A Comedy Education From Late Legend Buck Henry

What working on The Graduate, Get Smart, SNL, and more taught him about making timeless humor.

Buck Henry is going to be missed for many reasons, not least of which are his brilliant script of The Graduate, the creation of Get Smart, and the ahead-of-its-time but short-lived TV sci-fi satire Quark, as well as his SNL characters, a lot of whom (as the saying goes) would never get anywhere close to airtime these days — such as his version of Charles Lindbergh, who, on his first solo flight across the Atlantic, anxiously passes the time by jerking off to the pornographic magazines he brought with him.

With Buck’s passing on Wednesday at the age of 89, I’d love for you to read the extended version of the interview I conducted with him back in 2009, before it was cut down for inclusion in my book.

There’s a Heaven Can Wait reference I could use right now, but I’ll save you the time and agony. Instead, I’ll just say this:

Plastics.

Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?

Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age. At just sixteen, he was performing as one of the sons in the touring production of the mega-hit Life with Father (1947). A few years later, stationed in Germany and maintaining helicopters and aircraft, he found time to write, direct, and star in a cheerful (if somewhat unorthodox) musical review called Beyond the Moon, in which two GIs are accidentally rocketed to a distant planet, where they find a race of “weird but gorgeous women.”

The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry. In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. Though fans and critics adored its obvious spoofing of the James Bond spy genre, Get Smart was also a satire of government incompetence (and possible menace), a topic Henry revisited in his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970). But, arguably, Henry’s biggest cultural impact was the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), the Mike Nichols–directed comedy about alienation, plastics, and MILFs, which would soon come to define the baby-boomer generation. (...)

You’ve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature. Is this an example?

I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.

How do you achieve this? Where do you look and when do you listen?

I think the problem is that, if you live in California — and especially if you live in Hollywood — you aren’t connected to what the rest of the world thinks of as real life. Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.

If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world. (...)

Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres? Did it always come easily to you?

Yes, but I’m actually more a fan of other genres than I am of comedy. I rarely go to comedies. I just don’t find comedy as interesting as the forms that I don’t do myself. It’s harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.

You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.

It is defensive in nature. With comedy, you deflect danger. You cover up emotion. You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.

Comedy is also harder to write. Things are either funny or they’re not. If you were writing, say, a story about Jesus getting married and having children, you can go for a long period of time faking it before you have to do anything even pretending to be meaningful. You can’t fake it with comedy. (...)

Did you see the potential right away in the Charles Webb book The Graduate when you were asked to write the screenplay?

Yes, but I don’t think I read the book until Mike Nichols gave it to me. Once I did, my feeling was, This is going to make a very good movie. There were strong characters and a good story.

The book is dialogue-heavy. Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?

Sure. The more there is to steal, the easier the job — although, in some cases, it isn’t. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite, because you can’t figure out what to get rid of.

I was going to ask if you had any idea whether The Graduate would become such a phenomenon, but does anyone ever really know?

Oh, absolutely not. You never really know.

With The Graduate, nobody expected that what happened was going to happen. I mean, I thought the movie was going to be a hit, but I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of hit.

How about specific lines and jokes? As a screenwriter, do you ever really know if a line or joke will break through?

I can usually tell if a joke will work, but I can’t predict if a joke or a line will become iconic.

Such as the famous “plastics” line?

Right. I had no idea what would happen with that line. I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment. Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the “plastics” line was only a part of it.

The line was not in the book. What made you want to write it into the movie?

I had a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, and he would rail against the “plastic world.” I always remembered that phrase. The party scene needed something, just a little something, and “plastics” seemed to be the right word to use. I could have used “mohair” or another word, and if the actors had done it right, it still would have received a laugh. But “plastics” was just perfect. It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.

Everyone’s been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents’ friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you’d have paid to not have to stand around with … Well, we’ve all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.

by Mike Sacks, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Seaweed 'Forests' Can Help Fight Climate Change

As the Amazon burns, there’s growing interest in cultivating forests that absorb planet-warming carbon emissions, but that are fireproof.

