and island territories, are healthy and thriving for this and future generation”. Their mission is “to ensure the conservation and responsible use of our nation’s coastal and ocean resources”.

The key goals of the National CZM program include: “protecting natural resources, managing development in high hazard areas, giving development priority to coastal-dependent uses, providing public access for recreation, coordinating state and federal actions”. Ultimately the outcomes from the CZMP are for “healthy and productive coastal ecosystems, and to have environmentally, economically, and socially vibrant and resilient coastal communities”.

The National Estuarine Research Reserve System is the second programs established by the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 and is also administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NERRS is a network of 28 areas within the nation and various coastal states, which spans more than 1 million acres. These areas are used for long-term research, water-quality monitoring, education, and coastal stewardship.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Orjan F. Ellingvag/Corbis via Getty Images

[ed. For a good example of how dumb and short-sighted politicans (and the electorate in general) are in Alaska, look no further than the Coastal Zone Management Act. The state had a first-rate Coastal Management Program for over 30 years before it withdrew from the Act in 2011 because of extensive lobbying by extractive resource industries, and perceptions that locally affected communities had too much influence in the decision-making process (horrors). So now Alaska is the only eligible state in the US (out of 35) without a Coastal Management Program, greatly diminishing its ability to influence and condition any federal activity that occurs along it's shorelines. A short history of the hows and whys this came about can be found here: Why did Alaska eliminate the Alaska Coastal Management Program? (pdf).]

Robert Crumb - “Une Brève histoire de l'Amérique”, affiche (1997)
via:  [click to enlarge]

The High Life

Willie Nelson is sitting on a couch at his home, a modest cabin that overlooks his 700 acres of gorgeous Texas Hill Country, when he reaches into his sweatshirt and produces a small, square vaporizer, takes a hit and exhales slowly. “Wanna puff?” he asks.

Nelson’s wife, Annie, setting down a cup of coffee on a DVD case working as a coaster in front of him, speaks up. “Careful with that, babe,” she says. “You have to sing tonight.”

Nelson nods and puts it away. He turns 86 this spring and has a history of emphysema, so Annie, who’s been with Willie for 33 years, tries to get him to look out for his lungs, especially on show days. This can be a problem. “He’s super-generous,” she says, “and if there’s somebody around, he’ll want to offer it and do it with them to make them feel comfortable.”

Nelson says he stays high “pretty much all the time.” (“At least I wait 10 minutes in the morning,” Keith Richards has said.) His routine, Annie says, is to “take a couple of hits off the vape and then, an hour or two later, he might want a piece of chocolate. That keeps it going. So not a ton [of pot] . . . but he is Willie Nelson.” Annie recently bought Nelson an expensive version of a gravity bong — a fixture of high school house parties, which can shoot an entire bowl of weed into your lungs in one hit. “You can use ice water, which helps cool it off,” Annie says. “And no paper really helps.”

In addition to being the world’s most legendary country artist, Willie Nelson might also be the world’s most legendary stoner. Before Snoop or Cheech and Chong or Woody Harrelson, there was Willie. He has been jailed for weed, and made into a punchline for weed. But look at him now: Still playing 100 shows a year, still writing songs, still curious about the world. “I’m kind of the canary in the mine, if people are wondering what happens if you smoke that shit a long time,” he says. “You know, if I start jerking or shaking or something, don’t give me no more weed. But as long as I’m all right . . .”

Years before weed became legal, he spoke about the medical benefits and economic potential of weed if it were taxed and the profits were put toward education. “It’s nice to watch it being accepted — knowing you were right all the time about it: that it was not a killer drug,” says Nelson. “It’s a medicine.” (...)

Sitting with Nelson, you get used to long silences. “Oh, pickin’ a little,” he says when asked about what he’s been up to. He also just finished an album, Ride Me Back Home. The first song is about the 60 horses on his property, which Nelson bought at auction and saved from slaughterhouses. Nelson had showed me some of the horses when I visited five years ago. “Billy Boy is still here,” he says. “We lost Roll Em Up Jack. Wilhelmena the mule is gone. Uh, rattlesnake got her. Babe, you got any of that CBD coffee?”

