Wednesday, September 16, 2020
In America’s Blood
Twenty years ago, the National Rifle Association didn’t know what to do after a mass shooting. But it now has the protocol down: it’s had, after all, plenty of practice. First: keep quiet. Cancel events and interviews, stop updating Twitter and Facebook. If cornered, say: ‘This is a time to mourn, not to play politics.’ Or: ‘The anti-gun zealots are exploiting a tragedy to advance their anti-freedom agenda.’ Meanwhile, NRA fundraisers will be trying to reach all their five million members to let them know that this time it’s serious, the liberals are coming for their guns, and they need to dig deep and donate whatever can be spared to ‘freedom’s safest place’, the NRA. On their own, the members will have already started calling politicians to demand that they not back down on gun freedom: 60 per cent of Americans, when surveyed, are in favour of stricter gun control laws, but you wouldn’t know it from a congressman’s call log. On its website, the NRA advises members not to threaten the politicians they telephone, and to be careful about identifying themselves as members of the NRA, since ‘unfortunately, many anti-gun politicians are under the misguided impression that NRA members only say what NRA tells them to say.’
What the NRA no longer does after a mass shooting is grovel before Congress, as its flustered head did after Columbine in 1999, when – was that shame? – he testified that anyone who buys a gun should have to pass a background check (he took that back a few years later), and agreed that guns shouldn’t be allowed in schools (he took that back too). With reporters, silence and deflection tend to work well enough, but if a particular mass shooting seems to be getting more attention than usual, or if even Republican allies start suggesting that maybe they’re not completely unsympathetic to ‘some common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and how’s that working out for them? More than one hundred Americans are killed every day by cars – will you outlaw cars too? Will you force women to defend themselves against murderers and rapists with knives? And she’ll quote Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s leader, who likes to say that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ In 2012, after 26 people (twenty of them six and seven-year-olds) were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he suggested that every school in America should have ‘an extraordinary corps’ of armed citizens patrolling the halls. After all, Obama’s daughters were protected with guns: ‘Are the president’s kids more important than yours?’ an NRA ad asked. In 2018, after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, LaPierre said the solution was to arm teachers. News stations followed by holding debates on whether teachers should pack heat, with federal funds allocated to shooting lessons. Never mind gun control. The next month, the NRA broke a 15-year fundraising record.LaPierre likes to say that shooting is in America’s blood: it’s what Americans have always done, with the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its founders, George Wingate of the New York National Guard, ‘the Civil War had demonstrated with bloody clarity that soldiers who could not shoot straight were of little value. This situation, and the general ignorance concerning marksmanship which I found among our soldiers during the Civil War, appalled me.’ He assumed that Americans would eventually be drawn into a European war in which they would be outmatched, particularly against the Prussians with their superior rear-loading rifles. (...)
John F. Kennedy’s assassination was harder for the NRA to explain away: the president’s motorcade was hardly lacking in good guys with guns, and Lee Harvey Oswald had ordered his cheap Carcano infantry rifle, surplus from the Italian military, from the back pages of the NRA’s monthly magazine, American Rifleman. In response, the NRA’s then head, Franklin Orth, came out in favour of limiting mail-order gun purchases and did little to prevent the Gun Control Act of 1968, which ‘banned the interstate retail sale of guns, prohibited all sales to juveniles, convicted felons and individuals adjudicated as being mentally unsound’. It was far more anaemic than the bill that Lyndon Johnson had hoped to pass, but it enraged a faction of NRA hardliners, who would succeed in overturning the law prohibiting interstate sales. One board member, Neal Knox, argued that Kennedy’s assassination might have been the work of gun control activists trying to bring about disarmament – a commie plot to make Americans easier to subdue. The NRA split between members who bought their guns for hunting and target practice – and who wanted to move the organisation’s headquarters to Colorado Springs, where they would concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won. (...)
There are probably 400 million ‘civilian owned’ firearms in the US, and (although there is of course no registry) 43 per cent of Americans report that they live in a home with a gun, even if they don’t own one themselves. Those numbers are going up. Anxiety about the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests have done more for gun sales than the 9/11 attacks, and even more than the election of Barack Obama and the Sandy Hook shootings, when Americans thought that guns were about to become illegal and that they needed to stock up. Not all states require that all gun purchasers undergo background checks – loopholes abound – but whenever a person does buy a gun from a licensed dealer, the FBI dutifully performs one. The checks usually take a few minutes and are hardly intrusive, but at least they can be counted. Last year, they performed 28.4 million checks; by the end of August this year, they were already at 25.9 million. (Just wait until Christmas sales are taken into account.) In January and February, according to a Brookings study, Americans were buying between 80,000 and 100,000 guns a day. In March, after Trump declared a state of emergency, it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying failed, filed lawsuits – to have gun shops classified as ‘essential businesses’, to stop them having to close during lockdowns. What could be more ‘essential’, the NRA argued, than the ability to defend your life? Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, pushed back, and eventually prevailed in the courts; other Democratic governors caved in. The Republicans had needed little persuading in the first place. (...)
Trump admits that he’s been bought – ‘a lot of the people who put me where I am are strong supporters of the Second Amendment’ – and says that the best way to prevent gun violence is to build mental institutions (since ‘mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun’). But financially, Trump’s victory was a disaster for the NRA: members became complacent with an ally in the White House, and dues dropped by $35 million. (‘We have an unusual business model,’ one board member told the New York Times. ‘The more successful we are, the less money we make.’) In the midterm elections, for the first time, the NRA was outspent by gun control advocacy groups, and they’ve had layoffs. All this has made them increasingly dependent on large donations from gun manufacturers, sometimes estimated to be at least 60 per cent of their income. It’s not just American money: a quarter of the guns in the US were made in Europe, and Austrians (Glock), Germans (SIG Sauer) and Italians (Beretta) have donated millions of dollars to the NRA in order to protect their biggest market. The interests of gun sellers and gun buyers often overlap, but not always. I used to wonder why the NRA seemed to value the right to carry a concealed gun over an openly carried one, until it was pointed out to me (in Tom Diaz’s excellent book The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It) that gun manufacturers often make more money from accessories – waistband holsters, ankle holsters, jackets with special pockets, vegan leather handbags with gun compartments – than from the guns themselves.
