How Web Platforms Collapse: The Facebook Case Study

Most companies fail because of competition. They simply aren’t fast enough or smart enough to keep up with the marketplace.

But the big web platforms aren’t like that.

In many instances, they are quasi-monopolies. They are so big and powerful that they hardly need to worry about competition.

After all, who can match Google for search? Who can beat Amazon for online shopping? Who does more to keep you connected with family and friends than Facebook? Who helps you clean out the junk in your garage better than eBay?

But even the most dominant players can falter. There was a point in living memory when Sears controlled 30% of all retail spending in the US. I’m not exaggerating: three out of every ten dollars were spent at Sears.

Sears once operated 3,500 stores. Today only 22 are left. Many of my readers have never seen the inside of a Sears store.

This happened because Sears was so big that it didn’t need to worry about competitors.

That sounds impossible. How can you fail by being too powerful? But this has happened in many instances, even on the web. There was a day when Yahoo was the leader in search. There was a day when MySpace was the dominant social network. There was a day when Tumblr was the place to share photos.

There was a day when the two companies controlling your access to the Internet were called Netscape and America Online.

Not anymore.

This has happened before and will happen again. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Facebook (or Meta, as it now prefers to be called) is the most intriguing story of them all. So let’s look at it as a case study in how web platforms collapse. Because what’s happening at Meta is a textbook example of how the mighty are laid low.

Why Is Facebook Collapsing?

The situation at Facebook is now uglier than MC Hammer’s wardrobe closet. Meta is the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. In other words, there were 499 other companies in the composite that did better—and this was a tough year all around in financial markets.

Mark Zuckerberg has personally lost more than $100 billion. In fact, he lost $11 billion in a single day. Has that ever happened before in human history? Almost exactly 12 months earlier, I’d written an article entitled “Meta Is for Losers”—but even I never envisioned losses on this scale,

Of course, there are many losers in this story—including the 11,000 workers who got fired a few days ago.

What’s going on?

You probably think that this is the result of Zuckerberg’s fool’s bet on the Multiverse. That’s what everybody is saying. But as we shall see, the Metaverse is just a symptom not a cause.

I can actually explain the problem in one sentence:

Instead of serving users, the dominant company decides it’s better to control them. (...)

[ed. Much ensuing horror... (which, anyone who has ever used FB or any other large corporate website can relate to:]

"Of course, you could try phoning Facebook customer service for help.

That’s a joke, in case you didn’t realize it. One of the defining marks of the dominant web platforms—the true Sign of the Beast—is that there is never a phone number to call."

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Magazine covers touting the successes of AOL, Digg, and Netscape; Bloomberg
[ed. See also: Instagram Is Over (The Atlantic). Also, A Visitor’s Guide to Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell (Penguin Random House).]

Moms on the Net

[ed. Pretty much defines the term "cringey"... and this wasn't that long ago!]

Metallica: The Marines of Metal

The merch preceded them. Forty-eight hours before Metallica performed in Las Vegas, restaurants and bars along the Strip were crammed full of pilgrims dressed in branded gear: T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts, sneakers, tank tops, hats, beanies, socks, wristwatches. The most grizzled devotees wore fraying denim vests decorated with several decades’ worth of patches. Metallica’s licensing team estimates that about a hundred and twenty million Metallica T-shirts have been sold since 1995. The motifs are iconic. There’s the one where a hand clutching a dagger emerges from a toilet, alongside the phrase “Metal Up Your Ass.” There’s the one where a skull is wearing scrubs and performing brain surgery with a fork, a knife, and its fangs. There’s the one where the skull has a fistful of stumpy straws and is announcing, “This shortest straw has been pulled for you!” You get the idea.

