The Elephant in the Room

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy—$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

As the RAND report [whose research was funded by the Fair Work Center which co-author David Rolf is a board member of] demonstrates, a rising tide most definitely did not lift all boats. It didn’t even lift most of them, as nearly all of the benefits of growth these past 45 years were captured by those at the very top. And as the American economy grows radically unequal it is holding back economic growth itself.

Even inequality is meted out unequally. Low-wage workers and their families, disproportionately people of color, suffer from far higher rates of asthma, hypertension, diabetes, and other COVID-19 comorbidities; yet they are also far less likely to have health insurance, and far more likely to work in “essential” industries with the highest rates of coronavirus exposure and transmission. It is no surprise then, according to the CDC, that COVID-19 inflicts “a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” But imagine how much safer, healthier, and empowered all American workers might be if that $50 trillion had been paid out in wages instead of being funneled into corporate profits and the offshore accounts of the super-rich. Imagine how much richer and more resilient the American people would be. Imagine how many more lives would have been saved had our people been more resilient. (...)

Of course, America’s chronic case of extreme inequality is old news. Many other studies have documented this trend, chronicled its impact, and analyzed its causes. But where others have painted the picture in terms of aggregate shares of GDP, productivity growth, or other cold, hard statistics, the RAND report brings the inequality price tag directly home by denominating it in dollars—not just the aggregate $50 trillion figure, but in granular demographic detail. For example, are you a typical Black man earning $35,000 a year? You are being paid at least $26,000 a year less than you would have had income distributions held constant. Are you a college-educated, prime-aged, full-time worker earning $72,000? Depending on the inflation index used (PCE or CPI, respectively), rising inequality is costing you between $48,000 and $63,000 a year. But whatever your race, gender, educational attainment, urbanicity, or income, the data show, if you earn below the 90th percentile, the relentlessly upward redistribution of income since 1975 is coming out of your pocket.

by Nick Hanauer and David M. Rolf, Time |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt—Getty Images

Tricky

 

[ed. See also: Massive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good (TNR).]

Liziqi Channel

[ed. Liziqi. She can do everything (even make her own furniture). Some favorites: here and here.]

Beyond Burgers: 3D-Printed Steaks

Plant-based burgers that taste a heck of a lot like the real thing are now at your local Burger King. And you can find realistic meatless ground beef and sausages at grocery stores. As the next big thing in sustainable and cruelty-free meat, some startups are growing it in labs from animal cells. In December, Singapore became the first country to allow sales of lab-grown chicken from U.S. startup Just Eat.

But the founders of Barcelona-based Novameat want to take a bigger leap. They plan to go beyond chicken strips and processed “meat” to the chewy, muscle-y, juicy taste of whole meat cuts. “We want to create the Tesla Roadster or iPhone moment for the future of food,” says CEO and founder Giuseppe Scionti. “Alternative meats shouldn’t just be for the environment or animals or health, they should be superior compared to what they’re trying to compete with. The Holy Grail is pork and steak.”

The company is using 3D-printing to get there. In what could be a game-changer for the alternative meat industry, they have now made the world’s largest piece of 3D-printed whole-cut meat analog. And they say their 3D-printing process 150 times faster than their competitors, allowing them to make 1.5 tons of meat substitute per hour.

Creating a sirloin steak, with its fibrous protein and marbled fat, from plant-based proteins is a tough recipe to perfect. Novameat’s microextrusion technology, which produces 100–500 micrometer-wide fibers from different ingredients and combines them in precise ratios and organized microstructures, is key to mimicking the mouthfeel, taste, appearance, and nutritional properties of animal meat, says senior food engineer Joan Solomando Martí. The three-year old startup has been using vegetable fat and non-soy plant proteins to make realistic 3D-printed steaks.

The latest 3D-printed whole-cut prototype was made with the company’s new hybrid meat analog, which they make by adding mammalian fat cells to a biocompatible plant-based scaffold. The cells are grown separately using traditional cell culturing techniques, and then added to the scaffolds, where they produce fatty acids or proteins. “This allows us to create beef muscle cuts, pork muscle cuts, and we are now also exploring fish and seafood.”

by Prachi Patel, IEEE Spectrum | Read more:
Image: Novameat

"Hale Huna" a Tucked-Away Rural Hawaiian Retreat (Architectural Digest)

Images: Douglas Friedman

[ed. Rich people with nice houses. More pictures at the link.]

The Problem With Influencers

The Problem With Influencers (Current Affairs)

Image: Kostsov/Shutterstock
[ed. Hey... I learned two new things today: Sadfishing and Mukbang. And the day's just getting started.]