But above all, the NRA protects its own interests. Smyth’s book only touches on the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established for the first time that Americans have a right under the Second Amendment to keep guns for self-defence in their homes. Smyth mentions that the majority opinion partly relied on the work of a legal academic who’d been on the payroll of the NRA – a canny investment. But Adam Winkler’s more comprehensive (also more engaging) book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011), offers a persuasive account of the NRA’s efforts to prevent libertarian gun rights activists from pursuing Heller all the way to the Supreme Court – not because the NRA thought they’d lose, or that another case would be stronger, but because they feared that a stunning legal victory would depress membership dues. As a former NRA lobbyist told Winkler, ‘nothing keeps the fundraising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they’re a pro-gun David facing an invincible anti-gun Goliath.’ And the NRA needed the money – not only for its voter registration drives. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that NRA executives, principally LaPierre, have been diverting ‘charitable assets for their own benefit and interests’. The lawsuit she filed in August is a 168-page chronicle of lives well lived: private jets, yachts, safaris; $12,332.75 of NRA money for LaPierre’s niece to spend eight nights at a Four Seasons resort; $16,359 for hair and make-up artists for LaPierre’s wife. A senior assistant put her son’s wedding on expenses.
Trump admits that he’s been bought – ‘a lot of the people who put me where I am are strong supporters of the Second Amendment’ – and says that the best way to prevent gun violence is to build mental institutions (since ‘mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun’). But financially, Trump’s victory was a disaster for the NRA: members became complacent with an ally in the White House, and dues dropped by $35 million. (‘We have an unusual business model,’ one board member told the New York Times. ‘The more successful we are, the less money we make.’) In the midterm elections, for the first time, the NRA was outspent by gun control advocacy groups, and they’ve had layoffs. All this has made them increasingly dependent on large donations from gun manufacturers, sometimes estimated to be at least 60 per cent of their income. It’s not just American money: a quarter of the guns in the US were made in Europe, and Austrians (Glock), Germans (SIG Sauer) and Italians (Beretta) have donated millions of dollars to the NRA in order to protect their biggest market. The interests of gun sellers and gun buyers often overlap, but not always. I used to wonder why the NRA seemed to value the right to carry a concealed gun over an openly carried one, until it was pointed out to me (in Tom Diaz’s excellent book The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It) that gun manufacturers often make more money from accessories – waistband holsters, ankle holsters, jackets with special pockets, vegan leather handbags with gun compartments – than from the guns themselves.
But above all, the NRA protects its own interests. Smyth’s book only touches on the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established for the first time that Americans have a right under the Second Amendment to keep guns for self-defence in their homes. Smyth mentions that the majority opinion partly relied on the work of a legal academic who’d been on the payroll of the NRA – a canny investment. But Adam Winkler’s more comprehensive (also more engaging) book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011), offers a persuasive account of the NRA’s efforts to prevent libertarian gun rights activists from pursuing Heller all the way to the Supreme Court – not because the NRA thought they’d lose, or that another case would be stronger, but because they feared that a stunning legal victory would depress membership dues. As a former NRA lobbyist told Winkler, ‘nothing keeps the fundraising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they’re a pro-gun David facing an invincible anti-gun Goliath.’ And the NRA needed the money – not only for its voter registration drives. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that NRA executives, principally LaPierre, have been diverting ‘charitable assets for their own benefit and interests’. The lawsuit she filed in August is a 168-page chronicle of lives well lived: private jets, yachts, safaris; $12,332.75 of NRA money for LaPierre’s niece to spend eight nights at a Four Seasons resort; $16,359 for hair and make-up artists for LaPierre’s wife. A senior assistant put her son’s wedding on expenses.
by Deborah Friedell, LRB | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
Why Everything Is Sold Out
All summer, I tried to buy things, and mostly I failed. I signed up for two separate wait lists for out-of-stock black spandex bike shorts, which I needed for the Peloton I had bought, itself back-ordered for two months. I also added my email address to a wait list for curtain rods, remembering how the shifting fall sun broils the kitchen table that’s now my office. When word from Bed Bath & Beyond came weeks later to let me know they were back on sale, I was too slow on the draw—they sold out about as swiftly as hand sanitizer did in March. Over the weekend, I believed I had acquired replacements for my worn-out bed linens, but my email receipt contained a confession: The sheets would arrive, at best, around Halloween.
When I asked Steve Rowen, a managing partner at the retail-analytics firm Retail Systems Research, if these inventory problems were as widespread as my personal frustrations suggested, he had to stifle a laugh before answering me: “Absolutely.” Similar problems currently dog all kinds of retailers, and they have for months. At the beginning of the pandemic, when most people assumed that things would be back to normal in weeks or months, retailers and manufacturers “weren’t really in a hurry to shift gears and make a lot of expensive decisions,” Rowen said. “I don’t think anyone really had any indication as to how long this pandemic and its effects were going to be felt.” (...)
Since millions of Americans started spending a lot more time at home, many of them have been making very similar decisions about how to do so comfortably. According to Rowen, that has helped create supply issues in all sorts of categories: food, cleaning products, medication, exercise equipment, outdoor gear, furniture and home decor, renovation supplies, home electronics, office supplies, loungewear, and beyond. At the start of the year, no one could know that standing desks and kiddie pools would become hot commodities. But this far into the pandemic, shortages aren’t persisting only because of what’s suddenly trendy.
To understand why you still can’t find your preferred migraine medication or your usual brand of dog food, you have to start with where those products begin: manufacturing. Long before most Americans had a hint of the disaster to come, the inventory of many products began to thin behind the scenes. The United States imported more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of products from China in 2018, about 20 percent of the country’s total annual imports. When China went into lockdown in late January to stanch the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s enormous manufacturing sector screeched to a halt. That paralyzed the flow of all kinds of things into the United States—strollers, gym clothes, Nintendo Switch consoles, and crucial components for products assembled in other countries, such as textiles for clothing and parts for cellphones and computers. When those components disappeared, some assembly lines in countries such as Vietnam and South Korea went idle, compounding the crisis in the U.S.
Brands and retailers that relied on imports from China or elsewhere in Asia began considering suppliers in Latin America, Europe, or the U.S. to pick up the slack. But as those searches got under way, the coronavirus spread to more countries, shutting down many manufacturing facilities around the world, at least temporarily.
Then, having controlled the coronavirus, Chinese manufacturing rebounded. “As soon as China was up and running, and the United States’ manufacturing facilities weren’t, we started importing more goods from China than ever before,” Rowen said. But an elevated reliance on things produced half a world away comes with some risks. Goods make their way from Asia to the U.S. on massive cargo ships, and the shipping industry is barrelling toward a labor crisis: Hundreds of thousands of workers are currently stranded at sea because their home countries’ pandemic travel restrictions prevent them from coming ashore. Abandoning them on ships threatens to collapse global shipping by exhausting and abusing workers currently at sea while driving those waiting for work to other industries. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—which supplies the remaining 80 percent of imported goods sold in the U.S.—has yet to return to full manufacturing capacity.
