What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?

As culture evolves, it becomes ever more difficult to answer the question “What is art?” If you spill spaghetti sauce, is that a painting? Does a squeaky floor count as a song? If you say, “You, too,” when a T.S.A. agent says, “Safe travels,” is that a comedy-inflected performance piece?

Writing is among the art forms most difficult to define, most complicated to pin down, most synonym to yet another synonym. Fortunately, I have developed a helpful guide for the next time you find yourself asking, “Is the thing I have just done technically writing?” (Spoiler: the answer, almost always, is yes.)

• Writing is when you rearrange your pencils on a table until the café closes.

• Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.

• You can tell that someone is a writer because she’ll have a pencil behind her ear, a Moleskine notebook in her hand, a pen behind her other ear, coffee on her breath and shirt, eyes that beg for your approval, and a Sharpie she’s somehow hidden in her hair. (...)

• You officially become a writer when you own more than one laptop sticker. (If the first sticker is from a local NPR station, just the one will do.)

• A key sign of writing is letters happening in a specific order. If you can read the letters, that’s prose. If the letters are a little jumbled, that’s poetry. If the letters are grouped in threes with other symbols, that’s actually a pay phone which, if you think about it, is kind of spoken-word writing.

by Mia Mercado, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Iya Forbes / Getty

Squirrel King

The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. The intersection wasn’t particularly busy. It was, however, just tree-lined enough, and the neighborhood drivers just careless enough, that more than a few quiet afternoons were shattered by wrecks outside. Each time we heard squealing tires and crashing metal, Mom dutifully called 911 and then rushed to help. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.

Roadkill on our neighborhood’s streets was ever-present. Dad joked about free dinner. Mom insisted we keep the family dog away. She was always looking out for our safety and well-being. Sometimes this meant protective hugs, like after the time a bigger kid sat on me while eating a Klondike Bar. Sometimes this meant harsh words, like when I threw myself out of a moving car. And sometimes this meant saying nothing at all. But it definitely meant keeping us from playing with the street’s dead animals, especially the Squirrel King.

When I was nine, His Bushy-Tailed Majesty, the ruler of the Acorn Throne, was struck down immediately in front of our home. He must’ve been leading a crusade, because his fallen body, smooshed flat against the pavement, was surrounded by a host of chittering companions, a retinue of brave knights. Compared to them, he was huge. And more than that, he was getting treatment I’d never before seen. Staring wide-eyed out our front window, I spied a secret and sacred squirrel-rite: Royal Mourning.

The Squirrel King’s funeral wasn’t the first I attended, though it was the most frenetic. After my childhood friend Caleb was killed by a drunk driver, we stood quietly in church, our bodies nearly as still as his. When it was time to go, I begged to stay near his casket awhile longer, believing he was somehow more alive the longer I remained. The Squirrel King’s mourners had no such illusions: they’d rush into the street, pressing their bodies prone just like their King’s, and after a few moments’ pause, they’d scurry away, into the nearby trees. Soon others would take their place, lying flat to pay their respects before running away, too.

Mom eventually joined me at the window. Together we watched the squirrels grieve their lost leader, me providing enthusiastic commentary and squirrely speculation, her standing behind me quietly. After a few minutes, she gave me a tight squeeze, pulled us away, and said it was time for grocery shopping. I spent most of our trip wondering aloud at the splendors we’d seen. Squirrels must’ve been coming from across the city just to visit our street. Who’d known we’d had such an important resident in the leaves above.

by Steven A. Miller, Guernica |  Read more:
Image: Anne Le Guern
[ed. Happy Mother's Day.]

Hooligan Return to Cook Inlet Waters

Hooligan return to Cook Inlet waters (ADN)

[ed. One of my favorite rites of spring. A couple sandwiches, a few beers, sun, beautiful scenery, eagles, seals, beluga whales. I gave all my fish to friends because I didn't much care for the taste - a strong oily flavor, even after frying, smoking, baking, stewing and just about every other kind of prep you can think of. Not even spaghetti sauce or halibut bait, but a lot of people really like them. Just nice to be out after a long cooped-up winter.] 

Summer Bummer: A Young Camper’s $142,938 Snakebite

It was dusk as Oakley Yoder and the other summer camp kids hiked back to their tents at Illinois’ Jackson Falls last July. As the group approached a mound of boulders blocking the path, Oakley, then 9, didn’t see the lurking snake — until it bit a toe on her right foot.

“I was really scared,” Oakley said. “I thought that I could either get paralyzed or could actually die.”

