Getting Around Paywalls

[ed. Everybody hates paywalls (see here, here, here, here and here), and some are more impenetrable (and irritating) than others (like the Washington Post, thanks J. Bezos). In the past I've posted a few workarounds but it's probably worthwhile to revisit them from time to time. Here are a couple that I use:]

Cookie Remover: removes cookies (and paywall) from the current page.

Outline: Read and annotate without distractions (cut and paste url for a paywall/ad-free experience).

Never Mind the Internet. Here’s What’s Killing Malls.

It has been a tough decade for brick-and-mortar retailers, and matters seem only to be getting worse.

Despite a strong consumer economy, physical retailers closed more than 9,000 stores in 2019 — more than the total in 2018, which surpassed the record of 2017. Already this year, retailers have announced more than 1,200 more intended closings, including 125 Macy’s stores.

Some people call what has happened to the shopping landscape “the retail apocalypse.” It is easy to chalk it up to the rise of e-commerce, which has thrived while physical stores struggle. And there is no denying that Amazon and other online retailers have changed consumer behavior radically or that big retailers like Walmart and Target have tried to beef up their own online presence.

But this can be overstated.

To begin with, while e-commerce is growing sharply, it may not be nearly as big as you think. The Census Bureau keeps official track. Online sales have grown tremendously in the last 20 years, rising from $5 billion per quarter to almost $155 billion per quarter. But internet shopping still represents only 11 percent of the entire retail sales total.

Furthermore, more than 70 percent of retail spending in the United States is in categories that have had slow encroachment from the internet, either because of the nature of the product or because of laws or regulations that govern distribution. This includes spending on automobiles, gasoline, home improvement and garden supplies, drugs and pharmacy, food and drink.

Collectively, three major economic forces have had an even bigger impact on brick-and-mortar retail than the internet has.

In no particular order, here they are: [ed:]

• Big Box Stores
• Income Inequality: 
• Services Instead of Things

by Austan Goolsbee, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Abbey Lossing

Welcome to the Era of Fake Products

Imagine walking into your local grocery store and seeing two virtually identical cartons of milk right next to each other. The only discernible difference—and it’s barely discernible—is that there’s a tiny tag on one carton saying the milk is sold by a third-party seller. Oh, and it might have rat poop in it.

This scenario isn’t all that far from what’s happening in e-commerce retailers’ massive, hard-to-police markets of third-party sellers.

The rise of counterfeit goods and other phony products sold on the Internet has been swift—and it has largely gone unnoticed by many shoppers. But make no mistake: The problem is extensive. Most people don’t realize this, but the majority of listings on Amazon aren’t actually for items sold by Amazon—they’re run by third-party sellers. And even though many, many third-party sellers are upstanding merchants, an awful lot of them are peddling fakes.

A major Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed that Amazon has listed “thousands of banned, unsafe, or mislabeled products,” from dangerous children’s products to electronics with fake certifications. The Verge reported that even Amazon’s listings for its own line of goods are “getting hijacked by impostor sellers.” CNBC found that Amazon has shipped expired foods—including baby formula—to customers, pointing to an inability to monitor something as basic as an expiration date. Because of the proliferation of counterfeits and what Birkenstock describes as Amazon’s unwillingness to help it fight them, Birkenstock won’t sell on Amazon anymore. Nike announced that it is also pulling out of Amazon. “Many consumers are … unaware of the significant probabilities they face of being defrauded by counterfeiters when they shop on e-commerce platforms,” reads a January 2020 Department of Homeland Security report (PDF) recommending measures that would force e-retailers to take counterfeits even more seriously. “These probabilities are unacceptably high and appear to be rising.”

This is something we care a lot about here at Wirecutter. After all, we’re in the business of recommending the best products to our readers. We want to make sure that if you act on our advice, you actually get the top-quality product we’re recommending and not some third-rate knockoff.

Over several months of research, we were able to purchase items through Amazon Prime that were either confirmed counterfeits, lookalikes unsafe for use, or otherwise misrepresented. We talked with many brands about the rise of fakery and their efforts to combat it. And we tried to understand the new landscape of counterfeits and how to navigate it, so that you can as well.

Amazon, too, is clearly aware of the problem and is taking plenty of measures to combat counterfeits on its site. But critics say its efforts are not nearly enough. (Read more about Amazon’s efforts to fight counterfeits here.)