No matter where a product is made, it has to be packaged before it can be shipped or stocked on a shelf, creating yet another obstacle. Plastic bottles and pouches, cardboard boxes, and aluminum cans all have to be manufactured too, and often with expensive machinery that can make only a very specific type of bag or bottle. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you make if you don’t have the right thing to put it in. The consumer supply of flour is still recovering, in part because mills spent months fighting over a finite supply of the small paper sacks it’s packaged in. There was always plenty of flour, but someone baking sourdough for the first time doesn’t want one of the giant bags that typically get sent to restaurants.
Once products are manufactured, packaged, and imported, they still have to be distributed to warehouses and stores, which has become its own bottleneck. The pandemic has made long-haul trucking more dangerous and difficult—in the spring, truckers lacked protective gear and sanitizing equipment, and many of the places where they’d normally get a night’s rest or a hot meal had closed due to lockdowns. Since then, demand for truckers’ services has surged along with demand for certain types of products, and some trucking companies have capitalized on it by switching on short notice to routes that pay better, adding even more chaos to the scramble to get sought-after products onto shelves. Even when items make it onto a truck, more slowdowns await: More trucks are arriving than warehouses and stores usually deal with, and they have only so many loading docks and so many hours in a day.
by Amanda Mull, The Atlantic | Read more:
When I asked Steve Rowen, a managing partner at the retail-analytics firm Retail Systems Research, if these inventory problems were as widespread as my personal frustrations suggested, he had to stifle a laugh before answering me: “Absolutely.” Similar problems currently dog all kinds of retailers, and they have for months. At the beginning of the pandemic, when most people assumed that things would be back to normal in weeks or months, retailers and manufacturers “weren’t really in a hurry to shift gears and make a lot of expensive decisions,” Rowen said. “I don’t think anyone really had any indication as to how long this pandemic and its effects were going to be felt.” (...)
Since millions of Americans started spending a lot more time at home, many of them have been making very similar decisions about how to do so comfortably. According to Rowen, that has helped create supply issues in all sorts of categories: food, cleaning products, medication, exercise equipment, outdoor gear, furniture and home decor, renovation supplies, home electronics, office supplies, loungewear, and beyond. At the start of the year, no one could know that standing desks and kiddie pools would become hot commodities. But this far into the pandemic, shortages aren’t persisting only because of what’s suddenly trendy.To understand why you still can’t find your preferred migraine medication or your usual brand of dog food, you have to start with where those products begin: manufacturing. Long before most Americans had a hint of the disaster to come, the inventory of many products began to thin behind the scenes. The United States imported more than half a trillion dollars’ worth of products from China in 2018, about 20 percent of the country’s total annual imports. When China went into lockdown in late January to stanch the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s enormous manufacturing sector screeched to a halt. That paralyzed the flow of all kinds of things into the United States—strollers, gym clothes, Nintendo Switch consoles, and crucial components for products assembled in other countries, such as textiles for clothing and parts for cellphones and computers. When those components disappeared, some assembly lines in countries such as Vietnam and South Korea went idle, compounding the crisis in the U.S.
Brands and retailers that relied on imports from China or elsewhere in Asia began considering suppliers in Latin America, Europe, or the U.S. to pick up the slack. But as those searches got under way, the coronavirus spread to more countries, shutting down many manufacturing facilities around the world, at least temporarily.
Then, having controlled the coronavirus, Chinese manufacturing rebounded. “As soon as China was up and running, and the United States’ manufacturing facilities weren’t, we started importing more goods from China than ever before,” Rowen said. But an elevated reliance on things produced half a world away comes with some risks. Goods make their way from Asia to the U.S. on massive cargo ships, and the shipping industry is barrelling toward a labor crisis: Hundreds of thousands of workers are currently stranded at sea because their home countries’ pandemic travel restrictions prevent them from coming ashore. Abandoning them on ships threatens to collapse global shipping by exhausting and abusing workers currently at sea while driving those waiting for work to other industries. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—which supplies the remaining 80 percent of imported goods sold in the U.S.—has yet to return to full manufacturing capacity.
No matter where a product is made, it has to be packaged before it can be shipped or stocked on a shelf, creating yet another obstacle. Plastic bottles and pouches, cardboard boxes, and aluminum cans all have to be manufactured too, and often with expensive machinery that can make only a very specific type of bag or bottle. It doesn’t matter how much hand sanitizer you make if you don’t have the right thing to put it in. The consumer supply of flour is still recovering, in part because mills spent months fighting over a finite supply of the small paper sacks it’s packaged in. There was always plenty of flour, but someone baking sourdough for the first time doesn’t want one of the giant bags that typically get sent to restaurants.
Once products are manufactured, packaged, and imported, they still have to be distributed to warehouses and stores, which has become its own bottleneck. The pandemic has made long-haul trucking more dangerous and difficult—in the spring, truckers lacked protective gear and sanitizing equipment, and many of the places where they’d normally get a night’s rest or a hot meal had closed due to lockdowns. Since then, demand for truckers’ services has surged along with demand for certain types of products, and some trucking companies have capitalized on it by switching on short notice to routes that pay better, adding even more chaos to the scramble to get sought-after products onto shelves. Even when items make it onto a truck, more slowdowns await: More trucks are arriving than warehouses and stores usually deal with, and they have only so many loading docks and so many hours in a day.
Image: Getty/The Atlantic
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Australian Football League: What Is It?
[ed. My buddy was telling me about this and it sounded crazy. It is.]
Kolea: Relieve The Pandemic Blues By Counting Pacific Plovers
It is comforting to know that at least one beautiful and much anticipated event has not been cancelled because of the virus: the annual arrival of the Pacific golden plovers, known here as kolea.
And this year there is something new: residents are invited to join Hawaii’s first all-volunteer, statewide kolea count.
Since walking is one of the few activities many people do these days, counting kolea is an opportunity to add variety and purpose to daily strolls.
Marine life writer Susan Scott says, “The count is something positive during the COVID era. It gets you out of the house. You can do it by yourself and it offers a chance to build your awareness of these remarkable birds.”
The kolea — one of the longest nonstop migratory species in the world — normally begin arriving in the islands in July-August after their 3,000-mile nonstop, four-day flight from the tundra in western Alaska.
They are here now, hopping around in parks, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, any place there’s a grassy expanse, even on backyard lawns.
Each bird faithfully returns to the same place each year, fighting off other birds that dare to enter its territory.
The kolea reside in Hawaii for eight months each year before flying back to Alaska in late April-early May for their breeding and chick-raising season.
Hawaii Audubon Society is sponsoring the kolea count, hoping to collect data over the next 10 years on how many kolea arrive here annually, where they hang out and how long they stay. (...)
Interested counters can sign up for either a big count or a little count.