Her camp counselors suspected it was a copperhead and knew they needed to get her medical attention as soon as they could. They had to keep her as calm and motionless as possible — the venom could circulate more quickly if her heart raced from activity or fear.

One counselor gave her a piggyback ride to a van. Others distracted her with Taylor Swift songs and candy as the van sped from their location in a beautiful but remote part of the Shawnee National Forest toward help.

First responders met them and recommended Oakley be taken by air ambulance to a hospital.

The helicopter flight transported Oakley 80 miles from a school parking lot just outside the forest to St. Vincent Evansville hospital in Indiana, where she received four vials of antivenin and was then transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis for observation.

Her parents, Josh Perry and Shelli Yoder, were already in bed that night when they got the call about what had happened to Oakley. They jumped in the car and arrived at Riley about two hours before their daughter. Once she made it, doctors closely observed her condition, her toe still oozing and bruised. By lunchtime, Perry said, physicians reassured the parents that Oakley would be OK.

“It was a major comfort for me to realize, OK, we’re getting the best care possible,” said Perry, who is a health care ethics professor at the business school at Indiana University Bloomington. Less than 24 hours after the bite, Oakley left the hospital with her grateful parents.

Then the bills came.

Patient: Oakley Yoder, now 10, of Bloomington, Ind. Insured through Indiana University Bloomington, where her father and mother work as faculty.

Total Bill: $142,938, including $67,957 for four vials of antivenin. ($55,577.64 was charged for air ambulance transport.) The balance included a ground ambulance charge and additional hospital and physician charges, according to the family’s insurer, IU Health Plans.

Service Providers: St. Vincent Evansville hospital, part of Ascension, a nonprofit Catholic health system. Riley Hospital for Children, part of Indiana University Health, a nonprofit health system. Air Evac Lifeteam, an air ambulance provider.

Medical Service: The essential part of Oakley’s treatment involved giving her four vials of snake antivenin called CroFab.

What Gives: When bitten by a venomous snake, there is no time to waste. If left untreated, a venomous bite can cause tissue damage, hemorrhaging and respiratory arrest. Children tend to experience more severe effects because of their relatively small size.

CroFab has dominated the U.S. market for snake antivenin since its approval in 2000. When Oakley was bitten, it was the only drug available to treat venomous bites from pit vipers. (Oakley probably was bitten by a copperhead snake, a type of pit viper, the camp directors told her parents.)

In short, the drugmaker, London-based BTG Plc, essentially had a monopoly.

The average list price for CroFab is $3,198 per vial, according to the health care information tech company Connecture. Manufacturing costs, product improvements and research all factor into the drug’s price, said Chris Sampson, spokesman for BTG.

by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez, Kaiser Health News | Read more:
Image: Chris Bergen
[ed. See also (from the comments): I am the director of The Rattlesnake Conservancy. We are thrilled that you are covering snakebites and educating people without fear-mongering (“Bill Of The Month: Summer Bummer: A Young Camper’s $142,938 Snakebite,” April 30). However, I am concerned that in the radio report on NPR your team mentioned the young lady used a tourniquet and did not mention how dangerous that can be. Many snakebite experts agree that using a tourniquet is dangerous, leading to potentially life-threatening consequences when the tourniquet is removed. Absent loss of life, it also leads to venom accumulation in the limb and significant tissue damage. The best course of action is immobilizing the affected limb and emergency care as soon as possible. No snakebite kits, tourniquets or other devices will help. The only effective treatment for snakebite is antivenom.

The Facebook group “National Snakebite Support” is a crucial tool for anyone who may have been envenomated. The group is staffed by the United States’ top venom specialists and snakebite medical doctors. Their team quickly responds to patients and will communicate with hospital staff on behalf of a patient as needed.

That being said, remember that venom has saved more lives than it has taken. Many medications, including several for blood pressure, arterial clotting and experimental medications, are developed from venomous snakes. For more information, check out our website.

— Anthony Daly-Crews, Buckeye, Ariz.

Flora Borsi, Selfie
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The Gut Doctor

A mysterious gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out “this vegetable” now. But, like, which? A journey through internet garbage.

There is a gut doctor, and he begs Americans: “Throw out this vegetable now.” This news is accompanied by a different image nearly every time. This morning, the plea appeared at the bottom of an article on Vox next to a photo of a hand chopping up what appears to be a pile of green apples. At other times, it has been paired with a picture of a petri dish with a worm in it. Other times, gut bacteria giving off electricity. The inside of a lotus root. An illustrated rendering of roundworms.

