Soap Bubbles Pollinated a Pear Orchard Without Damaging Delicate Flowers

Soap bubbles facilitated the pollination of a pear orchard by delivering pollen grains to targeted flowers, demonstrating that this whimsical technique can successfully pollinate fruit-bearing plants. The study, from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Nomi, Japan, and published June 17 in the journal iScience, suggests that soap bubbles may present a low-tech complement to robotic pollination technology designed to supplement the work of vanishing bees.

"It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," says senior author Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor in the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. "In comparison with other types of remote pollination, functional soap bubbles have innovative potentiality and unique properties, such as effective and convenient delivery of pollen grains to targeted flowers and high flexibility to avoid damaging them."

Miyako and colleagues previously published a study in the journal Chem, in which they used a tiny toy drone to pollinate blossoming flowers. But although the drone was only two centimeters long, the researchers struggled to prevent it from destroying the flowers as it bumped into them. While searching for a more flower-friendly artificial pollination technique, Miyako spent a day at the park blowing bubbles with his son. When one of the bubbles collided against his son's face—a predictably injury-free accident—Miyako found his inspiration.

After confirming through optical microscopy that soap bubbles could, in fact, carry pollen grains, Miyako and Xi Yang, his coauthor on the study, tested the effects of five commercially available surfactants on pollen activity and bubble formation. The neutralized surfactant lauramidopropyl betain (A-20AB) won out over its competitors, facilitating better pollen germination and growth of the tube that develops from each pollen grain after it is deposited on a flower. Based on a laboratory analysis of the most effective soap concentrations, the researchers tested the performance of pear pollen grains in a 0.4% A-20AB soap bubble solution with an optimized pH and added calcium and other ions to support germination. After three hours of pollination, the pollen activity mediated through the soap bubbles remained steady, while other methods such as pollination through powder or solution became less effective.

Miyako and Yang then loaded the solution into a bubble gun and released pollen-loaded bubbles into a pear orchard, finding that the technique distributed pollen grains (about 2,000 per bubble) to the flowers they targeted, producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success. Finally, the researchers loaded an autonomous, GPS-controlled drone with functionalized soap bubbles, which they used to direct soap bubbles at fake lilies (since flowers were no longer in bloom) from a height of two meters, hitting their targets at a 90% success rate when the machine moved at a velocity of two meters per second.

by Cell Press, Phys.Org |  Read more:

Image: Eijiro Miyako

When Antifa Hysteria Sweeps America

What can we possibly make of the crisis that unfolded in the remote Oregon seaside town of Coquille?

Coquille is a sleepy logging community of 3,800 people, almost all of them white. It is miles and miles from nowhere. Portland is 250 miles to the north. San Francisco is 500 miles to the south.

But Fox News is in a frenzy about rioters and looters, and President Donald Trump warns about the anti-fascist movement known as antifa. So early this month as a small group of local residents planned a peaceful “Black Lives Matter” protest in Coquille, word raced around that three busloads of antifa activists were headed to Coquille to bust up the town.

The sheriff and his deputies donned bulletproof vests, prepared their mine-resistant ambush protected armored vehicle and took up positions to fight off the invasion. Almost 200 local people, some shouldering rifles and others holding flags, gathered to protect their town (overshadowing the handful of people who had come to wave Black Lives Matter signs).

“I feel defensive and want to protect my home,” one man, Timothy Robinette, told the local newspaper, The World.

A sheriff from a nearby county, John Ward, warned citizens in a public Facebook post of rumors that the anti-fascists could rampage into his area as well.

“I was told they are looking for a fight,” he explained. Ward added that he had no problem with peaceful protests — a Black Lives Matter protest had been held peacefully in the local town of Brookings — but he hinted that citizens might want to help police fend off any antifa attack.

“Without asking,” he said, “I am sure we have a lot of local boys, too, with guns that will protect our citizens.”

Of course, no rampaging anarchists ever showed up. The Battle of Coquille ended without beginning.

Similar hysteria about antifa invasions has erupted across the country. I asked my followers on Facebook how earnest citizens could fall prey to such panics, and I was stunned by how many reported similar anxieties in their own towns — sometimes creating dangerous situations. (...)

Antifa, short for anti-fascists, hasn’t killed anyone and appears to have been only a marginal presence in Black Lives Matter protests. None of those arrested on serious federal charges related to the unrest have been linked to antifa.

Still, the movement has a mythic status in some right-wing narratives, and Trump and Fox News have hyped the threat. (The Seattle Times caught Fox faking photos to exaggerate unrest in Seattle.)