Residents interested in the little count will be responsible for recording the one or two kolea in their home gardens, church lawns and small parks.
People who register to do the big count will be tallying birds in large areas including cemeteries, large parks, athletic fields and school and college campuses and golf courses. (...)
Counters of both the little and big areas are asked to answer just four questions: How many kolea are in the area? When do the kolea in that area arrive? When do they leave for Alaska? How many remain in Hawaii through the summer?
Scott says many people interested in doing little counts are already checking in with information about what they call “their kolea,” the plovers who have been coming to their yards year after year.
Many households have given the kolea on their lawns names and taken to feeding them everything from mealworms they purchase at pet stores to small portions of scrambled eggs.
Scott says the protein and fat in chicken eggs is an acceptable snack for the plovers, which spend their days in Hawaii fattening up on worms and insects for the rigors of their return flight to Alaska.
While they are here, they almost double their weight from 4 to 7 ounces for their flights north. (...)
Kolea are a native species that has been in the Hawaiian Islands for more than 100,000 years according to fossil records.
Scott says they are remarkable in their readiness to adapt to modern day living, many not being afraid of cars or noise and loving such innovations as mini golf courses where they find it easier to catch insects crawling across the AstroTurf.
And this year there is something new: residents are invited to join Hawaii’s first all-volunteer, statewide kolea count.
Since walking is one of the few activities many people do these days, counting kolea is an opportunity to add variety and purpose to daily strolls.
Marine life writer Susan Scott says, “The count is something positive during the COVID era. It gets you out of the house. You can do it by yourself and it offers a chance to build your awareness of these remarkable birds.”The kolea — one of the longest nonstop migratory species in the world — normally begin arriving in the islands in July-August after their 3,000-mile nonstop, four-day flight from the tundra in western Alaska.
They are here now, hopping around in parks, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, any place there’s a grassy expanse, even on backyard lawns.
Each bird faithfully returns to the same place each year, fighting off other birds that dare to enter its territory.
The kolea reside in Hawaii for eight months each year before flying back to Alaska in late April-early May for their breeding and chick-raising season.
Hawaii Audubon Society is sponsoring the kolea count, hoping to collect data over the next 10 years on how many kolea arrive here annually, where they hang out and how long they stay. (...)
Interested counters can sign up for either a big count or a little count.
Residents interested in the little count will be responsible for recording the one or two kolea in their home gardens, church lawns and small parks.
People who register to do the big count will be tallying birds in large areas including cemeteries, large parks, athletic fields and school and college campuses and golf courses. (...)
Counters of both the little and big areas are asked to answer just four questions: How many kolea are in the area? When do the kolea in that area arrive? When do they leave for Alaska? How many remain in Hawaii through the summer?
Scott says many people interested in doing little counts are already checking in with information about what they call “their kolea,” the plovers who have been coming to their yards year after year.
Many households have given the kolea on their lawns names and taken to feeding them everything from mealworms they purchase at pet stores to small portions of scrambled eggs.
Scott says the protein and fat in chicken eggs is an acceptable snack for the plovers, which spend their days in Hawaii fattening up on worms and insects for the rigors of their return flight to Alaska.
While they are here, they almost double their weight from 4 to 7 ounces for their flights north. (...)
Kolea are a native species that has been in the Hawaiian Islands for more than 100,000 years according to fossil records.
Scott says they are remarkable in their readiness to adapt to modern day living, many not being afraid of cars or noise and loving such innovations as mini golf courses where they find it easier to catch insects crawling across the AstroTurf.
by Denby Fawcett, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Susan Scott
[ed. This is great. We used to have a pair that returned to our front yard for years.]
[ed. This is great. We used to have a pair that returned to our front yard for years.]
Monday, September 14, 2020
I Appreciate Your Concern, But Our Enormous Wedding Was Socially Distanced
After I posted photos from Jared and my beautiful wedding weekend on Instagram, many of you expressed concern. You saw photos of 300 guests gathering and celebrating during a pandemic and commented things like, “Where are the masks?” and “Haven’t you heard of COVID-19?” and “What is wrong with you?” But I assure you, we took every precaution to ensure the safety of our guests and that we didn’t have to move our wedding date.
The fact is, the handful of our gorgeous photos that I shared don’t tell the whole story. For example, most of the wedding was outdoors, except for the ceremony and reception. Everyone wore masks during the entire event, except for the dinner, speeches, and dancing. And everyone was socially distanced, except for the transportation to and from the event, the event itself, and the after-party. Jared and I took the health and safety of our guests very seriously, and it was our first priority in planning our wedding and not moving it.
I know it might seem crazy to have a party right now, but honestly, the guest list was just family and friends, and co-workers, and random acquaintances we invited to fill the room, and we all know that that’s totally fine. Technically, all of our guests are in a quarantine pod with us, so there’s no need to worry. Some of you asked, “But what about the catering staff?” I appreciate your concern, but they were super clean about everything. Our wedding was probably no more dangerous than two people going out to eat. Just multiply that by a few hundred, and don’t even think about asking me to move my wedding date. (...)
A lot of you also had issues with the bubbles we handed out to our guests to blow at us when we exited the ceremony. I totally understand your worries since COVID is spread through air particles, but what you didn’t realize is that we asked people not to come if they were feeling sick, so everyone there was really healthy. We would never want to put our guests at risk, or have to find another date for our venue.
Another photo that seemed to upset a lot of you was of Jared and me blowing out the candles and stuffing each other’s mouths with wedding cake. You left comments like, “Gross” and “Are you crazy?” and “Who even has candles on a wedding cake?” But Jared and I were both tested the day before the wedding, so it really isn’t a big deal. We look forward to getting our results any day now, and to not having to plan a 2021 wedding with everyone else.
The fact is, the handful of our gorgeous photos that I shared don’t tell the whole story. For example, most of the wedding was outdoors, except for the ceremony and reception. Everyone wore masks during the entire event, except for the dinner, speeches, and dancing. And everyone was socially distanced, except for the transportation to and from the event, the event itself, and the after-party. Jared and I took the health and safety of our guests very seriously, and it was our first priority in planning our wedding and not moving it.
I know it might seem crazy to have a party right now, but honestly, the guest list was just family and friends, and co-workers, and random acquaintances we invited to fill the room, and we all know that that’s totally fine. Technically, all of our guests are in a quarantine pod with us, so there’s no need to worry. Some of you asked, “But what about the catering staff?” I appreciate your concern, but they were super clean about everything. Our wedding was probably no more dangerous than two people going out to eat. Just multiply that by a few hundred, and don’t even think about asking me to move my wedding date. (...)A lot of you also had issues with the bubbles we handed out to our guests to blow at us when we exited the ceremony. I totally understand your worries since COVID is spread through air particles, but what you didn’t realize is that we asked people not to come if they were feeling sick, so everyone there was really healthy. We would never want to put our guests at risk, or have to find another date for our venue.
