Thursday, June 27, 2019
The Apocalyptic Cult of Cancel Culture
Jordanian-American Natasha Tynes is an award-winning author who faced government prosecution in Egypt for her work defending free speech and a free press. In May, Tynes saw a Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) worker eating on the train—something she understood to be prohibited for all riders. She asked the employee about it. The woman responded, “Worry about yourself.” Frustrated that she rides the Metro hungry in order to comply with the rules while someone she understood to have the power to ticket her for eating was not complying with the rules, herself, Tynes “tweet-shamed” the employee by writing a complaint to WMATA and posting it on Twitter along with a photo of the woman eating.
Horrible behavior? I’d say so. Disappointing to see someone behave that way? Sure. But in a world in which online shaming is the new norm, it’s not surprising. What is surprising is that less than 45 minutes after posting the tweet, Tynes deleted it, apologized for what she called a “short-lived expression of frustration,” and contacted WMATA to say it was an “error in judgment” for her to report the employee. She even asked that WMATA not discipline the employee.
But Twitter’s outrage machine turned on her. She became “Metro Molly.” The independent publishing company set to distribute her novel tweeted that Tynes had done “something truly horrible” and they had “no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.” Her publishing deal was canceled.
Does this seem like a high price to pay for a 45-minute lapse in judgment? Or even for acting like, well, a jerk?
Enter Kyle Kashuv, the conservative Parkland school shooting survivor who declined lucrative scholarship offers in order to attend Harvard University only to have his admission rescinded after schoolmates alerted the Huffington Post to some extremely offensive, racist, and antisemitic comments Kashuv (who is Jewish) made in a private online chat when he was 16 years old. Kashuv, now 18, apologized publicly and unequivocally, and acknowledged his misdeeds in a letter to Harvard’s admissions office. He even sent a separate a letter to Harvard’s diversity dean. As David French remarked in the National Review, Kahsuv did “everything we want a young man to do when he’s done something wrong.”
One might think that Harvard would relish the opportunity to educate a young man who seems to have an interest in being a decent and productive member of society but appears not to have had the benefit of growing up in an environment in which uttering racial slurs is unthinkable. What could be better for him than spending four years in a community in which the thinking that produces that kind of behavior is replaced with better thinking (producing better behavior)?
Imagine the success story Harvard could have told: Teen with racist past graduates from Harvard with a commitment to social justice. But as Robby Soave of Reason Magazine noted, instead, a “corrosive impulse to seek and destroy” resulted in Harvard’s decision, seemingly “an endorsement of the position that people should be shamed and punished for their worst mistakes as kids.” On the other hand, former university president Michael Nietzel thinks Harvard was right to rescind the admission. “The idea that Mr. Kashuv should not be held accountable for his behavior because he was only 16 just doesn’t cut it. … Harvard was reasonable to say that his choice had consequences.”
Zack Beauchamp of Vox thinks the political left and right don’t see eye to eye on this incident because the view from the right is “sympathetic” while the view from the left is “critical.” What he sees as the “conservative view of racism” approaches racism as a “personal failing.” According to this view, he says, people can overcome their racism by “striving not to let race affect the way (they) speak and act,” and “the real threat isn’t the racist comments themselves,” because they can be overcome, “but the impulse to punish people for them.” From this "sympathetic" perspective, penalizing everyone for their past transgressions leaves them no room to grow, and even opens up the possibility of punishing the innocent.
While the “conservative” view focuses on individual growth and development, what Beauchamp defines as the “liberal and leftist” view sees racism as “a structural problem”—less of a personal failing to be overcome and more “unshakable,” leading “even people who firmly believe in ideals of equal treatment to act or speak in prejudiced ways.” According to this view, he says, “Kashuv looks less like a kid who made youthful mistakes and more like a young man who’s trying to escape responsibility for his actions.”
by Pamela B. Paresky Ph.D., Psychology Today | Read more:
Horrible behavior? I’d say so. Disappointing to see someone behave that way? Sure. But in a world in which online shaming is the new norm, it’s not surprising. What is surprising is that less than 45 minutes after posting the tweet, Tynes deleted it, apologized for what she called a “short-lived expression of frustration,” and contacted WMATA to say it was an “error in judgment” for her to report the employee. She even asked that WMATA not discipline the employee.
But Twitter’s outrage machine turned on her. She became “Metro Molly.” The independent publishing company set to distribute her novel tweeted that Tynes had done “something truly horrible” and they had “no desire to be involved with anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to jeopardize a person’s safety and employment in this way.” Her publishing deal was canceled.
Does this seem like a high price to pay for a 45-minute lapse in judgment? Or even for acting like, well, a jerk?
Enter Kyle Kashuv, the conservative Parkland school shooting survivor who declined lucrative scholarship offers in order to attend Harvard University only to have his admission rescinded after schoolmates alerted the Huffington Post to some extremely offensive, racist, and antisemitic comments Kashuv (who is Jewish) made in a private online chat when he was 16 years old. Kashuv, now 18, apologized publicly and unequivocally, and acknowledged his misdeeds in a letter to Harvard’s admissions office. He even sent a separate a letter to Harvard’s diversity dean. As David French remarked in the National Review, Kahsuv did “everything we want a young man to do when he’s done something wrong.”One might think that Harvard would relish the opportunity to educate a young man who seems to have an interest in being a decent and productive member of society but appears not to have had the benefit of growing up in an environment in which uttering racial slurs is unthinkable. What could be better for him than spending four years in a community in which the thinking that produces that kind of behavior is replaced with better thinking (producing better behavior)?
Imagine the success story Harvard could have told: Teen with racist past graduates from Harvard with a commitment to social justice. But as Robby Soave of Reason Magazine noted, instead, a “corrosive impulse to seek and destroy” resulted in Harvard’s decision, seemingly “an endorsement of the position that people should be shamed and punished for their worst mistakes as kids.” On the other hand, former university president Michael Nietzel thinks Harvard was right to rescind the admission. “The idea that Mr. Kashuv should not be held accountable for his behavior because he was only 16 just doesn’t cut it. … Harvard was reasonable to say that his choice had consequences.”
Zack Beauchamp of Vox thinks the political left and right don’t see eye to eye on this incident because the view from the right is “sympathetic” while the view from the left is “critical.” What he sees as the “conservative view of racism” approaches racism as a “personal failing.” According to this view, he says, people can overcome their racism by “striving not to let race affect the way (they) speak and act,” and “the real threat isn’t the racist comments themselves,” because they can be overcome, “but the impulse to punish people for them.” From this "sympathetic" perspective, penalizing everyone for their past transgressions leaves them no room to grow, and even opens up the possibility of punishing the innocent.
While the “conservative” view focuses on individual growth and development, what Beauchamp defines as the “liberal and leftist” view sees racism as “a structural problem”—less of a personal failing to be overcome and more “unshakable,” leading “even people who firmly believe in ideals of equal treatment to act or speak in prejudiced ways.” According to this view, he says, “Kashuv looks less like a kid who made youthful mistakes and more like a young man who’s trying to escape responsibility for his actions.”
by Pamela B. Paresky Ph.D., Psychology Today | Read more:
Image: Muns/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. See also: Melvil Dewey's name stripped from top librarian award (The Guardian), The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (One Zero), and On John Wayne, Cancel Culture, and the Art of Problematic Artists (LitHub).]
[ed. See also: Melvil Dewey's name stripped from top librarian award (The Guardian), The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (One Zero), and On John Wayne, Cancel Culture, and the Art of Problematic Artists (LitHub).]
Streaming TV is About to Get Very Expensive
The most watched show on US Netflix, by a huge margin, is the US version of The Office. Even though the platform pumps out an absurd amount of original programming – 1,500 hours last year – it turns out that everyone just wants to watch a decade-old sitcom. One report last year said that The Office accounts for 7% all US Netflix viewing.
So, naturally, NBC wants it back. This week, it was announced that Netflix had failed to secure the rights to The Office beyond January 2021. The good news is that it will still be available to watch elsewhere. The bad news is that “elsewhere”, means “the new NBCUniversal streaming platform”.
As a viewer, you are right to feel queasy. The industry-disrupting success of Netflix means that everybody wants a slice of the pie. Right now, things are just about manageable – if you have a TV licence, a Netflix subscription, an Amazon subscription and a Now TV subscription, you are pretty much covered – but things are about to take a turn for the worse.