Nelson is talking about Willie’s Remedy, the coffee that is sold by his cannabis company, Willie’s Reserve. The idea for a weed business started a few years ago; Nelson had bronchitis and he couldn’t smoke, so Annie started making him weed chocolates. The recipe took some perfecting — Nelson kept eating too many and getting too high, so she had to lower the dosages to five milligrams. She lent some to a friend, and big business came knocking. They were skeptical — “We don’t want to become the Wal-Mart of cannabis,” says Annie, who headed the negotiations. They wanted to keep in line with Nelson’s Farm Aid organization, supporting family farmers. Willie’s Reserve is now available in six states, and it’s proving “fairly lucrative,” Nelson says. It hasn’t been easy — since the drug is still federally prohibited, “the regulations change like chameleons,” says Annie. “The edibles are actually harder [to produce legally] than the flower. You have to have specific kitchens. You have to have specific licenses that take years to get.”

Nelson’s official title is “CTO: chief tasting officer.” The company even had business cards made up. He explains: “If I find something that’s really good, I say, ‘This is really good.’ ” Despite 65 years of pot use, Nelson is not a connoisseur; he shrugs when asked for his favorite Willie’s Reserve strains. His famous stash, he says — the weed that he used to keep in a Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox on his bus — is a bunch of random kinds that have been given to him by fans or thrown onto the stage. Willie’s Reserve VP Elizabeth Hogan has been trying for years to figure out what kind of weed Nelson likes. The response, Hogan says, is usually “ ‘I claim ’em all’ ” or “ ‘Pot’s like sex — it’s all good, some is great.’ ” (“He’s kind of a sativa dude,” says Annie. “He’s already funny, so it just makes him funnier.”)

Pot has been Nelson’s exclusive drug of choice since around 1978, when he gave up cigarettes and whiskey. He’d had pneumonia four times, and his hangovers had gotten nasty. Plus, he could be a mean drunk. “I had a pack of 20 Chesterfields, and I threw ’em all away and rolled up 20 fat joints, stuck ’em in there,” he says. “I haven’t smoked a cigarette since. I haven’t drank that much either, because one will make me want the other — I smoke a cigarette, I wanna drink a whiskey. Drink a whiskey, want a cigarette. That’s me. I can’t speak for nobody else.”

He has no doubt where he’d be without pot: “I wouldn’t be alive. It saved my life, really. I wouldn’t have lived 85 years if I’d have kept drinking and smoking like I was when I was 30, 40 years old. I think that weed kept me from wanting to kill people. And probably kept a lot of people from wanting to kill me, too — out there drunk, running around.”

Nelson uses the phrase “delete and fast-forward” a lot. It’s the title of a recent song of his, and it means forgive, forget and move on — a way to get through painful times. Weed, he says, helps him delete and fast-forward. “You don’t dwell on shit a lot. The short-term thing they talk about is probably true, but it’s probably good for you.”

by Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: James Minchin III for Rolling Stone

The Antibiotics Industry is Broken—But There’s a Fix

Last week, the biotech company Achaogen announced that it was filing for bankruptcy. That might not seem like much news: businesses crash and burn all the time. But Achaogen, founded in 2002, was an antibiotics company. Its first drug, Zemdri (plazomicin), was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last June.

The world is running out of useful antibiotics because the rise of antibiotic resistance in bacteria is undermining them, and big firms are disinclined to make more. In 2018 alone, three large legacy pharma firms closed their antibiotic research programs. So the collapse of even a small business that stepped up to make a new antibiotic is a blow.

Achaogen hit all the marks that should have signaled success. It recruited experienced developers, targeted an infection that the World Health Organization considers a critical unmet need, stuck with its compound through 15 years of testing, scored several rounds of public investment and private philanthropy, and got its drug approved. Yet the market didn’t reward the company for producing a new antibiotic: on the day the FDA announced its decision, its stock price actually dropped by 20 percent. Almost a year later, it has earned less than $1 million on the drug, not enough to stay alive.

The larger story of the Achaogen bankruptcy is that the financial structures that sustained antibiotic development for decades are broken. If we want new antibiotics, we’re going to have to find new ways to pay for them. And that will involve hard choices with big dollar signs attached.

Successful drug development relies on an extremely simple assumption. If you spend the industry-standard amounts of time and money to achieve a new drug—generally accepted to be 10 to 15 years and at least $1 billion—you will end up with a product to which you can assign a high enough price, or sell in enough volume, to earn back that R&D budget, reward investors, and turn a profit.