Another photo that seemed to upset a lot of you was of Jared and me blowing out the candles and stuffing each other’s mouths with wedding cake. You left comments like, “Gross” and “Are you crazy?” and “Who even has candles on a wedding cake?” But Jared and I were both tested the day before the wedding, so it really isn’t a big deal. We look forward to getting our results any day now, and to not having to plan a 2021 wedding with everyone else.
by Liz Galvao, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: McSweeny's
Abolish the Senate
Abolish the Senate (The Baffler)
Image: Brandon Celi
[ed. How about just ending the filibuster and electoral college as a start.]
Sunday, September 13, 2020
West Coast Has Worst Air Quality on Earth
The West Coast has the worst air quality on Earth right now, as nearly 100 active wildfires — including three of California's four biggest ever recorded — spew smoke.
Particulate matter from the smoke has made the air unhealthy to breathe all along the coast, as this map from air-quality monitoring company PurpleAir shows.
The numbers in the colored circles indicate the air quality index (AQI) detected by various monitoring sensors across the country. AQI is a metric measuring the level of pollutants in the air and how hazardous those levels are to human health, as determined by guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.
A higher AQI indicates more pollutants in the air and a greater health hazard. The EPA considers any AQI above 150 to be unhealthy for all people. Anything above 300 is considered a "health warning of emergency conditions."
The EPA does not make recommendations for AQI levels above 500, since they're "beyond index."
But PurpleAir's monitors around Salem, Oregon, reported AQIs as high as 758 on Friday morning.
by Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Yahoo News/Insider | Read more:
Image: PurpleAir
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Golf Courses Emerge as a Fix for L.A.’s Affordable Housing Crisis
Golf Courses Emerge as a Fix for L.A.’s Affordable Housing Crisis (City Lab/Bloomberg)
Image: Bryan Chan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
[ed. No.]
Guitars Are Back, Baby!
Not so long ago, things didn’t look so great for the guitar, that global symbol of youthful freedom and rebellion for 70 years running.
With hip-hop and Beyoncé-style spectacle pop supposedly owning the hearts and wallets of millennials and Generation Z — and so many 20th-century guitar deities either dead (Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain) or soloing into their 70s (Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page) — electric guitar sales had skidded by about one-third in the decade since 2007, according to Music Trades, a research organization that tracks industry data.
Gibson guitars, whose celebrated Les Paul line had helped put the Led in Zeppelin, was sliding toward bankruptcy.
All of this was enough for The Washington Post to declare the “slow, secret death of the six-string electric” in 2017. That same year, even Mr. Clapton himself, known simply as “God” to devotees more than half a century ago, sounded ready to spread the ashes. “Maybe,” he mused at a 2017 news conference for the documentary “Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars,” “the guitar is over.”
Hold the obituaries.
A half-year into a pandemic that has threatened to sink entire industries, people are turning to the guitar as a quarantine companion and psychological salve, spurring a surge in sales for some of the most storied companies (Fender, Gibson, Martin, Taylor) that has shocked even industry veterans.
“I would never have predicted that we would be looking at having a record year,” said Andy Mooney, the chief executive of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, the Los Angeles-based guitar giant that has equipped Rock & Roll Hall of Famers since Buddy Holly strapped on a 1954 sunburst Fender Stratocaster back in the tail-fin 1950s.
“We’ve broken so many records,” Mr. Mooney said. “It will be the biggest year of sales volume in Fender history, record days of double-digit growth, e-commerce sales and beginner gear sales. I never would have thought we would be where we are today if you asked me back in March.”
It’s not just graying baby boomer men looking to live out one last Peter Frampton fantasy. Young adults and teenagers, many of them female, are helping to power this guitar revival, manufacturers and retailers said, putting their own generational stamp on the instrument that rocked their parents’ generation while also discovering the powers of six-string therapy.
Playing Away the Blues
It all started with a collective breaking point, according to Jensen Trani, a guitar instructor in Los Angeles whose thousands of instructional videos on YouTube, he estimated, have attracted some 75 million views over the past 14 years.
“There was this point with my students where I could tell that numbing out on Netflix and Instagram and Facebook was just not working anymore,” Mr. Trani, 38, said. “People could no longer go to their usual coping mechanisms. They were saying, ‘How do I want to spend my day?’”
For many, apparently, the answer was “strumming.” (...)
Nearly 20 percent of the newcomers were under 24, and 70 percent were under 45, the company reported. Female users accounted for 45 percent of the new wave, compared with 30 percent before the pandemic.
In a narrow sense, the surge made sense. Prospective players who had never quite found the time to take up an instrument suddenly had little excuse not to. As James Curleigh, the chief executive of Gibson Brands, put it: “In a world of digital acceleration, time is always your enemy. All of a sudden time became your friend.”
But there was more to it, Mr. Trani said. Many newcomers to the instrument seemed to be looking for an oasis of calm in a turbulent world. “There is,” he said, “this sense of learning how to sit with yourself.” (...)
Guitars are hardly the only consumer item to experience a quarantine bounce, of course. Sales have spiked for many items since lockdowns began — bicycles, baking yeast, board games, yoga mats, beans and even Everclear, the 190-proof spirit.
But a guitar is not a bag of lentils. A new guitar usually requires an investment of several hundred dollars, if not several thousand, and new players and virtuosos alike often live with their trusty ax for years, bonding with it as a statement of personal taste and style.
It’s what economists would call a “discretionary” purchase, the sort of nonessential consumer item that is usually the last thing one might buy when the economy is plunging and unemployment is skyrocketing. Throw in monthslong factory closures for manufacturers and a virtual disappearance of brick-and-mortar retailers, and the situation seemed nearly apocalyptic.
“I figured that this is one of those business-falls-off a-cliff situations,” said Chris Martin, the chief executive of C.F. Martin & Co., the 187-year-old manufacturer of acoustic guitars that has supplied contemporary stars like John Mayer and Ed Sheeran, as well as legends like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and some guy named Elvis, over decades. “We’ll pick up the pieces and put the company back together whenever.”
But after a “terrible” March, with revenues 40 percent below normal, business roared back.
“It’s crazy,” said Mr. Martin, the sixth-generation Martin to run the company. “It’s unbelievable the demand there is right now for acoustic guitars. I’ve been through guitar booms before, but this one caught me completely by surprise.”