Metallica is now in its forty-first year. The band was a progenitor, along with Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth, of thrash, a subgenre of heavy metal marked by thick, suffocating riffs, played with astonishing speed. Lyrical themes include death, despair, power, grief, and wrath. Though metal is often dismissed as underground music—frantic, savage, niche—Metallica has sold some hundred and twenty-five million records to date, putting the band on par, commercially, with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z. It is the only musical group to have performed on all seven continents in a single calendar year. (In 2013, Metallica played a ten-song set in Antarctica for a group of research scientists and contest winners; because of the fragile ice formations, the band’s amplifiers were placed in isolation cabinets, and the concert was broadcast through headphones.) Since 1990, every Metallica album has débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

In 2009, Metallica was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. A speech was given by Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who described the band’s music as “this beautiful, violent thing that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before in my life,” and called its motivation pure. “This is outsider music, and for it to do what it has done is truly mind-blowing,” he said. Metallica is the only metal group to have had its music added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Kim Kardashian has been photographed in a Metallica shirt on at least two occasions. Beavis sported one for the entire nine-season run of “Beavis and Butt-Head.” Though the band has made adjustments to its sound through the years—some minor, some seismic, all irritating to certain subsets of its fan base—it’s hard to think of another act that has outlasted the whims of the culture with such vigor. The band recently finished writing and recording its eleventh record, which will be released next year. “Metallica are the Marines of metal,” Scott Ian, a founder of Anthrax, told me recently. “First one in, last one out.”

Metallica’s current lineup includes the singer and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and the drummer Lars Ulrich, both of whom co-founded the band; the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, who joined in 1983; and the bassist Robert Trujillo, a member since 2003. Hetfield—fifty-nine, tall, graying at the temples—moves with the confident saunter of a well-armed cowboy. Ulrich, fifty-eight, radiates so much kinetic energy that it’s hard to imagine him yawning. Hammett, fifty-nine, and Trujillo, fifty-eight, are the band’s gentle, long-haired surfers, jazz enthusiasts disinclined to dramatics. If Hetfield is Metallica’s heart—its musical center and primary lyricist—Ulrich is its brain, a visionary who instinctively understands cultural terrain.

The night before the Vegas show, the band gathered at Allegiant Stadium for sound check. A scrum of about a dozen people, mostly from Metallica’s touring crew, stood on the floor to watch. (The band’s full road team has at least a hundred members.) Derek Carr, the quarterback for the Las Vegas Raiders, appeared, looking as though he were resisting an intense urge to play air guitar. Some clients of the private-plane company NetJets sat in the stands, enjoying specialty cocktails and cheering. The band periodically gathered around Ulrich’s drum kit. “Is there anything anyone wants to run?” Ulrich asked. But everyone knew what to do. At one point, Trujillo glanced out at the vacant seats and dad-joked, “I thought we were playing a sold-out show.” Even in a mostly empty stadium, the band sounded powerful, lucid, heavy. (...)

That night, Metallica opened its set with “Whiplash,” from “Kill ’Em All,” its début album. On the floor, mosh pits formed; from the stands, they resembled tiny riptides, bodies circling one another, sometimes submitting to a menacing current but mostly just orbiting. If you squinted, it almost looked like an ancient folk dance—something that might happen at a Greek wedding, late, after people had been drinking. “I think the best seat in the arena is the second tier up, where you get to see the band but you also get to see all the fans,” Hetfield told me later. “Forget the band—look at the audience.”

by Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ian Allen for The New Yorker; video YouTube

Beth Hart

[ed. I wasn't familiar with Ms Hart until today when checking out a recommendation for her new tribute album to Led Zeppelin (full album here - pretty great). Definitely has the pipes, with a real Janis vibe.]

Mouseland

Maggie Rudy. We love the library! and New one
Images: via

[ed. Love this artist's work (as do my grandchildren).]

Welcome to Mouseland!
I'm a children's book author and illustrator from Portland, Oregon.
I make mice and other animals and the miniature worlds they inhabit,
which I photograph to illustrate my books. You can watch a short video
about Mouseland here.
If you are interested in the process of building Mouseland, look here.
I post new pictures most days on twitter and instagram .

The Impotence of Being Clever

“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays.... The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”

Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?