In the 2010s, the spread of misinformation and “fake news” meant learning to consume articles and news programs with skepticism. In this decade, as e-commerce sites increasingly become our go-to for nearly every purchase we make, the proliferation of fake products—and fake reviews—will similarly train a generation of consumers to be skeptical and careful about what they buy.

Welcome to the era of fake products.

by Ganda Suthivarakom, Wirecutter | Read more:
Image: Sarah MacReading

New $1 Million Contest for Best Personal Flying Machines

Boeing Sponsors $1 Million GoFly Prize for Best Personal Flying Machines (IEEE Spectrum)

Image: GoFly

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With the Beatles

What I find strange about growing old isn’t that I’ve got older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. It’s a little disconcerting—sad, even. Though I never feel sad at the fact that I have similarly aged.

I think what makes me feel sad about the girls I knew growing old is that it forces me to admit, all over again, that my youthful dreams are gone forever. The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being.

There’s one girl—a woman who used to be a girl, I mean—whom I remember well. I don’t know her name, though. And, naturally, I don’t know where she is now or what she’s doing. What I do know about her is that she went to the same high school as I did, and was in the same year (since the badge on her shirt was the same color as mine), and that she really liked the Beatles.

This was in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania. It was early autumn. The new school semester had begun and things were starting to fall into a routine again. She was hurrying down the long, dim hallway of the old school building, her skirt fluttering. I was the only other person there. She was clutching an LP to her chest as if it were something precious. The LP “With the Beatles.” The one with the striking black-and-white photograph of the four Beatles in half shadow. For some reason, I’m not sure why, I have a clear memory that it was the original, British version of the album, not the American or the Japanese version.

She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching “With the Beatles” to her chest.

My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared.

A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, “With the Beatles.”

That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about six hundred and fifty students in each grade. (We were the so-called baby-boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.

Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)

Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.

Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.

When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Adrian Tomine

Yuval Noah Harari's History of Everyone, Ever

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.

“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.” (...)

Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”

He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—there will be something else.” (...)

Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.

by Ian Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Olaf Blecker
[ed. See also: Yuval Noah Harari & Steven Pinker in Conversation (Duck Soup); and Homo Deus – How Data Will Destroy Human Freedom (Duck Soup).]

Number One? Worlds Golf Rankings Explained (Kind of...)

How to figure out the world golf rankings (or not).
via: here (Golf Channel), here (Golf Week), and here (Wikipedia).
Image: Brooks Koepka/Getty.
[ed. It's still a mystery.]

Seattle's Asian Art Museum Completes a Major Restoration and Expansion

Seattle's Asian Art Museum Completes a Major Restoration and Expansion (Architectural Digest).
Image: Tim Griffith
[ed. One of my favorite places to visit in Seattle, surrounded by Volunteer Park, botanical gardens, Black Sun sculpture by Isamu Noguchi (inspiration for Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun), and graveyard next door containing Bruce and Brandon Lee's gravesites. And, in other architectural news: Jeff Bezos buys lavish Beverly Hills estate for record $165m – report (The Guardian); and Tour Jack L. Warner's House in Beverly Hills (the one Bezos just bought - Architectural Digest).]

Shares of Bedding Unicorn Casper Collapsed by 72% from Magical Pre-IPO Valuation

Casper Sleep Inc., a money-losing cash-burning retailer of foam-mattresses, duvets, sheets, and other bedding items, had dressed itself up as some sort of magical tech company to obtain its former hyper-inflated unicorn status with a fantastical “valuation” of $1.1 billion during its last round of funding on March 27, 2019. But it has been one heck of a ride downhill from there.

At today’s closing price, Casper’s market valuation of $312 million has collapsed by 72% from that unicorn “valuation” of $1.1 billion. (...)

Casper’s IPO had been misbegotten from get-go. Its amended IPO prospectus filed on January 27 was instantly picked apart by yours truly, who included a photo of its enticing “mail-order-bride” marketing approach. Casper disclosed that it wanted to offer its shares at an IPO price in the range of $17 to $19 a share. An IPO price of $18 a share would have given the company a valuation of $705 million, down 36% from the $1.1 billion valuation as unicorn.

At the time, I postulated: “The Casper IPO will test just how much appetite there still is in this market for money-losing overvalued cash-burn machines in ho-hum low-tech businesses, such as bedding.”

Turns out, not much appetite. Even this lowered price range wasn’t saleable, and so the company and underwriters set the IPO price at $12 a share last Wednesday evening. Then they worked hard to obtain that initial “pop” Thursday morning and clean out some retail investors, before everyone threw in the towel.