With hip-hop and Beyoncé-style spectacle pop supposedly owning the hearts and wallets of millennials and Generation Z — and so many 20th-century guitar deities either dead (Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain) or soloing into their 70s (Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page) — electric guitar sales had skidded by about one-third in the decade since 2007, according to Music Trades, a research organization that tracks industry data.
Gibson guitars, whose celebrated Les Paul line had helped put the Led in Zeppelin, was sliding toward bankruptcy.
All of this was enough for The Washington Post to declare the “slow, secret death of the six-string electric” in 2017. That same year, even Mr. Clapton himself, known simply as “God” to devotees more than half a century ago, sounded ready to spread the ashes. “Maybe,” he mused at a 2017 news conference for the documentary “Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars,” “the guitar is over.”
Hold the obituaries.
A half-year into a pandemic that has threatened to sink entire industries, people are turning to the guitar as a quarantine companion and psychological salve, spurring a surge in sales for some of the most storied companies (Fender, Gibson, Martin, Taylor) that has shocked even industry veterans.
“I would never have predicted that we would be looking at having a record year,” said Andy Mooney, the chief executive of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, the Los Angeles-based guitar giant that has equipped Rock & Roll Hall of Famers since Buddy Holly strapped on a 1954 sunburst Fender Stratocaster back in the tail-fin 1950s.“We’ve broken so many records,” Mr. Mooney said. “It will be the biggest year of sales volume in Fender history, record days of double-digit growth, e-commerce sales and beginner gear sales. I never would have thought we would be where we are today if you asked me back in March.”
It’s not just graying baby boomer men looking to live out one last Peter Frampton fantasy. Young adults and teenagers, many of them female, are helping to power this guitar revival, manufacturers and retailers said, putting their own generational stamp on the instrument that rocked their parents’ generation while also discovering the powers of six-string therapy.
Playing Away the Blues
It all started with a collective breaking point, according to Jensen Trani, a guitar instructor in Los Angeles whose thousands of instructional videos on YouTube, he estimated, have attracted some 75 million views over the past 14 years.
“There was this point with my students where I could tell that numbing out on Netflix and Instagram and Facebook was just not working anymore,” Mr. Trani, 38, said. “People could no longer go to their usual coping mechanisms. They were saying, ‘How do I want to spend my day?’”
For many, apparently, the answer was “strumming.” (...)
Nearly 20 percent of the newcomers were under 24, and 70 percent were under 45, the company reported. Female users accounted for 45 percent of the new wave, compared with 30 percent before the pandemic.
In a narrow sense, the surge made sense. Prospective players who had never quite found the time to take up an instrument suddenly had little excuse not to. As James Curleigh, the chief executive of Gibson Brands, put it: “In a world of digital acceleration, time is always your enemy. All of a sudden time became your friend.”
But there was more to it, Mr. Trani said. Many newcomers to the instrument seemed to be looking for an oasis of calm in a turbulent world. “There is,” he said, “this sense of learning how to sit with yourself.” (...)
Guitars are hardly the only consumer item to experience a quarantine bounce, of course. Sales have spiked for many items since lockdowns began — bicycles, baking yeast, board games, yoga mats, beans and even Everclear, the 190-proof spirit.
But a guitar is not a bag of lentils. A new guitar usually requires an investment of several hundred dollars, if not several thousand, and new players and virtuosos alike often live with their trusty ax for years, bonding with it as a statement of personal taste and style.
It’s what economists would call a “discretionary” purchase, the sort of nonessential consumer item that is usually the last thing one might buy when the economy is plunging and unemployment is skyrocketing. Throw in monthslong factory closures for manufacturers and a virtual disappearance of brick-and-mortar retailers, and the situation seemed nearly apocalyptic.
“I figured that this is one of those business-falls-off a-cliff situations,” said Chris Martin, the chief executive of C.F. Martin & Co., the 187-year-old manufacturer of acoustic guitars that has supplied contemporary stars like John Mayer and Ed Sheeran, as well as legends like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and some guy named Elvis, over decades. “We’ll pick up the pieces and put the company back together whenever.”
But after a “terrible” March, with revenues 40 percent below normal, business roared back.
“It’s crazy,” said Mr. Martin, the sixth-generation Martin to run the company. “It’s unbelievable the demand there is right now for acoustic guitars. I’ve been through guitar booms before, but this one caught me completely by surprise.”
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Fender
Why Goodreads is Bad for Books
On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world’s largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they’re losing their mind. After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them. Sometimes even checking what they’ve already read will be next to impossible. Across a huge range of reading habits and preferences, this the one thing that unites millions of Goodreads users: that Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable.
There should be nothing in the world more benign than Goodreads, a website and app that 90 million people around the world use to find new books, track their reading, and attempt to meet people with similar tastes. For almost 15 years, it has been the dominant platform for readers to rate books and find recommendations. But many of the internet’s most dedicated readers now wish they could share their enthusiasm for books elsewhere. What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster.
Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler say they initially launched the platform in 2007 to get recommendations from their literary friends. But it was something many others wanted, too: by 2013, the site had swelled to 15 million users. That year Goodreads it was bought by Amazon, an acquisition Wired magazine called “quaint”, given Amazon’s roots in bookselling before it became the store that sold everything. Even then, many Goodreads users already felt stung by the tech giant which had, a year earlier, changed the terms of its huge books dataset (which Goodreads used to identify titles). Goodreads had been forced to move to a different data source, called Ingram; the move caused users to lose large amounts of their reading records.
Most stuck with it, however – not because of the platform itself, but because of its community. Writing in the Atlantic in 2012, Sarah Fay called Goodreads “Facebook with books”, and argued that “if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own”. While newspapers mourned the decline of reading and literature, Goodreads showed that a large and growing number of people still had a real passion for books and bookshops. Thirteen years after the first Kindle was sold, printed books have more than ten times the market share of ebooks, but talking about books happens much more online. But now, for many, the utopia Goodreads was founded to create has become closer to purgatory.
Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.” (...)
With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.
In an alternate universe, we could be living with a meticulous tool for finding books we would love to read, from a much wider diversity of authors. Instead we have a book tracker that, for many people, barely works.
All this makes Goodreads an obvious target for a competitor. However, it has huge advantages over any new contenders; its megalithic books library and its tens of millions of readers give it a very comfortable position. But the discontent is quietly reaching breaking point.
There should be nothing in the world more benign than Goodreads, a website and app that 90 million people around the world use to find new books, track their reading, and attempt to meet people with similar tastes. For almost 15 years, it has been the dominant platform for readers to rate books and find recommendations. But many of the internet’s most dedicated readers now wish they could share their enthusiasm for books elsewhere. What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster.
Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler say they initially launched the platform in 2007 to get recommendations from their literary friends. But it was something many others wanted, too: by 2013, the site had swelled to 15 million users. That year Goodreads it was bought by Amazon, an acquisition Wired magazine called “quaint”, given Amazon’s roots in bookselling before it became the store that sold everything. Even then, many Goodreads users already felt stung by the tech giant which had, a year earlier, changed the terms of its huge books dataset (which Goodreads used to identify titles). Goodreads had been forced to move to a different data source, called Ingram; the move caused users to lose large amounts of their reading records.Most stuck with it, however – not because of the platform itself, but because of its community. Writing in the Atlantic in 2012, Sarah Fay called Goodreads “Facebook with books”, and argued that “if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own”. While newspapers mourned the decline of reading and literature, Goodreads showed that a large and growing number of people still had a real passion for books and bookshops. Thirteen years after the first Kindle was sold, printed books have more than ten times the market share of ebooks, but talking about books happens much more online. But now, for many, the utopia Goodreads was founded to create has become closer to purgatory.
Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.” (...)
With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.
In an alternate universe, we could be living with a meticulous tool for finding books we would love to read, from a much wider diversity of authors. Instead we have a book tracker that, for many people, barely works.
All this makes Goodreads an obvious target for a competitor. However, it has huge advantages over any new contenders; its megalithic books library and its tens of millions of readers give it a very comfortable position. But the discontent is quietly reaching breaking point.
by Sarah Manavis, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Friday, September 11, 2020
The Injustices of Aging
Life is short, it is said, though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe. Youth is the plaything of the novel—certainly of the bildungsroman, with its lost illusions and great expectations, and of the midlife novel, whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age. Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty. In Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein” and Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory. It compels reminiscences, flashbacks; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock. There such novels hang, too, amid the misty romance of the past, fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture no longer waits faithfully on the horizon. Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead) says, “But after a certain age, that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t happen, it can’t happen.”
Nunez’s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez’s prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, “a female of a certain age,” keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four, the grandmother of six”; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features—his “stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince the look of entitlement “that comes to many older white men at a certain age.” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:
For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator’s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks “like a frightened toddler,” she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an “Other,” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. “As men see it, a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, “The Coming of Age.” “When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” adding that women often internalized other people’s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book’s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, “a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through.
Nunez’s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez’s prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, “a female of a certain age,” keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four, the grandmother of six”; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features—his “stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince the look of entitlement “that comes to many older white men at a certain age.” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she’s past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair . . . everything says: I’m still fuckable.“A certain age”—the phrase echoes mockingly through the early chapters of the novel, which find the narrator relaying conversations she has with other unnamed women about growing old. Irony occasionally swells into contempt, though the contempt hardly belongs to the narrator alone. Disdain for the elderly is a distinctly modern form of brutality, difficult to imagine before the nineteenth century, when great gains in life expectancy turned aging into a moral and aesthetic project. No doubt women are its primary targets. No doubt they suffer more for it. Obliged to learn the art of “aging gracefully” (the phrase appears as early as an 1894 newspaper article promising that old ladies “are a thing of the past”) in a culture where productivity and reproductivity are the measure of a woman’s worth, women invariably fail to do so, and either make a spectacle of their failure, like Nunez’s intellectual vamp, or shrivel into invisibility. That modern societies, and Anglo-American society in particular, treat the elderly as unseemly and disposable should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the news for the past six months.
For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator’s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks “like a frightened toddler,” she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an “Other,” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. “As men see it, a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, “The Coming of Age.” “When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” adding that women often internalized other people’s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book’s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, “a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through.
by Merve Emre, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Anja Slibar
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Disaster Advice
[ed. Lots of advice on Reddit for folks affected by fires on the West Coast. I imagine this might be useful for any disaster situation and there are probably handy pamphlets or websites with similar information elsewhere, but nothing like experience. Here's a sampling:]
I don’t know if any Oregon friends will read this but I was just evacuated from my home in California and have some advice and tips I wish I would have known before hand.- fill your gas tank. Make sure it’s at least 3/4 until all fires are extinguished
- pack way more than you think you need- we anticipated 2-3 days but were evacuated for 2 weeks
- make a list of things and keep it by the door. I somehow ran out without my wedding ring and laptop. Also if you have kids, keep a bin of distance learning stuff in your go bag- the sooner you can get them back on a schedule the more safe they feel.
- take a video of all contents in your home- open drawers and closets. Document your refrigerator and freezer contents
- throw away everything in your fridge and freezer and make sure you take out your garbage. Your power will likely be cut if you’re evacuated and it will be a smelly mess when you come back home.
- contact your insurance company now to start your claim. Both home owners and renters usually cover hotel, food, and supplies for two weeks while under mandatory evacuation.
- monitor airb&b - once evacuated they will open emergency housing - email the owners if you have pets- those rules are usually out the window during evacuation orders so don’t be discouraged if it says no pets
- if you can self evacuate EARLY. I do not want to see any Oregon friends waiting in long traffic lines surrounded by fire. Use your instincts and go as soon as you feel it’s necessary don’t wait.
- seal all windows and doors. Put Saran Wrap over any ac units or cracks. This will greatly reduces smoke damage.
- keep a cooler of non perishable snacks and water in your car. My family had to drive to another state because the hotels and shelters were filled because the area was so huge.
- keep all identification and documents in a safe place on you. If your id doesn’t have a current address grab a utility bill you’ll need this for applications to show residency with fema, airb&b etc
- if you can withdraw a bit of cash to keep on hand in a bag- I accidentally got my cards shut off because I didn’t put travel notices on them so my bank thought it might be fraud.
- when you get back home do not sweep or blow the ash. This can create a toxic air quality and can blow hot embers. Instead you want to wet things down and use wet paper towels on surfaces
- upon returning home replace all filters in your home and car
- am easy way to rid your home of smoke is to get box fans, large filters and attach them, then allow them to run non stop while being covered with a wet towel that has liquid fabric softener on it.
****
Piggybacking on your post to share this post from /r/bestof from a few years back https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/43jrp0/former_insurance_claims_adjuster_explains_how_to/Hey OP... I used to be the guy who worked for insurance companies, and determined the value of every little thing in your house. The guy who would go head-to-head with those fire-truck-chasing professional loss adjusters. I may be able to help you not get screwed when filing your claim.
Our goal was to use the information you provided, and give the lowest damn value we can possibly justify for your item.
For instance, if all you say was "toaster" -- we would come up with a cheap-as-fuck $4.88 toaster from Walmart, meant to toast one side of one piece of bread at a time. And we would do that for every thing you have ever owned. We had private master lists of the most commonly used descriptions, and what the cheapest viable replacements were. We also had wholesale pricing on almost everything out there, so really scored cheap prices to quote. To further that example:
- If you said "toaster - $25" , we would have to be within -20% of that... so, we would find something that's pretty much dead-on $20.01.