On Your Own

[ed. M. Emmet Walsh from the Coen Brother's Blood Simple. See also: this (CNN).]

How to Write About Iran: A Guide for Jounalists, Analysts, and Policymakers

1. Always refer to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” and its government as “the regime” or, better yet, “the Mullahs.”

2. Never refer to Iran’s foreign policy. The correct terminology is its “behavior.” When U.S. officials say Iran “must change its behavior” and “behave like a normal country,” write those quotes down word for word. Everyone knows that Iran is a delinquent kid that always instigates trouble and must be disciplined.

3. Omit that Iran has a population of 80 million with half a dozen ethnicities, languages, and religions. Why complicate when you can do simple? Just write “Iranians” or “the Iranians.” They are all the same and consequently think alike – when they get to think, that is.

4. To illustrate your article, pick a photo of brown, bearded men screaming with fists punching the air. An image of brown, bearded men setting a U.S. flag on fire with fists punching the air is also on point. A photo of brown, bearded men sitting crossed-legged on the floor of a mosque harboring their habitual anger just before they explode into raised fists punching the air is perfectly fine too.

5. If your article is about Iran-U.S. relations and even if it is not, include a photo of a woman in a head-to-toe black chador walking past the famous anti-U.S. mural in Tehran. (Note: that go-to mural in downtown Tehran of the Statue of Liberty with a skull face set against the American flag has been painted over, but it can easily be found in online image archives.) Always include a picture of a woman in a black chador walking down the street so it’s clear that this is Iran where women are oppressed, voiceless, and invisible.

6. For a business story, choose a photo of long queues at the gas station and a brown man filling his tank to show Iran is a dysfunctional country with a dysfunctional economy. Or one of Tehran’s busy Haft-e-Tir square to show Iran has roundabouts and shops while still being dysfunctional and chaotic. Remember the random woman walking by in a black chador? Make sure there is one somewhere in the photo. (...)

8. If you travel to Iran, refer to yourself not as being “in” Iran but “inside” Iran. Be transparent about the risks you are taking to spend as many as five consecutive days in the Iranian capital. Start your dispatch with the queasy feeling that you — a white man — have upon landing in Tehran.

9. When inside Iran, write about meeting key sources to shed light on the realities in the Islamic Republic: the exclusive interview with your cab driver, the secret meeting with a female student in a café in northern Tehran, that overwhelming expedition to a mosque in southern Tehran. Wrap up your article with comments from an English-speaking political analyst with loose ties to the regime who can predict the next impulses of the Mullahs in one quote.

10. Never mention that there are theatres, cinemas, art galleries, museums, concert halls, bookshops, gyms, yoga studios, hair salons, or bakeries in Iran. It’s more informative to write about how you experience the Islamic Republic during your short stay rather than how Iranians live every day.

11. Always remind readers that Iran is a dangerous country, more dangerous than any other country in the Middle East. Underline at any chance you get that it poses an imminent threat to the future of the entire world and more particularly to the U.S. and Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons.

by Ladane Nasseri, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image:Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/EFE via

Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun

For the Ishiguro household, 5 October 2017 was a big day. After weeks of discussion, the author’s wife, Lorna, had finally decided to change her hair colour. She was sitting in a Hampstead salon, not far from Golders Green in London, where they have lived for many years, all gowned up, and glanced at her phone. There was a news flash. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop this,” she said to the waiting hairdresser. “My husband has just won the Nobel prize for literature. I might have to help him out.”

Back home, Kazuo Ishiguro was having a late breakfast when his agent called. “It’s the opposite to the Booker prize, where there’s a longlist and then a shortlist. You hear the rumbling thunder coming towards you, often not striking. With the Nobel it is freak lightning out of the blue – wham!” Within half an hour there was a queue of journalists outside the front door. He called his mother, Shizuko. “I said: ‘I’ve won the Nobel, Shon.’ Oddly, she didn’t seem very surprised,” he recalls. “She said: ‘I thought you’d win it sooner or later.’” She died, aged 92, two years ago. His latest novel Klara and the Sun, in part about maternal devotion and his first since winning the Nobel, is dedicated to her. “My mother had a huge amount to do with my becoming a writer,” he says now. (...)