That’s because these forests are underwater.

An increasing body of research is documenting the potential of seaweed farming to counter climate change as deforestation decimates rainforests and other crucial carbon sinks. Fast-growing oceanic jungles of kelp and other macroalgae are highly efficient at storing carbon. Seaweed also ameliorates acidification, deoxygenation, and other marine impacts of global warming that threaten the biodiversity of the seas and the source of food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

“Seaweed is finally having its moment in the spotlight,” says Halley Froehlich, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She is the lead author of a new study that for the first time quantifies the global capacity of large-scale seaweed farming to offset terrestrial carbon emissions and maps areas of the ocean suitable for macroalgae cultivation.

Farming seaweed in just 3.8 percent of the federal waters off the California coast—that’s 0.065 percent of the global ocean suitable for growing macroalgae—could neutralize emissions from the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry, according to the paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Seaweed is currently grown on a small scale for use in food, medicines, and beauty products. The scientists, however, propose the establishment of industrial-size farms to grow seaweed to maturity, harvest it, and then sink it in the deep ocean where the captured carbon dioxide would be entombed for hundreds to thousands of years.

They found that raising macroalgae in just 0.001 percent of seaweed-growing waters worldwide and then burying it at sea could offset the entire carbon emissions of the rapidly growing global aquaculture industry, which supplies half of the world’s seafood. Altogether, 18.5 million square miles of the ocean is suitable for seaweed cultivation, the study concluded.

There’s a catch

“The technology doesn’t yet exist” to sequester seaweed in the deep ocean, notes Froehlich. “Hopefully this paper spurs conversation among engineers and economists about what would it take for the actual mechanisms to be put in place.” (...)

Beyond seaweed’s potential to counteract acidification and deoxygenation, absorb excess nutrients and provide habitat for marine life in at least 77 countries, seaweed can be processed into biofuel. And research has shown that adding seaweed to livestock feed can reduce potent methane emissions from the burps of cows and other grazing livestock—a significant source of global greenhouse gases—by as much as 70 percent. Seaweed can also be used as an agricultural soil supplement, replacing petroleum-based fertilizers.

“The math shows you that seaweed can be a very effective tool to fight climate change, but it has to be validated by the market,” says Scotty Schmidt, chief executive of Primary Ocean, a Los Angeles company working on a United States government-funded project to develop technologies to deploy large-scale seaweed farms.

“Farming seaweed just for carbon sequestration is not a viable business case at this time as there's barely a carbon market that's willing to accept seaweed offset credits,” he says.

by Todd Woody, National Geographic |  Read more:

Image: divedog, Adobe Stock 2019 via:
[ed. Only if it's profitable.]

Japanese stamp depicting marimo moss balls, 1956.

via:

Ho Sung Choi

[ed. Whatever works. See also: 2019 SMBC Singapore Open.]

via:

Deaths of Despair: Who Killed the Knapp Family?

Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.

Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000.

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

We were foreign correspondents together for many years, periodically covering humanitarian crises in distant countries. Then we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.

“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.

by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dee Knapp
[ed.  See also: (Andrew Sullivan, Intelligencer - The Poison We Pick):

"And so we wait to see what amount of death will be tolerable in America as the price of retaining prohibition. Is it 100,000 deaths a year? More? At what point does a medical emergency actually provoke a government response that takes mass death seriously? Imagine a terror attack that killed over 40,000 people. Imagine a new virus that threatened to kill 52,000 Americans this year. Wouldn’t any government make it the top priority before any other? (...)

One of the more vivid images that Americans have of drug abuse is of a rat in a cage, tapping a cocaine-infused water bottle again and again until the rodent expires. Years later, as recounted in Johann Hari’s epic history of the drug war, Chasing the Scream, a curious scientist replicated the experiment. But this time he added a control group. In one cage sat a rat and a water dispenser serving diluted morphine. In another cage, with another rat and an identical dispenser, he added something else: wheels to run in, colored balls to play with, lots of food to eat, and other rats for the junkie rodent to play or have sex with. Call it rat park. And the rats in rat park consumed just one-fifth of the morphine water of the rat in the cage. One reason for pathological addiction, it turns out, is the environment. If you were trapped in solitary confinement, with only morphine to pass the time, you’d die of your addiction pretty swiftly too. Take away the stimulus of community and all the oxytocin it naturally generates, and an artificial variety of the substance becomes much more compelling.