Race-baiting extremists have also tried to manipulate public fears. One Twitter account purportedly run by an antifa group, @Antifa_US, announced May 31 that “tonight’s the night … we move into the residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours.” But Twitter said that the account was actually run by white supremacists posing as antifa.

These antifa panics are where racism and hysteria intersect, in a nation that has more guns than people. They arise when a lying president takes every opportunity not to heal our national divisions but to stoke them, when people live in a news ecosystem that provides no reality check but inflames prejudices and feeds fears.

You might think that this kind of hysteria would be self-correcting: Citizens would see that no antifa people show up and then realize that they had been manipulated by people who treat them as dummies. But the narrative actually gaining traction in some quarters is that guns forced the antifa to back off.

NBC News, which has published excellent accounts of this hysteria, quoted one armed “defender” of the remote town of Klamath Falls, Oregon, as initially saying that antifa warriors were on the way “to burn everything and to kill white people.”

After none showed up, a local bar owner said on Facebook that he was proud of the armed turnout and boasted that antifa activists had been repelled because they “walked into a hornet’s nest.”

by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Amy Moss Strong/The World

[ed. What's with this whole antifa thing? Fascism is now somehow aligned with patriotism? I don't get it. This country has gone insane.]

John Divola, Zuma

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I’m Not a Dad, but I Rock Like One

The beginning is too banal to recall vividly: A familiar melody stuck in my head one morning last summer, leading to a streaming-service search, then a long afternoon lost listening to the entire record and its ambitious follow-up. From there, things snowballed. By the end of that week I had to accept it: I was going through a Steely Dan phase.

Like a lot of people, many of my earliest musical memories involve being a captive back-seat listener in my parents’ car during long road trips. It was there, on the upholstered bench seat of a Ford Taurus, that I first declared that the blandest, dullest, most excruciatingly monotonous music I’d ever heard in my nearly decade-long life was Steely Dan.

As a kid, the noodly, pristine sounds of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen signified nothing so much as my dad exerting oppressive control over the car stereo. Just infinite shades of sonic gray and songs that would never freaking end. Do it … again?! What else have you been doing for the last five and a half minutes of this song?

And then, all of a sudden, I was 32 and listening to “Pretzel Logic” intently in my best headphones, declaring myself an honorary resident of Barrytown. What had happened to me?

Like anyone seeking rational advice, I looked to Twitter. “Some personal news,” I posted last August, announcing my new infatuation. I was dumbfounded by the response: nearly 1,000 likes and a lively discussion among friends and followers reassuring me that I was not alone. “We’ll all meet you for dinner at Denny’s at 4:30,” my friend Rob wrote, which I assumed was a reference to an obscure Steely Dan lyric I didn’t yet recognize, but I now see was just his way of saying that we are both old. I am at once honored and chilled to my bones to tell you that, from the beyond, the Walter Becker Estate replied, “We’ve been expecting you.”

As I sighed and once again dropped the needle on my parents’ old copy of “Gaucho,” I started to see that my Steely Dan phase was not an aberration, but an inevitable if long-resisted final frontier of my musical taste.

One of my beloved car requests was Billy Joel’s “Storm Front.” As an annoyingly precocious and not even remotely popular preteen, I got very into Wilco circa its 1996 double-album, “Being There.” I am still not over the death of Tom Petty and cannot imagine a time when the opening chords of “Free Fallin’” playing unassumingly over a drugstore’s speakers will not bring me to public tears.

If anything, my recent embrace of Steely Dan has helped me settle into a newfound level of self-acceptance. I am a discerning, feminist-minded millennial woman. I also love dad rock.

At least in print, the phrase “dad rock” was coined in 2007 by the music critic Rob Mitchum — to his later regret. He used it in an unfavorable Pitchfork review of Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky,” an album “of unapologetic straightforwardness,” he wrote, that “nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise.”

The term stuck, not just to Wilco but to their more canonical and constitutionally laid-back classic rock influences. Several years later, in the introduction to a list of “20 Dad-Rock Albums You Should Learn to Love” (“The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Astral Weeks,” “The River,” etc.), the website Flavorwire defined the common usage of the term as “music made by old white dudes that somehow always ends up on the car stereo and/or being played on the hi-fi at various school friends’ houses.”

I was struck by this definition’s similarities with my own more personal recollections: dad rock’s numbing ubiquity and the childlike feeling that it is being chosen, absurdly, from on high by some unchecked authority figure behind the wheel of life. As I got older and started writing about music, though, I found that dad rock’s dominance was not just confined to the plush interior of a Taurus: What is “rockism” if not the larger cultural equivalent of the dad who just won’t relinquish control of the car stereo?

