Sign Stealing Fallout: Like the Steroids Scandal

So, have you caught baseball fever yet?

Pitchers and catchers report for spring training in a month, which usually is cause for celebration. But the carnage from baseball’s cheating scandal continues to grow, casting a pall on what should be a joyous time of pleasant anticipation.

Instead, the darkest week in recent memory took another victim Thursday when Carlos Beltran departed as rookie manager of the New York Mets, before he had even begun.

There were lots of euphemisms to describe Beltran’s exit, just as there had been with Red Sox manager Alex Cora two days earlier. But the reality, when all the platitudes are stripped away, is they were both fired. Just as Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow had been Monday, for their entanglement in the plot to use center-field cameras and replay-room monitors to steal signs during the 2017 and ’18 seasons. Cora was the Astros’ bench coach in 2017, and Beltran played for Houston that season.

What we have now is a burgeoning crisis that in many ways parallels the steroids scandal of the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

In both cases, the credibility of the sport takes a substantial hit. The most vital element for any professional sport, its lifeblood, is the inherent belief from the public that the competition is on the up and up.

Anything that compromises that trust poses a grave threat – and steroids certainly did that. Fans were left to wonder who was using, who was clean and whether the eye-popping offensive statistics of the era had any validity.

And now, with the World Series champions in both 2017 (Astros) and ’18 (Red Sox) having been implicated in cheating plots, the core integrity of the game once again is in question. The pursuit of a title is what fans invest the bulk of their emotional energy into; now, two of the past three titles are tainted.

So, for that matter, are the achievements of an Astros team that is obviously hugely talented. But we will always wonder how much of their success must be attributed to the benefits of having someone bang a trash can when an offspeed pitch was coming.

As it was with steroids, the collateral damage is substantial. The Dodgers may have been jobbed out of two World Series championships, having lost to the Astros in seven games in 2017 and the Red Sox in five games in 2018. Maybe the narrative that their manager, Dave Roberts, can’t win the big one is based on an entirely false premise.

Dodger pitchers Yu Darvish and Clayton Kershaw both were accused of choking under pressure after getting thrashed in World Series games in Houston. You have to look at that much differently now. There are young pitchers around baseball who may have had their careers derailed because they had the misfortune to face an Astros team that knew exactly what they were going to throw.

Teams may have missed the playoffs, and managers fired, for the same reason. Joe Girardi was let go as Yankees manager in 2017 just five days after losing the ALCS in seven games to the Astros. In that series, the Yankees dropped a pair of one-run games in Houston. Who knows how much of that was attributable to the Astros’ cheating?

The ripple effect of all this is massive. The tentacles are far-reaching and intertwined. And just as was the case during the heart of the steroids era, there is a deep suspicion that the whole business is far more widespread than just the parties getting the publicity and punishment. There has been much insinuation, in fact, that this kind of sign-stealing goes back further than 2017, and reaches much deeper than just two teams.

by Larry Stone, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: David Zalubowski / The Associated Press

Nike Air Force The Great Wave off Kanagawa

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[ed. See also: Nike's Vaporfly running shoes and tumbling records (Reuters).]

Uncanny Valley

Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. We escape for drinks and fret about our company culture. “Our culture is dying,” we say gravely, apocalyptic prophets all. “What should we do about the culture?”

It’s not just the salespeople, of course. It’s never just the salespeople. Our culture has been splintering for months. Members of our core team have been shepherded into conference rooms by top-level executives who proceed to question our loyalty. They’ve noticed the sea change. They’ve noticed we don’t seem as invested. We don’t stick around for in-office happy hour anymore; we don’t take new hires out for lunch on the company card. We’re not hitting our KPIs, we’re not serious about the OKRs. People keep using the word paranoid. Our primary investor has funded a direct competitor. This is what investors do, but it feels personal: Daddy still loves us, but he loves us less.