The gut doctor’s desperation pops up over and over, on websites like CNN and the Atlantic (and as I said, this one), in what are known colloquially as “chumboxes.” These are the boxes at the bottom of the page that have several pieces of clickbaity “sponsored content” or “suggested reading.” They’re generated by a variety of companies, but the largest two are Taboola ($160 million in funding) and Outbrain ($194 million in funding), both founded in Israel in the mid-aughts.

What is the point of a chumbox, and why would it be called that?

Chumbox is a sort of gross fishing reference, chum being the tiny fish that fishers use as bait to catch larger fish. Before the word came into the lexicon, Casey Newton explained the purpose of these boxes for The Verge in 2014:

Outbrain, Taboola, and their peers have a simple pitch for the sites they work with: add our modules to your site for free, with just a few lines of code, and start making money immediately from the traffic you deliver to paying partners. “Our whole pitch to publishers is a no-brainer,” LaCour says. Adam Singolda, co-founder and CEO of Taboola, says top journalistic outlets are making more than $10 million a year adding its modules to their sites — significant revenues in an industry still struggling to find its footing online.

The shift happened after publications realized that they weren’t making enough money from banner ads (which have dismal click-through rates of around one-tenth of a percent) and before they started cutting deals directly with large tech platforms like Facebook and Google to serve their content to broader audiences and try to wring out some revenue.

In 2015, John Mahoney coined the term and wrote a widely cited “taxonomy” of chumbox content for the Awl. The content types he identified:

• Sexy Thing (e.g., hot singles in your area, “your area” determined using your IP address)
• Localized Rule (e.g., some change in your city’s parking meter system, ditto)
• Deeply Psychological Body Thing
• Celeb Thing
• Old Person’s Face
• Skin Thing
• Miracle Cure Thing
• Weird Tattoo
• Implied Vaginal or Other Bodily Opening
• Disgusting Invertebrates or Globular Masses
• Extreme Weight Loss Thing
• Money Thing
• Wine
• Oozing Food

The gut doctor fits into several of these categories, depending on the image he’s paired with. He is always a Miracle Cure Thing and he is often also a Disgusting Invertebrates thing. He is sometimes a Deeply Psychological Body Thing, or Oozing Food.

By 2016, 41 of the top 50 news sites used these modules as a revenue source. Reply All co-host Alex Goldman visited Taboola’s New York offices in June 2018, where he met CEO and founder Adam Singolda. Singolda informed him that he had never heard the term “chumbox,” and that he did not like the word “ads,” but that Taboola serves about 20 billion “recommendations” per day.

by Kaitlyn Tiffany, Vox | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Charlotte Knox
via:
[ed. I like third guy, he seems the happiest. Weird stripes and all.]

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Murder Insurance

The National Rifle Association emerged from its annual convention last week with a veneer of stability.

Its leader Wayne LaPierre managed to quash a takeover attempt by now-ousted President Oliver North, winning reelection as executive vice president in a unanimous vote of top board members.

But beneath the surface, the organization is in turmoil. New York Attorney General Letitia James is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into alleged financial mismanagement at the NRA, while the group is embroiled in a messy lawsuit with its longtime image-maker, Ackerman McQueen. The NRA sued the Oklahoma City-based ad firm last month to get documents as part of an apparent internal investigation into whether the firm has been siphoning money out of the gun lobby, allegations that Ackerman denies.

Then there’s Carry Guard. The program — which offers combat training and liability insurance for shootings carried out in “self-defense” — was founded in 2017 to keep money flowing into the NRA’s dwindling coffers after President Trump’s surprise election left gun owners assured that, for the time being, at least, no “jack-booted”government officials were coming for their firearms.

Instead, Carry Guard has become a financial liability of its own. Multiple states have banned the program and are investigating whether the NRA violated state law regarding the marketing and sale of insurance. In a lawsuit against Lockton, Carry Guard’s administrator, the NRA alleged it lost “tens of millions of dollars” from the program after relying on assurances that Lockton was complying with state law. Numerous NRA members took issue with the program’s “sloppy” rollout.

Gun control advocates even gave Carry Guard a nickname: “murder insurance.”

Rather than help the NRA shore up its finances, Carry Guard has become a symbol of the unprecedented public relations and legal woes plaguing the nation’s largest gun group. (...)

From the NRA’s perspective, Carry Guard had real potential to be lucrative. Like many affinity groups, the NRA had long offered various forms of insurance to members, former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman told TPM.