Last year, in Esquire, Mitchum wrote a mea culpa for originating what he believed to be a grievous insult. He was particularly apologetic that the phrase had become so closely associated with the Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who found the description “unflattering and hurtful” — even if that was something Tweedy said while promoting an album he’d made featuring his own son on drums. (“It almost feels like we’re trolling those people now,” he added.)

But in the past decade or so, Mitchum realized, the “dad rock” tag has become much less derisive than it was when he first used it. Its ethos of “middle-age contentment” and just liking what you like was now “something to aspire to.” “Calling a band dad-rock in 2019,” he concluded, “is just as likely to be a defiant re-appropriation of a hipster insult.”

How, in the span of a decade, did dad rock go from an insult to becoming … kind of a compliment? One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.

by Lindsay Zoladz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
[ed. Good music is always good music. See also: Steely Dan (Duck Soup).]

Day-Afterthoughts: Reflections on a Post-Corona-Time

How will the pandemic change the world? What do you see as long-term consequences of the crisis?

A friend and I are exchanging emails. Our lenses polarize very differently. He says, “I’m moving to Sweden.” The “medieval method” of forcing businesses to close disgusts him. Never mind that Swedes are mostly staying home, or that their infection rate is the highest in Scandinavia: America’s ruin-the-economy approach is exactly the wrong one. A day later, I see a San Francisco Chronicle’s analysis showing the powerful effect of the Bay Area’s early closure. Seven jurisdictions coordinated a shelter-in-place order on March 17th, and the number of per-capita Covid cases has remained lower than in nearly every other U.S. metropolitan area. I want to tell my friend: “Better to move to San Francisco.”

The novel coronavirus has not eased the partisan divide here. If anything, it’s become even clearer how differently two friends can view the same article or proposal or analysis. We hardly speak the same language, because our news sources share almost no assumptions in common. Among loud partisans on the American right, this is a disease of the blood, strongly affecting the kidneys—hence Trump’s attachment, via Sean Hannity, via Dr. Oz, to hydroxychloroquine. Among respondents on the left, it’s a disease of the lungs, a pneumonia. Both of these may turn out to be correct as far as they go. But as researchers struggle to understand Covid, our president gins up the divide in our outlooks and conclusions. He doesn’t want national unity. He wants States’ Rights, more now than ever. Fifty Americas serve him better than one, because unifying isn’t a huckster’s schtick.

Nevertheless, my friend and I agree that the consequences of hiding out and shutting down could be grievous. He sees the hamstringing of businesses, I see the shedding of workers. He anticipates more deaths from economic devastation than from Covid, I expect one-off shops and restaurants to fail in high numbers as chains revive more easily and spread their sameness. Both of us foresee a protracted weakening of physical and mental health. We feel the beginnings of it in ourselves.

After the risk of Covid subsides, will people touch each other less? Will a generation grow up avoiding strangers on the street? Touch underwrites our health, even in the narrowest sense: by training and strengthening our immune systems. Yet a leading infectious-disease specialist has declared that the handshake should never return. Will those who are able to do so choose to stay in their digital caves? Commuting can be a curse—especially for those who live farthest away, many of whom are still have to commute during the pandemic. But seeing real people during the day, especially people we haven’t expressly chosen to spend time with, preserves a space in our lives for serendipities of caring and connection.

The incursion of technology had reached a tipping point before Covid. If we allow it to, this pandemic could be the boot that nudges us over the precipice—bringing, in the name of efficiency and health, an ill-advised sterility and a further, more permanent retreat from the material world, an abandonment of bricks and mortar and flesh. This is the bleak future the stock market seems to be predicting. Articles in the last few days have noted ruefully that U.S. stocks had their best month in decades even as the pandemic took deeper hold. But April’s rally wasn’t evenhanded: it centered on the digital behemoths.

My friend and I both fear, though he expresses it with a finality I don’t accept, that America’s response to the pandemic will permanently disempower the individual—that the large and faceless will cement its dominance over the quirky and singular. Fortunately, the post-Robber Baron history of the early twentieth century suggests there might be a different outcome—a return or resurgence of the people suppressed. The drying cement of this quarantine will preserve an impression of our haves and have-nots. Who can order in, and who has to deliver? Who stays in the dense city, and who escapes to a country house? Who complains of having nothing to do, and who, after each day’s work, sleeps in donated rooms to keep the virus away from family back home? Why are trained hospital staff being laid off in the U.S. even as hospitals become busier? Why are some workers without health insurance and paid leave, and therefore unable to stay home when sick? Why do so many who lack financial buffers earn historically less than the CEOs of the corporations their humble labor makes possible?

by William Pierce, The Goethe-Institut | Read more:
Image: William Pierce
[ed. From the series Day Afterthoughts: Reflections on a post-corona-time. See also: Schrödingers Virus, by Bina Shah.]