That math works for most of the products of the pharmaceutical industry, from old drugs that people take every day—antidepressants, beta-blockers, statins—to the newest cancer therapiesknown as CAR-T, which can cost almost $500,000 per dose. But antibiotics don’t fit that equation. Unlike cancer drugs, most antibiotics are inexpensive; the few with high price tags are reserved for rare hospital use. And unlike drugs to treat chronic diseases, people take antibiotics for only short periods of time.

There’s another way in which antibiotics are unlike all other categories of drugs. A daily dose of Lipitor causes the world no harm—but every dose of antibiotics poses a risk of encouraging bacteria to adapt and develop resistance. So these new medications are caught in a conundrum: their fiscal promise and their social value are at odds. Public health implicitly asks physicians “to use older drugs as long as possible so that we don't add a new level of resistance,” says Kathy Talkington, who directs the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Antibiotic Resistance Project. “And the other challenge is that antibiotics lose their effectiveness over time” as resistance develops.

Past research by the Pew Trusts has shown that almost all of the companies doing research on new antibiotics—at least 90 percent—are small in pharma terms, with a market capitalization of less than $100 million. More than half are pre-revenue, still working on their first product. They don’t have a built-up infrastructure, or a steady revenue stream, which means they can quickly get overextended. (Achaogen’s last public offering in February, meant to generate three months of emergency cash, offered 15 million shares at $1 each. Its stock price the day before the FDA approval was $12.)

Because this situation is common, the policy conversation around getting new antibiotics has focused on offering support to small companies. So far, that has meant what are called “push” incentives, making grants that fund very early stage research. The largest provider of push incentives is CARB-X, an internationally funded public-private partnership based in Boston that has given more than $100 million to small pharmas since it was launched in 2016.

As it happens, Achaogen got CARB-X money. It also received funds from BARDA, the US government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. These were substantial grants, enough to get the company over the “valley of death” between discovery and commercialization. But they weren’t enough, because it turns out there’s a second deadly valley—after commercialization but before profitability, whenever that arrives.

Which means it’s time to talk about other, more controversial enticements to get more antibiotics on the market. These so-called “pull” incentives (the alternative to push) don’t pay R&D costs up front; instead, they reward R&D done well. Short version: they gift pharma companies huge wads of cash.

Maryn McKenna, ArsTechnica | Read more:
Image: Getty/Bloomberg

Banksy

via:

Robert Cottingham, HA, 1971
via:

Free Speech at Middlebury, Part Two

In recent months, there have been both disturbing and hopeful developments around the barring of non-leftist voices on Western college campuses.

The bans are no longer just on fascist clowns like Milo Yiannopoulos, but on serious scholars. My old professor, Harvey C. Mansfield, a man of profound learning, was invited and then disinvited to Concordia University in Canada to give an address on the role of great books in contemporary education – because of his alleged (and, I can personally vouch, nonexistent) sexism, homophobia, etc., etc. Jordan Peterson was invited and then disinvited by Cambridge to do research for a semester, for roughly the same crimes against “social justice” ideology. Next up: Roger Scruton, perhaps the most profound and persuasive conservative philosopher in the West. He had an unpaid position to advise the British government by chairing an innocuous “Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.” This time, he was fired after an unethically doctored interview was published by the deputy editor of the New Statesman, George Eaton. Eaton marked the occasion of a scholar’s downfall by posting a photo of himself downing a bottle of Champagne.

And then Middlebury. Ah, yes, Middlebury, a fine school that has, in recent years, capitulated to the outrage mob. Middlebury’s latest strike against free discourse is the sudden disinvitation of one professor Ryszard Legutko, a reactionary Polish philosopher and sometime politician, who despises liberal democracy (which you’d think the “social justice” crowd might approve of). Legutko, however, has no time for gay equality or visibility, because of his sincerely held orthodox Christian convictions, but he is nonetheless a serious scholar, specializing in ancient political philosophy, in particular Plato. He was also a hero of the Polish resistance to Communist rule and the editor of a samizdat publication. He was invited to speak at Middlebury, flew across the Atlantic, only to discover as he arrived in Vermont that his talk had been canceled for “safety” reasons.