To make sure everyone understood that this wasn’t some kind of online ho-hum bedding retailer, competing with all ho-hum bedding retailers in the world that market their products online in the US on platforms such as Amazon or eBay, and competing with every legacy bedding and foam-mattress retailer in the US, Casper surrounded itself with the aura of being some kind of tech company with an app that would disrupt the world of bedding as we know it.

Casper is in the business of marketing, advertising, and selling mattresses, duvets, sheets, and the like, and this is a low-margin business with no barriers to entry, open to the entire world, requiring huge marketing expenses to achieve any kind of growth. (...)

But it spent a gazillion dollars on its fancy and overwhelmingly cool 34,000 square-foot headquarters at 230 Park Avenue South in New York City, as is appropriate for a unicorn. Unicorns spend money. They don’t make money. That’s the deal. But investor appetite for this sort of thing, while still astoundingly robust, is clearly not as robust as it used to be.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street |  Read more:

Image: Wolf Street

[ed. See also: The mattress landfill crisis: how the race to bring us better beds led to a recycling nightmare (The Guardian).]

Complexity and Understanding

Complexity and Understanding (Quillette)
Image: Adobe Stock

Endless Wars

President Trump has repeatedly promised to end what he calls America’s “endless wars,” fulfilling a promise he made during the campaign.

No wars have ended, though, and more troops have deployed to the Middle East in recent months than have come home. Mr. Trump is not so much ending wars, as he is moving troops from one conflict to another.

Tens of thousands of American troops remain deployed all over the world, some in war zones such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and — even still — Syria. And the United States maintains even more troops overseas in large legacy missions far from the wars following the Sept. 11 attacks, in such allied lands as Germany, South Korea and Japan.

Although deployment numbers fluctuate daily, based on the needs of commanders, shifting missions and the military’s ability to shift large numbers of personnel by transport planes and warships, a rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed overseas today.

by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
[ed. Just in case anyone's still interested in what we're doing and where we are militarily (and why we're spending $750 billion each year on military spending, including jets that can't fight, new aircraft carriers, a new "space force", etc.). See also: United States military deployments (Wikipedia). Also in today: "President Trump released a $4.8 trillion budget proposal on Monday that includes a familiar list of deep cuts to student loan assistance, affordable housing efforts, food stamps and Medicaid, reflecting Mr. Trump’s election-year effort to continue shrinking the federal safety net." (NY Times).]

Hannah Höch, am Nil, 1934
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Orion Carloto
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Saul Leiter, San Genaro Festival, New York City, 1958
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There Are Rivers in the Sky Drenching the U.S. Because of Climate Change

Climate change is spurring a new, deep dive into a complex, little-studied weather system blamed for creating billions of dollars in flood damage across the western U.S.

Atmospheric rivers are narrow ribbons of concentrated moisture that originate in the Pacific and can flow thousands of miles before dropping rain and snow on land. Scientists are ramping up their research into the systems this winter fearful that warmer temperatures tied to climate change will boost the moisture they carry, supercharging them moving forward.

“Hurricane hunter” planes are set to fly at least 12 missions directly into the systems, double last year’s number, to gather a wide range of meteorological data. At the same time, 100 new ocean buoys will monitor how the systems form. The goal: Better warning processes to stave off flooding.

“It is 100% completely saturated air,” said Rich Henning, a flight director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who conducts onboard weather observations. “If you’re ever wondering how six feet of snow can fall in the Cascades in one day, this is exactly how all that moisture is transported.” (...)

A study released in December by Scripps and the Army Corps of Engineers found that atmospheric rivers caused 84% of the flood damage suffered in 11 western states over 40 years through 2017. The average annual cost: $1.1 billion, according to the report.

“In a warmer climate,” the study concluded, atmospheric rivers will be “more intense as they become wetter, longer, and wider; there is some indication that this is already happening.”

It won’t take much of a temperature change to boost their moisture content, according to John Dickson, a flood researcher who is the chief executive officer of Aon Edge, a Montana-based flood insurance provider. A rise of just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit can boost water vapor in the air by 7%, he said.

“Our world continues to change and our land use practices are constantly evolving,” Dickson said., “Yet we rely on risk management tools that are decades old to navigate the current times.”

Besides helping forecasts in the western U.S., the new data will have international significance, since the rivers can originate in oceans worldwide.