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

This is a group of secret smokers, and we go in on a communal pack of cigarettes. The problem, we admit between drags, is that we do care. We care about one another. We even care about the executives who can make us feel like shit. We want good lives for them, just like we want good lives for ourselves. We care, for fuck’s sake, about the company culture. We are among the first twenty employees, and we are making something people want. It feels like ours. Work has wedged its way into our identities, and the only way to maintain sanity is to maintain that we are the company, the company is us. Whenever we see a stranger at the gym wearing a T-shirt with our logo on it, whenever we are mentioned on social media or on a client’s blog, whenever we get a positive support ticket, we share it in the company chat room and we’re proud, genuinely proud.

But we see now that we’ve been swimming in the Kool-Aid, and we’re coming up for air. We were lucky and in thrall and now we are bureaucrats, punching at our computers, making other people — some kids — unfathomably rich. We throw our dead cigarettes on the sidewalk and grind them out under our toes. Phones are opened and taxis summoned; we gulp the dregs of our beers as cartoon cars approach on-screen. We disperse, off to terrorize sleeping roommates and lovers, to answer just one, two more emails before bed. Eight hours later we’ll be back in the office, slurping down coffee, running out for congealed breakfast sandwiches, tweaking mediocre scripts and writing halfhearted emails, throwing weary and knowing glances across the table.

I skim recruiter emails and job listings like horoscopes, skidding down to the perks: competitive salary, dental and vision, 401k, free gym membership, catered lunch, bike storage, ski trips to Tahoe, off-sites to Napa, summits in Vegas, beer on tap, craft beer on tap, kombucha on tap, wine tastings, Whiskey Wednesdays, Open Bar Fridays, massage on-site, yoga on-site, pool table, Ping-Pong table, Ping-Pong robot, ball pit, game night, movie night, go-karts, zip line. Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance. Sometimes I forget I’m not applying to summer camp. Customized setup: design your ultimate work station with the latest hardware. Change the world around you. Help humanity thrive by enabling — next! We work hard, we laugh hard, we give great high-fives. We have engineers in TopCoder’s Top 20. We’re not just another social web app. We’re not just another project-management tool. We’re not just another payment processor. I get a haircut and start exploring.

Most start-up offices look the same — faux midcentury furniture, brick walls, snack bar, bar cart. Interior designers in Silicon Valley are either brand-conscious or very literal. When tech products are projected into the physical world they become aesthetics unto themselves, as if to insist on their own reality: the office belonging to a home-sharing website is decorated like rooms in its customers’ pool houses and pieds-à-terre; the foyer of a hotel-booking start-up has a concierge desk replete with bell (no concierge); the headquarters of a ride-sharing app gleams in the same colors as the app itself, down to the sleek elevator bank. A book-related start-up holds a small and sad library, the shelves half-empty, paperbacks and object-oriented-programming manuals sloping against one another. It reminds me of the people who dressed like Michael Jackson to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral.

But this office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.

It’s not clear whether I’m here for lunch or an interview, which is normal. I am prepared for both and dressed for neither. My guide leads me through the communal kitchen, which has the trappings of every other start-up pantry: plastic bins of trail mix and Goldfish, bowls of Popchips and miniature candy bars. There’s the requisite wholesale box of assorted Clif Bars, and in the fridge are flavored water, string cheese, and single-serving cartons of chocolate milk. It can be hard to tell whether a company is training for a marathon or eating an after-school snack. Once I walked into our kitchen and found two Account Mana­gers pounding Shot Bloks, chewy cubes of glucose marketed to endurance athletes. (...)

Ours is a "pickax-during-the-gold-rush" product, the kind venture capitalists love to get behind. The product provides a shortcut to database infrastructure, giving people information about their apps and websites that they wouldn’t necessarily have on their own. All our customers are other software companies. This is a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry. I would say more, but I signed an NDA.