But the good news is that there are inklings of a pushback. At Middlebury, the students who were planning to protest Legutko were far more liberal than their college administrators: “It is absolutely, unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated,” wrote one of the student organizers. The inspired idea was to create a glorious festival of gay visibility outside the lecture, while Legutko spoke — but not to shut him down, as the mob did with Charles Murray. Perfect.

So when the administrators abruptly canceled the event, the students who wanted to engage Legutko did something remarkable. They asked their political science professor if he would host Legutko in their regular seminar. The invitation was unanimously supported by the students, the professor agreed, and the students spent one hour developing arguments in advance against Legutko, then heard him lecture and tackled him in vigorous debate. There was no “safety” issue whatsoever. In fact, students in other classes migrated to that seminar, the crowd growing as time went by.

After Legutko’s invite, the administration convened an emergency meeting with students. And in another encouraging sign, a rebel student secretly recorded it. Check out his video here and here. You can hear PC students arguing that gay students are too fragile to engage arguments against homosexuality, so distraught by even the idea of it that they could not study anything at all. Seriously. All those pioneering activists for gay equality, who risked their lives and careers for their cause and brought their arguments directly to the face of their opponents, should shudder at the insult.

Legutko, of course, is no stranger to having his speech threatened. In Poland, the Communists did it, with the power of the state. Communist students would berate professors in class with the same arguments against a liberal education that today’s “social justice” activists make. Legutko remembers them: “Why teach Aristotle who despised women and defended slavery? Why teach Plato whom Lenin derided as the author of ‘super-stupid metaphysics of ideas’? Why teach Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was propagating anti-scientific superstition? Why teach Descartes who in his notion of cogito completely ignored the class struggle?”

In America, with the First Amendment, he is far freer. But it’s quite clear that college administrators, following critical race, gender, and queer theory, did all they could to silence him, just as the Polish Communists did. In the same samizdat tape, one professor, responding to the outrage at even inviting Legutko to speak, told the students: “You should be outraged and we should acknowledge that and apologize for it.”

I’ve long believed that at some point students would rebel against their new ideological overlords, like students always have. The desire to learn by engaging uncomfortable arguments rationally has been a deep one in the human psyche, since Socrates was executed for it. It is the root of liberal democracy. It is what universities are for. More and more are deciding to back the Chicago Principles, which guarantee that no speech can be suppressed on campus, within First Amendment limits. Sixty-two other institutions of higher learning have now adopted this principle, and the list is growing. If you’re a student denied a free education by the social-justice fanatics, ask your college administrators if they would agree to sign on.

by Andrew Sullivan, NY Magazine/Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. Stop the madness. Here's another link to the Chicago Principles (pdf).]

The Case Against Lawns

My father, like myself, was never one to cut down a tree. So the longleaf pines that were already there grew, slowly, through their Dr. Seuss-like grass stage, through their pipe-cleaner-esque adolescence, fanning out into gangly young adults, gaining a little bit of girth and height each year. The backyard and one side was pine straw, with spotty patches of failed grass, a small graveyard of the pines. The side yard was mostly the eponymous white sand of the sandhills. We had a yard, including some stunted azaleas and crepe myrtles flanking the immediate three-foot perimeter of the house, but not a lawn. That space made me who I was.

After the neighbors replaced the nearby woods with an oversized house and lawn, annihilating a small ecosystem, the birds at our bird feeder grew fewer and fewer, and their species changed to hardier, more urbane types: sparrows, robins, some cardinals, and an occasional cedar waxwing. To this day, I wonder what happened to the goldfinches. There were plants in that patch of forest; rare plants, like the elusive sandhill lily and the tiny five-petaled blankets of sandhills pixie-moss, that were lost, further endangering these already brow-beaten species found only in this part of the world. Meanwhile, the neighbors’ lawn, like many lawns, introduced plants that we only too late realized had great potential to be invasive, such as Bradford pear and Chinese privet. What is lost to this carelessness cannot be regained. As we build more and more of our houses with lawns, we deprive ourselves of both natural signposts and crucial ecological elements.