In Nobel terms, at 62 Ishiguro was a relative whippersnapper. Precocity is part of the Ishiguro myth: at 27 he was the youngest on Granta’s inaugural best of young British novelists list in 1983 (with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes et al), appearing again the following decade. In between he won the Booker prize for The Remains of the Day, which was given the full Merchant Ivory treatment in 1993. Indeed, his claim that most great novels were produced by writers in their 20s and 30s has become part of literary legend. “It is Martin Amis who goes round repeating this, not me,” Ishiguro says, laughing. “He became obsessed with the idea.” But he still maintains that your 30s are the crucial years for novel writing: “You do need some of that cerebral power.” (Which is lucky for Naomi, who at 28 also has her first novel, Common Ground, out this month, much to her father’s delight.) Whenever anybody brought up the question of the Nobel, his standard line used to be: “Writers won their Nobel prizes in their 60s for work they did in their 30s. Now perhaps it applies to me personally,” the 66-year-old notes drily.

He remains the supreme creator of self-enclosed worlds (the country house; the boarding school), his characters often under some form of lockdown; his fastidious attention to everyday details and almost ostentatiously flat style offsetting fantastical plot lines and pent-up emotional intensity. And Klara and the Sun is no exception.

Set in an unspecified America, in an unspecified future, it is – ostensibly at least – about the relationship between an artificial “friend”, Klara, and her teenage owner/charge, Josie. Robots (AFs) have become as commonplace as vacuum cleaners, gene-editing is the norm and biotechnological advances are close to recreating unique human beings. “This isn’t some kind of weird fantasy,” he says. “We just haven’t woken up to what is already possible today.” “Amazon recommends” is just the beginning. “In the era of big data, we might start to be able to rebuild somebody’s character so that after they’ve died they can still carry on, figuring out what they’d order next online, which concert they’d like to go to and what they would have said at the breakfast table if you had read them the latest headlines,” he continues.

He deliberately didn’t read either the recent Ian McEwan novel Machines Like Me or Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, which also take on artificial intelligence, but from very different angles. Klara is a sort of robotic parent, “Terminator-like in her determination to look after Josie”, but she is also a potential surrogate child: when Josie gets sick, Klara is being programmed to take her place. “What happens to things like love in an age when we are changing our views about the human individual and the individual’s uniqueness?” he asks. “There was this question – it always sounds very pompous – about the human soul: do we actually have one or not?”

The book revisits many of the ideas behind Never Let Me Go, his 2005 novel about three teenage clones whose organs will be harvested, leading to certain death before their 30s: “only a slight exaggeration of the human condition, we all have to get ill and die at some point”, he says now. Both novels hold out the possibility that death can be postponed or defeated by true love, which must be tested and proved in some way; a fairytale bargaining that is also made explicit in the boatman’s challenge to Axl and Beatrice in his previous novel The Buried Giant. This hope, even for those who don’t believe in an afterlife, “is one of the things that makes us human,” he reflects. “It perhaps makes us fools as well. Perhaps it is a lot of sentimental hogwash. But it is very powerful in people.”

He is unapologetic about repetition, citing the “continuity” of great film directors (he is a huge cinephile), and likes to claim that each of his first three books was essentially a rewrite of its predecessor. “Literary novelists are slightly defensive about being repetitive,” he says. “I think it is perfectly justified: you keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” He gets away with it, he says, by changing location or genre: “People are so literal they think I’m moving on.” For him, genre is like travel, and it is true that he has enjoyed genre-hopping: When We Were Orphans (detective fiction); Remains of the Day (period drama); The Unconsoled (Kafkaesque fable); Never Let Me Go (dystopian sci-fi) and The Buried Giant (Tolkienish fantasy). Now, as the title Klara and the Sun hints, he visits what he calls “children’s storyland”. But be warned, we are still very much in Ishiguroland. (...)

Each novel takes him around five years: a long build-up of research and thinking, followed by a speedy first draft, a process he compares to a samurai sword fight: “You stare at each other silently for ages, usually with tall grass blowing away and moody sky. You are thinking all the time, and then in a split second it happens. The swords are drawn: Wham! Wham! Wham! And one of them falls,” he explains, wielding an imaginary sword at the screen. “You had to get your mind absolutely right and then when you drew that sword you just did it: Wham! It had to be the perfect cut.” As a child, he was mystified by swashbuckling Errol Flynn films when he first came to the UK, in which the sword fights consisted of actors going “ching, ching, ching, ching, for about 20 minutes while talking to each other,” he says. “Perhaps there’s a way of writing fiction like that, where you work it out in the act, but I tend towards the ‘Don’t do anything, it’s all internal’ approach.”

by Lisa Allardice, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Howard Sooley

[ed. See also: this extract from Klara and the Sun.]

via:

History of Zork

Zork

a.k.a Dungeon
by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling
First Appeared: late June 1977
First Commercial Release: December 1980
Language: MDL
Platform: PDP-10

Opening Text: You are in an open field west of a big white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

[Note: contains spoilery discussion of the jeweled egg, cyclops, and robot puzzles.]