As America Reopens, Here’s How to Assess the Risk of Shopping and Dining Out

In most parts of the United States, you can now grab a drink with your friends at a bar, eat inside a restaurant, get your hair washed and cut in a salon, and try on clothes in a store.

Manicures and pedicures are generally allowed, as is working out in a gym and even getting a massage to soothe your stressed-out muscles.

It sounds like a dream come true after all those months cooped up at home — but at the same time, for many of us, something feels off.

Sure, we want the economy to reopen and do the things that used to bring us joy. But then we remember that the virus hasn't actually disappeared. In fact, in some parts of the country like California, Texas, Arizona and Florida, the number of people infected is still rising each day.

We also remember that in just five months, this virus has killed more than 116,000 Americans and infected more than 2.1 million.

And so we wonder: Is it really safe to be out and about? If I care about my own health and the health of my family and neighbors, should I be resisting the urge to patronize businesses in person even if my local government says I can?

The Los Angeles Times spoke with epidemiologists and physicians about what has changed since stay-at-home orders were first put in place, what remains the same, and what we can do to be responsible citizens as we move into the summer months.

And just so you know, this article is not going to address the risks associated with attending protests. Why? Because the risks you're willing to take to get your hair cut or eat at your favorite restaurant may not be the same as those you might take to fight systemic racism. That's a whole other story.

The first thing to remember is that the coronavirus is no less deadly or contagious now than it was three months ago, when the country all but shut down.

"It's still the same virus that has caused an average of 1,000 U.S. deaths a day and 4,000 around the world," said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm worried that people have accepted where we are as the new normal. This is not normal."

And it's not like we are nearing the end of the pandemic either, said Carolyn Cannuscio, director of research at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. Far from it.

Studies suggest just 5% of the U.S. population has been infected with the virus thus far. To get herd immunity, 60% to 70% of the population will need to be infected.

"If you think about how many people have died in just the first few months of this crisis, we still have a lot of suffering ahead of us," Cannuscio said. "We should try to do all we can to contribute to slowing the pandemic to give us more time to establish effective treatments."

Even as coronavirus infections and fatalities continue to grow, some experts say it is safer to venture out into the world today than it was when most stay-at-home orders first went into effect.

"I would say it's a lot safer," said Gerardo Chowell, a professor of mathematical epidemiology at Georgia State University. "We have a lot more information about the enemy."

Back in March and April, we still did not know that the virus spread primarily through the droplets expressed when we cough, sneeze, shout or sing without wearing masks. We also didn't know about the potential for asymptomatic transmission, or the potential for presymptomatic transmission, he said.

"Now, assuming that the population at large has this information, we have the power to protect ourselves," he said.

Specifically, several studies have shown that wearing facemasks can drastically reduce the spread of the virus.

"Back in April, it was not yet clear how useful this tool was," he said. "Since then, the science has been overwhelming."

So, even if you live in a state where the virus is circulating more now than it was in March, we now know that your chances of becoming infected are relatively low if you are careful about wearing a mask, social distancing and washing your hands.

One of the reasons we all stayed at home for three months was to slow the outbreak's spread and give hospitals time to prepare for a surge in COVID-19 patients as the numbers of infections inevitably ticked up.

"We didn't eliminate the virus, but we pumped the brakes on it," said Dr. Armand Dorian, chief medical officer for Verdugo Hills Hospital of the University of Southern California in Glendale.

In the past few months, most hospitals have put that grace period to good use, Dorian said. Among other things, they've stocked up on personal protective equipment for medical professionals and obtained more ventilators.

Now, doctors know to consider therapeutics like dexamethasone, remdesivir, anti-inflammatories and rheumatoid arthritis medication. They've learned to have patients lie prone on their bellies and to not intubate them right away.

"Three years from now we'll look back at this treatment and say it was so primitive, but it is massive leaps from where we were a few months ago," Dorian said.

"I don't think we've had enough advances in treatment to make me feel this is an un-concerning infection," she said. "I still think this is a disease we want to prevent."

Where does this all leave us? Is it OK to go out to eat? Get your hair cut? Go shopping for something besides groceries?

All the experts say that to make the most responsible decision, you'll have to consider many factors.

by Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times | Read more: (paywalled)
Image:AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
[ed. See also: How Exactly Do You Catch Covid-19? There Is a Growing Consensus (WSJ).]