I am the inaugural customer support rep, or Support Engineer. My job involves looking at strangers’ codebases and telling them what they’ve done wrong in integrating our product with theirs, and how to fix it. There are no unsolvable problems. Perhaps there are not even problems, only mistakes. After nearly three years in book publishing, where I mostly moved on instinct, taste, and feeling, the clarity of this soothes me.

I learn the bare minimum, code-wise, to be able to do my job well — to ask questions only when I’m truly in over my head. Still, I escalate problems all the time. I learn how to talk to our customers about the technology without ever touching the technology itself. I find myself confidently discussing cookies, data mapping, the difference between server-side and client-side integrations. “Just add logic!” I advise cheerfully. This means nothing to me but generally resonates with engineers. It shocks me every time someone nods along.

This is not to confuse confidence with pride. I doubt myself daily. I feel lucky to have this job; I feel desperately out of place. My previous boss — breezy and helpful, earnest in the manner of a man in his early twenties bequeathed $4 million to disrupt libraries — had encouraged me to apply for the role; I had joined his publishing start-up too early and needed something new. “This is the next big company,” he had said. “It’s a rocket ship.” He was right. I had been banking on him being right. Still, there are days when all I want is to disembark, eject myself into space, admit defeat. I pander and apologize and self-deprecate until my manager criticizes me for being a pleaser, at which point it seems most strategic to stop talking.

by Anna Wiener, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007. Courtesy Clint Roenisch Gallery.

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophistication to Late Night Talk Shows

270 Classic Interviews, Now Online

Just as the avuncular presence of Ed Sullivan helped ease middle America into accepting Elvis Presley and The Beatles, the aw-shucks midwestern charm of Dick Cavett made Woodstock hippies seem downright cuddly when he had Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell on just after the legendary music festival in 1969. He had a way of making everyone around him comfortable enough to reveal just a little more than they might otherwise. (See Jimi Hendrix talk about his National Anthem performance, below.)

Born in Nebraska in 1937, “the only persona [Cavett] bothered to, or needed to, develop for working on camera was of a boy from Nebraska dazzled by the bright lights of New York,” as Clive James writes in an appreciation of the TV host. As he interviewed the biggest stars of late sixties, seventies, and eighties on the long-running Dick Cavett Show, Cavett’s easygoing Midwestern demeanor disarmed both his guests and audiences. He kept them engaged with his erudition, quick wit, and breadth of cultural knowledge. (...)

Cavett, writes James, was “the most distinguished talk-show host in America… a true sophisticate with a daunting intellectual range.” He was also an empathic interviewer who could lead his guests beyond the stock responses they were used to giving in TV interviews. (David Bowie, below, reveals how he was influenced by his fans.)

Once he had his own late-night talk show, however, which ran opposite Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, it became clear that he was doing something very different. “Cavett never mugged, never whooped it up for the audience, rarely told a formally constructed joke, and listened to the guest,” writes James. He became “famous enough not to be able to go out except in disguise,” but “his style did not suit a mass audience.” This is what made—and still makes—Cavett worth watching.

by Open Culture |  Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. If you're not that familiar with Mr. Cavett's work and cultural impact, do read the Clive James link above. Also this and this. See also: Dozens of Classic Interviews from The Dick Cavett Show (Kotke.org): Some of the other videos feature John Lennon on why The Beatles ended, Jimmy Hendrix talking about performing at Woodstock, Orson Welles recounting a dinner with Adolf Hitler, Janis Joplin’s final TV interview, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, and David Crosby fresh off of their appearances at Woodstock, Robin Williams on depression, and Carly Simon talks about stage fright. Wikipedia has a list of most notable shows and moments.]

Preparing For The Next Pandemic

As a new coronavirus spreads within China and to other countries, I’m reminded of my time in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak of 2003. Back then, I spent an otherwise beautiful spring wearing masks in public but mostly working from home, as I reported on the disease and the struggle to contain it. Every day at the same time — 3:20 p.m., if my memory’s correct — I checked an official Hong Kong website, which I trusted completely, to see that day’s new cases. I remember my relief as the number finally trended down. When it was over, it felt as though SARS had been just a shot across the world’s bow.