In November, Disney will launch Disney+, a streaming platform that will not only block off an enormous amount of existing content (Disney films, ABC shows, Marvel and Pixar films, Lucasfilm, The Simpsons and everything else made by 20th Century Fox), but will also offer a range of new scripted Marvel shows that will directly inform the narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Essentially, if you want to understand anything that happens in any Marvel film from this point onwards, you’ll need to splash out on a Disney+ subscription.
Apple will also be entering the streaming market at about the same time, promising new work from Sofia Coppola, Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Brie Larson, Damien Chazelle and Steven Spielberg. In the next three years, Apple will spend $4.2bn on original programming, and you won’t get to see any of it if you don’t pay a monthly premium.
There are so many others. NBCUniversal is pulling its shows from Netflix for its own platform. Before long, Friends is likely to disappear behind a new WarnerMedia streaming service – along with Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter films, anything based on a DC comic and everything on HBO – that it is believed will cost about £15 a month. In the UK, the BBC and ITV will amalgamate their archives behind a service called BritBox. The former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg is about to launch a platform called Quibi, releasing “snackable” content from Steven Spielberg and others that is designed to be watched on your phone. YouTube is producing more and more original subscription-only content. Facebook is making shows, for crying out loud.
And this sucks. Watching television is about to get very, very expensive. There will be a point where viewers are going to hit their tolerance for monthly subscriptions – I may be able to manage one more service, but only if I unsubscribe from an existing platform – meaning that TV will become more elitist, tiered and fragmented than it already is. There’s a huge difference between not being able to watch everything because there’s too much choice and not being able to watch everything because you don’t have enough money.
Most importantly, we should all remember that this content war is hinged upon a fundamental misunderstanding of viewing habits. Netflix didn’t become a monster because people wanted to watch a specific show; it became a monster because people wanted to watch everything.
So, naturally, NBC wants it back. This week, it was announced that Netflix had failed to secure the rights to The Office beyond January 2021. The good news is that it will still be available to watch elsewhere. The bad news is that “elsewhere”, means “the new NBCUniversal streaming platform”.
As a viewer, you are right to feel queasy. The industry-disrupting success of Netflix means that everybody wants a slice of the pie. Right now, things are just about manageable – if you have a TV licence, a Netflix subscription, an Amazon subscription and a Now TV subscription, you are pretty much covered – but things are about to take a turn for the worse.In November, Disney will launch Disney+, a streaming platform that will not only block off an enormous amount of existing content (Disney films, ABC shows, Marvel and Pixar films, Lucasfilm, The Simpsons and everything else made by 20th Century Fox), but will also offer a range of new scripted Marvel shows that will directly inform the narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Essentially, if you want to understand anything that happens in any Marvel film from this point onwards, you’ll need to splash out on a Disney+ subscription.
Apple will also be entering the streaming market at about the same time, promising new work from Sofia Coppola, Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Brie Larson, Damien Chazelle and Steven Spielberg. In the next three years, Apple will spend $4.2bn on original programming, and you won’t get to see any of it if you don’t pay a monthly premium.
There are so many others. NBCUniversal is pulling its shows from Netflix for its own platform. Before long, Friends is likely to disappear behind a new WarnerMedia streaming service – along with Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter films, anything based on a DC comic and everything on HBO – that it is believed will cost about £15 a month. In the UK, the BBC and ITV will amalgamate their archives behind a service called BritBox. The former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg is about to launch a platform called Quibi, releasing “snackable” content from Steven Spielberg and others that is designed to be watched on your phone. YouTube is producing more and more original subscription-only content. Facebook is making shows, for crying out loud.
And this sucks. Watching television is about to get very, very expensive. There will be a point where viewers are going to hit their tolerance for monthly subscriptions – I may be able to manage one more service, but only if I unsubscribe from an existing platform – meaning that TV will become more elitist, tiered and fragmented than it already is. There’s a huge difference between not being able to watch everything because there’s too much choice and not being able to watch everything because you don’t have enough money.
Most importantly, we should all remember that this content war is hinged upon a fundamental misunderstanding of viewing habits. Netflix didn’t become a monster because people wanted to watch a specific show; it became a monster because people wanted to watch everything.
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: NBC/Fox
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Skin Cancer is on the Rise, and Not Just for Golfers
Skin cancer is the commonest type of cancer: There are more new cases each year than there are of all other cancers combined. The principal cause is exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun, with the usual contributions from genetic bad luck. Basal cell carcinoma is the most widespread and least-frightening variety. It almost never metastasizes, and, if the tumor is superficial and small, it can sometimes even be obliterated non-surgically, with repeated applications of a topical cream or with a particular kind of light therapy. Next in severity is squamous cell carcinoma, the treatment for which is trickier but usually also straightforward unless the cancer has spread. The worst kind—and, fortunately, a relatively uncommon one, although its incidence is increasing—is melanoma. If melanoma isn't caught early, it can metastasize rapidly to distant parts of the body, and once that happens it's often fatal. Invasive melanoma accounts for a tiny percentage of all skin-cancer cases but for the majority of skin-cancer deaths.
Golfers have always been at greater risk of developing skin cancer than people who never go outside or visit tanning parlors, but even among nongolfers the incidence has been rising for years, worldwide. Studies cited by the Skin Cancer Foundation have shown that, in the United States, cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer increased by 77 percent from 1994 to 2014, and that there will be 7.7 percent more melanoma cases this year than there were in 2018. (Whales are also affected. They're exposed to the sun when they surface, and the skin damage they suffer appears similar to the skin damage suffered by humans.) The main cause for the increases is the depletion of the earth's ozone layer, which is a part of the stratosphere that begins about nine miles up and absorbs ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise broil us. It's like sunscreen for the entire planet. (...)
An excellent place to study the long-term effects of sunlight on human skin is the PGA Tour Champions. If you look closely at Andy North's face during one of his appearances as a commentator on ESPN, for example, you'll notice that his left and right nostrils are different sizes. The reason is that in 1991—after his wife had pointed out that his nose looked odd—he had surgery to remove a large basal cell carcinoma that extended into his left cheek, followed by plastic surgery to repair the quarter-size hole that the excision had created. The USGA persuaded him to write about his experience for Golf Journal, and his article had a big impact on players at all levels. Since that time, he has been an active and effective advocate for skin-cancer prevention and treatment.
North and many other seniors and super-seniors grew up, as I did, in an era when sunburn was viewed as no big deal. In those days, if you applied anything to your skin before going outside, it was almost always in the hope of increasing sun damage, not preventing it. (Sun-darkened skin blocks some UV rays—it's the body's attempt at producing its own sunscreen—but the darkening itself is an indicator of damage. “To be clear,” a dermatologist told me, “there is no such thing as a healthy tan.”) My friends and I used to compete, at the swimming pool, to see who could peel the largest intact sheet of skin from his stomach. When I was in college, I fell asleep on a beach in Mexico and burned my back so badly that I had to lean all the way forward in the passenger seat of a friend's Volkswagen Beetle during our 20-plus-hour drive back to school. The peeling skin hardened into curls the size, shape and approximate color of Fritos: My back looked as though a woodcarver had worked it over with a chisel. A professor of mine removed the curls by (agonizingly) rubbing me down with cold cream—a service that college professors no longer provide to students, I believe. (...)
Golfers have always been at greater risk of developing skin cancer than people who never go outside or visit tanning parlors, but even among nongolfers the incidence has been rising for years, worldwide. Studies cited by the Skin Cancer Foundation have shown that, in the United States, cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer increased by 77 percent from 1994 to 2014, and that there will be 7.7 percent more melanoma cases this year than there were in 2018. (Whales are also affected. They're exposed to the sun when they surface, and the skin damage they suffer appears similar to the skin damage suffered by humans.) The main cause for the increases is the depletion of the earth's ozone layer, which is a part of the stratosphere that begins about nine miles up and absorbs ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise broil us. It's like sunscreen for the entire planet. (...)An excellent place to study the long-term effects of sunlight on human skin is the PGA Tour Champions. If you look closely at Andy North's face during one of his appearances as a commentator on ESPN, for example, you'll notice that his left and right nostrils are different sizes. The reason is that in 1991—after his wife had pointed out that his nose looked odd—he had surgery to remove a large basal cell carcinoma that extended into his left cheek, followed by plastic surgery to repair the quarter-size hole that the excision had created. The USGA persuaded him to write about his experience for Golf Journal, and his article had a big impact on players at all levels. Since that time, he has been an active and effective advocate for skin-cancer prevention and treatment.