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Dinosaur Jr.

[ed. Repost. See also: Tiny (D. Jr.)]

Study Examines The Lasting Effects Of Having — Or Being Denied — An Abortion

In The Turnaway Study, Diana Greene Foster shares research conducted over 10 years with about 1,000 women who had or were denied abortions, tracking impacts on mental, physical and economic health. (...)

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When Mike Pence was running for vice president, he said, if we appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, as Donald Trump intends to do, I believe we will see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs. Since then, Trump has appointed two conservative justices. The arguments used against abortion often refer to the medical risks of the procedure and the guilt and loss of self-esteem suffered by women who have abortions.

In order to explore what the impact of abortion is on women's health and women's lives, my guest, Diana Greene Foster, became the principal investigator of a 10-year study comparing women who had abortions at the end of the deadline allowed by the clinic and those who just missed the deadline and were turned away. The study focuses on the emotional health and socioeconomic outcomes for women who received a wanted abortion and those who were denied one.

Her goal is for judges and policymakers to understand what banning abortion would mean for women and children. The results of the study are published in Foster's new book "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, And The Consequences Of Having - Or Being Denied - An Abortion." Turnaway refers to the women who were turned away from having an abortion. Foster is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.

Diana Greene Foster, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we get to the results of the study, what impact do you think the pandemic is having on access to abortion?

DIANA GREENE FOSTER: Thank you for having me. The pandemic has definitely made abortion a lot harder for women to access in certain states. There were a handful of states that tried to declare that abortion wasn't an essential service. And that shut down clinics. And then a judge would put a hold on that. And they would open. But then they would have too many people waiting. And they couldn't see everyone. It was, I think, particularly a nightmare in Texas, with a lot of people unable to be seen and people traveling hundreds of miles at a time when they should've been able to shelter in place.

GROSS: So why did you want to do this study comparing women who had abortions at the end of the deadline allowed by the clinic and women who just missed the deadline and were turned away?

FOSTER: The idea that abortion hurts women has been put forth by people who are opposed to abortion. And it really has resonated. So state governments have imposed restrictions in response to the idea that abortion hurts women, so telling clinics that they have to counsel women on the harms of abortion. And that idea made it all the way up to the Supreme Court so that Justice Kennedy, in 2007, used the idea that abortion hurts women as an excuse - or as a reason - for banning one procedure.

And what he said in 2007 was that while we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. And critics of this statement have said this is patronizing that women would need to be protected from their own decisions.

But the one thing I like about this quote is that he admits that there aren't reliable data. And so my goal with the Turnaway Study was to create reliable data, so have a scientific study where the two groups of women are similar. But their outcomes are different because one group received an abortion and one was denied.

by Terry Gross, NPR |  Read more:
Image: The Turnaway Study

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In

For all the value Jon Stewart delivered as a political satirist and voice of reason during his 16-year-run as the host of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ it’s quite plausible to suggest that the political and media Bizarro World in which we live — where skepticism is the default, news is often indistinguishable from entertainment and entertainers have usurped public authority from the country’s political leaders — is one that he and his show helped to usher in. ‘‘Look, we certainly were part of that ecosystem, but I don’t think that news became entertainment because they thought our show was a success,’’ Stewart says. ‘‘Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11. There are very few events that would justify being covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So in the absence of urgency, they have to create it. You create urgency through conflict.’’ That pervasive sense of political and social conflict has only grown since Stewart left the air in 2015. It has also made Stewart’s post-‘‘Daily Show’’ silence — apart from a few guest spots on his old friend and colleague Stephen Colbert’s show, he has been mostly out of the spotlight — more intriguing. What has he been thinking about this country while he has been gone? Now he has returned with some answers.

Stewart, who is 57, has written and directed ‘‘Irresistible,’’ a political satire about a small Wisconsin town that becomes engulfed in a political spectacle when a Democratic strategist and his Republican counterpart become fixated on the larger symbolic value and bellwether potential of the local mayoral race. The film, which will make its theatrical and video-on-demand premiere on June 26, is evidence that being away from the grind of a daily TV show has expanded rather than shrunk Stewart’s satirical powers. (...)

How strange is it, after having been basically out of the public eye for five years, to be coming back with something now? ‘‘The world is on fire, here’s my new movie’’ seems like an awkward spot to be in. It’s like showing up to a plane crash with a chocolate bar. There’s tragedy everywhere, and you’re like, ‘‘Uh, does anybody want chocolate?’’ It feels ridiculous. But what doesn’t feel ridiculous is to continue to fight for nuance and precision and solutions.