For one thing’s certain: the next pandemic will come, and it may resemble the Spanish flu of 1918, which infected half a billion people. The questions are when, where and how, and whether we’ll be ready collectively. I say “collectively” because a pandemic, like climate change, doesn’t respect passports or borders. We don’t quarantine, cure or save America First, or China First or anybody first; we either put humanity first or we all lose.

There are other links between climate change and pandemics (and, to be clear, the current outbreak is still far from being one). The main connection is that global warming actually creates new disease vectors. As the permafrost thaws in places like Siberia, viruses that have been frozen for millennia, and against which animals and humans no longer have any resistance, will resurface. And as desertification and other side effects of warming move the boundaries between habitats, species will come into contact with creatures they’ve never encountered before. That’s how viruses start their journey.

What, then, are my lessons from the SARS outbreak? First, that we must plan for human nature, both in its perfidy and its heroism. I observed SARS crash into various cultures in totally different ways.

Mainland China at first suppressed information about it, fearing economic loss or political turmoil. But that allowed the virus to spread farther and faster for longer than was necessary. And once China did open up on the subject, its people no longer trusted the government’s information. Rumors circulated and often prevailed over facts, hampering the official response.

Singapore, by contrast, lived up to its reputation for iron discipline with immediate quarantines that I initially considered draconian and illiberal, but came reluctantly to respect. Taiwan initially showed the darker side of individualism, as some hospital workers, to protect themselves and their families, shirked their duties. In Hong Kong (and then Taiwan and other places too) the opposite happened, as nurses and doctors cared for the victims and valiantly fought the virus.

Nobody who’s read Albert Camus’ “The Plague” or Jose Saramago’s “Blindness” should be surprised that human beings, individually and in crowds, will respond unpredictably to such crises. Some will hoard scarce medicine or food that’s more urgently needed by others. Some will break quarantines to be with loved ones. Some will do their duty, others won’t.

The biggest lesson, which China seems to have learned, is that the government must be ruthlessly honest and transparent. The more facts, the better. Hide nothing. It was my trust in that Hong Kong website that eventually made me believe SARS was waning. Once trust between the population and the state breaks down, controlling an outbreak becomes almost impossible.

Another lesson is, thankfully, one we’ve already learned. Screening and surveillance, which should usually be used with caution in free societies, becomes necessary in an outbreak and is effective. Even now various airports around the world are digitally observing the body temperatures of passengers arriving from Wuhan, the center of the new outbreak.

Quarantine should be voluntary at first and actively encouraged by employers and government. Whoever can work from home, via Skype and such, should do so, without fearing recrimination. The more people can keep acting on their own volition, the more “agency” they believe they have, the calmer and more cooperative they will remain. Once an outbreak goes out of control, of course, quarantines must become mandatory.

But the most profound lesson is that we must cooperate as a species, with a geopolitical approach that seems to have gone out of fashion: multilateralism. We’ve always been locked in an arms race between the evolution of viruses, bacteria and fungi and our medicines against them. When a new virus appears, it potentially threatens all of us and should be fought by all of us together.

by Andreas Kluth, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Outbreak of new virus explodes in China; human-to-human spread confirmed (Ars Technica). Update (01/26/20): A Historic Quarantine (The Atlantic).]

Canefield Songs: Holehole Bushi

[ed. Such beautiful music. I grew up in the canefields of Waipahu (where many of these pictures were taken). They were my playground. And my grandparents worked the pineapple plantation on Lanai for most of their lives. Plantation life. Strong memories, and some of them very sad (such a hard life, and feelings of mono no aware, too). See also: Allison Arakawa Hole Hole Bushi (YouTube).]

Nā Pali Coast Kauai, Hawaii
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.ORG

Late last year, the nonprofit Internet Society abruptly announced a deal to sell control over the Public Interest Registry (which manages all .ORG domain registrations) to Ethos, a newly created private equity fund capitalized by three politically connected families of Republican billionaires. Under the deal, ISOC would get $1.135B to spend on various projects, and PIR would have to return a profit to their private equity investors.