North and many other seniors and super-seniors grew up, as I did, in an era when sunburn was viewed as no big deal. In those days, if you applied anything to your skin before going outside, it was almost always in the hope of increasing sun damage, not preventing it. (Sun-darkened skin blocks some UV rays—it's the body's attempt at producing its own sunscreen—but the darkening itself is an indicator of damage. “To be clear,” a dermatologist told me, “there is no such thing as a healthy tan.”) My friends and I used to compete, at the swimming pool, to see who could peel the largest intact sheet of skin from his stomach. When I was in college, I fell asleep on a beach in Mexico and burned my back so badly that I had to lean all the way forward in the passenger seat of a friend's Volkswagen Beetle during our 20-plus-hour drive back to school. The peeling skin hardened into curls the size, shape and approximate color of Fritos: My back looked as though a woodcarver had worked it over with a chisel. A professor of mine removed the curls by (agonizingly) rubbing me down with cold cream—a service that college professors no longer provide to students, I believe. (...)
Stewart Cink had a basal cell carcinoma removed from the side of his nose in 2018. Two years earlier, Cink's wife, Lisa, had begun treatment for advanced breast cancer, and some sportswriters (though not Cink) reacted as though their health problems were roughly equivalent: two cancer cases in one couple! But basal cell carcinoma, by comparison with Stage Four breast cancer, is more like a skinned knee than a medical emergency. People don't die from it, except in the rarest of circumstances, and the treatment doesn't overturn lives, families and careers.
Melanoma, by contrast, truly is scary. Ellen Flynn—a member of my golf club and an occasional mixed-event partner of mine—has had three melanomas, beginning about 15 years ago. “The first was on the back of my calf, and that wasn't so terrible,” she told me recently. “Then, four or five years later, I suddenly saw this major mole on my shoulder.” She'd been having regular checkups with a melanoma specialist, but she couldn't get an appointment right away. “I didn't want to be neurotic, but the mole had come from out of nowhere,” she continued. “So I pursued it, and as soon as the doctor saw it I could tell that it wasn't a good thing.”
The surgeon to whom Flynn's specialist sent her shocked her by telling her that he couldn't guarantee that, after the operation, she'd still have the use of her right arm. (“I'm, like, seriously?”) The visible part of a melanoma can be a minor element of a large and rapidly expanding cancer network, and surgeons sometimes have to cut out huge amounts of tissue. Flynn's tumor, fortunately, turned out to be far less extensive than the surgeon had feared: her golf swing survived. Then, a few years ago, she found a third melanoma, on her shin of her other leg. This one—whew again!—was also neither life- nor golf-threatening. “Plus a thousand other skin cancers, on my face mostly,” she said. “So without makeup I look like a hockey player.” (...)
Ellen Flynn was in her late 50s when she found her first melanoma. That makes her statistically typical—although the statistics are changing. The incidence of melanoma has risen during the past 85 years, from a lifetime risk of roughly 1 in 1,500 in 1935 for people with white skin to something more like 1 in 40 today. (The darker the skin, the lower the risk of skin cancer, although even for people with very dark skin the risk is not zero, and there are melanoma types that are unrelated to sun exposure and appear at similar frequencies across all racial groups.) Diagnoses among people much younger than Flynn have also increased. Melanoma is now the most common skin cancer among people 15 to 19, the most common cancer of any kind among people in their 20s, and the leading cause of cancer death among women 25 to 30. I realized recently that I know shockingly many people who have had melanomas, including two people who were in their 20s. One of those is Tyler Fairbairn, another occasional golf partner of mine (and a former playmate of my children), who's now in his mid-30s. “When I was in graduate school, I noticed that I had a kind of dark, raised thing, like the size of a pencil eraser, on my lower back,” he told me. “The surgeon who operated on it made about a two-inch incision and cut out a bunch all around it.”
Flynn's and Fairbairn's melanomas had not penetrated far into their skin, and for such cases the cure rate, through surgery alone, has always been high. The truly dangerous melanomas are the relatively few that have metastasized. (Skip Nottberg, a high-school classmate of Tom Watson's and an acquaintance of mine, died of one of those in 1997, when he was 47.) Hensin Tsao, who is the clinical director of the Melanoma & Pigmented Lesion Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me, “The thicker the tumor, and the bigger the tumor, the more likely it is to reach a blood vessel in the skin, crawl into it, and take off into an internal organ.” Tsao said that as recently as 10 years ago there was very little that could be done for patients whose melanomas has spread to the brain, the liver, the lungs or other body parts, but that several recently developed drugs have turned out to be extremely effective for many patients—so much so that doctors have begun to speak of cures in cases that once would have been considered hopeless.
Among the many challenges with melanoma is that, although 90 percent of cases are related to solar exposure, some types can appear on parts of the body that have seldom, if ever, been exposed to the sun: between two toes, within the folds of the bellybutton, inside the esophagus, on the anus. In Palm Desert a year and a half ago, I played golf with a retired CEO who was undergoing treatment for a melanoma on the tip of a big toe. He said that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, an ominous sign, and that the main reason it hadn't been diagnosed earlier was that its odd location and unusual appearance had fooled his doctor into thinking it was something else. A number of years ago, a nephew of a friend of a friend of mine was told by his ophthalmologist, during a routine eye exam, that he needed to see an oncologist right away. He did so, and learned that what the ophthalmologist had noticed, inside his eyeball, was an ocular melanoma. Six weeks later, he was dead.
Melanoma, by contrast, truly is scary. Ellen Flynn—a member of my golf club and an occasional mixed-event partner of mine—has had three melanomas, beginning about 15 years ago. “The first was on the back of my calf, and that wasn't so terrible,” she told me recently. “Then, four or five years later, I suddenly saw this major mole on my shoulder.” She'd been having regular checkups with a melanoma specialist, but she couldn't get an appointment right away. “I didn't want to be neurotic, but the mole had come from out of nowhere,” she continued. “So I pursued it, and as soon as the doctor saw it I could tell that it wasn't a good thing.”
The surgeon to whom Flynn's specialist sent her shocked her by telling her that he couldn't guarantee that, after the operation, she'd still have the use of her right arm. (“I'm, like, seriously?”) The visible part of a melanoma can be a minor element of a large and rapidly expanding cancer network, and surgeons sometimes have to cut out huge amounts of tissue. Flynn's tumor, fortunately, turned out to be far less extensive than the surgeon had feared: her golf swing survived. Then, a few years ago, she found a third melanoma, on her shin of her other leg. This one—whew again!—was also neither life- nor golf-threatening. “Plus a thousand other skin cancers, on my face mostly,” she said. “So without makeup I look like a hockey player.” (...)
Ellen Flynn was in her late 50s when she found her first melanoma. That makes her statistically typical—although the statistics are changing. The incidence of melanoma has risen during the past 85 years, from a lifetime risk of roughly 1 in 1,500 in 1935 for people with white skin to something more like 1 in 40 today. (The darker the skin, the lower the risk of skin cancer, although even for people with very dark skin the risk is not zero, and there are melanoma types that are unrelated to sun exposure and appear at similar frequencies across all racial groups.) Diagnoses among people much younger than Flynn have also increased. Melanoma is now the most common skin cancer among people 15 to 19, the most common cancer of any kind among people in their 20s, and the leading cause of cancer death among women 25 to 30. I realized recently that I know shockingly many people who have had melanomas, including two people who were in their 20s. One of those is Tyler Fairbairn, another occasional golf partner of mine (and a former playmate of my children), who's now in his mid-30s. “When I was in graduate school, I noticed that I had a kind of dark, raised thing, like the size of a pencil eraser, on my lower back,” he told me. “The surgeon who operated on it made about a two-inch incision and cut out a bunch all around it.”
Flynn's and Fairbairn's melanomas had not penetrated far into their skin, and for such cases the cure rate, through surgery alone, has always been high. The truly dangerous melanomas are the relatively few that have metastasized. (Skip Nottberg, a high-school classmate of Tom Watson's and an acquaintance of mine, died of one of those in 1997, when he was 47.) Hensin Tsao, who is the clinical director of the Melanoma & Pigmented Lesion Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me, “The thicker the tumor, and the bigger the tumor, the more likely it is to reach a blood vessel in the skin, crawl into it, and take off into an internal organ.” Tsao said that as recently as 10 years ago there was very little that could be done for patients whose melanomas has spread to the brain, the liver, the lungs or other body parts, but that several recently developed drugs have turned out to be extremely effective for many patients—so much so that doctors have begun to speak of cures in cases that once would have been considered hopeless.