One way of thinking of postindustrial America is to imagine it as a former rat park, slowly converting into a rat cage. Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. The dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation. Stable family life has collapsed, and the number of children without two parents in the home has risen among the white working and middle classes. The internet has ravaged local retail stores, flattening the uniqueness of many communities. Smartphones have eviscerated those moments of oxytocin-friendly actual human interaction. Meaning — once effortlessly provided by a more unified and often religious culture shared, at least nominally, by others — is harder to find, and the proportion of Americans who identify as “nones,” with no religious affiliation, has risen to record levels. Even as we near peak employment and record-high median household income, a sense of permanent economic insecurity and spiritual emptiness has become widespread. Some of that emptiness was once assuaged by a constantly rising standard of living, generation to generation. But that has now evaporated for most Americans." ]

America Can End Its War On Drugs. Here's How.

Decades into the war on drugs, the world doesn't have much to show for it. The US is now in the middle of an opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that has killed tens of thousands each year, despite tough-on-crime policies enforced under the drug war. Mexico has suffered from tens of thousands of deaths annually as the black market for drugs finances drug cartels that are so powerful they can wage war against governments and conquer cities. And drug use and trafficking haven't declined by an appreciable amount for decades.

These circumstances led more than 1,000 world leaders, including Bernie Sanders, to call for an end to the "disastrous" war on drugs in a recent letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

But what exactly does it mean to end the war on drugs? (...)

Through interviews with some of the world's smartest drug policy experts and my review of the research, I put together three of the best ideas on dismantling the current system. These are by no means the only options for ending the war on drugs. But they are the ones that seemed, based on my reporting on the issue and data, to have the most merit.

There were some points of agreement. Experts agreed that, regardless of how legal regimes change, countries should boost public health programs for drugs, including treatment and prevention. And whether drugs have medical use, such as marijuana or hallucinogens, is also something that can be evaluated separately.

But there was a lot of disagreement about what legal regimes for drugs should look like. So here are the three plans that came from my conversations.

Approach 1: Pull back harsh enforcement, but keep criminalization (...)

Approach 2: Decriminalization, smart prohibition, and smart legalization (...)

Approach 3: Legalize and tightly regulate all drugs

The most radical approach — and one most Americans don't agree with — is legalizing and regulating all drugs. This is something no country has done in modern times, as many recreational drugs remain illegal to sell virtually everywhere in the world. So it's difficult to say for certain what would happen.

Still, there was one consistent group that drug policy experts and historians pointed me to when I asked whether anyone had a realistic legalization model: the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. While many don't agree with Transform's plan, it was consistently cited as the most detailed, evidence-based proposal.

Explaining his approach, Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform, said his group applied what we already know about other vice markets — particularly alcohol, tobacco, and gambling — to illegal drugs.

To be clear, this would not mean letting people buy any drug they want at the grocery store. "Different drugs would be regulated in different ways," Rolles explained. "The determinant of how you would regulate a drug would be what the risks and behaviors associated with that particular drug were. So the more risky a drug is, clearly, the more justification you have for more intrusive or intense regulation."

In its very detailed blueprint, Transform lays out its regulatory models based on tiers that ramp up restrictions based on a drug's dangers. Here's a quick summary of the five tiers, which divide up where and how the drugs would be available based on how potentially dangerous they are:

Medically supervised venues: Drugs put in this category, including heroin or amphetamines, would only be allowed with a prescription (typically for people with drug use disorders) and the direct supervision of a trained expert, like a doctor in a controlled facility.

Pharmacies: Drugs in this tier, such as MDMA, powder cocaine, or amphetamine, would only be dispensed through pharmacies with a prescription or over the counter. While it is currently the case that pharmacies focus on medical applications, the blueprint suggests that pharmacists could also act as trained and licensed gatekeepers for drugs used in recreational settings.