The deal was incredibly fishy. For one thing, Ethos turned out to be staffed with former execs and staffers from ICANN, the body that has the power to bless or halt the sale of PIR -- and these people had come to Ethos after overseeing a highly irregular change in policy that would let PIR hit .ORG domain holders with unlimited price-hikes.

Since then, we've learned that the deal to buy PIR will be financed by hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of debt, which PIR will have to make payments on just to keep the lights on -- money it will have to make by somehow radically increasing PIR's revenues.

It's not clear how they'll do this, or why it needed doing. .ORG is home to the world's best-established human rights groups and nonprofits, and depending on how Ethos manages PIR, those organizations could see their online presence censored to appease the dictatorial governments they watchdog, or have every visitor to every .ORG tracked and the information sold to the highest bidder.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. For a comprehensive overview, see: ICANN needs to ask more questions about the sale of .ORG (Boing Boing).]

Inside Tech’s Fever Dream

We’re not at a loss for in-depth accounts of the tech industry these days. Reporters, cultural critics, academic historians, and tech figures themselves have been busy trying to explain a social and economic paradigm shift that’s affected everything from our dating lives to the security of municipal infrastructure. Books like Alexandra Wolfe’s 2017 Valley of the Gods have fetishized Silicon Valley, offering portraits of tech as a culture apart, rising up to replace the moribund institutions that have failed society—academia, public transit, local news media, government. Other books, such as Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist and an early mentor of Mark Zuckerberg’s, have taken a far darker view. Where these accounts converge is in portraying tech as nothing less than the catalyst of a radically new social order.

Uncanny Valley is a different sort of Silicon Valley narrative, a literary-minded outsider’s insider account of an insulated world that isn’t as insular or distinctive as it and we assume. Wiener is our guide to a realm whose denizens have been as in thrall to a dizzying sense of momentum as consumers have been. Not unlike the rest of us, she learned, they have been distracted and self-deluded in embracing an ethos of efficiency, hyperproductivity, and seamless connectivity at any cost. Arrogant software developers, giddy investors, and exorbitantly paid employees—all have been chasing dreams of growth, profits, and personal wealth, without pausing to second-guess the feeling of being “on the glimmering edge of a brand-new world,” as Wiener puts it in the middle of her book.

Now, from the vantage of 2020, the unintended consequences of the chase are glaringly obvious. But why was the recognition so slow in coming? Wiener downsizes that question to human scale: How, even half a decade ago—a lifetime in the Valley—could everyone still have been so blinkered, from those at the top down to her and others at the bottom? Complicity is Wiener’s theme, and her method: She’s an acute observer of tech’s shortcomings, but she’s especially good at conveying the mind of a subject whose chief desire is to not know too much. Through her story, we begin to perceive how much tech owes its power, and the problems that come with it, to contented ignorance. (...)

Wiener’s swerve into tech took place in post-recession America, where even graduates from prestigious universities found the old economy’s wreckage jamming the path to wealth and power. “My desires were generic,” she offers by way of explaining her jump from publishing to tech. “I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued.” Tech held out the opportunity to “feel like I was going somewhere,” to stop questioning her worth. In publishing, she writes, “nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.” (...)

To watch Wiener watching herself become absorbed by her Valley existence, and then ever so gradually alienated, is to recognize along with her that the social life of the tech industry holds the key to understanding its hypnotic sway—and the corrosive effects of its cultlike culture. Paradoxically, the Valley’s vaunted commitment to transparency and social change gets in the way of perceiving its actual social effects. (...) In the Valley, money still counts, of course: Billions of dollars slosh across the Bay Area. But Wiener was “seduced by the confidence of young men” who had recalibrated the style, and the scale, of ambition. These geniuses see themselves in direct competition with the “middle-aged leaders of industry.” Their own professed faith in principles that promise meaning and purpose, along with an “optimized” lifestyle, marks a crucial and contagious difference. Wiener bought into the narrative, trusting innovators who she thought would be enlightened versions of Wall Street titans. “I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world,” she writes, “and not just for people like themselves.”

by Ismail Muhammad, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chau Luong

Sending Bees to War

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

This shouldn’t be happening to someone like Arp, a beekeeper with decades of experience. But his story is not unique. Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Environmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US.