Feldman called insurance sales a tremendous source of revenue for the NRA over the years, but that, under LaPierre’s watch, the drive to earn a profit off them was taken “to the extreme.”

LaPierre had “turned the NRA into a business,” he added.

NRA members — and numerous stories from The Trace — refer to Carry Guard as the “brainchild” of NRA member Josh Powell. Brought on as NRA chief of staff in 2016 from the world of high-end outdoor garments, Powell reportedly “billed” the program “as an integral part of securing the NRA’s finances well into the future,” a source “close to the NRA” told The Trace.

Court filings indicate that Powell began serious preparation on Carry Guard in late 2016. The final version of the product offered four tiers of protection, from a bronze plan providing $250,000 in protection from civil lawsuits and another $50,000 in criminal defense to gold plus, with $1.5 million in civil protection and an extra $250,000 for criminal defense.

The Trace quoted a former Ackerman McQueen employee as saying that “Carry Guard was pushed to the front after the election because they needed money.”

But the project appears to have failed in that task. Between 2016 and December 2018, when Powell was shifted to a new role handling legal strategy for the various lawsuits entangling Carry Guard, the NRA lost some $55 million in income, according to The Trace.

That period saw internal dissent over the program, with some NRA members seeing it as a potential scam, according to interviews with NRA members and publicly available posts.

Carry Guard’s liability insurance component only kicks in for criminal cases after an acquittal. Individual Carry Guard customers would have to cover the hefty costs of criminal defense out of pocket until they were acquitted, leading to accusations within the firearms community that the NRA was luring people into paying for a service unlikely to help them during the most expensive and consequential phase of liability.

by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Friends of the Pod

Every day we find news to be online. One man’s refrigerator texts him alerts about a coolant error. Another’s baby monitor sends photos of his child in night vision. People wielding phones chase apparitions in the park — Pokémon Go, a layer of childhood pixel monsters draped over physical reality — streaming trails of data behind them. There are tablets at the airport, browsers in rental cars. No screens yet on the subway, we think, and examine print ads for a chat-based pharmacy. But then, as if summoned, the screens appear! It’s our stop, crumbling and dirty as ever, newly outfitted with luminous displays shilling an expanding internet of things. Out on the street, a row of boxy storefronts displays the same pastel objects that have been following us around the social networks via tracker pixel. It’s as if the Instagram square has leapt from the screen. We look around, do a double take. Is this the internet, too?

We accept it, we guess. We like the internet. And really, we’d be online all the time if it weren’t for our eyes, those sensitive organs. Sidewalks fill with blue-light protection ads (on screens, of course) while we wait for our phones to learn to track eyestrain. In the meantime, we tear ourselves away to do the laundry and wash dishes, to drive to the grocery store or navigate on foot via . . . our screens. These activities demand the attention of our eyes and hands, for now. But we still have ears and mouths. Alexa! Play the Goldberg Variations. Actually, no — play the Song Exploder episode about Fleetwood Mac!

This is why we love podcasts: they are the internet for our ears. Now we can be on the internet all the time.

Every corner of the internet has its corresponding podcast. We can’t read left Twitter when assembling Ikea furniture — at least, it’s not in the instructions — but we can listen to The Dig’s deep dive on The Eighteenth Brumaire. Reading the New York Times while attempting Times recipes isn’t recommended, but those who want the Gesamtkunstwerk experience can queue up The Daily. If all you watch on TV is basketball and Top Chef, you can listen to a podcast about Top Chef hosted by two basketball journalists. Or say, just hypothetically, you fell off your bike trying to take a selfie, concussing yourself, and the doctor said not to watch anything on a screen, not even Making a Murderer. Luckily for you, podcasters love murder. A woman we know just posted on Facebook, “FAVORITE MURDER PODCASTS??” and the recs go on for days. The gray ellipsis is still bouncing.

Listening to podcasts is a soothing kind of saturation, like ASMR, if you replaced the crinkly sounds and sensuous whispering with reedy-voiced dudes and cool girls with vocal fry. It’s hard to get riled up by a podcast, when the hosts are inarticulate and the episodes run over an hour. Done right, what the medium encourages is binge listening: each episode, a smooth little capsule, perfectly self-contained, can be popped one after another. The overall effect is pacification, a balm for burnout. As we fall asleep to podcasts and extend our time online into the first REM cycle, their murmuring voices drift into our dreams. There are words in our heads — thoughts, opinions — but for once, they’re not our own.