Licensed sales: Drugs in this classification, like marijuana and stimulant-based drinks, would be dispensed by licensed, regulated vendors. These sellers don't have to be for-profit entities; they could be nonprofits or government-controlled.

Licensed premises: These regulated establishments would dispense drugs, such as smoked opium, psychedelics, or poppy tea, much like alcohol is sold and consumed in bars today — although in some cases, as with psychedelics, the vendors would need training to help guide people through their experiences.

Unlicensed sales: Drugs in this category, like coca tea, would be available easily, much like caffeine.

Rolles emphasized that commercialization should be avoided. So even the drugs that are more accessible could still fall under strict regulations, such as a ban on marketing, taxes to keep the prices high, and even price controls. This could make up for at least part of the price drop that comes with the end of prohibition.

The new regulations could also be applied to alcohol and tobacco, as well as marijuana in states that already legalized the drug. (Rolles said he doesn't like that marijuana is moving to a commercialized legal model in parts of the US.)

But why go for legalization and regulation? There are two main reasons for this, Rolles argued: One, it completely eliminates the black market for drugs that enables so much violence around the world, particularly Latin America. Two, it could potentially make drug consumption safer.

The first point is relatively uncontroversial. It is clear that the war on drugs has had an enormously negative effect in several countries around the world, particularly Mexico in recent years. Again, a study found that violence from the drug war caused Mexico's life expectancy to stagnate — and, in men's cases, drop — after decades of increases.

On the second point, Rolles argues that legalizing and regulating drugs could make for safer drug use. So if people get their drugs from a regulated source, governments can ensure there's nothing that would make an already dangerous substance even more dangerous (such as fentanyl in heroin).

It may also eliminate the incentives in the black market to make drugs as potent as possible, since in a black market it's much easier to smuggle a highly potent pound of a drug (such as heroin) than it would be to smuggle a few pounds of something that's not as potent (such as smoked opium).

A similar black market phenomenon occurred during Prohibition, when the US banned alcohol from 1920 to 1933. During Prohibition, the market quickly went to spirits. After Prohibition, it has shifted toward wine and beer. (...)

"The idea that we're trying to promote in the blueprint is that a regulatory model can tilt the market the other way," Rolles said. "So the less risky, less potent products are more available, and the higher risk products are increasingly less available or not available at all." 

by German Lopez, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

[ed. See also: The rise in meth and cocaine overdoses, explained; and How the war on drugs has made drug traffickers more ruthless and efficient (Vox).]

New Demand For Old, Low Tech Farm Tractors

Farmers are increasingly sick of high-tech tractors that are expensive to buy and usually impossible to fix yourself due to their integrated digital technology. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, "Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days." To be sure, the farmers buying these old machines aren't luddites. In fact, they often customize and retrofit them with contemporary tech like GPS for automatic steering. From the Star Tribune:

“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” (BigIron owner Mark) Stock said. 

There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor. “That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” (Machinery Pete founder Greg) Peterson said... 

The cheaper repairs for an older tractor mean their life cycle can be extended. A new motor or transmission may cost $10,000 to $15,000, and then a tractor could be good for another 10 or 15 years. 

Folland has two Versatile 875s manufactured in the early 1980s in Winnipeg and bought a John Deere 4440 last year with 9,000 hours on it, expecting to get another 5,000 hours out of it before he has to make a major repair.
“An expensive repair would be $15,000 to $20,000, but you’re still well below the cost of buying a new tractor that’s $150,000 to $250,000. It’s still a fraction of the cost,” (farmer Kris) Folland said. “That’s why these models are so popular. They’ve stood the test of time, well built, easy to fix, and it’s easy to get parts.”

by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: "John Deere 3020" by Artiez (CC BY-SA 3.0)

[ed. Also a problem with personal vehicles and trucks outfitted with new technologies, making repair bills a nightmare. Not to mention "Right to Repair" issues. See also: here, here and here.]