If Adventure had introduced hackers to an intriguing new genre of immersive text game, Zork was what brought it to the public at large. In the early 1980s, as the personal computer revolution reached into more and more homes, a Zork disk was a must-buy for first-time computer owners. By 1982 it had become the industry’s bestselling game. In 1983, it sold even more copies. Playboy covered it; so did Time, and American astronaut Sally Ride was reportedly obsessed with it. In 1984 it was still topping sales charts, beating out much newer games including its own sequels. At the end of 1985 it was still outselling any other game for the Apple II, half a decade after its first release on the platform, and had become the bestselling title of all time on many other systems besides.

Its creation can be traced to a heady Friday in May 1977 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the last day of finals week, and summer was kicking off with a bang for the school’s cohort of tech-obsessed engineers: a new movie called Star Wars opened that day in theaters, the groundbreaking Apple II had just been released, and Adventure was exploding across the terminals of computer labs nationwide, thousands of students having no further distractions, at last, to keep them from solving it.

Among those obsessive players were four friends at a campus research lab, the Dynamic Modeling Group. Within two weeks they’d solved Adventure, squeezing every last point from it through meticulous play and, eventually, the surgical deployment of a machine-language debugger. Once the game was definitively solved, they immediately hatched plans to make something better. Not just to prove the superiority of their school’s coding prowess over Don Woods at Stanford—though that was undoubtedly part of it—nor simply because many were dragging their feet on graduating or finding jobs, and a challenging new distraction seemed immensely appealing—though that was part of it too. But the most important factor was that Adventure had been so incredibly fun and, regrettably, there wasn’t any more of it. “It was like reading a Sherlock Holmes story,” one player recalled, “and you wanted to read another one of them immediately. Only there wasn’t one, because nobody had written it.”

The four friends were an eclectic group of grad students ranging in age from 22 to 28, united by shared sensibilities and a love of hacking. Dave Lebling had a political science degree and had started programming only because of an accidental hole in his freshman year schedule. A “voracious reader” and “frustrated writer,” he’d helped design Maze in 1973, one of the earliest graphical exploration games and first-person shooters. Marc Blank was young, tall, thin, and technically enrolled in med school, but found messing around with computers an addictive distraction. Bruce Daniels was nearing thirty and increasingly bored with his PhD topic; he’d helped develop the lab’s pet project, the MDL programming language, and was always eager to find new ways of showing it off. And Tim Anderson was close to finishing his master’s but none too excited about leaving the heady intellectual community at MIT. With Adventure solved, the four sat down to hack together a prototype for an improved version, which would run like the earlier game on a PDP-10 mainframe. Needing a placeholder name for the source file, they typed in zork, one of many nonsense words floating around campus that could, among other usages, be substituted for an offensive interjection.

The game they began to create was at first quite similar to Adventure, so much so that historian Jimmy Maher has noted parts of it are more remake than homage. Both games begin in a forest outside a house containing supplies for an underground expedition, including food, water, and a light source with limited power; in both you search for treasures in a vast underground cave system and score points by returning them to the building on the surface; both feature underground volcanoes, locked grates, trolls, and a “maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” Hacker tropes and nods to other early text games abound, like a huge bat who whisks you off to another location like in Hunt the Wumpus. But as Zork expanded, it began to develop its own character: less realistic than the caverns sketched from Will Crowther’s real-life experience, but also more whimsical, more threatening, and driven by an improved parser and world model.

>open trap door
The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into darkness.
>down
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.
>what is a grue?
The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

The infamous grues were invented as a solution to a sort of bug: not with the game’s code, but with the player’s suspension of disbelief. In early versions of Zork, as in Adventure, you’d fall into a bottomless pit if you tried to move through a dark room without a portable light source. But someone noticed this could happen in Zork even in the dark attic of the above-ground house. Lebling, stealing the word “grue” from a Jack Vance novel, invented a new and more broadly applicable threat for dark places.

by Aaron A. Reed, Substack | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. A great classic. From the series 50 Years of Text Games.]

via:

Racoon Trouble

Soon after he became a raccoon trapper, Musa Ramada began having nightmares, waking with the sensation that one of the animals was on his chest. Again and again this happened, upsetting him more and more; eventually he told his boss, an old tough guy named Steve. Steve knew these dreams well and offered advice for escaping them: when you trap a raccoon and its babies, release them together, he said. Ramada started doing so religiously, even when it cost him time and money. His sleep has been undisturbed by raccoons ever since.