The turf grass lawn, more than white-picket-fence Levittown Cape Cods, perhaps even more than the urbanist bugbears of highways and tunnel-vision car travel, renders entire landscapes, entire whole places, homogenous carpets of green. The botanical term for this is monoculture, an ecological system dominated by one plant. It is an extreme situation, one that is, despite numerous horticultural catalogs full of annuals and perennials, limited in its diversity. For all the talk in the suburbs around being closer to nature, the nature in question is both ersatz and an ecological horrorshow.

“Lawns … displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term,” the Roaming Ecologist writes: “no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage.”

Lawns, by acreage, are the nation’s largest irrigated crop, surpassing corn. Lawns consume resources, including fresh water (especially in those lawns cultivated in desert climes), fertilizer, pesticides and other chemicals, fossil fuels for mowing, and a mind-numbing amount of time, on an immense scale. Much hand-wringing goes on about the use of pesticides in industrial farming and the effect it has had on the worldwide population of pollinators, but less about its destructive use in lawn care. Lawns have introduced some of the country’s most invasive species, including English ivy, Japanese and Chinese wisteria, and decorative trees such as princess tree, Bradford pear, and mimosa. Second only to deforestation, invasive species are the largest threat to the world’s biodiversity.

And all this for what?

by Kate Wagner, Curbed |  Read more:

Image: Paige Vickers

Put Aside Your Purity Politics

As the 2020 presidential election draws closer, it’s more important than ever for Democrats to put aside their differences to unite around my feckless centrist candidate. We must remember that this is simply not the time to discuss and debate the merits of each candidate to arrive at a popular consensus pick. That sort of “primarying” isn’t helpful in a primary election, as it will only result in the most popular candidate winning the nomination, which isn’t my feckless centrist.

You might think that the candidate voters select is self-evidently the best candidate to win the general, as they have already proven they have some sort of popular support. But what really wins elections is “electability.” Electability is a perfect metric I invented that rejects flawed models like polling data and past election results and favors the views of myself and other wealthy, white op-ed columnists. Yes, Bernie Sanders consistently polls as the most popular running Democrat, but that’s because most voters don’t understand that he’s not who most voters want. If you want to win elections, you have to listen to me. I know my stuff — you don’t get to where I am without graduating from Rich Kid Legacy Admissions University, interning at the Koch Brothers Institute for Promoting the Agenda of the Koch Brothers, and consulting for several prominent losing candidates.

Sure, it’d be nice to have a leftist in the Oval Office, but in the real world, an extremist wouldn’t stand a chance at becoming president. The American people like moderates. Just ask Jeb Bush, who cruised his way to an easy victory in the 2016 election. It’s what decades of behavioral science has told us — people are perfectly rational animals driven by an innate desire for compromise. It’s why sports fans cheer for good, clean play and games that end in ties. It’s why cereal commercials always have nutritional data front and center, while a voiceover calmly explains the cereal’s pros and cons. Voters don’t want someone championing radical policies that would directly improve their lives. They want a feckless centrist who’s only willing to sputter out vague platitudes for fear of alienating oil executives and white supremacists. That’s the feckless centrism that contributes to the proud American tradition of having one of the lowest voter turnouts among developed democracies!

You need to accept that we both want progress. I want Medicare For All (in a very limited form that will still let me sell prescription drugs at five hundred times the cost) and a Green New Deal (hopefully long after I’m dead and my children have secured their place in their hermetically-sealed bunker). The fact is, you can’t have progress too quickly. Progress doesn’t work like a nuclear bomb that goes off suddenly and changes the world overnight, like when we bombed Hiroshima and eighty thousand people died instantaneously. Real change, lasting change, happens in incremental steps over time. You know how when we bombed Hiroshima, thousands of civilians didn’t die outright, but rather, they were poisoned by radiation, causing constant and severe nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting over the course of a few agonizing, painful weeks, until all of their blood cells deteriorated and their bodies emaciated and died? That’s what progress looks like! (...)

I understand that committing to this feckless centrism isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to hear a lot of purity political talking points this election cycle, like “we must do everything we can to fight climate change,” or “the electoral college doesn’t represent the will of the people and is inherently undemocratic,” or even, “it is morally wrong to put human children in cages.” You might even start to believe these things and imagine that a better world is possible. But just remember the lessons taught to us from all our favorite stories. The hero, when faced with incredible odds, looks deep within herself, musters all her remaining strength, and compromises.

by Matthew Brian Cohen, McSweeny's |  Read more:

[ed. I'd rather go down swinging for the fences. See also: A Rough Transcript of Every Interview With Pete Buttigieg (McSweeny's). Also: Clinton-era politics refuses to die. Joe Biden is its zombie that staggers on (The Guardian).]