White House Moves to Exempt Big Projects From Environmental Review

President Trump on Thursday capped a three-year drive to roll back clean air and water protections by proposing stark changes to the nation’s oldest and most established environmental law that could exempt major infrastructure projects from environmental review.

The revisions to the law — the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark measure that touches nearly every highway, bridge, pipeline and other major federal construction in the country — underscored Mr. Trump’s focus on stripping away regulations, to the consternation of conservationists. In the middle of a foreign-policy crisis and on the cusp of an impeachment trial in the Senate, Mr. Trump appeared in his element on Thursday, flanked by men in hard hats and orange safety vests.

“America’s most critical infrastructure projects have been tied up and bogged down by an outrageously slow and burdensome federal approval process, and I’ve been talking about it for a long time,” he said.

Mr. Trump, who made his fortune as a real estate developer, spoke as if personally aggrieved: “The builders are not happy. Nobody’s happy.”

Since taking office Mr. Trump has proposed nearly 100 environmental rollbacks, including weakening protections for endangered species, relaxing rules that limit emissions from coal plants and blocking the phaseout of older incandescent light bulbs. Hundreds of thousands of public comments against the president’s moves have flowed in. Scientists have spoken out in opposition. Democrats have vowed to stop him, all with little effect.

“He sees himself as the kingpin of an anti-federal-regulatory movement,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who has written about environmental policy.

But haste and zeal may work against administration. Nearly 70 lawsuits have been filed to challenge the administration’s deregulatory moves, asserting that officials have violated federal procedures in their rollback efforts. The Trump administration has, so far, been successful just four times, according to New York University School of Law data.

Some of Mr. Trump’s moves have been never been tried before, such as the reversal of national monument designations by his predecessors. Some have been remarkably defiant, like Thursday’s effort to alter a half-century-old law by decree, carving out a new category of infrastructure projects not subject to environmental review.

The interior secretary, David Bernhardt, who has overseen plans to weaken limits on the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and loosen offshore drilling safety rules, called the proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act the Trump administration’s most significant deregulatory proposal yet.

Critics agreed. James A. Thurber, a political-science professor at American University, described Mr. Trump’s latest actions to “altering the Ten Commandments of environmental policy.”

All told, Mr. Trump has gone further than any other president, including Ronald Reagan, in dismantling clean air and water protections. The National Environmental Protection Act was signed into law by Richard M. Nixon after calls for greater oversight when the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and a tanker spilled three million gallons of crude off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. (...)

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, major federal projects like bridges, highways, pipelines or power plants that will have a significant impact on the environment require a review, or environmental impact statement, outlining potential consequences.

The proposed new rules would change the regulations that guide the implementation of the law in a number of ways, including by narrowing the range of projects that require such an assessment and by imposing strict new deadlines on completing the studies.

The changes would also eliminate the need for agencies to consider the “cumulative impacts” of projects. In recent years, courts have said that includes studying the planet-warming consequences of emitting more greenhouse gases. Mary B. Neumayr, the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the change did not prevent or exclude consideration of the impact of greenhouse gases; consideration would no longer be required.

And the changes would set hard deadlines of one year to complete reviews of smaller projects and two years to complete reviews of larger ones.

Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe the changes would hold up in court. The National Environmental Policy Act requires that all the environmental consequences of a project be taken into account, he said, and that core requirement cannot be changed by fiat.

“A regulation can’t change the requirements of a statute as interpreted by the courts,” Mr. Revesz said. In fact, he argued, under the Trump administration’s guidance, federal agencies are more likely to be sued for inadequate reviews, “leading to far longer delays than if they had done a proper analysis in the first place.”

by Lisa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Charles Mostoller/Reuters
[ed. Everyone is familiar with Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). NEPA is the cornerstone, the gold standard of environmental protection. I spent my whole career implementing its policies and navigating its laws. If anyone thinks this is going to be good for business they're sadly mistaken. Without a formal process for identifying and resolving potential issues up front (environmental, technical, legal, economic, social), projects will be tied up in courts for years and may never get built. See also: How the Process Works - An Outsider's Guide to Cherry Point; and Megaproject Management (Duck Soup).]