Among the many challenges with melanoma is that, although 90 percent of cases are related to solar exposure, some types can appear on parts of the body that have seldom, if ever, been exposed to the sun: between two toes, within the folds of the bellybutton, inside the esophagus, on the anus. In Palm Desert a year and a half ago, I played golf with a retired CEO who was undergoing treatment for a melanoma on the tip of a big toe. He said that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, an ominous sign, and that the main reason it hadn't been diagnosed earlier was that its odd location and unusual appearance had fooled his doctor into thinking it was something else. A number of years ago, a nephew of a friend of a friend of mine was told by his ophthalmologist, during a routine eye exam, that he needed to see an oncologist right away. He did so, and learned that what the ophthalmologist had noticed, inside his eyeball, was an ocular melanoma. Six weeks later, he was dead.
by David Owen, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: C.J. Burton
Facebook’s Faux Cryptocurrency
Ideological purity is a common affliction these days. It’s also one the cryptocurrency community is particularly prone to. Witness the upset over this week’s announcement from Facebook that it is to be the prime mover behind a new cryptocurrency, Libra.
Everyone instantly hated the idea. Real cryptos are about privacy and freedom. They are decentralised and permissionless – no one runs them, no one can be prevented from using them and the system never needs reference to a central authority.
Libra is to be none of these wonderful things. It is to be run by an actual organisation – the Swiss based Libra Association, made up of Facebook and 27 partners. It is centralised and permissioned – and its value will depend not on anything intrinsic to it but on the value of a basket of currencies, something that makes it seem more like an exchange-traded fund than a currency in its own right. Worst of all, the Libra Association is planning to make money from Libra, too.
Facebook has an obvious interest in bringing the world’s financial transactions in-house. But there’s another element: the interest from the deposits and government bonds backing Libra will not go to the people holding it. It will be used to pay for the system’s operating costs and, once those are covered, to the founding members as dividends. Add it all up and, to anyone of a puritanical crypto bent, this is clearly not quite right.
Libra could be a sovereignty game-changer
There is lots of detail still to come on how Libra will work. While we wait for some of that, it is true that there are things to worry about. One is privacy. Christina Frankopan, special projects lead at colony.io and a senior adviser to Lazard, questions the use of the metadata Libra will throw up, given that Facebook may be able to “triangulate this with other data sets to give them unprecedented knowledge of consumer behaviour and spending”.
If you are worried about the way financial apps might use data on your spending patterns, you should be really worried about how a vast social network morphing into a financial network might use it.
Anyone with your social media data can guess what you might buy. Anyone with your financial data knows already. Longer term there are the huge issues of what happens if Libra were to become genuinely successful. How does that affect national sovereignty?
Bitcoin has caused endless angst among central bankers but it hasn’t much bothered governments. That’s partly because, so far, it has been marginal stuff. But also because it hasn’t really acted as a currency. It isn’t a particularly effective or scalable means of payment, since almost no one actually uses it. It is a hopeless store of value – huge unpredictable swings don’t work for most buyers or sellers.
And it has not become a value reference in itself. If you have bitcoin you think about their value not in bitcoin but in dollars. Libra could be entirely different, particularly in the last sense. If it really is based on a basket of currencies and is stable as a result it might not take long at all for us to refer to the value of things in Libras. A Libra could just be a Libra. That is a sovereignty game changer.
Libra could work precisely because it isn’t a cryptocurrency
But let’s put all this to one side. Stop thinking about Libra as if you were a cryptocurrency expert. Start thinking about it as a consumer and you can see why it might work.
We haven’t adopted bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency for all sorts of reasons. We can’t quite get our heads around the idea that it makes sense to use something invented by a very shadowy and entirely unidentifiable entity. We can’t really understand the way bitcoin is mined (using computers to solve increasingly difficult maths problems). Our minds boggle every time we read about how mining for bitcoin uses as much energy as mining for gold. Then there is the scalability, the volatility and the difficulty of storage and use. Baffling.
Libra could solve all these problems. Facebook might be a bit shadowy but at least it exists as an accountable brand. And while we might not trust it as a standalone backer, we all quite clearly trust the likes of Mastercard, Visa and PayPal (all also founder members of the Libra Association) with our money.
Libra could be a sovereignty game-changer
There is lots of detail still to come on how Libra will work. While we wait for some of that, it is true that there are things to worry about. One is privacy. Christina Frankopan, special projects lead at colony.io and a senior adviser to Lazard, questions the use of the metadata Libra will throw up, given that Facebook may be able to “triangulate this with other data sets to give them unprecedented knowledge of consumer behaviour and spending”.
If you are worried about the way financial apps might use data on your spending patterns, you should be really worried about how a vast social network morphing into a financial network might use it.
Anyone with your social media data can guess what you might buy. Anyone with your financial data knows already. Longer term there are the huge issues of what happens if Libra were to become genuinely successful. How does that affect national sovereignty?
Bitcoin has caused endless angst among central bankers but it hasn’t much bothered governments. That’s partly because, so far, it has been marginal stuff. But also because it hasn’t really acted as a currency. It isn’t a particularly effective or scalable means of payment, since almost no one actually uses it. It is a hopeless store of value – huge unpredictable swings don’t work for most buyers or sellers.
And it has not become a value reference in itself. If you have bitcoin you think about their value not in bitcoin but in dollars. Libra could be entirely different, particularly in the last sense. If it really is based on a basket of currencies and is stable as a result it might not take long at all for us to refer to the value of things in Libras. A Libra could just be a Libra. That is a sovereignty game changer.
Libra could work precisely because it isn’t a cryptocurrency
But let’s put all this to one side. Stop thinking about Libra as if you were a cryptocurrency expert. Start thinking about it as a consumer and you can see why it might work.
We haven’t adopted bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency for all sorts of reasons. We can’t quite get our heads around the idea that it makes sense to use something invented by a very shadowy and entirely unidentifiable entity. We can’t really understand the way bitcoin is mined (using computers to solve increasingly difficult maths problems). Our minds boggle every time we read about how mining for bitcoin uses as much energy as mining for gold. Then there is the scalability, the volatility and the difficulty of storage and use. Baffling.
Libra could solve all these problems. Facebook might be a bit shadowy but at least it exists as an accountable brand. And while we might not trust it as a standalone backer, we all quite clearly trust the likes of Mastercard, Visa and PayPal (all also founder members of the Libra Association) with our money.
Image: uncredited
Bill Gates' Biggest Mistake
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently gave a wide-ranging interview to VC firm Village Global, and at one point, the topic of mobile came up. Gates revealed his biggest regret while at Microsoft was a failure to lead Microsoft into a solid position in the smartphone wars.
In the software world—particularly for platforms—these are winner-take-all markets. So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win, and you know it really is winner-take-all. If you're there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system. And what's that worth? Four hundred billion? That would be transferred from Company G to Company M. And it's amazing to me having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time—and there was this antitrust lawsuit and various things—our other assets—Windows, Office—are still very strong. So we are a leading company. If we'd got that one right, we would be the leading company. But oh well.In the interview, Gates takes full responsibility for not reacting to the new era of smartphones. But by that time, he already had a foot out the door at Microsoft to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The original iPhone came out in 2007, and the first Android device was released in 2008. Gates had already announced his transition plan in June 2006.
The CEO of Microsoft at the time was Steve Ballmer, who famously laughed at the iPhone and called the $500 device "The most expensive phone in the world" while deriding its lack of a hardware keyboard. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share," Ballmer once told USA Today. "No chance."Apple went on to sell over 2 billion iPhones.
The launch of the iPhone was a huge inflection point in the tech landscape, and the way companies reacted to it would shape their fortune for years to come. Unlike Microsoft, Google took the iPhone seriously. Google was investing in mobile before the iPhone was announced, having acquired Andy Rubin's Android, Inc. in 2005. The team was working on a Blackberry-style OS, but once the iPhone was announced, Google's mobile division realized it would need to "start over" on an all-touch interface in response. This decision eventually led to the launch of Android 1.0. (...)
Microsoft would eventually take on the iPhone and Android with Windows Phone, but its slow response and failure to recognize the modern smartphone revolution meant Windows Phone would only launch in late 2010. By then, it was too late. Google was throwing an unprecedented amount of resources behind its mobile efforts and, by 2010, had grown too powerful, with something like six major releases of Android and a suite of killer apps like Gmail, Search, YouTube, and Google Maps. Microsoft could build an OS, but it couldn't compete with Google's services. The Windows Phone was killed by the app gap.
Today, Android owns 85 percent of the smartphone OS market and is the most popular operating system in the world—mobile or otherwise—just ahead of Windows.
by Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Village Global
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
The Chronic-Pain Quandary
Amid a reckoning over opioids, a doctor crusades for caution in cutting back.