You know, I’ve been trying to think of some precise, encapsulating question to ask you about what we’ve been witnessing over the last few weeks, and everything I was coming up with felt forced or phony. Maybe it’s better, because you’ve been eloquent during times of crisis in the past, just to ask what you’ve been thinking about and seeing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing? I’d like to say I’m surprised by what happened to him, but I’m not. This is a cycle, and I feel that in some ways, the issue is that we’re addressing the wrong problem. We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that. (...)

Does the scale and intensity of the protests suggest some positive strides toward accountability? Maybe. Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing. You know, we’re in a bizarre time of quarantine. White people lasted six weeks and then stormed a state building with rifles, shouting: ‘‘Give me liberty! This is causing economic distress! I’m not going to wear a mask, because that’s tyranny!’’ That’s six weeks versus 400 years of quarantining a race of people. The policing is an issue, but it’s the least of it. We use the police as surrogates to quarantine these racial and economic inequalities so that we don’t have to deal with them. (...)

We used to have news and we had entertainment. Now those categories are totally intertwined — to the extent that it’s not far-fetched to say that we just have varieties of entertainment. And similarly, people are looking at entertainers, rather than politicians, as political authorities. I don’t think it’s too far off base to suggest that, unintentionally or not, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ played a part in that transformation. What do you think about those changes and what they’ve wrought? I think you have to look at what incentivized the system. The news didn’t become ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ because at its core, ‘‘The Daily Show’’ was a critique of the news and a critique of those systems. If they’d taken in what we were saying, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing now: creating urgency through conflict. Conflict has become the catalyst for the economic model. The entire system functions that way now. We are two sides — in a country of 350 million people.

That reminds me of the old George Carlin joke about how in America you have 23 kinds of bagels to choose from but only two political parties. Politically in this country, you have Coke or Pepsi. Every now and again, Dr Pepper comes along and everybody is like, ‘‘You ruined this for everyone else.’’ Dr Pepper is Ralph Nader, let’s say. But getting back to your question — it plays into that scenario of looking for the scapegoat. ‘‘Well, it’s ‘The Daily Show.’ They popularized news-as-entertainment.’’ It’s the New York Times trend-piece thing of somebody getting hold of an idea and amplifying it even though it really has no breadth or depth to it.

What do you think of the news media’s handle on this political moment more generally? I don’t think it has ever had a good handle on a political moment. It’s not designed for that. It’s designed for engagement. It’s like YouTube and Facebook: an information-laundering perpetual-radicalization machine. It’s like porn. I don’t mean that to be flip. When you were pubescent, the mere hint of a bra strap could send you into ecstasy. I’m 57 now. If it’s not two nuns and a mule, I can’t even watch it. Do you understand my point? The algorithm is not designed for thoughtful engagement and clarity. It’s designed to make you look at it longer.

Have there been any positive changes, though? Let me give you an example of what might be one: When you were doing ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ part of what made you unique was your last-sane-man-in-Crazytown quality. You would actually say that someone in power was telling a lie when the nightly newscasters wouldn’t. Now they will say that. Is that a step in the right direction? The media’s job is to deconstruct the manipulation, not to just call it a lie. It’s about informing on how something works so that you understand the lie’s purpose. What are the structural issues underneath the lie? The media shouldn’t take the political system personally, or allow its own narcissism to rise to the narcissism of the politicians, or become offended that the politicians are lying — their job is to manipulate.

Are the controversial things that President Trump says structurally motivated? Do you believe he’s thinking on that level? I think he understands very well — and the right understands very well — that undermining the credibility of the institutions that people look to for help defining and making sense of reality is the key to bending reality to your will. It’s a wonderful rhetorical trick. He had a great one on Memorial Day Weekend: ‘‘We’re getting great reviews on our pandemic response. But of course, not getting credit for it.’’ The twisted logic of that: If you’re getting great reviews, I’m pretty sure that’s considered credit. It’s like saying, ‘‘I’m being praised, but of course I won’t be praised for it.’’ Language is utterly meaningless. Everything is placed into its category in the tribal war and who its real victims are: Donald Trump and his minions. Poor little billionaire president who can’t catch a break. It’s incredible. Are we all just extras in this guy’s movie? But I do feel as if his approach has worked for him his whole life.

by David Marchese, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty

Coronavirus Shows Good Restaurants Can't Be Replaced

A Culinary Tragedy (Bloomberg)

Image: Howard Chua-Eoan

Vintage - Dokorder reel to reel tape recorder
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Uniqlo Rolls Out Reusable Mask Line as Retailers Adapt to Virus

Asia’s largest retailer is betting that it has the right product at the right time: a Uniqlo face mask.