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.” (...)

This year Arp’s bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States’ commercial honeybee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California’s Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.

Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer-owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness. (...)

The high price of growth

When the phenomenon called colony collapse disorder was first identified in 2006, after a record number of honeybees mysteriously disappeared or died outside their hives, it was linked to a variety of factors including loss of habitat and climate change. But the primary culprit was pesticides. Researchers found that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids was especially lethal to bees.

Last May, the EPA pulled a dozen “neonics” from the market following a successful lawsuit brought by beekeepers and environmental groups.

But there are many chemicals that are not labeled as bee toxic, even though they can make bees sick and weaken their immune systems. While bees may survive the pollination season, they may not last the winter or may take back substances that gradually poison the entire colony.

Those on the almond growers’ side acknowledge there is a huge problem. “The bee mortality rate is too high and is unacceptable,” says the entomologist Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant for the Almond Board of California. “It is only because of the hard work and creativity of beekeepers that [almond growers] have gotten the bees they need.”

The almond board’s “best practice” guidelines encourage beekeepers to spend as little time in California’s Central Valley as possible. Honeybees can travel up to three miles in search of varied forage, so even if the almond grower is doing everything right to protect a pollination investment, the cotton or grape farmer down the road may be spraying bee-toxic chemicals on crops.

Even as almond production has steadily ramped up for decades, the number of commercial hives in the US has remained at a steady 2.7m colonies since the early 2000s. With all the challenges beekeepers face, just maintaining the bare minimum is a struggle.

by Annette McGivney, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Caitlin O’Hara

Marko Spalatin, Self Portrait, 1968
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Andrew Nawroski - Kicking the degree at 0.7
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8 Best Watercolor Marker Sets for Beginners and Professionals

Watercolor paints are a popular medium for both professional artists and hobbyists alike. But, let’s face it: they can be a bit inconvenient to use. While there are some portable watercolor sets out there, you still have to make sure that you have a palette, paintbrush, and a cup of water handy. If you get discouraged by all of the accouterments needed for watercolor painting, give watercolor markers a try.

As their name suggests, watercolor markers are essentially watercolor pigments packaged in the form of a drawing utensil. Available in sets of 12, 24, or even 48 pens, they are perfect for sketching and painting on the go. Best of all, they retain the same qualities of conventional watercolor pigments. Many brands of watercolor markers are formulated so you can blend their colors with water and a brush.

What to Look for in Watercolor Markers

You’ll find a lot of similarities among watercolor marker brands. Most of the highest-rated marker sets have nylon brush tips that will give you a painterly stroke when you draw with them. Additionally, they have water-based pigments so that you can use your favorite watercolor techniques and special effects with ease.

There are, however, some markers that use oil-based inks. This means that you won’t be able to add water to your drawing and will instead have to blend colors using other oil-based ink markers.

Before you buy a set of watercolor markers, be sure to consider what type of drawings you’ll want to make. Do you still want the option of adding water to your artwork? If so, make sure to buy a set of markers with water-based ink. Or, would you simply prefer a painterly look to your drawing? If that’s the case, then you’ll probably enjoy using the oil-based markers sans water.

by Sara Barnes, My Modern Met |  Read more:

Image: Winsor & Newton
[ed. See also: 15-Minute Watercolor Masterpieces (Anna Koliadych), Amazon.]

Charlotte Knox
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Josh Brown

[ed. Kids these days. From the Norman's Rare Guitars series.]

Should Public Transit Be Free?