About four years ago, Dr. Stefan Kertesz started hearing that patients who had been taking opioid painkillers for years were being taken off their medications. Sometimes it was an aggressive reduction they weren’t on board with, sometimes it was all at once. Clinicians told patients they no longer felt comfortable treating them.
Kertesz, a primary care physician who also specializes in addiction medicine, had not spent his career investigating long-term opioid use or chronic pain. But he grew concerned by the medical community’s efforts to regain control over prescribing patterns after years of lax distribution. Limiting prescriptions for new patients had clear benefits, he thought, but he wondered about the results of reductions among “legacy patients.” Their outcomes weren’t being tracked.
Now, Kertesz is a leading advocate against policies that call for aggressive reductions in long-term opioid prescriptions or have resulted in forced cutbacks. He argues that well-intentioned initiatives to avoid the mistakes of the past have introduced new problems. He’s warned that clinicians’ decisions are destabilizing patients’ lives and leaving them in pain — and in some cases could drive patients to obtain opioids illicitly or even take their lives.
“I think I’m particularly provoked by situations where harm is done in the name of helping,” Kertesz said. “What really gets me is when responsible parties say we will protect you, and then they call upon us to harm people.”
It’s a case that Kertesz, 52, has tried to make with nuance and precision, bounded by an emphasis on the history of overprescribing and the benefits of tapering for patients for whom it works. But against a backdrop of tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths each year and an ongoing reckoning about the roots of the opioid addiction crisis, it’s the dialectical equivalent of pinning the tail on a bucking bronco. Kertesz’s critics have questioned his motives. He’s heard he’s been called “the candyman.” (...)
Opioid prescribing has been declining since 2012, though levels remain higher than they were two decades ago. Today, depending on the estimate, anywhere from 8 million to 18 million Americans take opioids for chronic pain.
The interest in reducing their dosages is predicated in part on efforts to minimize patients’ risk of overdose and addiction. But there are other considerations. Enduring opioid use makes people more sensitive to pain, many experts believe. Opioid use has also been associated with anxiety, depression, and other health issues.
Plus, as people become dependent, the drugs might just be staving off symptoms of withdrawal that would come without another dose, rather than treating the original source of pain.
In short, experts say, long-term opioid use is not good medicine.
Kertesz, who is also a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, agrees with all of that. But he believes that lowering dosages will hurt some patients who are leading functional lives on opioids, and that top-down strategies won’t protect them.
So, in 2015, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed prescribing guidelines for primary care clinicians treating chronic pain, Kertesz grew nervous.
The guidelines, a set of measured recommendations finalized in March 2016, suggested clinicians try other therapies for pain before moving to opioids and prescribe only the lowest effective dose and duration of the drugs. (The guidelines do not apply to end-of-life or cancer care.) For patients on high doses, the guidelines said, “If benefits do not outweigh harms of continued opioid therapy, clinicians should optimize other therapies and work with patients to taper opioids to lower dosages or to taper and discontinue opioids.”
“Our day-to-day practice aligns with nearly all principles laid out in the guideline,” Kertesz wrote in a comment he submitted on the draft. But he cautioned the voluntary recommendations could be implemented too stringently by others.
“This is a guideline like no other … its guidance will affect the immediate well-being of millions of Americans with chronic pain,” he wrote.
After the release of the guidelines, Kertesz started seeing ripple effects. In early 2017, federal officials unveiled a Medicare proposal that would have blocked prescriptions higher than 90 MME without a special review. Around the same time, the National Committee for Quality Assurance considered docking clinicians’ scores if they had patients on high doses for long periods.
Kertesz, other experts, and some medical societies protested such proposals, contending they invoked the CDC guidelines while violating them.
“Most of us wish to see an evolution toward fewer opioid starts and fewer patients at high doses,” Kertesz and colleagues wrote in response to the NCQA plan. “The proposed NCQA measure indulges no such subtleties.”
The discussion overall has been hindered by limited research, including evidence for the benefits of forced tapering. But as of October 2018, 33 states had codified some prescription limits into law. Pharmacies and insurers capped prescriptions at 90 MME. Law enforcement agencies warned high prescribers.
Some initiatives have focused on avoiding “new starts,” not on tapering legacy patients. But Kertesz and other advocates argued the pressure of all the policies and warnings inculcated an anxiety around prescribing.
Chronic pain patients were seen as legally risky and medically complicated, so they had trouble finding providers.
Kertesz and his allies raised their concerns in the popular and academic presses and at conferences, building momentum over the years. They collected anecdotes from patients who said they had been harmed in some way by dose reductions or involuntary tapers.
“It is imperative that healthcare professionals and administrators realize that the Guideline does not endorse mandated involuntary dose reduction or discontinuation,” read a March letter co-authored by Kertesz calling on the CDC to reiterate its recommendations were not binding. The letter continued: “Patients have endured not only unnecessary suffering, but some have turned to suicide or illicit substance use.”
More than 300 patient advocates and experts, including three former White House drug czars, signed it.
About four years ago, Dr. Stefan Kertesz started hearing that patients who had been taking opioid painkillers for years were being taken off their medications. Sometimes it was an aggressive reduction they weren’t on board with, sometimes it was all at once. Clinicians told patients they no longer felt comfortable treating them.
Kertesz, a primary care physician who also specializes in addiction medicine, had not spent his career investigating long-term opioid use or chronic pain. But he grew concerned by the medical community’s efforts to regain control over prescribing patterns after years of lax distribution. Limiting prescriptions for new patients had clear benefits, he thought, but he wondered about the results of reductions among “legacy patients.” Their outcomes weren’t being tracked.
Now, Kertesz is a leading advocate against policies that call for aggressive reductions in long-term opioid prescriptions or have resulted in forced cutbacks. He argues that well-intentioned initiatives to avoid the mistakes of the past have introduced new problems. He’s warned that clinicians’ decisions are destabilizing patients’ lives and leaving them in pain — and in some cases could drive patients to obtain opioids illicitly or even take their lives.“I think I’m particularly provoked by situations where harm is done in the name of helping,” Kertesz said. “What really gets me is when responsible parties say we will protect you, and then they call upon us to harm people.”
It’s a case that Kertesz, 52, has tried to make with nuance and precision, bounded by an emphasis on the history of overprescribing and the benefits of tapering for patients for whom it works. But against a backdrop of tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths each year and an ongoing reckoning about the roots of the opioid addiction crisis, it’s the dialectical equivalent of pinning the tail on a bucking bronco. Kertesz’s critics have questioned his motives. He’s heard he’s been called “the candyman.” (...)
Opioid prescribing has been declining since 2012, though levels remain higher than they were two decades ago. Today, depending on the estimate, anywhere from 8 million to 18 million Americans take opioids for chronic pain.
The interest in reducing their dosages is predicated in part on efforts to minimize patients’ risk of overdose and addiction. But there are other considerations. Enduring opioid use makes people more sensitive to pain, many experts believe. Opioid use has also been associated with anxiety, depression, and other health issues.
Plus, as people become dependent, the drugs might just be staving off symptoms of withdrawal that would come without another dose, rather than treating the original source of pain.
In short, experts say, long-term opioid use is not good medicine.
Kertesz, who is also a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, agrees with all of that. But he believes that lowering dosages will hurt some patients who are leading functional lives on opioids, and that top-down strategies won’t protect them.
So, in 2015, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed prescribing guidelines for primary care clinicians treating chronic pain, Kertesz grew nervous.
The guidelines, a set of measured recommendations finalized in March 2016, suggested clinicians try other therapies for pain before moving to opioids and prescribe only the lowest effective dose and duration of the drugs. (The guidelines do not apply to end-of-life or cancer care.) For patients on high doses, the guidelines said, “If benefits do not outweigh harms of continued opioid therapy, clinicians should optimize other therapies and work with patients to taper opioids to lower dosages or to taper and discontinue opioids.”
“Our day-to-day practice aligns with nearly all principles laid out in the guideline,” Kertesz wrote in a comment he submitted on the draft. But he cautioned the voluntary recommendations could be implemented too stringently by others.
“This is a guideline like no other … its guidance will affect the immediate well-being of millions of Americans with chronic pain,” he wrote.
After the release of the guidelines, Kertesz started seeing ripple effects. In early 2017, federal officials unveiled a Medicare proposal that would have blocked prescriptions higher than 90 MME without a special review. Around the same time, the National Committee for Quality Assurance considered docking clinicians’ scores if they had patients on high doses for long periods.