With your precious metal parasite humming happily in your hand, the only thing stopping you from listening to a podcast is you. Just plug in, pick the show, and play it: there’s no flipping through stations, no snatches of song or prayer, no scraps of news, and no chance you’ll settle on something without knowing what it is. There’s nothing intrusive, accidental, surprising — no static, no interference — and it’ll cut out all the other unwanted noise of life, too. An unbroken stream of sound, a stealth multitasking machine, the podcast has no natural predators. The only interruptions are the ads, but we don’t mind them. They’re for the same five free-delivery, life-in-a-box, order-from-your-phone services we stare at on the subway anyway.

Above all, podcasts make us feel less lonely. We tell ourselves offer codes in order to live. They simulate intimacy just enough to make us feel like we’re in a room with other people, or at least near the room . . . definitely in the same city as the room. But these people with podcasts are so much sharper than us, so at home in their corners of the world, with easy command of their respective bodies of pop-culture knowledge. The appropriate response is fandom. Coughing up $5 on Patreon feels like paying the cover at a dive for our local band, and we’re pleased to be part of something. Some podcasts even do live appearances, for which we might buy tickets. Listening to our heroes’ once intimate voices on a booming sound system, though, surrounded by a thousand fanboys, feels like a betrayal. We thought we had something special, with their voices so close to our ears. Podcasts were the first medium designed to be listened to primarily on headphones, by a single person. Hell is other listeners.

Actually, hell is other fans — specifically, fans of podcasts we don’t listen to. People give each other recommendations, barely better than the algorithm’s, and describe it as “discovery.” “You have to check out Pod Save America,” we hear a journalism student say to a barista. A rookie error, to admit to not listening; once you do, you’ve brought the proselytizing upon yourself. By now we have learned to lie, just like we learned to lie about watching Six Feet Under. Of course we love 99% Invisible! That episode about the artists squatting in a room accidentally built into the mall? So good. Back when we were honest, we suffered more.

Maybe we were better off with loneliness. In that meme “How It Feels to Listen to Podcasts,” three laughing friends eat sundaes in a brightly colored ad while our IRL stand-in laughs along beside it, a bowl of ice cream slowly melting in his hand. Is that us? Podcast hosts are the friends we think we love hanging out with but whom we suspect don’t love us back. You know the types. There are the explainers, at the start of the party, who corner us at the drink table to talk about blockchain-transferred solar power and the fine points of cosmetic dentistry. There are the recappers and decanters, who narrate TV episodes at length, spinning their theories and dispensing gossip. Over on the couch are the nihilist shitposters, politically incoherent but reliably mean about other people’s outfits, and the endearing deadbeats who record from their closets. Standing up straight, beers in hand, are the professionals: producers and reporters who either work for NPR or migrated from the once stable profession of print journalism. They’re talking to the big-name comedians, who invited — ugh — the storytellers. Holding forth by the door is the human-interest host, a descendant of congested Third Coast favorites like Ira Glass, and his rival, the stoner MMA fanatic whose favorite website is a tie between Pornhub and the Wikipedia page for the singularity. Then there are our favorites, the charismatic weirdos: people we like for no reason, people who are just good at talking. Maybe not even good. Maybe just talking.

Did we actually learn anything useful from these people, or just suffer through for a moment of company? Did we stay for that little high of accruing knowledge, however thin? At least now we’re armed with a collection of blithe anecdotes, prepped for retelling. At the next party we can all just talk about what we heard on this week’s podcasts. It doesn’t matter if we remember what they say, or if it’s all nonsense. This is friendship.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Zimoun, 25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system. 2009

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[ed. Pretty clever.]

How Chinese Spies Got the N.S.A.’s Hacking Tools, and Used Them for Attacks

Chinese intelligence agents acquired National Security Agency hacking tools and repurposed them in 2016 to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia, a leading cybersecurity firm has discovered. The episode is the latest evidence that the United States has lost control of key parts of its cybersecurity arsenal.

Based on the timing of the attacks and clues in the computer code, researchers with the firm Symantec believe the Chinese did not steal the code but captured it from an N.S.A. attack on their own computers — like a gunslinger who grabs an enemy’s rifle and starts blasting away.

The Chinese action shows how proliferating cyberconflict is creating a digital wild West with few rules or certainties, and how difficult it is for the United States to keep track of the malware it uses to break into foreign networks and attack adversaries’ infrastructure.