Fast Retailing Co., operator of the clothing stores, will begin selling reusable face masks in Japan this week. The masks, which will sold in sets of three and retail for 990 yen ($9), aim for both performance and comfort, the company said in a statement Monday.

Uniqlo joins a constellation of businesses seeking to offer new products and services as the coronavirus pandemic upends lifestyles around the globe, changing how people work, dress and eat. Companies are racing to adapt to that change; Fast Retailing said the decision to make and sell masks was due to customer demand.

Plans for sales of the Uniqlo masks outside of its home base of Japan will be announced as they are set, Fast Retailing said. With more than 2,000 stores globally and over $20 billion in annual sales, it would be one of the largest retailers to sell masks. Other large apparel makers such as Gap Inc., Madewell Inc. and Adidas AG have also recently introduced face masks.

Fast Retailing, which plans to produce 500,000 mask packs a week, will use its breathable AIRism fabric for the masks, which it developed with Japanese textile company Toray Industries Inc. The masks have a bacterial filtration efficiency of 99% which is retained even after 20 washes, according to the statement. AIRism is often used to market breathable summer clothing, which could boost its appeal ahead of the hot and humid summer in Japan, where authorities have begun issuing warnings of the increased danger of heat stroke when wearing a mask.

by Lisa Du and Grace Huang, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Fast Retailing Co

Elon Musk: The Man, The Myth, The Meme

Bloomberg via YouTube

Same As It Ever Was: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, Minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.”

― from Network, screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky

And thus spoke “Arthur Jensen”, CEO of fictional media conglomerate “CCA” in what is for me the most defining scene in director Sidney Lumet’s prescient 1976 satire. Jensen (wonderfully played by Ned Beatty) is calling “mad prophet of the airwaves” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet a cash cow for the network, Jensen hands him a new set of stone tablets from which he is to preach (the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen). It is screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest monologue.

Recently, we’ve witnessed a President of the United States who is Tweeting and making public statements in TV interviews and press conferences (in a very “mad prophet of the airwaves” manner) that suggest he feels it’s more important right now in the midst of a still-raging pandemic to get everyone back to work than to save their lives. Because the economy. And per usual, Wall Street watches, waits and yawns while it gets a manicure.

You would almost think “someone” has handed the President a set of stone tablets from which he is to preach (akin to the corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen). Or, at the very least-he opines from the perspective of someone borne of privilege and inherited wealth?

So how did the world become “…a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business”? And come hell, high water, or killer virus, why is it that “Thou shalt rally the unwashed masses to selflessly do their part to protect the interests of the Too Big to Fail” (whether it’s corporations, the dynastic heirs of the 1% or the wealth management industry that feeds off of them) remains the most “immutable bylaw” of all?

It’s not like “the people” haven’t tried through history to level the playing field between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. Take, for example the French Revolution, which ultimately did not change the status quo, despite the initial “victory” of the citizenry over the power-hoarding aristocracy. As pointed out in Justin Pemberton’s documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century, while there was initial optimism in the wake of the revolution that French society would default to an egalitarian model, it never really took.

Why? Because the architects of the revolution overlooked what is really needed to establish and maintain true equality: strong political institutions, an education system, health care (*sigh*), a transport system, and a tax system that targets the highest incomes.

Same as it ever was. (...)

As the film was produced before Covid-19 shut down much of the world’s economy, it does not delve into the possibilities of a post-pandemic restructuring. As luck would have it though, a fitting postscript for my review presented itself the day after I screened the film when Thomas Piketty popped up as a guest on The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah. Curiously, he was not there to promote the documentary, but did share some interesting thoughts on possible post-pandemic shifts in current economic models:

[Piketty] I think this is one of these crises we see that can really change people’s views about the world and how we should organize the economy. What we see at this stage is a big increase in inequality. […]

With this crisis right now, I think people are going to be asking for proof that we can also use this power of money creation and the Federal Reserve in order to invest in people; investing in hospitals, in public infrastructure, increasing wages for unskilled workers…all the low-wage and middle-wage people which we see today are necessary for our existence and our society.

In the longer run, of course we cannot just pay for everything with public debt and money creation…so we have to re-balance our tax system. […]

In the past three decades in America, we’ve seen a lot more billionaires; but we’ve seen a lot less growth. So in the end, the idea that you get prosperity out of inequality just didn’t work out. […]

[Noah] What do you think about the “worst case scenario”, then…if you live in a world where the inequality just keeps growing; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, what do we inevitably get to?