Kertesz, other experts, and some medical societies protested such proposals, contending they invoked the CDC guidelines while violating them.
“Most of us wish to see an evolution toward fewer opioid starts and fewer patients at high doses,” Kertesz and colleagues wrote in response to the NCQA plan. “The proposed NCQA measure indulges no such subtleties.”
The discussion overall has been hindered by limited research, including evidence for the benefits of forced tapering. But as of October 2018, 33 states had codified some prescription limits into law. Pharmacies and insurers capped prescriptions at 90 MME. Law enforcement agencies warned high prescribers.
Some initiatives have focused on avoiding “new starts,” not on tapering legacy patients. But Kertesz and other advocates argued the pressure of all the policies and warnings inculcated an anxiety around prescribing.
Chronic pain patients were seen as legally risky and medically complicated, so they had trouble finding providers.
Kertesz and his allies raised their concerns in the popular and academic presses and at conferences, building momentum over the years. They collected anecdotes from patients who said they had been harmed in some way by dose reductions or involuntary tapers.
“It is imperative that healthcare professionals and administrators realize that the Guideline does not endorse mandated involuntary dose reduction or discontinuation,” read a March letter co-authored by Kertesz calling on the CDC to reiterate its recommendations were not binding. The letter continued: “Patients have endured not only unnecessary suffering, but some have turned to suicide or illicit substance use.”
More than 300 patient advocates and experts, including three former White House drug czars, signed it.
by Andrew Joseph, STAT | Read more:
Image: Tamika Moore
[ed. Read the comments. America has a schizophrenic problem when it comes to mood-altering drugs (see here, here and here). Unfortunately, pain killers fall into this category. If the the ongoing 'War on Drugs' (and Prohibition before it) taught us anything, it's that targeting supply while ignoring demand is a recipe for failure (with sometimes horrific unintended consequences). People are dying not because drugs are easily available but because they aren't, and this uncontrolled environment creates an opportunity for all kinds of other Bad Things to happen (eg. flourishing crime organizations, dangerously adulterated products, property crimes, soaring suicide rates, etc.). The government and medical community's message: we want you to feel better, but not too good (and if unrelieved pain causes you to self-medicate, stick to approved drugs like alcohol, tobacco and anti-depressants; or just get more exercise, think positive thoughts and meditate your way out of the pain). One might reasonably ask why people need to escape reality in the first place (and if that's inherently a bad thing or just normal human behavior). Nearly every culture on earth since humans came onto the scene has had some form of mood-altering drug(s) as a component. See also: The Government's Cure for the Opioid Epidemic May Be Worse Than the Disease (Reason), and Faced with an outcry over limits on opioids, authors of CDC guidelines acknowledge they’ve been misapplied (STAT).]
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds
Two rival civilizations are battling for supremacy. Civilization A is stronger than Civilization B and is perceived by Civilization B as a grave threat; its position, however, is more fragile than it seems. Neither side hesitates to employ espionage, subterfuge, and surveillance, because the rules of conduct—to the extent that they exist—are ill-defined and frequently contested. But the battle lines are clear: whoever controls the technological frontier controls the future.
In Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy, “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”—also known by the title of its first volume, “The Three-Body Problem”—Civilization A is a distant planet named Trisolaris and Civilization B is Earth. Life on Trisolaris has become increasingly difficult to sustain, so its inhabitants prepare to colonize Earth, a project made possible by their vast technological superiority. Using higher-dimensional geometry, they deploy supercomputers the size of a proton to spy on every terrestrial activity and utterance; Earth’s entire fleet of starships proves no match for one small, droplet-shaped Trisolaran probe. Yet Trisolaris’s dominance is far from assured, given the ingenuity of the underdogs. Seeking out the vulnerabilities of its adversary, Earth establishes a deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and forces the Trisolarans to share their technology.
When the first volume of the series was published in the United States, in 2014, the models for Trisolaris and Earth were immediately apparent. For the Chinese, achieving parity with the West is a long-cherished goal, envisaged as a restoration of greatness after the humiliation of Western occupations and the self-inflicted wounds of the Mao era. As Liu told the Times, “China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction.” The future, he went on, would be “full of threats and challenges,” and “very fertile soil” for speculative fiction.
In the past few years, those threats and challenges have escalated, as China’s global ambitions, especially in the field of technology, have begun to impinge upon America’s preëminence. Disputes about tariffs, intellectual property, and tech infrastructure have become urgent matters of national security. The U.S. has blocked China’s access to certain technologies and has cracked down on cyber espionage. In January, the Justice Department filed charges against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for alleged offenses (denied by the company) including fraud, theft of intellectual property, and violations of sanctions against Iran; the company’s C.F.O., who is the daughter of its director and founder, was arrested in Canada, and faces possible extradition to the U.S. In May, Donald Trump signed an executive order that warned of foreign tech companies committing “malicious cyber-enabled actions” at the behest of their governments. The next day, Huawei was added to a list of organizations prohibited from doing business with American companies without explicit government approval, and, not long afterward, Google discontinued Huawei’s access to the Android operating system. In response, the president of Huawei told the Chinese media, “I’ve sacrificed myself and my family for the sake of a goal that we will stand on top of the world. To achieve this goal, a conflict with the U.S. is inevitable.”
As the standoff has intensified, Liu has become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work. In November, when I accompanied him on a trip to Washington, D.C.—he was picking up the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation’s Award for Imagination in Service to Society—he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said. Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”
The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, “The Physics of Three Body.” Some years ago, China’s aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that “sci-fi thinking” could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems. More recently, he was invited to inspect a colossal new radio dish, one of whose purposes is to detect extraterrestrial communications. Its engineers had been sending Liu updates on the project and effusive expressions of admiration.
Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever. A headline in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, jubilantly summed up the mood: “Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!”
by Jiayang Fan, New Yorker | Read more:
In Liu Cixin’s science-fiction trilogy, “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”—also known by the title of its first volume, “The Three-Body Problem”—Civilization A is a distant planet named Trisolaris and Civilization B is Earth. Life on Trisolaris has become increasingly difficult to sustain, so its inhabitants prepare to colonize Earth, a project made possible by their vast technological superiority. Using higher-dimensional geometry, they deploy supercomputers the size of a proton to spy on every terrestrial activity and utterance; Earth’s entire fleet of starships proves no match for one small, droplet-shaped Trisolaran probe. Yet Trisolaris’s dominance is far from assured, given the ingenuity of the underdogs. Seeking out the vulnerabilities of its adversary, Earth establishes a deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and forces the Trisolarans to share their technology.
When the first volume of the series was published in the United States, in 2014, the models for Trisolaris and Earth were immediately apparent. For the Chinese, achieving parity with the West is a long-cherished goal, envisaged as a restoration of greatness after the humiliation of Western occupations and the self-inflicted wounds of the Mao era. As Liu told the Times, “China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction.” The future, he went on, would be “full of threats and challenges,” and “very fertile soil” for speculative fiction.In the past few years, those threats and challenges have escalated, as China’s global ambitions, especially in the field of technology, have begun to impinge upon America’s preëminence. Disputes about tariffs, intellectual property, and tech infrastructure have become urgent matters of national security. The U.S. has blocked China’s access to certain technologies and has cracked down on cyber espionage. In January, the Justice Department filed charges against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for alleged offenses (denied by the company) including fraud, theft of intellectual property, and violations of sanctions against Iran; the company’s C.F.O., who is the daughter of its director and founder, was arrested in Canada, and faces possible extradition to the U.S. In May, Donald Trump signed an executive order that warned of foreign tech companies committing “malicious cyber-enabled actions” at the behest of their governments. The next day, Huawei was added to a list of organizations prohibited from doing business with American companies without explicit government approval, and, not long afterward, Google discontinued Huawei’s access to the Android operating system. In response, the president of Huawei told the Chinese media, “I’ve sacrificed myself and my family for the sake of a goal that we will stand on top of the world. To achieve this goal, a conflict with the U.S. is inevitable.”
As the standoff has intensified, Liu has become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work. In November, when I accompanied him on a trip to Washington, D.C.—he was picking up the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation’s Award for Imagination in Service to Society—he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said. Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug. “I don’t begin with some conceit in mind. I’m just trying to tell a good story.”
The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, “The Physics of Three Body.” Some years ago, China’s aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that “sci-fi thinking” could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems. More recently, he was invited to inspect a colossal new radio dish, one of whose purposes is to detect extraterrestrial communications. Its engineers had been sending Liu updates on the project and effusive expressions of admiration.
Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu’s short story “The Wandering Earth” earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China’s second-highest-grossing film ever. A headline in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, jubilantly summed up the mood: “Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!”
Image: Robert Beatty
[ed. Definitely in the 'hard sci-fi' category (some of the described physics are mind-bending if not headache inducing). The second installment of the Three Body Problem trilogy - The Dark Forest - is my favorite.]
Rock Riff Rip-Off
In a little-noticed moment during Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven plagiarism trial, a Guitar God inadvertently revealed that his industry’s most famous (and valuable) tunes were up for grabs. It was June 2016, on the third day of the proceedings in Los Angeles federal court, when Jimmy Page took the stand. He faced examination by attorney Francis Malofiy. At issue in the trial was whether Page had stolen the introduction of 1971’s Stairway from the obscure 1968 instrumental Taurus by the band Spirit.
To the frustration of Malofiy, the judge said it was irrelevant whether the songs’ album recordings sounded alike. What mattered was whether Page had lifted the Spirit song as it had been written on a single page of music submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 1967. The Taurus “deposit copy,” as it’s called, is a spare document handwritten by a record company scribe who listened to the record and then distilled it into only 124 notes of piano music. The reverse engineering was required to comply with U.S. law, which before 1978 allowed songs to be registered only via sheet music “deposited” in Washington. When a pianist performed the Taurus deposit copy for jurors earlier in the trial, it didn’t sound much like the Spirit record, let alone Stairway.
In a bind, Malofiy turned the issue on its head:
“I’d like to pull up Exhibit 2708, which is the Stairway to Heaven deposit copy,” he told the court. The sheet music appeared, projected on a screen between Page’s witness stand and the jury box. “Can you point to where on the deposit copy of Stairway to Heaven it indicates the solo?” Malofiy asked, referring to the electric guitar finale that’s considered one of Page’s crowning achievements.
“I’ll have to have a look,” Page said, then scanned the first bit. “Um, I think you need to scroll down one more.” The second folio came up on the screen. “Please scroll one more,” he said as more music appeared. “Please, one more,” he said again as the fourth and final bit came up. “OK. That’s it. I’ve read it.”
“You would agree that there’s no solo on the deposit copy … of Stairway to Heaven, which was deposited with the office?”
“Yeah, we—I agree with that. It’s not in there, no,” Page said.
Malofiy then pointed to the first measure. On the record, Stairway begins with a finger-picked introduction—one of the most recognizable musical passages of the past half-century, mimicked by millions of aspiring guitarists. That iconic intro, Malofiy said, “That’s not represented in the deposit copy?”
“No,” Page said. “You’re correct.”
Sitting in the courtroom that day, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were some of the most famous passages in rock history really not protected by copyright? And did this also apply to any number of other songs whose deposit copies were certainly equally lacking? I felt as if someone had dropped $100 bills on the ground. Countless unregistered bits of song—guitar solos, bass lines, horn parts, background vocals—could be sitting out there exposed to unscrupulous financial exploitation. Ring tones, TV ads, film soundtracks—or even entire new songs—could be made and sold from these orphaned riffs. (...)
Led Zeppelin won at the 2016 trial, but the matter isn’t resolved, and the stakes seem to have actually grown. Malofiy appealed, and in September, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a Stairway do-over trial for procedural reasons. At the heart of the judges’ decision was a potentially industry-changing declaration: For pre-1978 unpublished songs, the deposited sheet music “defines the scope of the copyright.”
That ruling set off second appeals by both sides. Led Zeppelin asked for the original verdict to be upheld. Malofiy asked the entire appeals court, and not only three judges, to decide on the narrow issue of deposit copies. In early June, the San Francisco appeals court voted to have a rare 11-judge panel rehear the case in September, suspending the earlier appeals decision. The only topic on which the court has asked the parties for briefs so far is the primacy of deposit copies. The litigation has broader implications, undergirding a high-profile New York case in which plaintiffs are demanding more than $100 million for the alleged theft of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for Ed Sheeran’s hit Thinking Out Loud .
The irony is there may be no winning outcome for Led Zeppelin. As Page’s testimony showed, the harder his lawyers push for strict readings of the copyright sheet music, the more they weaken the protection for Stairway. They’re going all-out, too. The legal team for the band and its publisher, Warner Music Group Corp., wrote in a December filing about “the primacy of deposited sheet music” as a bedrock of their industry and how “contracts are entered into in reliance on the certainty that a copyright protects the copyrighted work.”
by Vernon Silver, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Library of Congress
[ed. Here's a side-by-side comparison of Taurus vs. Stairway (YouTube).]
The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi
The New Sex Drug Is Called Vyleesi (The Cut)
The FDA just approved a new drug aimed at revving up women’s libidos and treating “low sexual drive.” Called Vyleesi, the drug calls for being injected, shortly before sex, into the abdomen or the thigh. In trials, 40 percent of women who tried Vyleesi experienced nausea. The chief medical officer for the company behind it, AMAG Pharmaceuticals, told the New York Times that they were “obviously thrilled about being able to bring another option to patients.”
Image: AMAG Pharmaceuticals[ed. Insert joke here.]
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Chianti Classico, Beyond the Straw-Covered Bottle
Chianti Classico wines are better than they have ever been.
The best examples are remarkably distinctive, wonderfully satisfying and, in some ways, the essence of Italian red wines. Still many people seem unaware of what they are missing.
At a dinner party recently, I brought a few bottles of wine including one of my favorite Chianti Classicos, a 2016 from Monteraponi. When the bottle was poured, the other guests loved it, but seemed shocked at learning its identity.
“Chianti?” one said. “Really? I don’t think I’ve had Chianti since it used to come in those straw-covered bottles.”
Now, these people were not wine experts. But I had long convinced myself that differentiating today’s Chianti from those bottles of old was as unnecessary as reminding people that Chablis comes from Burgundy, not California.
Younger consumers nowadays may have no idea that 40 years ago Americans often referred generically to California white wine as “Chablis.” Nor are they likely to know that college students in the 1970s bought Chianti not for the wine but to use the empty fiasco, as the straw-covered bottle is called in Italian, as a candleholder.
The last time I thought about Chianti in fiaschi was a few years ago when Monte Bernardi, a very good producer, began selling Chianti in the straw-covered bottles as a sort of playful retro statement.
As good as Chianti Classico is these days, it rarely seems to be an object of anybody’s desire. With the exception of some excellent Italian restaurants, few wine lists put it in the spotlight. It seldom features on any sommelier’s Instagram feed.
Yet a good Chianti Classico is one of the most soulful wines I know. The best have a pure, deep red-cherry flavor, sometimes deliciously tart or bittersweet, along with pronounced floral aromas and flavors, and an earthy minerality. The acidity is fresh and lively; tannins should be discernible, though not overly chewy — often with what I think of as a dusty quality, focusing the wine and readying the mouth for another sip.
I love Chianti with cooked tomato sauces and pizza. It is also a natural partner with sausages, all sorts of beef dishes and stews. And if you wonder why I’m thinking about a red wine as summer is about to envelop us with heat, I wonder if you ever plan to eat burgers or steaks off the grill. If so, you might consider a Chianti Classico.
How is it that Chianti Classico is generally well known and so often ignored? There are several reasons beyond its checkered-tablecloth past.
First, Chianti is an expression of the sangiovese grape, and sangiovese is very much undervalued, except in the case of Chianti’s Tuscan sibling, Brunello di Montalcino.
Chianti is the historic name of the hilly Tuscan wine region between Florence and Siena. As Chianti became well known in the early 20th century, Italian wine authorities took advantage of its fame by expanding the zone in which wine could legally be called Chianti. Not surprisingly, one result of this expansion was to dilute the quality of the wine.
It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that the greater Chianti region was officially divided into a series of subzones, of which Chianti Classico represents the historic heartland.
Geography was only one issue. While what constituted Chianti centuries ago is difficult to reconstruct as few records exist, most authorities date modern Chianti back to 1872, when Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a leading Tuscan statesman and agricultural expert, set out what came to be considered the formula for Chianti.
by Eric Asimov, NY Times | Read more:
Image: DEA / G.COZZI/ Getty Images
The best examples are remarkably distinctive, wonderfully satisfying and, in some ways, the essence of Italian red wines. Still many people seem unaware of what they are missing.
At a dinner party recently, I brought a few bottles of wine including one of my favorite Chianti Classicos, a 2016 from Monteraponi. When the bottle was poured, the other guests loved it, but seemed shocked at learning its identity.