No longer consigned to the urban edge, raccoons have infiltrated New York City, occupying homes and generating steady business for people who catch them. The past five years has seen a rise in raccoon trouble—subway lines shut down, brownstones vandalized—that has become even more noticeable during the pandemic, with New Yorkers holed up indoors. Raccoons have been spotted in the West Village, on the Upper East Side, in groups of more than twenty (the collective noun is a “gaze”) among the trees of Prospect Park. In 2016, the New York Times ran a feature headlined “Raccoons Invade Brooklyn,” with tales of backyard chickens being mauled and baby raccoons, known as kits, tumbling from apartment roofs. When a tourist inquired on Reddit about where one might encounter raccoons in the city, someone responded: “Come to Queens! They’re everywhere! Just had to throw one out of my bathtub.” (...)

A Syrian immigrant in his 40s, Ramada moved to New York in the 1990s to study computer science but dropped out when he couldn’t afford tuition. Since then, he’s passed through a series of marginal jobs, from construction and fixing cars to being a cook in an Italian restaurant. About four years ago he became a trapper entirely by accident, after responding to an online advertisement that he believed was related to house painting. At the interview, Steve, the boss, asked Ramada if he knew how to climb a ladder. “I said sure,” Ramada told me. “He said, high ladder—like 40 feet.” When Ramada found out he’d be catching raccoons, he was taken aback; that Americans would pay you to remove wild animals from their houses was something he’d never imagined. Back home, he said, this would be the duty of young men—a son or a cousin looking to demonstrate his bravery. But home was here now, in this city of money and exclusion that creates its own forms of opportunity. “Sure,” he told Steve, rolling the r, and just like that he was hired.

Ramada is in his forties, with grey stubble, scruffy hair, and tobacco-stained teeth. He rolls stubby joints of cheap pot purchased from a contact in the Bronx and cruises around, lightly stoned, with his traps and the junk that fills his panel van: tools for keeping the engine going; scraps of paper with the scribbled addresses of his customers (which he otherwise forgets); husks of sunflower seeds (he says he’s addicted); and books by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate who published 34 novels and more than 350 short stories, nearly all of which Ramada says he has read.

I first met him in November 2019, soon after he stopped working for Steve and started his own trapping company. I had been calling raccoon trappers for days, but most of them declined to speak to me; even Steve had fobbed me off, claiming that his bosses were “at their holiday house upstate.” (It was only later, when I met Ramada, that I began piecing the story together: Steve is one of the biggest trappers in New York, and emphatically has no boss.) Another trapper spoke to me on background for 45 minutes and made me promise not to refer to a word of our conversation. Others put the phone down when they heard the word “journalist.” But Ramada, when I reached him, acted as if he’d been waiting for me to call. His accent was very different from those of the gruff New Yorkers I’d been dealing with. First, with conviction, he told me he could communicate with raccoons. Then he asked me if I could help him design a website.

He’d spent hours trying to find customers, printing business cards and creating listings on Google Maps, but his rivals were far ahead of him, often operating multiple businesses, each with their own phone numbers. (I had discovered this on my earlier calls when the deep background man listened to me for a minute and then said, “I already explained this to you, pal.”) So Ramada tried another strategy: undercutting the competition. Initially he charged $600 to remove up to five raccoons—“that’s like a family,” he said—no matter the number of return visits; this was about a third of the going rate. Slowly, business picked up until he was averaging a raccoon a week. He abandoned the idea of a website.

“Best job I ever had,” he told me, splitting open one sunflower seed and then another. Ramada traverses the five boroughs in his van, laying traps in attics and basements; sometimes a raccoon falls through a ceiling and he must chase after it with a sack and noose. He is always on call but seldom busy, and in between jobs he cooks, walks his dog, watches Syrian news on YouTube, or— when he has the money—plays golf; sometimes a customer calls mid-round and he has to leave to deal with a raccoon. He lives in Queens with his wife, who is Italian American, and her young son, who, according to Ramada, is fond of raccoons. This is not surprising, given Ramada’s own rich and unusual affection for them.

* * *

On the internet, there is an outpouring of love for raccoons, with Instagram accounts like @cutest.raccoons and @raccoonfeeds amassing hundreds of thousands of followers. Clips of pet raccoons (#trashpandas) rolling on giant hamster wheels, falling off furniture, and skirmishing with cats rack up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. Influencer raccoon accounts come replete with merchandise and sponsored content; one of the most successful, an unusually pale raccoon named Uni, who lives in Taiwan, has been featured on BuzzFeed and People.com.