[Piketty] Well to me the worst scenario is that some skilled politicians like Donald Trump, or [President of the National Front Party] Marie Le Pen in my country in France will use the frustration coming from wage and income stagnation and rising inequality in order to point out some foreign workers or “some people” [are] to blame. […] And this is what really worries me-that if we don’t change our discourses, if we don’t come up with another economic model that is more equitable, more sustainable…then, in effect we re-open the door for all this nationalist discourse.

by Dennis Hartley, Den of Cinema |  Read more:
Image: Network/YouTube

Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Buffalo Springfield

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The Girl From the Red River Shore

Some of us turn off the lights and we live
In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I’ve never wanted any of them wanting me
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I sat by her side and for a while I tried
To make that girl my wife
She gave me her best advice and she said
“Go home and lead a quiet life.”
Well, I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west
And I’ve been out where the black winds roar
Somehow, though, I never did get that far
With the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I could never be free
One look at her and I knew right away
She should always be with me
Well, the dream dried up a long time ago
Don’t know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the Red River shore

Now I’m wearing the cloak of misery
And I’ve tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove
But I can’t escape from the memory
Of the one that I’ll always adore
All those nights when I lay in the arms
Of the girl from the Red River shore

Well, we’re living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of a life of crime
And when it’s all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I’ll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I’ve stayed here before
Once, a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the Red River shore

Well, I went back to see about it once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talking about
Well, the sun went down on me a long time ago
I’ve had to fall back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River shore

Now, I’ve heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
Whenever someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring ’em on back to life
Well, I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore

The Girl From the Red River Shore ~ Bob Dylan (YouTube)

Too Close For Comfort: Russia's Communal Apartments

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Through the thin wall separating her from her neighbors, Dr. Anzhela Kirilova began to hear the rasping cough associated with Covid-19 sometime in May. That was hardly a surprise, as a few weeks earlier her neighbors had heard the same cough coming from her room.

Dr. Kirilova, who works in a Covid-19 ward at a hospital, said she had tried to warn the single man and the young family with whom she shares the four-room apartment, suggesting they wear masks in the kitchen.

“They said, ‘We don’t care, and we’ll do what we want,’” she said with a shrug.

For residents of Russia’s communal apartments — a relic of the Soviet Union but still home to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them in St. Petersburg — self-isolation to fend off the coronavirus is hardly an option.

From a half-dozen to more than 20 people live in separate rooms within a single apartment, typically one to a family, while sharing a kitchen and bathroom in one large, usually unhappy, household. In St. Petersburg, about 500,000 people live in communal apartments, constituting 10 percent of the city’s population.

Life in communal apartments has always bordered on intolerable. The rules for close-quarters living among people who may despise one another are delicate. Feuds are common.

“Because of a lack of privacy, people become very suspicious,” said Ilya Utekhin, a professor of anthropology at the European University of St. Petersburg and author of “Essays on Communal Life.”

Even in the best of times, which, to be honest, there have not been many for the communal apartment residents of this city, “they believe their neighbors want to inflict all kinds of damage,” he said. “They become afraid. They are sure that in their absence, their neighbors are looking at or touching their things.”

Some families keep their own toilet seat, usually hanging on a nail in the bathroom, which they swap out for the common seat. In another arrangement, several families that get along share a seat among themselves, but not with others. This is called a “toilet seat circle.”

The tensions have been compounded by the threat of the new coronavirus. Russia, with more than 500,000 reported cases, has the third-highest number of infected people after the United States and Brazil. (...)

The idea of communal apartments sprang up right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In a process they called “creating density,” the Communists divided up the palaces and apartments of the rich, the noblemen and various lords and vassals of the czarist court and moved in thousands of poor families.

The resulting communal apartments, of which about 69,000 remain today, accounting for as much as 40 percent of the residential real estate in central St. Petersburg, became a blend of architectural opulence and everyday penury.

Millions of people in the Soviet Union lived in communal apartments. Most are now gone outside of St. Petersburg, where they remain because of the vast number of historic buildings that had been converted to communal apartments. On floors once walked by Russian aristocrats, residents argue over noise, unwashed dishes, demented or alcoholic neighbors, guests and germs.

by Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sergey Ponomarev

The Limits of Celebrity Activism

Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the score of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their massive platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.) (...)

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays. (...)

What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the last few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.

by Jordan Coley, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Confluential Films / YouTube
[ed. Not to mention all the generic corporate bs we've been subjected to lately. See also: What Do We Want From White Celebrities Right Now? (The Cut).]