“There has been an amazing amount of research on the hurricane problem and tornadoes and nor’easters,” said Marty Ralph, a Scripps scientist. “But it turns out atmospheric rivers are a real issue on the West Coast, and they have not really had that much attention.”

by Brian K. Sullivan, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory

Self-Flagellation and Stuffed Goody Bags

There must be a word – maybe in German, or possibly in Korean – for that piquant feeling of being at one of the most exclusive events in the world, surrounded by people who have only ever turned left on a plane, but are now cheering on a movie about the corrosive effects of class barriers. Don’t get me wrong: it was genuinely delightful to be in the Dolby theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night, watching Parasite bulldoze its way through the awards. And goodness, how the audience was on Parasite’s side, with the cheers becoming so much more pronounced for it than any of its other fellow nominees that it felt almost awkward by the end. Still, let’s remember that a significant number of those applauding the film with one hand were, in the other hand, holding the gift bag for the nominees, worth an impressively humble $225,000 (£174,000).

Offerings inside included $20,000 worth of “facial rejuvenation treatments” and “a book that empowers girls”. That’s right, girls: maybe one day you will feel so empowered that you, too, can have five figures-worth of chemicals injected into your face! But look, as Parasite’s win proved, the Oscars LOVES poor people, so also included was “a cleanser that supports showers for the homeless”. If you’re asking: “Why not just give the whole damn bag – hell, even the whole $225,000 – to the homeless instead of to people who earn seven to eight figures a film?” then you are insufficiently empowered, because you are asking the wrong questions. I can recommend a book for that.

The significance of Parasite’s win should not be downplayed, but it is also true that when it comes to efforts at inclusivity, the Oscars ceremony is a veritable master of making small gestures to buy itself some licence, and this year was filled with absolutely classic examples before the event even started.

In the run-up to Sunday night, an enormous amount of hot air was spewed into the atmosphere about the Academy’s efforts at being a bit more environmentally friendly than sticking a private jet directly into the earth’s lung and choking it. I don’t know about you, but there is nothing I enjoy more than hearing about the half-hearted eco efforts of the 0.0001%. There have been press releases about “plant-based” meals at the event and doomy warnings about the negative environmental impact of sequins. If you think finger-wagging about sequins while your guests take private jets to the beach house and helicopters to music festivals is the literalisation of fiddling while Rome burns, well, that’s ridiculous. Unlike a sequin, no one would put a fiddle on a dress, because it’s just not very slimming.

Most of all, there were promises that (some of) the guests would (maybe) re-wear an outfit, as opposed to getting a new one for the ceremony. This is the celebrity equivalent of going off-grid and, last month, Stella McCartney posted a deeply excited tweet in which she praised Joaquin Phoenix for “making choices for the future of the planet”, this particular choice being “to wear this same tux for the entire award season”. That the much-worn tux just happened to be by one Stella McCartney is surely a coincidence, and I have no doubt that McCartney would have been just as happy if Phoenix had decided to clothe his body solely in Gucci, Pucci, or Fiorucci. If you save a tree in the forest, but don’t send out a press release about it, did you save it at all? (...)

Yet when I arrived at the theatre on Sunday afternoon, I struggled to find any celebrities re-wearing their clothes. Well, to be honest, I struggled to find any celebrities, full stop. In previous years, everyone – celebrities and peasants alike – walked down the red carpet together, but this year, only the A-listers were granted that privilege, with the rest of us shunted off to the gutter, hidden behind a white screen, thus sparing TV watchers at home from seeing our hideous zombie faces. It felt – and yes, you might have seen this Parasite analogy coming – like being stuck in the basement, watching the rich and the beautiful frolic in the sunshine above us. (...)

After everyone in the Dolby theatre recovered from dislocating their shoulder after patting themselves on the back for Parasite’s win, we made our way to the Governor’s Ball, the official Oscars after-party. And what better way to celebrate a movie about the rising up of an underclass than a party where waiters were dutifully spraying gold dust on mini chocolate Oscars for the guests’ enjoyment? If it was hard to see the celebrities from behind the white screen on the red carpet, it was downright impossible in the Governor’s Ball, with the whole room filled with golden flecks of dust.

“The whole evening has been dripping with glamour!” was the nominee Florence Pugh’s take on it. But this was Pugh’s debut at the Oscars, and that was a verdict only a first-timer could make. One of the many strange things about the Oscars is that, for an event so exclusive and elite, it feels decidedly tacky and overcrowded – a bit like a Hilton hotel, really. And it gets palpably worse every year.

by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Matt Petit/AMPAS/AFP via Getty Images