Lauritz Hartz, Landscape
via:

Rickie Fowler, professional golfer,  fashion trendsetter. 
Image: Instagram via
[ed. Yikes.]

Millions of Animals Lost in Australia's Wildfires

Koala Mittens and Baby Bottles: Saving Australia’s Animals After Fires (NY Times)

Image: Christina Simons for The New York Times

[ed. Loss in the millions (if not billions), including up to 30% of Australia's koala's. See also: Bugpocolypse.]

Tom Petty on Songwriting

“Sometimes songwriting is pretty lonely work. I don’t think a lot of people have the patience for it. You’re not necessarily going to get one every time you try. In fact most times you try you’re not going to get one. It’s like fishing. You’re fishing, and you either caught a fish or you didn’t. If you did, there’s one in the boat; if you didn’t, there’s not. But you’re going to go back and keep your pole in the water. That’s the only way you’re going to get a bite.”

~ Tom Petty (Billboard)

[ed. See also: How Tom Petty Wrote Songs for Everyone (The Ringer)

The Superpowers of Super-Thin Materials

In materials science, 2-D is the new 3-D.

In recent years, internet-connected devices have colonized a range of new frontiers — wrists, refrigerators, doorbells, cars. But to some researchers, the spread of the “internet of things” has not gone nearly far enough.

“What if we were able to embed electronics in absolutely everything,” Tomás Palacios, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently. “What if we did energy harvesting from solar cells inside highways, and had strain sensors embedded in tunnels and bridges to monitor the concrete? What if we could look outside and get the weather forecast in the window? Or bring electronics to my jacket to monitor my health?”

In January of 2019, Dr. Palacios and his colleagues published a paper in Nature describing an invention that would bring that future a little closer: an antenna that can absorb the ever-thickening ambient soup of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular signals and efficiently turn it into usable electrical energy.

The key to the technology is a promising new material called molybdenum disulfide, or MoS₂, that can be deposited in a layer just three atoms thick. In the world of engineering, things can’t get much thinner.

And thin is useful. For instance, a layer of MoS₂ could wrap around a desk and turn it into a laptop charger, without any power cords.

As researchers like Dr. Palacios see it, two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat.

by Amos Zeeberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times
[ed. From 2D to holographics (see next post).]

Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms.

In preparation for his first American tour in a decade, Ronnie James Dio spent months sequestered in a modest office suite in Marina del Rey, in Los Angeles. The office was on the second floor of a strip mall, above a vape shop and a massage parlor. I visited at the end of May, only a couple of days before the opening date of the tour, and among Dio’s team, there was a tangible air of anticipation. Dio never became a household name, but he is considered one of the great heavy-metal vocalists of all time, up there with Ozzy Osbourne (whom he replaced in Black Sabbath) and metal-adjacent rockers like Axl Rose and Robert Plant. Beginning in the 1970s, Dio took a lead role in codifying a number of his genre’s most ludicrous, yet utterly foundational, conventions. He sang of wolves and demons, toured with an animatronic dragon and supposedly introduced the splay-fingered “devil horns” headbanger’s salute, which he claimed his Italian grandmother used to flash as an old-world method of warding off the malocchio and other forms of bad luck.

Opinion among the Dio faithful, nonetheless, was divided on the subject of his “Dio Returns” comeback tour, largely because Dio has been dead for almost 10 years. The Marina del Rey office suite was the site of a visual-effects company creating a Dio hologram. The hologram would tour with a living backing group consisting, in large part, of former Dio bandmates.

If you missed the tour, you might want to take a moment here and call up one of the fan-shot videos posted on YouTube — say, “Rainbow in the Dark,” Dio’s 1983 hit, filmed at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on June 3, during which the Dio hologram prowls a central portion of the stage, bobbing, weaving, twirling his microphone cord to the monster riffs and occasionally using his free hand to air-conduct his most operatic vocal flourishes. (“His” — would “its” be more apt? Neither word feels quite right.) At one point, the bassist, Bjorn Englen, takes several very deliberate steps to his left, allowing the hologram to dance in front of him and adding to the illusion of a three-dimensional conjuring.