Paige Jiyoung Moon, Warm House, 2018
via:

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

midding
v. intr. feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be.

Altschmerz
n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

flashover
n. the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world.

gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows |  Read more:

The Terrifying Potential of the 5G Network

In January, 2018, Robert Spalding, the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, was in his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, when he saw a breaking-news alert on the Axios Web site. “Scoop,” the headline read, “Trump Team Considers Nationalizing 5G Network.” At the time, Spalding, a brigadier general in the Air Force who previously served as a defense attaché in Beijing, had been in the military for nearly three decades. At the N.S.C., he was studying ways to insure that the next generation of Internet connectivity, what is commonly referred to as 5G, can be made secure from cyberattacks. “I wasn’t looking at this from a policy perspective,” he said. “It was about the physics, about what was possible.” To Spalding’s surprise, the Axios story was based on a leaked early draft of a report he’d been working on for the better part of a year.

Two words explain the difference between our current wireless networks and 5G: speed and latency. 5G—if you believe the hype—is expected to be up to a hundred times faster. (A two-hour movie could be downloaded in less than four seconds.) That speed will reduce, and possibly eliminate, the delay—the latency—between instructing a computer to perform a command and its execution. This, again, if you believe the hype, will lead to a whole new Internet of Things, where everything from toasters to dog collars to dialysis pumps to running shoes will be connected. Remote robotic surgery will be routine, the military will develop hypersonic weapons, and autonomous vehicles will cruise safely along smart highways. The claims are extravagant, and the stakes are high. One estimate projects that 5G will pump twelve trillion dollars into the global economy by 2035, and add twenty-two million new jobs in the United States alone. This 5G world, we are told, will usher in a fourth industrial revolution.

A totally connected world will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks. Even before the introduction of 5G networks, hackers have breached the control center of a municipal dam system, stopped an Internet-connected car as it travelled down an interstate, and sabotaged home appliances. Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.”

Spalding’s solution, he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design. Because this would be a massive undertaking, he initially suggested that one option would be for the federal government to pay for it and, essentially, rent it out to the telecom companies. But he had scrapped that idea. A later draft, he said, proposed that the major telecom companies—Verizon, A.T. & T., Sprint, and T-Mobile—form a separate company to build the network together and share it. “It was meant to be a nationwide network,” Spalding told me, not a nationalized one. “They could build this network and then sell bandwidth to their retail customers. That was one idea, but it was never that the government would own the network. It was always about how do we get industry to actually secure the system.”

Even before Spalding began working on his report, the telecom companies were rolling out what they were calling their new 5G services in test markets around the country. In 2017, Verizon announced that it would be introducing 5G in eleven municipalities, including Dallas, Ann Arbor, Miami, and Denver. A.T. & T. was testing its service in a dozen cities. T-Mobile was concentrating on Spokane. For the most part, they were building their new services on top of existing infrastructure—and inheriting its vulnerabilities. As the Clemson University professor Thomas Hazlett told me, “This is just the transitional part. You have various experiments, you do trial in the market, and various deployments take place that lay a pathway to something that will be truly distinguishable from the old systems.”

In the meantime, the carriers jockeyed for position. A lawsuit brought by Sprint and T-Mobile, which was settled on Monday, claimed that A.T. & T.’s 5GE service, where “E” stands for “evolution,” was just 4G by another name. According to Spalding, when the carriers heard that the government was considering “nationalizing” the future of their industry, they quickly mobilized against it. “As I’ve talked to people subsequently, they said they’ve never seen that industry unite so quickly,” Spalding said. “They have such support in government and on the Hill and in the bureaucracy, and they have such a huge lobbying contingent, that it was across the board and swift.” The Axios story came out on a Sunday. The following day, Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, roundly rejected any idea of federalizing the Internet, saying that “the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment.” By Wednesday, Spalding was out of a job. “There was no ‘Hey, thank you for your service,’ ” Spalding told me. “It was just, ‘Get out. Don’t let the door hit your butt.’ ”

Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer of consumer electronics and telecommunications equipment, is currently the global leader in 5G technology. Founded in the eighties by Ren Zhegfei, an engineer who began his career in the People’s Liberation Army, Huawei has been accused by cybersecurity experts and politicians, most notably Donald Trump, of being a conduit to Chinese intelligence. (...)