“Chianti?” one said. “Really? I don’t think I’ve had Chianti since it used to come in those straw-covered bottles.”
Now, these people were not wine experts. But I had long convinced myself that differentiating today’s Chianti from those bottles of old was as unnecessary as reminding people that Chablis comes from Burgundy, not California.Younger consumers nowadays may have no idea that 40 years ago Americans often referred generically to California white wine as “Chablis.” Nor are they likely to know that college students in the 1970s bought Chianti not for the wine but to use the empty fiasco, as the straw-covered bottle is called in Italian, as a candleholder.
The last time I thought about Chianti in fiaschi was a few years ago when Monte Bernardi, a very good producer, began selling Chianti in the straw-covered bottles as a sort of playful retro statement.
As good as Chianti Classico is these days, it rarely seems to be an object of anybody’s desire. With the exception of some excellent Italian restaurants, few wine lists put it in the spotlight. It seldom features on any sommelier’s Instagram feed.
Yet a good Chianti Classico is one of the most soulful wines I know. The best have a pure, deep red-cherry flavor, sometimes deliciously tart or bittersweet, along with pronounced floral aromas and flavors, and an earthy minerality. The acidity is fresh and lively; tannins should be discernible, though not overly chewy — often with what I think of as a dusty quality, focusing the wine and readying the mouth for another sip.
I love Chianti with cooked tomato sauces and pizza. It is also a natural partner with sausages, all sorts of beef dishes and stews. And if you wonder why I’m thinking about a red wine as summer is about to envelop us with heat, I wonder if you ever plan to eat burgers or steaks off the grill. If so, you might consider a Chianti Classico.
How is it that Chianti Classico is generally well known and so often ignored? There are several reasons beyond its checkered-tablecloth past.
First, Chianti is an expression of the sangiovese grape, and sangiovese is very much undervalued, except in the case of Chianti’s Tuscan sibling, Brunello di Montalcino.
Chianti is the historic name of the hilly Tuscan wine region between Florence and Siena. As Chianti became well known in the early 20th century, Italian wine authorities took advantage of its fame by expanding the zone in which wine could legally be called Chianti. Not surprisingly, one result of this expansion was to dilute the quality of the wine.
It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that the greater Chianti region was officially divided into a series of subzones, of which Chianti Classico represents the historic heartland.
Geography was only one issue. While what constituted Chianti centuries ago is difficult to reconstruct as few records exist, most authorities date modern Chianti back to 1872, when Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a leading Tuscan statesman and agricultural expert, set out what came to be considered the formula for Chianti.
by Eric Asimov, NY Times | Read more:
Image: DEA / G.COZZI/ Getty Images
Slouching Toward War
President Trump has been all over the place on Iran, which is what happens when you take a serious subject, treat it with farcical superficiality, believe braggadocio will sway a proud and ancient civilization, approach foreign policy like a real estate deal, defer to advisers with Iran Derangement Syndrome, refuse to read any briefing papers and confuse the American national interest with the Saudi or Israeli.
This American slouching toward another Middle East war has been a disgrace, shot through with the twisting of truth or outright lies. Now Trump has approved, only to reverse, a retaliatory strike for the Iranian downing of an American drone, an aptly chaotic culmination to the drift the president has allowed.
The 11th-hour calling-off of military action was the one wise decision Trump has taken on Iran since he took office. Dazzled by Saudi blandishments, Israeli veneration, the opportunity to trash Barack Obama’s diplomacy and the lure of evangelicals’ votes, Trump determined from Day 1 that the Islamic Republic was the enemy from Central Casting. His view was unburdened by any serious assessment of how to balance toughness and engagement in the long-traumatized American-Iranian relationship.
The United States does not need the war with Iran that John Bolton, the national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem determined to deliver. It would be a war of choice, illusion and irresponsibility. It would place Americans at risk across the Middle East, with no benefit to the United States or its allies.
The Trump administration has been lucky. Now, in a real crisis, and one of the administration’s own making, the cavalier ineptitude and absence of anything resembling process is on full public view. Threats and bombast get you just so far. Iran has called Trump’s bluff.
Just over a year ago, when Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China had hammered out over years of diplomacy to keep Iran from a bomb, I wrote:
“President Trump is withdrawing the United States from an Iran nuclear deal that has worked, in the name of unrelated demands that are unworkable, at very high cost to America’s alliances and the value of its word, with no viable alternative policy in place and at the risk of igniting the Middle East.”
Here we are, on the brink of ignition. Over the past year, Bolton has threatened military action multiple times, telling Iran there will be “hell to pay,” ratcheting up tensions wherever possible and extending potential pretexts for war.
Pompeo has been a willing dance partner in this exercise. He has declared a determination to drive Iran’s oil exports to “zero” and energetically pursued the grotesque objective of conflating Iran, a Shia nation, with Al Qaeda, an expression of murderous Wahhabi Sunni extremism. In fact, as former Secretary of State John Kerry told me, “Iran has helped in the war against the ISIS,” another Sunni terrorist group.
The aim of the Bolton-Pompeo Iran-equals-Al-Qaeda maneuver has been obvious: to bring a war with Iran within the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed by Congress in response to Sept. 11, whose perpetrators were overwhelmingly Saudi. (...)
“The Trump administration policy has been unnecessary, counter-strategic and dangerous,” Kerry told me. “It has completely upended the legitimacy of approaching certain issues — Yemen, Hezbollah, missile technology — while having the nuclear issue in a box in the most accountable, transparent nuclear deal on the planet.
“All they have done is given life to the deeply held Iranian belief that you cannot trust or negotiate with the United States, while trying to squeeze Iran into economic oblivion in pursuit of regime change that would only hand power to the hard-line Republican Guards, not some democrat.”
This American slouching toward another Middle East war has been a disgrace, shot through with the twisting of truth or outright lies. Now Trump has approved, only to reverse, a retaliatory strike for the Iranian downing of an American drone, an aptly chaotic culmination to the drift the president has allowed.
The 11th-hour calling-off of military action was the one wise decision Trump has taken on Iran since he took office. Dazzled by Saudi blandishments, Israeli veneration, the opportunity to trash Barack Obama’s diplomacy and the lure of evangelicals’ votes, Trump determined from Day 1 that the Islamic Republic was the enemy from Central Casting. His view was unburdened by any serious assessment of how to balance toughness and engagement in the long-traumatized American-Iranian relationship.The United States does not need the war with Iran that John Bolton, the national security adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seem determined to deliver. It would be a war of choice, illusion and irresponsibility. It would place Americans at risk across the Middle East, with no benefit to the United States or its allies.
The Trump administration has been lucky. Now, in a real crisis, and one of the administration’s own making, the cavalier ineptitude and absence of anything resembling process is on full public view. Threats and bombast get you just so far. Iran has called Trump’s bluff.
Just over a year ago, when Trump tore up the nuclear deal that the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China had hammered out over years of diplomacy to keep Iran from a bomb, I wrote:
“President Trump is withdrawing the United States from an Iran nuclear deal that has worked, in the name of unrelated demands that are unworkable, at very high cost to America’s alliances and the value of its word, with no viable alternative policy in place and at the risk of igniting the Middle East.”
Here we are, on the brink of ignition. Over the past year, Bolton has threatened military action multiple times, telling Iran there will be “hell to pay,” ratcheting up tensions wherever possible and extending potential pretexts for war.
Pompeo has been a willing dance partner in this exercise. He has declared a determination to drive Iran’s oil exports to “zero” and energetically pursued the grotesque objective of conflating Iran, a Shia nation, with Al Qaeda, an expression of murderous Wahhabi Sunni extremism. In fact, as former Secretary of State John Kerry told me, “Iran has helped in the war against the ISIS,” another Sunni terrorist group.
The aim of the Bolton-Pompeo Iran-equals-Al-Qaeda maneuver has been obvious: to bring a war with Iran within the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force that was passed by Congress in response to Sept. 11, whose perpetrators were overwhelmingly Saudi. (...)
“The Trump administration policy has been unnecessary, counter-strategic and dangerous,” Kerry told me. “It has completely upended the legitimacy of approaching certain issues — Yemen, Hezbollah, missile technology — while having the nuclear issue in a box in the most accountable, transparent nuclear deal on the planet.
“All they have done is given life to the deeply held Iranian belief that you cannot trust or negotiate with the United States, while trying to squeeze Iran into economic oblivion in pursuit of regime change that would only hand power to the hard-line Republican Guards, not some democrat.”
by Roger Cohen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: US bases around Iran via
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