The hologram itself has an uneasy pallor, a brighter shade than the humans onstage but at the same time insubstantial, like a ghost struggling to fully materialize. One crucial decision that had faced the animators was choosing the right age for their creation. Dio in his MTV-era prime tempted them, of course, but then wouldn’t it be strange to watch him perform alongside band members who were roughed up by the ensuing years like the rest of us? Then again, Dio’s actual age in 2019, were he alive, would be 77, which is not ideal for a heavy-metal frontman. The creative team ultimately settled on a spry, middle-aged Dio, outfitting him in black leather pants, a studded leather wristband and a bell-sleeved white tunic embossed with a silver cross.

A start-up called Eyellusion produced “Dio Returns.” It’s one of a handful of companies looking to mold and ultimately monetize a new, hybrid category of entertainment — part concert, part technology-driven spectacle — centered, thus far, on the holographic afterlives of deceased musical stars.  (...)

According to the trade publication Pollstar, roughly half of the 20 top-grossing North American touring acts of 2019 were led by artists who were at least 60 years old, among them Cher, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney, Dead & Company and Billy Joel; the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Bob Seger took the top three slots. Using technology to blur the line between the quick and the dead tends to be a recipe for dystopian science fiction, but in this case, it could also mean a lucrative new income stream for a music industry in flux, at a time when beloved entertainers can no longer count on CD or download revenues to support their loved ones after they’ve died. “If you’re an estate in the age of streaming and algorithms, you’re thinking: Where is our revenue coming from?” Brian Baumley, who handles publicity for Eyellusion, told me. Some of those estates, Baumley bets, will arrive at a reasonable conclusion about the dead artists whose legacies they hope to extend: “We have to put them back on the road.”

Tupac Shakur became one of the earliest test subjects for the new technology 15 years after his murder, when his hologram made a surprise appearance at the 2012 Coachella festival. To actually project a person-size holographic image into three-dimensional space, à la Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” would require powerful, prohibitively expensive lasers that would also burn human flesh. The Tupac hologram was created with a combination of C.G.I., a body double and a 19th-century theatrical trick known as Pepper’s Ghost, some variation of which has been used for almost all the hologram musical performances of recent years.

As the magician and magic historian Jim Steinmeyer recounts in his book “Hiding the Elephant,” John Henry Pepper, the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, popularized the technology with a dramatization of a scene from the Charles Dickens novella “The Haunted Man” on Christmas Eve 1862. To call up his ghosts, Pepper projected a bright light onto an actor in a hidden, cutout space beneath the stage, something like an orchestra pit, casting a reflection onto an angled pane of glass. The glass stood upright on the stage but remained invisible to the audience. The spectral image appeared slightly behind the glass, “moving in the same space with the actors and the scenery,” Steinmeyer writes. “If all the players were perfectly synchronized, the ghost could interact with the characters onstage, avoiding sword thrusts or walking through walls.” Pepper intended the original display, which took place at the Polytechnic Institution, as a scientific lecture, but the audience’s riotous response persuaded him to go the magician’s route, and soon he began touring the illusion in British and American theaters.

The Tupac hologram performed only two songs, shouting, “What the [expletive] is up, Coachella?” and rapping “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” alongside Snoop Dogg. But his digital resurrection worked as a proof of concept. (...)

The more bullish hologram boosters envision all sorts of uses beyond the second coming of music deities major and minor. Finnerty just made a hologram for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library of the former president. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has campaigned holographically, and a circus in Germany uses holographic projections of elephants and horses instead of live animals. Base, meanwhile, has cut a deal with Jack Horner, the paleontologist who served as a scientific adviser for “Jurassic Park,” to create dinosaur holograms that will travel to natural-history museums. Imagine, Becker said, a dialogue between holograms of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Or a Julia Child hologram teaching a cooking class. Or a Derek Jeter hologram teaching you how to bat.

by Mark Binelli, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Base Holograms

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Kozo Miyoshi, Untitled, Yokote, 1984
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Hardball Questions For the Next Debate

Mr. Biden: Your son Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during your vice-presidential term. The Ukrainian government was investigating Burisma for misdeeds, and Hunter was allegedly one of the targets of the investigation. President Trump alleges that you used your clout as VP to shut down the investigation into Hunter, which if true would constitute an impeachable abuse of power.