Dionisia Ramos gets on the 37 bus twice a day, rooting through her handbag to dig out the fare and drop it into the slot, so it came as a shock several months ago when the bus driver reached out his hand to stop her.

“You don’t have to pay,” he said. “It’s free for the next two years.”

Ms. Ramos had never heard of anything like this: Someone was paying her bus fare? At 55, she lives on a monthly unemployment check for $235. So saving $2.40 a day, for her trip to and from community college, past the hulking mills of Lawrence’s industrial past — that meant something.

Since a pilot program began in September, use of the buses has grown by 24 percent, and the only criticism Ms. Ramos has of the Massachusetts city’s experiment with fare-free transit is that it is not permanent.

“Transportation should be free,” she said. “It’s a basic need. It’s not a luxury.”

That argument is bubbling up in lots of places these days, as city officials cast about for big ideas to combat inequality and reduce carbon emissions. Some among them cast transportation as a pure public good, more like policing and less like toll roads.

The City Council in Worcester, Massachusetts’ second-largest city, expressed strong support last week for waiving fares for its buses, a move that would cost between $2 million and $3 million a year in lost fares. And fare-free transit is the splashiest policy recommendation of Michelle Wu, a Boston City Council member who is expected by many to run for mayor in 2021.

Larger experiments are underway in other parts of the country. The cities of Kansas City, Mo., and Olympia, Wash., both declared that their buses would become fare-free this year.

The argument against fare-free transit is a simple one: Who is going to pay for it?

In communities where ridership has been falling, the cost of waiving fares may be less than expected.

Mayor Daniel Rivera of Lawrence, intrigued after hearing his friend Ms. Wu speak about fare-free transit, asked his regional transit authority how much was collected on three of the city’s most-used bus lines. The answer was such a small amount — $225,000 — that he could offset it from the city’s surplus cash reserves.

“What I like is the doability of this, the simplicity of it,” Mr. Rivera said. “We are already subsidizing this mode of transportation, so the final mile is very short. It isn’t a service people need to pay for; it’s a public good.”

Around 100 cities in the world offer free public transit, the vast majority of them in Europe, especially France and Poland.

A handful of experiments in the United States in recent decades, including the cities of Denver and Austin, were viewed as unsuccessful because there was little evidence that they removed cars from the road; new riders tended to be poor people who did not own cars, according to a 2012 review by the National Academies Press.

But in another sense, they were successful: They increased ridership right away, with rises between 20 and 60 percent in the first few months. That statistic accounts for its revival among a new wave of urban progressives, who see transit as a key factor in social and racial inequality.

by Ellen Barry, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Greta Rybus

What’s So Fascinating About Weird Children’s TV Shows?

Pepi Nana stirs, and sits up in bed.

“Tiddle toddle, tiddle toddle,” she says, flapping her arms, and blinking a pair of enormous round eyes. She walks over to the desk, sits down, and, using the oversized pencil in her front pocket, scribbles a letter to the Moon.

“Tiddle toddle, please come to tea, and we can have a story. Yours lovingly, out of the window, Pepi Nana.”

She steps onto the balcony of her toy house, kisses the letter and watches it flutter up into the night sky. What Pepi Nana doesn’t know is that on the Moon lives a waxy-looking creature with coal-black eyes called Moon Baby. He has a fixed smile and a blue Mohican. He reads her letter, pulls up the hood of his dressing-gown, and flies out of his crater towards Earth…

Most people have a favourite TV show from childhood. If you’re a parent, there’s also probably a show that your children adore but you find strange, or even a bit creepy. Right now, for many parents, that show is Moon and Me. It follows the night-time exploits of a mismatched set of dolls – including Pepi Nana, a soft pink onion called Mr Onion, and the milky, clown-like Colly Wobble – who come to life whenever the Moon shines.

My 1.5-year-old nephew doesn’t share this scepticism. As the episode we’re watching unfolds, he moves closer and closer to the screen, smiling, cooing, pointing and saying “Wow”. My eight-year-old daughter stares in slack-jawed wonder at it all.