Let me start by trying to define cleverness a little more narrowly. We tend to use it in two related ways. The first is to mean brilliant, sharp, and insightful in a way that others might miss. A “clever” solution is not just effective but demonstrates imagination and a kind of a command of the situation. It arises out of and reveals a different, more imaginative way of understanding a problem. When Albert Einstein resolved fundamental problems in physics, his solution was clever insofar as it upended assumptions about space and time that people didn’t even realize they were making. We also use clever to mean something like witty. Like a clever solution, a clever remark reveals command and control. There is a detached, isolated composure with which the clever individual can survey the whole scene and make connections others can’t. In both instances, cleverness implies dexterity—an ability to get a grip on the world from the outside. Indeed, the word derives from an East Anglian word, cliver, meaning “expert at seizing.”

There is, then, an affinity between cleverness and the outsider. The clever individual is often aloof, whether by choice or by circumstance, and uses this alienation to advantage. The diffusion of cleverness in modernity is, therefore, closely connected to the diffusion of alienation, as well as to the emergence of a number of alienated character types found in both fiction and reality: the private detective, the comedian, the flâneur, and, most recently, the social media poster.

The detective is clever in full, solving mysteries in ingenious fashion and tossing off witticisms while he’s at it. As many critics have noted, the detective is a modern archetype. He is an isolated mercenary, holding himself above conventional attachments. He is thrown back on himself and doomed to create his own morality or code, and he regards official institutions, especially the police, with the utmost skepticism.

More than the stereotypical scientist or scholar—whose intellectual passion and naivete make him, for all his putative rationality, quite unlike reason itself—the detective personifies the cool, analytical dispassion of rationality in the human world: He is cold and calculating. He takes measures to keep himself outside the world while analyzing it. He is never caught off guard, and he’s never wrong.

Very often, this kind of cleverness comes in the form of seeing through illusions. Take this remark from detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” It is this jaded, but realistic, irony—often in the face of visions of consumer luxury or romance—that gives rise to both the detective’s analytical ability and his clever brand of humor. (...)

Internet detectives are forever alert to scams and conspiracies. Launching deeply researched accusations against hucksters, hacks, grifters, trolls, bots, propagandists, and purveyors of misinformation becomes a tactic for legitimating one’s own idleness. These detectives turn the largely meaningless detritus of information overproduction into genuine evidence. They give rational meaning to the Internet—whose absurdity and meaninglessness might otherwise be intolerable to the people wasting away there.

Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.

by Alexander Stern, The Hedgehog Review |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock, Inc.

Before Sunrise

Before Sunrise
1995, dir. Richard Linklater

via:

Journalists Near and Far React to the Journalism of ‘Alaska Daily’

What does it take to authentically portray journalism on television? Is it election night pizza? The work of holding power to account? For the new ABC show “Alaska Daily,” it’s drawing from the real-life reporting of local journalists at the Anchorage Daily News. Created by Tom McCarthy, who helmed the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight,” it stars Bellingham-raised actor Hilary Swank as hard-boiled reporter Eileen Fitzgerald, who moves to Alaska from New York after her previous job fell through. She begins working with intrepid local journalist Rosalind “Roz” Friendly, played by Secwépemc actor Grace Dove, on an investigation into the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the state. It raises the question: How well can television grapple with the day-in and day-out of this important yet tough job?

Playwright and journalist Vera Marlene Starbard, T’set Kwei (Tlingit/Dena’ina) is a co-writer on the show. A former editor of Anchorage Native News and the current editor of First Alaskans Magazine, she said she’s hoping the show will provide a more authentic portrayal of Alaska Natives that pushes back against harmful stereotypes she argues have been perpetuated in both television and journalism in the past, pointing to one scene where Roz expresses why it’s important to add a paragraph to a story so it doesn’t leave a hateful stereotype expressed by a racist sheriff about Native women unchallenged.

“Having the lie repeated and not contested, sometimes even the journalists don’t even know they’re lies. That was a discussion that went on literally for months and ended up in that small but really important scene that was a journalism argument, a TV argument and a national argument that we’re having at the same time,” Starbard said. “Having people of different races, ethnicities, backgrounds and sexual identities in a newsroom isn’t just about checking a box. It’s about how they give a new perspective. They give a perspective that actually has more truth, that has a fuller truth in it.”