The losses have touched off a debate within the intelligence community over whether the United States should continue to develop some of the world’s most high-tech, stealthy cyberweapons if it is unable to keep them under lock and key.

The Chinese hacking group that co-opted the N.S.A.’s tools is considered by the agency’s analysts to be among the most dangerous Chinese contractors it tracks, according to a classified agency memo reviewed by The New York Times. The group is responsible for numerous attacks on some of the most sensitive defense targets inside the United States, including space, satellite and nuclear propulsion technology makers.

Now, Symantec’s discovery, unveiled on Monday, suggests that the same Chinese hackers the agency has trailed for more than a decade have turned the tables on the agency.

Some of the same N.S.A. hacking tools acquired by the Chinese were later dumped on the internet by a still-unidentified group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers and used by Russia and North Korea in devastating global attacks, although there appears to be no connection between China’s acquisition of the American cyberweapons and the Shadow Brokers’ later revelations.

But Symantec’s discovery provides the first evidence that Chinese state-sponsored hackers acquired some of the tools months before the Shadow Brokers first appeared on the internet in August 2016.

Repeatedly over the past decade, American intelligence agencies have had their hacking tools and details about highly classified cybersecurity programs resurface in the hands of other nations or criminal groups.

The N.S.A. used sophisticated malware to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges — and then saw the same code proliferate around the world, doing damage to random targets, including American business giants like Chevron. Details of secret American cybersecurity programs were disclosed to journalists by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor now living in exile in Moscow. A collection of C.I.A. cyberweapons, allegedly leaked by an insider, was posted on WikiLeaks.

“We’ve learned that you cannot guarantee your tools will not get leaked and used against you and your allies,” said Eric Chien, a security director at Symantec.

Now that nation-state cyberweapons have been leaked, hacked and repurposed by American adversaries, Mr. Chien added, it is high time that nation states “bake that into” their analysis of the risk of using cyberweapons — and the very real possibility they will be reassembled and shot back at the United States or its allies. (...)

For American intelligence agencies, Symantec’s discovery presents a kind of worst-case scenario that United States officials have said they try to avoid using a White House program known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

Under that process, started in the Obama administration, a White House cybersecurity coordinator and representatives from various government agencies weigh the trade-offs of keeping the American stockpile of undisclosed vulnerabilities secret. Representatives debate the stockpiling of those vulnerabilities for intelligence gathering or military use against the very real risk that they could be discovered by an adversary like the Chinese and used to hack Americans.

The Shadow Brokers’ release of the N.S.A.’s most highly coveted hacking tools in 2016 and 2017 forced the agency to turn over its arsenal of software vulnerabilities to Microsoft for patching and to shut down some of the N.S.A.’s most sensitive counterterrorism operations, two former N.S.A. employees said.

The N.S.A.’s tools were picked up by North Korean and Russian hackers and used for attacks that crippled the British health care system, shut down operations at the shipping corporation Maersk and cut short critical supplies of a vaccine manufactured by Merck. In Ukraine, the Russian attacks paralyzed critical Ukrainian services, including the airport, Postal Service, gas stations and A.T.M.s.

“None of the decisions that go into the process are risk free. That’s just not the nature of how these things work,” said Michael Daniel, the president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, who previously was cybersecurity coordinator for the Obama administration. “But this clearly reinforces the need to have a thoughtful process that involves lots of different equities and is updated frequently.”

by Nicole Perlroth, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michal Czerwonka for The New York Times

Zillow Wants to Buy Your House

In today’s on-demand digital world, buying and selling a home remains stubbornly, painfully analog. Most sales still begin with a real estate agent (and a 6 percent commission). Most still end in an office, with the two sides signing page after page of legalese.

Silicon Valley wants to change that. Tech companies have begun to nibble away at the edges of the residential real estate industry, offering virtual open houses, digital closings and other services. Now they are coming straight for the real estate transaction itself through “instant buying,” in which companies buy homes, perform some light maintenance and put them back on the market.

Established companies like Zillow and venture-backed upstarts like Opendoor and Offerpad have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can use sophisticated algorithms to predict the value of individual homes. They contend that those predictions, combined with old-fashioned economies of scale, will allow them to be far more efficient than traditional home flippers.

The companies and their backers say they are doing what tech is best at: bringing efficiency and convenience to a process not known for either. Silicon Valley has already upended the way we hail a cab and order takeout, they argue. Why not improve a transaction that even well-educated professionals find intimidating?

“You should be able to sell a home within a handful of clicks,” said Eric Wu, Opendoor’s chief executive.