What is it about these pre-school TV shows that makes them so captivating for young viewers, but so strange to adult eyes? As a mother, I’ve worried whether watching television at a young age is a healthy childhood experience or a mind-rotting activity stunting my children’s development. The fact that I don’t understand these shows hasn’t helped.

But weirdness, it turns out, can be a good thing.

Young children’s minds process information differently from adults’ – what’s weird for us is often highly engaging for them. A better understanding of these differences could help create healthier, more engaging television programmes, boosting children’s understanding of the world as well as keeping them entertained. And it could also help us parents to make better decisions about the type of television we let our children watch.

Moon and Me, it turns out, is a product of research, informed by a collaboration between the co-creator of the hit show Teletubbies – Andrew Davenport – and Dylan Yamada-Rice, a researcher specialising in children’s education and storytelling, to study how children interact with toy houses.

by Linda Geddes, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

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The Rise of Japan's 'Super Solo' Culture

A decade ago, many Japanese were so embarrassed to be seen eating alone in the school or office cafeteria that they’d opt to eat in a bathroom stall. Appearing friendless was a no-no, leading to what became known as “benjo meshi” – taking a “toilet lunch”.

But many think Japan is changing in a big way. One of those people is Miki Tateishi, a bartender in Tokyo. She works at Bar Hitori, a cosy spot in the Shinjuku nightlife district that is designed for solo drinkers.

The bar, which opened in mid-2018, represents an unusual opportunity in conformity-driven Japan – to go out and drink by yourself. And it’s doing well: instead of hiding in toilet stalls, people are stepping out and embracing being seen solo.

“Some people want to enjoy being alone, others want to build a new community,” says Tateishi. She believes the bar’s “solo only” policy helps potential guests who might otherwise get turned off by big groups or regulars. Customers can strike up conversation with each other in a laid-back environment that accommodates about a dozen people. The flowing booze and tight quarters make for easy interactions.

“I think this is rare,” says Kai Sugiyama, a 29-year-old who works for a manufacturing company, from his barstool. “I feel Japanese people live a life in a group, so people want to do things with other people. We don’t have much culture of doing things alone.”

Yet Hitori – hitori means “one person” – is by no means the only example of how businesses are changing to accommodate people who want to do things by themselves. From dining to nightlife to travel, new options catering specifically to individuals have popped up in recent years. It’s known as the “ohitorisama” movement: people boldly choosing to do things alone, the opinions of others be damned.

The power of one

Loosely translated, “ohitorisama” means something like “party of one”. Search for the hashtag on Instagram in Japanese and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of photos: plated restaurant meals for one, cinema hallways, pitched tents at campgrounds or transport shots highlighting solo adventures. In the last 18 months particularly, more and more people have been declaring their love of ohitorisama alone time in both the news and social media.

One recent innovation is “hitori yakiniku”. Meaning “grilled meat”, yakiniku usually involves sitting around a gridiron at a restaurant table with a group of people and communally cooking mountains of chicken, beef or pork. But with ohitorisama, the only one grilling (and eating) all that meat is you.

Even karaoke is going solo – a huge change to the classic Japanese pastime. “Demand for single-person karaoke has increased to account for 30 to 40% [of all karaoke customers],” says Daiki Yamatani, a sales manager who does PR for the 1Kara solo karaoke company in Tokyo. In Japan, karaoke spots are everywhere, often big buildings with several floors of private karaoke rooms built for groups of various sizes. But demand from solitary singers has been growing, and so 1Kara swapped large group rooms for phone booth-sized personal recording studios.

In Japan, drinking and nightlife activities have traditionally been shared with colleagues or friends, while food culture means dinners are often shared. So the ohitorisama movement represents a major shift. But what’s driving the change and why exactly is it considered so significant? 

by Bryan Lufkin, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Shiho Fukada and Keith Bedford