For Rhonda LeValdo (Acoma Pueblo), professor of media communications at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and a journalist for a variety of outlets, she felt like the show made a misstep in who it centered.

“The whole white savior thing with having a person like Hilary Swank having to make sure this issue is brought to mainstream attention is kind of the bad thing about it,” LeValdo said. “I really wish that Hollywood or any type of mainstream media would let us tell that story instead of having to rely on a non-Native to do that for us.” (...)

The importance of engaging with the way these stories are covered was echoed by Jarrette Werk, Indigenous affairs reporter and photographer for the Oregon-based nonprofit publication Underscore. Having watched three episodes, Werk — a member of the Native American Journalists Association and Report for America corps member and a citizen of Aaniiih and Nakoda Tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Community — felt the show got a lot right in showing the importance of Native journalists.

“Being a Native journalist going into these different communities, a lot of them agree to work with me because I have an understanding of how Native communities work and what goes on,” Werk said. “Having Native characters, Native writers and Native journalists sharing Native stories is super important because we’re shifting the narrative from a stereotypical narrative that has been shared for forever by non-Native media.”

by Chase Hutchinson, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Well this should be interesting, even if I never get to see it (not having a Hulu account); I used to know a few reporters from the old Daily News. At least (from the trailer) it looks like they've included a lot of beautiful local scenery. The last paragraph here seems the most important, racial diversity = different perspectives.] 

White Noise

Noah Baumbach’s terrifically stylish movie, adapted by him from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, is a deadpan comedy of catastrophisation, a meditation on western prosperity and its discontents, its anxieties, its intellectual satiety. It’s a sensuous apocalyptic reverie founded on the assumption that nothing can really go wrong – or can it? Could it be that our preoccupations with ecological disaster are not played out in the service of rational pre-emptive measures, but irrational occult fears, supernatural inoculations against death?

DeLillo’s garrulous and witty novel of ideas has been hungered after by film-makers for nearly 40 years (Emma Cline even wrote a short story called White Noise in 2020 about Harvey Weinstein hoping to reclaim respectability by making a DeLillo movie.) Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

His film amplifies not merely the book’s richness as a period piece which speaks of the trendy zeitgeistiness of postmodernism on the American campus, but how prescient it is about the fears of the present day. The horror of the American suburban heartland in the face of the poisonous chemical cloud floating overhead - the “airborne toxic event” – feels like an address to Covid and the lockdown, and making uneasy, normalising accommodations with this pandemic.

And it is about an obsession with the growing ubiquity of information and interpretation, the availability of data that show one thing and apparently equally valid data that show the opposite. This is the white noise of ersatz fact: the fizz of bad television reception in which conspiracy and fake news takes root: a particulate formless blur. When I first read the novel I thought of the thing we used to as kids: place your face very close to the TV screen while a programme was on to see nothing but the tiny pixels.

Adam Driver plays a midwestern academic in the liberal arts called Jack Gladney, middle-aged and given what I thought was a fake pot belly but in one scene in his doctor’s treatment room he has his shirt off, revealing a paunch. Greta Gerwig plays Babette, his amiable distracted wife – both divorcees, they preside over a lively household of annoyingly precocious children and stepchildren.

Jack is America’s leading light in the world of the strangely preposterous discipline of Hitler Studies (Gladney speaks no German) an ahistorical technique of deconstructing the iconography of Hitler without being overwhelmed by or even necessarily aware of the tragic and horrendous context. Among its other premonitions, the story foresees the “end of history” briefly and modishly celebrated in the west with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jack’s colleague Murray Siskind (drolly played by Don Cheadle) is hoping to do for Elvis what Jack has done with Hitler and a big set piece has the two men delivering an ingenious (and flippant and insouciantly provocative) analysis of Elvis and Hitler at the same time. Slavoj Žižek has nothing on these guys.