But houses are not taxicabs. A bad Uber ride might set a user back $20 and make her late for a meeting. A house is the largest asset for most Americans and the most expensive purchase they will ever make.

At best, skeptics see instant buying, also known as “iBuying,” as an overhyped, capital-intensive business whose explosive growth will fizzle once investors tire of profit margins that Zillow itself calls “razor thin.” At worst, they worry that it could bring volatility and risk to an industry that has already brought down the American economy once this century. (...)

Instant buying is a small part of the market, but it is growing at breakneck speed. Zillow bought fewer than 700 homes in 2018; it expects to be buying 5,000 homes per month in three to five years. Opendoor, the first big iBuyer, bought more than 11,000 homes last year and in the past year has raised more than $1 billion to step up its pace.

The companies typically aim to hold homes for 90 days or less before selling them, typically to an individual buyer. For the eventual owner, little changes about the process.

by Ben Casselman and Conor Dougherty, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

How 'I Got a Plan' Became a Thing

Warren Nerds Out and the Crowds Go Crazy

The Twitter exchange played out over several hours on April 11: “Many profitable companies pay nothing in corporate income tax. Elizabeth Warren has a plan to stop that,” Vox wrote, linking to one of its wonky explainers. “You bet I do,” Warren tweeted back.

Then a woman named Keely Murphy — a self-described bookworm, space enthusiast and feminist — replied back to the Massachusetts senator: “I would certainly buy a shirt that said ‘Elizabeth Warren: She’s Got a Plan for That.’”

Within days, the tweet — along with many others the campaign had been noticing expressing unbridled enthusiasm for Warren’s policy-heavy approach to her presidential candidacy — prompted the campaign to embrace the nerd-tastic meme. “I got a plan” has become a staple of her stump speech, often drawing loud applause. And Warren fans like Murphy can now purchase “Warren has a plan for that” T-shirts and tote bags from her website.

The bottom-up evolution of the slogan is a source of encouragement for the Warren campaign, perhaps a sign that the former Harvard professor’s policy-heavy bid is breaking through. Since January, she’s rolled out plans to break up tech companies, forgive over $600 billion in student loan debt, enact a 2 percent wealth tax, provide universal child care and more — lapping the Democratic field on both the volume and scope of policy proposals.

She regularly goes into the weeds when taking questions at town halls and sometimes cautions voters that she’s going to “nerd out” for a bit. Some of her supporters see the approach as a way to distinguish her as a heavyweight in a crowded 2020 field. And Warren’s embrace of “I got a plan” has coincided with a rise in her poll numbers over the past two weeks.

Some Democrats say it’s unclear whether voters will ultimately care about the policy rollouts. They point out that Hillary Clinton also had a well-staffed policy shop and that the flood of white papers didn’t always resonate with voters.

But for now, at least, Warren and her campaign think they might be on to something.

by Alex Thompson, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
[ed. Imagine... running a campaign based on detailed policies (instead of slogans, generalities, vague 'ideas' and aspirations) then being criticized for being too "nerdy". See also: A Guide to Elizabeth Warren’s (Many) 2020 Policy Proposals (The Cut).]

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The Fish Leather Pioneers

"The first 200 times we just made smelly fish soups," she says.

Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir is the sales manager of Icelandic company Atlantic Leather, which owns the only fish tannery in Europe.

Overlooking a fjord on Iceland's remote north coast, since 1994 it has been processing the skins of salmon, perch, cod and wolffish.

The tanning process takes between three and four weeks, and 19 employees now produce 10,000 skins, or nearly a tonne, of fish leather a month.

"The fish smell disappears in the early stages, then it smells like any other leather," adds Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir, who is the daughter of the founders.

The company gets all its fish from sustainable stocks, via Icelandic, Norwegian and Faroe Island fishing fleets, and unlike the worst examples in the global cow leather industry its tanning process is as environmentally friendly as possible.

The operation runs off geothermal energy, which is prevalent in Iceland, and the firm has equipment that enables it to re-use every drop of water between eight and nine times in the production process.

Atlantic Leather also uses natural, non-polluting dyes. The price of its leather varies depending on the fish, but the salmon skins sell for $12 (£9) a square foot.

Now supplying top European fashion houses Jimmy Choo, Dior and Ferragamo, Ms Gunnsteinsdóttir says it is a misconception that fish leather must be delicate and easy to tear.

"Fish leather's actually nine times stronger than lamb or cow leather of similar thickness," she says.