This online adoration is at stark odds with reality, where, for the most part, we treat raccoons as pests. And not without reason: They are destructive visitors, ripping through drywall, gnawing pipes, robbing food, making noises (“whissing,” as Ramada puts it), and leaving droppings that carry a parasite which causes nausea and sometimes blindness. To deter raccoons, you can buy ultrasonic noise machines, wall spikes, and heat-activated sprinklers. You can buy urine (“100 percent pure”) from coyotes held in cages. An animal welfare activist I spoke to abhors such tactics and recommended, instead, blasting “hard rock music” in the attic. When I asked if this ever became irritating, she said: “It doesn’t bother me as much as having a raccoon gassed would bother me.” (...)

It is Ramada’s job to clean up after raccoons and thwart their attempts at havoc—the leaks and ruined ceilings and foul, crusted dens. Unlike some of his rivals, though, he refuses to blame the animals. “They been here in America before us,” he said. “That’s why they’re invading our home, just like we invade theirs.”

He has come to believe, too, that he is able to communicate with them, just as one might communicate with a dog. “They live in the house, so they understand our language,” he said. “So many times the raccoon can see us and we cannot see it. It’s in the trees and houses, just listening.”

And so a raccoon might hear a man speaking tenderly to his wife or children, Ramada said.

“So when I say to them I love you, they understand that.”

by Kimon de Greef, Guernica | Read more:

Image: via

The History Behind 'One Night in Miami'

When 22-year-old Cassius Clay unexpectedly defeated Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, football star Jim Brown, a close friend of the young athlete, expected to mark the occasion with a night of revelry. After all, in beating Liston, Clay was now the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, proving that his skills in the ring matched his reputation for bravado. As Brown, who narrated the match for an avid audience of radio listeners, later recalled to biographer Dave Zirin, he’d planned “a huge post-fight party” at a nearby luxury hotel. But Clay had another idea in mind.

“No, Jim,” he reportedly said. “There’s this little black hotel. Let’s go over there. I want to talk to you.”

One Night in Miami, a new film from actress and director Regina King, dramatizes the hours that followed the boxer’s upset victory. Accompanied by Brown (Aldis Hodge), civil rights leader Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and singer-songwriter Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Clay (Eli Goree) headed to the Hampton House Motel, a popular establishment among black visitors to Jim Crow–era Miami. The specifics of the group’s post-fight conversation remain unknown, but the very next morning, Clay announced that he was a proud convert to the anti-integrationist Nation of Islam. Soon after, he adopted a new name: Muhammad Ali.

King’s directorial debut—based on Kemp Powers’ 2013 play of the same name—imagines the post-fight celebration as a meeting of four minds and their approach to civil rights activism. Each prominent in their respective fields, the men debate the most effective means of achieving equality for black Americans, as well as their own responsibilities as individuals of note. As Powers (who was also the writer-director of Pixar’s Soul) wrote in a 2013 essay, “This play is simply about one night, four friends and the many pivotal decisions that can happen in a single revelatory evening.”

Here’s what you need to know to separate fact from fiction in the film, which is now available through Amazon Prime Video.

Is One Night in Miami based on a true story?

In short: yes, but with extensive dramatic license, particularly in terms of the characters’ conversations.

Clay, Malcolm X, Cooke and Brown really were friends, and they did spend the night of February 25, 1964, together in Miami. Fragments of the story are scattered across various accounts, but as Powers, who also penned the film’s script, told the Miami Herald in 2018, he had trouble tracking down “more than perfunctory information” about what actually took place. Despite this challenge, Powers found himself intrigued by the idea of four ’60s icons gathering in the same room at such a pivotal point in history. “It was like discovering the Black Avengers,” he said to Deadline last year.

Powers turned the night’s events into a play, drawing on historical research to convey an accurate sense of the men’s character and views without deifying or oversimplifying them. The result, King tells the New York Times, is a “love letter” to black men that allows its lionized subjects to be “layered. They are vulnerable, they are strong, they are providers, they are sometimes putting on a mask. They are not unbreakable. They are flawed.”

In One Night in Miami’s retelling, the four friends emerge from their night of discourse with a renewed sense of purpose, each ready to take the next step in the fight against racial injustice. For Cooke, this translates to recording the hauntingly hopeful “A Change Is Gonna Come”; for Clay, it means asserting his differences from the athletes who preceded him—a declaration Damion Thomas, a sports curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), summarizes as “I’m free to be who I want to be. I’m joining the Nation of Islam, and I don’t support integration.”

The film fudges the timeline of these events (Cooke actually recorded the Bob Dylan–inspired song prior to the Liston-Clay fight) and perhaps overstates the gathering’s influence on the quartet’s lives. But its broader points about the men’s unique place in popular culture, as well as their contrasting examples of black empowerment, ring true.