My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer?

Mr. Bloomberg: You’ve been criticized as puritanical and self-righteous for some of your more restrictive policies, like a ban on large sodas. You seem to lean into the accusation, stating in a 2014 interview that:

I am telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.

Let’s not focus on what this says about your humility, or about your religious beliefs. I want to focus on a different issue.

Despite spending $100 million in the first month of your presidential campaign, you are currently placed fifth – behind two socialists, a confused old man, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. In, let’s not forget, an increasingly shaky effort to prevent President Donald J. Trump from winning a second term.

So my question for you is: what makes you so sure you’re not in Hell already?

Mayor Buttigieg: You are a gay Navy veteran. Your last name is “Buttigieg”. You are mayor of “South Bend”. And you first achieved prominence on the national stage for a New York Times editorial about your travels in the Horn of Africa, which includes the country of “Djibouti”.

My question is: is your campaign just the setup for a gay porno? Do you really think viewers want this much backstory?

Senator Warren: Despite your many years of service to the nation, media attention has focused on your claim to be descended from Native Americans. You told your former employer Harvard that you were of Native descent. Republicans accused you of trying to unfairly exploit affirmative action, but an investigation showed you did not benefit from any affirmative action at the time, leaving it unclear why you would do this.

More recently, you took a genetic test to establish your Native background. The test showed you did have a Native ancestor 6-12 generations back, but supporters were left baffled as to why you would take it or expect anyone to care. Conservatives used to the test to reignite the scandal around your Harvard employment, and progressives condemned you for promoting a view of race based on biology rather than culture or self-identification. The general consensus, again, was that you got no benefit from the test and it was unclear why you would do this.

The development of one of the algorithms that uses genetic information to determine racial background was called the “Warren Project” after its lead geneticist Jim Warren. Warren founded FamilyTreeDNA, a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company that continues to be a leader in genetic testing for ancestry, with about $16 million in revenue each year. This is relevant because Jim Warren is your ex-husband and the father of your children, who presumably stand to inherit a significant part of the FamilyTreeDNA fortune.

So my question for you is: is your campaign is just a publicity stunt to raise interest in genetic testing?

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Loitering Is Delightful

I’m sitting at a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands

NO SOLICITING 

NO LOITERING

stacked like an anvil. I have a fiscal relationship with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring in under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel over considering loitering a concept and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.

The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to stand or wait around idly without apparent purpose,” and “to travel indolently with frequent pauses.” Among the synonyms for this behavior are linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey. Any one of these words, in the wrong frame of mind, might be considered a critique or, when nouned, an epithet (“Lollygagger!” or “Loafer!”). Indeed, lollygag was one of the words my mom would use to cajole us while jingling her keys when she was waiting on us, which, judging from the visceral response I had while writing that memory, must’ve been not quite infrequent. All of these words to me imply having a nice day. They imply having the best day. They also imply being unproductive. Which leads to being, even if only temporarily, nonconsumptive, and this is a crime in America, and more explicitly criminal depending upon any number of quickly apprehended visual cues.

For instance, the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be “loitering.” Though a Patagonia jacket could do some work to disrupt that perception. A Patagonia jacket, colorful pants, Tretorn sneakers with short socks, an Ivy League ball cap, and a thick book that is not the Bible and you’re almost golden. Almost. (There is a Venn diagram someone might design, several of them, that will make visual our constant internal negotiation toward safety, and like the best comedy it will make us laugh hard before saying, “Lord.”) (...)

Which points to another of the synonyms for loitering, which I almost wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.

by Ross Gay, Paris Review |  Read more:

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Year of the Rat

2020 - Year of the Rat (Chinese)
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