Jack and Babette are content in an uneasy way, dramatised by time-honoured movie visits to the dreamy, affectless giant supermarket which is incidentally the site of a gloriously choreographed closing credit sequence. But Jack has worries. Babette has symptoms of what appear to be early onset dementia: she also seems to be addicted to a mysterious drug called Dylar, empty bottles of which appear in the trash. Without Google, Jack and his children have no choice but to ask academic colleagues and comb medical textbooks to find out what on earth “Dylar” is and what its dangers are. (In a similarly pre-YouTube state, the kids are obsessed with plane crash footage on the TV news, waiting impatiently for it to be shown.)

And then the great crash happens – an environmental disaster caused by a Jack Daniel’s-swigging truck driver transporting oceans of gasoline crashing into a train transporting volatile toxic waste. (We have already seen Murray giving an amusing lecture on how the car crash in American cinema is an essentially light-hearted genre.) The resulting poison cloud causes them to leave their homes, an exodus involving a wonderfully surreal scene in which the station wagon drifts down a swollen river.

by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wilson Webb/AP
[ed. Really looking forward to this. I read White Noise years and years ago and it sounds like they've made a good adaptation. To be released in cinemas on 2 December and Netflix on 30 December.]

Seattle Times: 11 Best Eats of 2022

The Dungeness crab gunkan maki at Ltd Edition Sushi on Capitol Hill

Ltd Edition Sushi is so great, it might make you depart your senses. This happened to me over and over on two visits for my review earlier this year: a glowing piece of Copper River salmon nigiri placed in front of me by chef Keiji Tsukasaki, or a luscious otoro handroll given from his fingers to mine, then every thought banished, eyes unfocused for a moment of pure, lit-up pleasure. The gorgeous simplicity belies the care taken — this is Edomae-style sushi, with seasonal fish painstakingly marinated or cured, stintingly adorned with intense intention. Here, too: highest-quality fish, single-origin rice, best-possible nori. Tsukasaki’s Dungeness crab gunkan is a miniature crown of our region’s pure, sweet, deep-scuttling treat, topped in a rare moment of experimentation with a glistening crab-fat gel, plus tiny bits of chive, a few grains of salt. If ever a taste can, this transports you out over glinting Pacific Northwest waves, catching the scent of our coastal air, hearing all sound drowned to the bottom and wanting to stay there. Before his time at Sushi Kappo Tamura, Shiro’s and Sushi Kashiba, Tsukasaki used to be a techno DJ, so he might have knowledge of synesthesia to share. I recently paid my own way — $140 — for a third omakase trip. Ltd Edition Sushi is, hands down, Seattle’s best new restaurant. (1641 Nagle Place, Seattle; no phone; ltdeditionsushi.com)

More Reviews:

Image: Daniel Kim/Seattle Times

[ed. No particular reason (for this post). I haven't been to any of these places. Just love the look of this crab sushi. Full review of Ltd Edition Sushi here: Sushi so good, it might make you cry (Seattle Times).]

via:

Vintage room dividers
via:

The Sunset

When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short man with a thick north Texas accent and a handlebar mustache who finished the training with the advice to “treat each resident like they’re your grandmama.” The course lasted two weeks and came with the stipulation that I stay for at least six months. Employee turnover was high.

This job, caring for grandparents around the clock, paid $7.25 an hour — above minimum wage, the hiring manager boasted, which at the time in Texas was set at $5.15. This really was a great job, the other aides told me. It was steady work that came with a lunch break and health insurance for your kids, things that were lost on me. I was an anomaly in that job: a teenager, in college, white.

   

None of my friends understood why I wanted to work there. Young people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of death. Death hung over the place like a ghost, the hospital smell embedded daily in my clothes. All I can say is that I wanted a real job and I liked old people. I’d already seen my share of dead bodies, thanks to the slew of open-casket funerals that came with a childhood spent in an aging rural community. Also, the home was the only place that called back when I applied.