As John Troutman, a music curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), says via email, “Cooke, Ali, Brown and Malcolm X together presented a dynamic range of new possibilities for Black Americans to engage in and reshape the national conversation.”

by Meilan Solly, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Bob Gomel / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

The Secret Forces That Squeeze and Pull Life Into Shape

The secret forces that squeeze and pull life into shape (Nature)

Image: Alessandro Mongera and Otger Campàs, UC Santa Barbara

[ed. Not sure how 'secret' these forces are, or why the article should suggest they're some kind of emergent field of study (maybe I'm misinterpreting it). My son got his PhD studying biomolecular motors (transport processes that underlie cellular organization and reorganization) years ago. It's called bio-physics.]

snatti89, Falling star

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Next!

I want to tell you about a feeling I would have in my stomach before modeling castings. A frenetic energy, a fluttering that carried me each step as I would approach wherever the casting was. Sometimes it would be in the office of the brand, sometimes in a photo studio. Sometimes it would be in hotel rooms, and sometimes a casting director might invite you to a go-see, and you’d meet them, one on one. One time I found myself on my own, in my underwear, at midday on a Sunday in a casting director’s apartment, very aware of how alone I was at that moment. Most castings weren’t like this, though. For the majority of them, I was one of many. I walked everywhere, even in winter, because I wanted desperately to burn calories and because I was never sure I’d be long enough wherever I was to buy a bicycle. I’d know when I was approaching the casting because I’d start to see a few guys with pronounced cheekbones and skinny black jeans among the regular street goers. It would have started already, that pit-stomach feeling, but it would increase.

In Milan, during fashion week, the city would fill with models. There were castings seemingly everywhere, and so wherever I would turn, I’d see other models. The flutters were constant. I remember one time my agency sent me to cast for Moncler, the expensive outerwear brand. I was excited. Even though I don’t like Moncler jackets (not that I could have ever afforded them, but I thought they looked like inflated bin-liners), it was a big brand. If I could walk in their show, I thought, it would definitely mean something. Milan Fashion Week was twice a year––in pre-pandemic times––once in September showing the following year’s spring/summer collection, and once in February showing the fall/winter collection of that same year. This casting was in early February, when morning mist would hang over the canals, then clear, revealing a piercing, cloudless sky.

To be in fashion week was to be stepping into the future, a reminder that fashion existed on a speculative timescale. On that February day, when I went to cast for Moncler, I walked down a busy Milanese street, following Citymapper on my phone. I arrived at my destination, stepping through a massive doorway that opened into a courtyard. My heart sank. There was a long line snaking its way through the space. My agency had told me that Moncler was only looking to cast a few guys for its show; they already had a few booked who had done their campaign, and they had a roster of regular bookings. I thought they had given me this information as a boost: they’re only looking for a few guys, but here you are, being called for the casting. Instead, I guess they had said it as a warning. They are only looking for a few guys, and it’s a crapshoot. I couldn’t count the number of models in the line in front of me. It snaked back and forth enough times that I couldn’t get a good sense of it even if I’d tried.

I waited two hours to get into the casting itself. It was a cold day, so cold that I couldn’t read or hold my phone out because my fingers were numb. I kept my hands in my pockets, rocked back and forth in my black Doc Marten boots, and watched as my breath curled up into a little cloud of steam. The shadows of the other models traced long and skinny along the pink courtyard wall. I heard a guy behind me tell the model he’d come with that he really needed this job. The guy nodded but said nothing. But I think this could be the one, he continued. I have a good feeling about this one.

They finally called me inside. I was handed a jacket two sizes too small for me, and the second it became clear that the arms stopped somewhere midway up my wrist and I was never going to be able to zip it closed, I was told to leave. Next! I fumbled with the jacket, accidentally dropped my portfolio, and spilled a composite card on the floor. I didn’t bother to pick up. A two dimensional me looked up at the ceiling, only to be stood on by the hopeful guy from the queue. Next! We walked out into the Via Stendhal together, in silence.

The model-turned-sociologist Ashley Mears calls it “the jackpot.” That’s what we were all doing in that line, what the flutters in my stomach were. They were the judders of the gambler, my body’s version of the clammy hands of the slot-puller. Two lemons and a cherry. Fashion is about fantasy. There was a negligible chance of me getting that job for Moncler, but I still waited for two hours even after seeing the long line of models that slunk its way around the courtyard. Not enough, I went from Moncler to another casting, and another. I kept pulling the lever.

***

Now, a few years removed from modeling, I’m interested in why.