- If you said "toaster- $200" , we'd kick it back and say NEED MORE INFO, because that's a ridiculous price for a toaster (with no other information given.)
- If you said "toaster, from Walmart" , you're getting that $4.88 one.
- If you said "toaster, from Macys" , you'd be more likely to get a $25-35 one.
- If you said "toaster", and all your other kitchen appliances were Jenn Air / Kitchenaid / etc., you would probably get a matching one.
- If you said "Proctor Silex 42888 2-Slice Toaster from Wamart, $9", you just got yourself $9.
- If you said "High-end Toaster, Stainless Steel, Blue glowing power button" ... you might get $35-50 instead. We had to match all features that were listed.
I remember one specific customer... he had some old, piece of shit projector (from mid-late 90s) that could stream a equally piece of shit consumer camcorder. Worth like $5 at a scrap yard. It had some oddball fucking resolution it could record at, though -- and the guy strongly insisted that we replace with "Like Kind And Quality" (trigger words). Ended up being a $65k replacement, because the only camera on the market happened to be a high-end professional video camera (as in, for shooting actual movies). $65-goddam-thousand-dollars because he knew that loophole, and researched his shit.
Remember to list fucking every -- even the most mundane fucking bullshit you can think of. For example, if I was writing up the shower in my bathroom:
- Designer Shower Curtain - $35
- Matching Shower Curtain Liner for Designer Shower Curtain - $15
- Shower Curtain Rings x20 - $15
- Stainless Steel Soap Dispenser for Shower - $35
- Natural Sponge Loofah - from Whole Foods - $15
- Natural Sponge Loofah for Back - from Whole Foods - $19
- Holder for Loofahs - $20
- Bars of soap - from Lush - $12 each (qty: 4)
- Bath bomb - from Lush - $12
- High end shampoo - from salon - $40
- High end conditioner - from salon - $40
- Refining pore mask - from salon - $55
Most people writing claims for a total loss wouldn't even bother with the shower (it's just some used soap and sponges..) -- and those people would be losing out on $400.
Some things require documentation & ages. If you say "tv - $2,000" -- you're getting a 32" LCD, unless you can provide it was from the last year or two w/ receipts. Hopefully you have a good paper trail from credit/debit card expenditure / product registrations / etc.
If you're missing paper trails for things that were legitimately expensive -- go through every photo you can find that was taken in your house. Any parties you may have thrown, and guests put pics up on Facebook.
Maybe an Imgur photo of your cat, hiding under a coffee table you think you purchased from Restoration Hardware. Like... seriously... come up with any evidence you possibly can, for anything that could possibly be deemed expensive.
The fire-truck chasing loss adjusters are evil sons of bitches, but, they actually do provide some value. You will definitely get more money, even if they take a cut. But all they're really doing, is just nitpicking the ever-living-shit out of everything you possibly owned, and writing them all up "creatively" for the insurance company to process.
Sometimes people would come back to us with "updated* claims. They tried it on their own, and listed stuff like "toaster", "microwave", "tv" .. and weren't happy with what they got back. So they hired a fire-truck chaser, and re-submitted with "more information." I have absolutely seen claims go from under $7k calculated, to over $100k calculated. (It's amazing what can happen when people suddenly "remember" their entire wardrobe came from Nordstrom.)
by Reddit | Read more:
The NFL’s Season of Uncertainty Begins
It has been 221 days since an NFL game was last played. You may not have realized it, because in the meantime, time broke. If you’d explained to anyone on that February night what the next NFL game would look like, well, they’d have some follow-up questions. It’s easier to list the things that haven’t changed in the past six months, so here’s one: Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, the two quarterbacks who face each other Thursday to start the NFL season, are two of the best players in football.
They will play in front of 16,000 fans in Kansas City, ending the strangest offseason in football history and beginning the strangest season in football history. They will play without having any preseason games or in-person offseason training due to COVID-19. Even from a football perspective, things shifted for both quarterbacks: They will face off having signed $663 million worth of contracts this summer. Watson will be playing without his former top receiver, DeAndre Hopkins, who was traded to Arizona. This football season, like most things this year, won’t be like anything we’ve seen before. Thursday’s game will not feel normal, nor should it. But Mahomes and Watson will again be on TV making a defensive back look like they’ve never seen a football before. It’s good to know some things never change.
The 2020 season will be about playing safely. NBC Sports’ Peter King asked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell this week if he believes some teams won’t play a 16-game schedule. Goodell said he didn’t know but the league is “prepared if we have to do that … There will be potential competitive inequities that will be required this season because of the virus and because of the circumstances that we wouldn’t do in other years. That’s going to be a reality of 2020. If we feel like we have an outbreak, that’s going to be driven by medical decisions—not competitive decisions.”
The NFL season, like MLB’s, will not be played in a bubble. Major League Baseball has postponed more than 40 games since its restart due to positive COVID-19 tests. The NFL has, despite its 80-man rosters and large coaching staffs, had no in-facility outbreaks during camp and a low number of players on the COVID-19 list that indicates either a positive test or exposure to the virus. The virus has not meaningfully disrupted the NFL since training camps began, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
They will play in front of 16,000 fans in Kansas City, ending the strangest offseason in football history and beginning the strangest season in football history. They will play without having any preseason games or in-person offseason training due to COVID-19. Even from a football perspective, things shifted for both quarterbacks: They will face off having signed $663 million worth of contracts this summer. Watson will be playing without his former top receiver, DeAndre Hopkins, who was traded to Arizona. This football season, like most things this year, won’t be like anything we’ve seen before. Thursday’s game will not feel normal, nor should it. But Mahomes and Watson will again be on TV making a defensive back look like they’ve never seen a football before. It’s good to know some things never change.The 2020 season will be about playing safely. NBC Sports’ Peter King asked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell this week if he believes some teams won’t play a 16-game schedule. Goodell said he didn’t know but the league is “prepared if we have to do that … There will be potential competitive inequities that will be required this season because of the virus and because of the circumstances that we wouldn’t do in other years. That’s going to be a reality of 2020. If we feel like we have an outbreak, that’s going to be driven by medical decisions—not competitive decisions.”
The NFL season, like MLB’s, will not be played in a bubble. Major League Baseball has postponed more than 40 games since its restart due to positive COVID-19 tests. The NFL has, despite its 80-man rosters and large coaching staffs, had no in-facility outbreaks during camp and a low number of players on the COVID-19 list that indicates either a positive test or exposure to the virus. The virus has not meaningfully disrupted the NFL since training camps began, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.
by Kevin Clark, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty/The Ringer
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