The facility was broken into seven distinct hallways, with two aides assigned to each for their shifts. Each hall housed 15 or 20 residents, making each aide responsible for eight to 10 residents. There were no firm state or federal regulations on what the resident-aide ratio should be (and still aren’t), but 10-to-1 is considered easy street in most facilities. To be clear, this is still a terrible ratio. Imagine having to wake, bathe, dress, and hand-feed 10 elderly patients who need total assistance: buttoning shirts, brushing dentures, changing bedsheets for those who will have inevitably soiled the bed in the night. Imagine having to complete it all in an hour or less. It’s an impossible task. Which is why dentures don’t get brushed, baths don’t get offered, nightgowns are worn at the breakfast table. Now double it to 20 patients; this is what you have in many facilities across the country.

Hall One was for rehab patients, those who had suffered strokes or broken bones and were simply there until they could regain strength and rejoin the world (if they were lucky) or move to another wing (if they were less so). Hall Two was reserved for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They were mostly ambulatory, which was great for those residents who liked to wander and terrible for the aides who had to keep track of them and everyone else. Halls Three and Four had a mean reputation, old folks who bit and scratched. One resident in that hall was a literal shit-flinger, known to keep her hands hidden until an aide was close enough to smear. Many of the Black residents were placed on these halls, creating a racist chicken-or-egg situation where the care was poor because the residents were difficult and the residents were difficult because the care was poor. Hall Five was a tale of two extremes — people who either needed a ton of help or none at all. Any aide was happy to get that assignment, though, because the extremes averaged out to something sustainable. Hall Six was for the bedridden.

It was a toss-up whether Hall Three, Four, or Six was the worst assignment for aides — it depended on whether you felt like taking insults or blowing your back out. But Hall Seven was the hall everyone wanted: elderly people who were mostly lucid, mostly independent, who just needed a little help and some company. Hall Seven was heaven. And because I was young, too small to lift alone, and white, I got assigned to Hall Seven every time. (...)

The entire elder care system operates on a mantra of out of sight, out of mind. Medical residencies feature little to no geriatric training; the profession experiences an annual turnover rate of 60 percent. A 2021 study found that turnover in nursing care facilities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the average annual rate in 2020 at a shocking 128 percent. In other words, if you apply for a job at a nursing home, you can pretty well count on getting hired. For someone with little access to education living on the edge of poverty, this fact is a godsend. Yet, caveats lurk. There are countless reports of understaffing in nursing homes, underfunding, limited regulations where it matters (staff pay, patient ratio) and reels of red tape where it doesn’t (hours of required paperwork that detail how many ounces of water the resident drank, but not how they cry at night for their children). And while you may be trained on how to wipe from front to back, there’s no training to prepare you for the psychic toll of watching your people suffer until they die.

There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places, and I’m sorry to say that my experience working in one did not change this perception. But I can also say that the perception has less to do with staffing, funding, and regulations (or lack thereof) and much more to do with our country’s fear of death, its rejection of vulnerability, and its subsequent inability to see the inherent dignity in people — especially in their vulnerable moments.

Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that?

Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity. Our friends pass on, our families visit less and less, we spend more time alone, helpless to arrest the breakdown of our own bodies. It’s no wonder the elderly — and those who care for the elderly — are steeped in a hot tea of shame. And because shame repels, it is no wonder our policies and priorities for eldercare are so lax as to be nearly criminal. Out of sight. Out of mind. (...)

One of my favorite tasks at the nursing home was supervising the 4 p.m. smoke break. Many of the residents were lifetime smokers and no nursing facility was going to curb that habit, so after breakfast and before dinner we’d wheel everyone to a small, glassed-in room off the corner of the dining hall. It stunk like only a room solely used by smokers could stink. Staff hated covering smoke time because of it. But it was also 15 minutes in which all you had to do was light cigarettes and make sure nobody burned themselves. I volunteered every time.

by Lisa Bubert, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Peter Rubin. Photos by SolStock and Kenneth Faulkner/Getty Images.

[ed. My mom went through this, and it's my worst nightmare. Our politicians and medical community are less than worthless when it comes to helping/allowing people to die with dignity. See also: Emergency Room Notebook, 1977 (Lucia Berlin).]