Why did I keep going to huge open castings when the probability of booking them was so slim? What was it about the dream of walking in a fashion show that was so enticing that it managed to draw us in enough to stand in the freezing cold on that Milanese street? The anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri, whose recent ethnography of Paris and Brussels-based creatives working in fashion, The Most Beautiful Job in the World: Lifting the Veil on the Fashion Industry, caused a stir throughout the industry, argues that fashion is “overexposed.” What she means is that the dream of fashion––the money, the fame, the craft, the artistry, the fabrics, the exuberance and excess––is a blinding light. It simultaneously draws you in, mothlike, while it obscures the reality of what is actually going on. The light is so bright that it washes out the edges. This, she argues, is how the fashion industry ends up being so exploitative. (...)

There are many ways to describe fashion’s excesses. It’s the toll that it takes on designers like Raf Simons, who caved under the crushing pressure of having to do six collections a year. It’s Burberry burning $37 million of product to maintain brand value. It’s the fact that the industry contributes 20 percent of the world’s global wastewater and trillions of plastic microfibers into our oceans (which then come back to us, in our salt). But the excesses are part of that blinding light, the exact thing that makes fashion so enticing. Mensitieri’s book is important for showing that these excesses provide cover for the exploitation that happens up and down the fashion chain. It’s not just the sweatshop workers in emerging market economies who are taken advantage of, she notes; it’s everyone except the tiniest minority right at the top of the fashion pyramid. It’s photographers working for a magazine for exposure, models working to pad their books and stylists to build their portfolios. All of this unpaid. It’s “unjust,” noted Karl Lagerfeld before he passed, impassive behind his dark sunglasses and untouchable position at the top.

As a model, the exploitation was fairly obvious. It was my agency charging me a $300 printing fee for a bunch of composite cards, which models take to castings and leave behind with casting directors, and another few hundred dollars for my portfolio—a plastic binder with the agency’s logo on it. It was having to pay out of pocket for test shoots early in my career to build my book, then paying more money to do them over after shaving off the facial hair, which I’d hated, that my agency had told me to grow. It was the models I knew sharing a studio apartment in outer Bushwick, with a shower curtain in the middle of the room for some privacy. (They were each charged over $1,000 monthly by their agency to live there.) (...)

The fact that you are selling your image also makes the rejections sting in a different way. To be a successful model is to commodify your likeness. You are essentially selling a product, and the product just happens to be the way you look. And while I’m sure it sucks when you sell clothes to be told repeatedly that your product isn’t quite what the customer is looking for, at least there is a sliver of comfort in knowing that there exists a clear separation between you (the salesperson) and your product. In modeling, that distinction is almost nonexistent. I could never quite get over the fact that I was handing over a com-card with a picture of my face on it, and that the “no” wasn’t a complete rejection of me, in my entirety. I started to question everything, not just my looks. The constant rejection was a very intimate way to be hollowed out.

While this never got easier, the thing that eventually broke me was one that no one warned me about, and thus I had no way of preparing for––the way the industry extracted time. I could never understand why a brand would hold an open casting to see five hundred or so models when they could have pre-selected a handful and still had ample choice? Why make us stand around in the cold all day only for a moment’s consideration? I have often wondered: How much of my time as a model did I spend actually modeling (like walking a runway or posing in front of a camera) versus chasing the dream, standing in lines waiting to be considered, or sitting in a make-up chair or draping myself on a sofa, waiting to be called?

To model was to wait. To wait for my turn to be cast, to wait on a set, to wait for the shutter-click, to wait to succeed, to make it, to see my face on a billboard, and, even more, to make rent, to pay off my debts to the agency, to simply keep going. This waiting, this never-knowing life of ellipses, is how the dream functions, and it’s the one aspect of the industry that Mensitieri doesn’t touch on. I think the pre-pandemic industry was so good at carving out great swathes of wasted time because to dream requires time. It’s in those wasted moments that we were given space to lean, ever so closely, into the dream.

by Barclay Bram, Guernica |  Read more:

Image:Barclay Bram

[ed. My nephew Tony is a top tier model, and I've followed his career from the beginning. This seems like an eerily accurate account of some of our conversations. Despite the glamour, the fashion industry can be a brutal and extremely competitive business. Here's a famous shoot he did with Sølve Sundsbø and more at The Fashionisto.]

Texas Turtles Traumatized

My mom is retired, & she spends her winters volunteering at a sea turtle rescue center in south Texas. The cold snap is stunning the local turtles & they’re doing a lot of rescues. She sent me this photo today of the back of her Subaru. It’s *literally* turtles all the way down. ~ Lara

Thousands Of Stunned Sea Turtles Rescued From Texas Storm (Yahoo News)

Image: Lara

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ModernSketch-50watts by 50 Watts
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