"This is because the fibres in fish skin criss-cross rather than just up and down... it makes it much more durable leather for products that have to be really strong like shoes, belts and bags."

by Beth Timmins, BBC | Read more:
Image: Atlantic Leather

Netflix and Suicide

Netflix’s teen drama “13 Reasons Why” was born in controversy. The show, based on a novel by Jay Asher, from 2007, follows the suicide of a high-school girl named Hannah Baker, who recorded tapes that explain her decision to take her life. At the time of the show’s release, a host of commentators, from individual suicide survivors to the National Association of School Psychologists, pointed out that a wide array of studies has linked portrayals of suicide in the media to increases in the suicide rate. Before the show’s première, in 2017, Netflix contacted, among others, Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, whose advice was to not release the series. “But that wasn’t an option. That was made very clear to me,” he said at the time. Netflix responded to the controversy surrounding the release of the show with bromides: “Entertainment has always been the ultimate connector and we hope that ‘13 Reasons Why’ can serve as a catalyst for conversation.” On April 29th of this year, the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published a report, by the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided evidence that the experts were right and Netflix was wrong.

The study stated that “13 Reasons Why” was “associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the show’s release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates.” An association is not, of course, the same thing as causality. Suicide is a vastly complex phenomenon. A study from the University of Pennsylvania, published a week earlier, showed that suicide risk decreased for students who watched “13 Reasons Why” all the way to the end of Season 2. (Students who stopped in the middle were at a higher risk for suicide.) There were other events—such as the suicide of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, in May, 2017—that may have contributed to the spike. The study’s press release also notes that the researchers could not rule out that other, unmeasured events could have had an effect on the elevated rates, and that the increase in the suicide rate began the month before the series premièred.

Nonetheless, for anyone who studies the effects of mass media, a rise in the suicide rate following the release of “13 Reasons Why”—and during the marketing push that preceded it—would not be surprising. Our understanding of the interaction between pop culture and real-world consequences is fraught with lazy assumptions and fearmongering, and the best research is never utterly conclusive, but suicide is mostly an exception to this state of confusion. Suicide contagion has been observed for centuries. A notable example provides the basis for the famous Werther effect; in 1774, a rash of suicides followed the publication of Goethe’s novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” (The novel “13 Reasons Why” was the most banned book in American schools for the year 2017, according to the American Library Association, for exactly this reason.) More recently, other studies have suggested that news coverage of suicide plays a role in roughly ten per cent of suicides by people younger than twenty-five—“either by giving youths the idea to commit suicide or by providing youths already contemplating suicide with information about a specific method.” Among traditional media, this relationship is now mostly respected. That’s why you don’t often read specific details about suicides in the newspaper, even when there might be an obvious public interest in reporting them.

What are we to make, then, of Netflix’s decision to ignore this social phenomenon? It is obvious that the company did not want to cause these extra deaths. I do not doubt that its intentions were good. The show itself is hedged about on all sides with warnings and guidance for vulnerable viewers. Nic Sheff, a writer on the show and himself the survivor of a suicide attempt, defended the specifics of the show’s representation in a powerful open letter to Vanity Fair. There is an extended warning video that precedes the first episode: “By shedding a light on these difficult topics,” the lead actress, Katherine Langford, declares, “we hope our show can help viewers start a conversation.” Another actress in the video, Alisha Boe, goes so far as to say that, if you’re struggling with these issues, “this series may not be right for you.”

Netflix responded to the recent National Institute of Mental Health study with circumspection: “This is a critically important topic and we have worked hard to ensure that we handle this sensitive issue responsibly.” Except, of course, when it came to the option of not doing the show at all. Those who predicted the association between the show’s release and a rise in the suicide rate have met the fate of so much expert opinion in the twenty-first century: their predictions were ignored or cast into doubt by financially interested parties; the research, which came too late to matter, gave evidence that the predictions were true; and there were no consequences.

Netflix’s claim of good intentions is the kind of response that we have come to expect from tech companies in particular. Facebook is the leading master of the apology without consequence. These companies repeatedly claim, in the face of one scandal after another, that they really only wanted the best, that they’re working on it, that they’re sorry. No substantial change that might interfere with growth ever follows. We’ve become inured to this pattern—from Twitter, from Uber, and now from Netflix. Their expression of good intentions only makes the refusal to change more infuriating. If you cared, why didn’t you listen to the people who knew what they were talking about? If you listened, why didn’t you stop?

by Stephen Marche, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Getty

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