Christine McVie, Hitmaker for Fleetwood Mac, Dies at 79

Farewell, Christine McVie, the Songbird Who Knew the Score (Rolling Stone)

Image: Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
Ms. McVie’s commercial potency, which hit a high point in the 1970s and ’80s, was on full display on Fleetwood Mac’s “Greatest Hits” anthology, released in 1988, which sold more than eight million copies: She either wrote or co-wrote half of its 16 tracks. (NY Times); also:

Mother Earth, musical prodigy or steely powerhouse? The enigma of Christine McVie (The Guardian)

[ed. I just finished reading David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue about a fictional band in the 60s and 70s. One of the main protagonists and leader of the group, Elf Holloway reminds me of Christine. Inately decent, grounded, a gifted songwriter and pianist, and the glue that holds the band together. See also: Songbird; and, from Chicken Shack (pre-Fleetwood Mac): When the Train Comes Back.]

Judgment of Paris: The Tasting That Changed Wine Forever

In a Parisian hotel 45 years ago, some of France's biggest wine experts came together for a blind tasting.

The finest French wines were up against upstarts from California. At the time, this didn't even seem like a fair contest -- France made the world's best wines and Napa Valley was not yet on the map -- so the result was believed to be obvious.

Instead, the greatest underdog tale in wine history was about to unfold. Californian wines scored big with the judges and won in both the red and white categories, beating legendary chateaux and domaines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

The only journalist in attendance, George M. Taber of Time magazine, later wrote in his article that "the unthinkable happened," and in an allusion to Greek mythology called the event "The Judgment of Paris," and thus it would forever be known.

"It was a complete game changer," says Mark Andrew, a wine expert and co-founder of wine magazine Noble Rot, "and it catapulted California wine to the top of the fine wine conversation." Wine had gotten its watershed moment.

The tasting was the brainchild of British wine merchant Steven Spurrier, who passed away in March 2021 aged 79. "He was a legend," says Andrew, who had known Spurrier for 15 years. "He was an open-minded guy who really knew wine, based on its quality and its intrinsic value rather than reputation."

In the early 1970s, Spurrier owned a wine shop in Paris and a wine school right next to it, called L'Academie du Vin. Both were aimed primarily at non-French speakers and were located on the Right Bank of the Seine river, where most of the foreign banks and firms were.

Spurrier liked to showcase wines from countries other than France in the shop and at the school -- an act of true rebellion in Paris -- and thought of a tasting as a way to promote his business.

Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher, an American associate of Spurrier, visited California wineries in 1975 and was impressed with the rising quality of their offerings. She suggested to look into such wines for the tasting and have it take place on the bicentennial of the 1776 American War of Independence. She also encouraged Spurrier to visit California himself, to pick a few worthy candidates.

And so, in early May 1976, Spurrier and his wife Bella took off for San Francisco for a wine tour. The tour was arranged by Napa resident and connoisseur Joanne DePuy, who showed the Spurriers around. "Steven wanted to go to the smaller, boutique wineries," she tells CNN. "He had a very good palate and he bought the wines he liked, at full price."

The tasting, now six months in the making, was scheduled for May 24, 1976 at the Intercontinental Hotel, not far from Spurrier's shop and school. The nine judges, all French, included Odette Khan, editor of a prestigious wine magazine, and Aubert de Villaine, the director of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, a Burgundy estate that makes some of the world's best, and most expensive, wines.

The fateful day

(...) Spurrier had no intention to cause a stir or to humiliate his French judges. He wanted little more than to create recognition for Californian wines and generate publicity for his school. But he did come up with a way of making things more interesting: he picked the four best white wines from Burgundy and the four best red Bordeaux blends from his cellar to go against the American wines, and covered up all the labels.

"It was only pretty much at the last minute that Steven decided to change the testing from an open one to a blind one. Blind tastings are common now, but at the time, it was a very innovative way to compare and contrast wines," says Andrew.

Among the French wines Spurrier picked were Batard-Montrachet, Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Chateau Haut-Brion -- the elite of fine wine. The Californian offerings, 12 in total, included Ridge Vineyards, Freemark Abbey, Spring Mountain, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars and Chateau Montelena -- all of which were largely unknown in Europe.