There are very good reasons to keep a company that appears to be beholden to a government with a documented history of industrial cyber espionage, international data theft, and domestic spying out of global digital networks. But banning Huawei hardware will not secure those networks. Even in the absence of Huawei equipment, systems still may rely on software developed in China, and software can be reprogrammed remotely by malicious actors. And every device connected to the fifth-generation Internet will likely remain susceptible to hacking. According to James Baker, the former F.B.I. general counsel who runs the national-security program at the R Street Institute, “There’s a concern that those devices that are connected to the 5G network are not going to be very secure from a cyber perspective. That presents a huge vulnerability for the system, because those devices can be turned into bots, for example, and you can have a massive botnet that can be used to attack different parts of the network.”

This past January, Tom Wheeler, who was the F.C.C. chairman during the Obama Administration, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?” The Trump Administration had walked away from security efforts begun during Wheeler’s tenure at the F.C.C.; most notably, in recent negotiations over international standards, the U.S. eliminated a requirement that the technical specifications of 5G include cyber defense. “For the first time in history,” Wheeler wrote, “cybersecurity was being required as a forethought in the design of a new network standard—until the Trump F.C.C. repealed it.” The agency also rejected the notion that companies building and running American digital networks were responsible for overseeing their security. This might have been expected, but the current F.C.C. does not consider cybersecurity to be a part of its domain, either. “I certainly did when we were in office,” Wheeler told me. “But the Republicans who were on the commission at that point in time, and are still there, one being the chairman, opposed those activities as being overly regulatory.” (...)

In October, Trump signed a memorandum on “Developing a Sustainable Spectrum Strategy for America’s Future.” A few weeks later, the F.C.C. auctioned off new swaths of the electromagnetic radio spectrum. (There was another auction last month, with more scheduled for later this year.) Opening up new spectrum is crucial to achieving the super-fast speeds promised by 5G. Most American carriers are planning to migrate their services to a higher part of the spectrum, where the bands are big and broad and allow for colossal rivers of data to flow through them. (Some carriers are also working with lower spectrum frequencies, where the speeds will not be as fast but likely more reliable.) Until recently, these high-frequency bands, which are called millimetre waves, were not available for Internet transmission, but advances in antenna technology have made it possible, at least in theory. In practice, millimetre waves are finicky: they can only travel short distances—about a thousand feet—and are impeded by walls, foliage, human bodies, and, apparently, rain.

To accommodate these limitations, 5G cellular relays will have to be installed inside buildings and on every city block, at least. Cell relays mounted on thirteen million utility poles, for example, will deliver 5G speeds to just over half of the American population, and cost around four hundred billion dollars to install. Rural communities will be out of luck—too many trees, too few people—despite the F.C.C.’s recently announced Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. According to Blair Levin, a communications analyst and former F.C.C. chief of staff in the Clinton Administration, the fund “has nothing to do with 5G.” Rather, it will subsidize companies to lay fibre-optic cable that, minimally, will provide speeds forty times slower than what 5G promises.

Deploying millions of wireless relays so close to each other and, therefore, to our bodies has elicited its own concerns. Two years ago, a hundred and eighty scientists and doctors from thirty-six countries appealed to the European Union for a moratorium on 5G adoption until the effects of the expected increase in low-level radiation were studied. In February, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, took both the F.C.C. and F.D.A. to task for pushing ahead with 5G without assessing its health risks. “We’re kind of flying blind here,” he concluded. A system built on millions of cell relays, antennas, and sensors also offers previously unthinkable surveillance potential. Telecom companies already sell location data to marketers, and law enforcement has used similar data to track protesters. 5G will catalogue exactly where someone has come from, where they are going, and what they are doing. “To give one made-up example,” Steve Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University, told the Wall Street Journal, “might a pollution sensor detect cigarette smoke or vaping, while a Bluetooth receiver picks up the identities of nearby phones? Insurance companies might be interested.” Paired with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the data streams and location capabilities of 5G will make anonymity a historical artifact.

by Sue Halpern, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg/Getty