The journalist George M. Taber was given a card with the names of the wines that were being served, so he knew exactly what the judges were tasting. He soon realized things were getting interesting when one of the judges tasted a white wine and proclaimed, "This is definitely California. It has no nose," when he was really tasting the Batard-Montrachet, a Burgundy Chardonnay that is often categorized as one of the world's best white wines.

The unthinkable was indeed happening.

When Spurrier tallied the scores, it turned out that California had dominated the white wine category, with a 1973 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena as the winner, and three American wines in the top five. In the red category, a 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag's Leap Wine Cellars came out on top, narrowly edging out a 1970 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild from Bordeaux.

It was a David versus Goliath outcome, with wines that were much cheaper and younger unexpectedly getting rated higher. The Chateau Montelena retailed at the time for about $6.50 per bottle, a small fraction of the cost of its French rivals; Stag's Leap had been founded just six years earlier, in 1970, whereas winemaking at Chateau Mouton-Rothschild had been going on for three centuries. Both winners hailed from Napa Valley, which would go on to become one of the world's premier wine regions.

The French judges were far from impressed with the results. Odette Khan unsuccessfully demanded her scorecard back, according to Taber, so that the world wouldn't know how she scored the wines, while Aubert de Villaine later described the event as "a kick in the rear for French wine."

by Jacopo Prisco, CNN |  Read more:

Image: Bella Spurrier; WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Getty Images; Harold Dorwin/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution Archives;
[ed. See also: Is Wine Fake? (Asterisk):]

What about the tasting notes — the part where experts say a wine tastes like aged orange peel or avocado or whatever?

There aren’t many studies that investigate this claim directly. But their claims make sense on a chemical level. Fermentation produces hundreds of different compounds, many are volatile (i.e., evaporate easily and can be smelled), and we naturally round chemicals off to other plants or foods that contain them.

When people say a wine has citrus notes, that might mean it has 9-carbon alcohols somewhere in its chemical soup. If they say chocolate, 5-carbon aldehydes; if mint, 5-carbon ketones.

(Do wines ever have 6-carbon carboxylic acids, or 10-carbon alkanes — i.e., goats, armpits or jet fuel? I am not a wine chemist and cannot answer this question. But one of the experts interviewed on Somm mentioned that a common tasting note is cat urine, but that in polite company you’re supposed to refer to it by the code phrase “blackcurrant bud.” Maybe one of those things wine experts say is code for “smells like a goat,” I don’t know.)

Hawaii Farmers Struggle As Worldwide Macadamia Market Goes Nuts

It’s a time-honored ritual for people traveling from Hawaii: a visit to the local grocery, ABC Store or Long’s Drugs to pick up boxes, bags and cans of macadamia nuts to deliver to friends and family as gifts – treats grown in the sun, soil and rain of Hawaii.

But now Hawaii’s most iconic macadamia nut brands are significantly scaling back their purchases of Hawaii-grown nuts. Instead, shipping records indicate, South Africa and Kenya have become big suppliers.

Hawaiian Host Group, which also owns the brand, earlier this year informed Big Island macadamia nut farmers that it was temporarily shutting down its Big Island processing facility in Keaau, “for at least a year or two,” due to costly problems involving a 50-year-old boiler that burns mac nut shells for fuel.

While Hawaiian Host has long imported nuts from elsewhere to supplement its Hawaiian nuts, this year’s harvest would be different: Hawaiian Host would cease buying from Big Island’s mac nut orchards for now, the company’s president and chief executive Ed Schultz wrote in a letter to growers.

“While we are exploring ways to potentially process some crop this year, the closure at Mauna Loa requires us to temporarily suspend receiving any macadamia nut harvest at our Napoopoo Husking Facility until further notice,” Schultz wrote. “Therefore, we understand that you will look for alternative places to sell your crop this year.”

In an email to Civil Beat, Schultz clarified that the company still will purchase about 4 million pounds of Hawaiian mac nuts for the harvest seasons from September 2022 through April 2023.

Still, the letter reverberated through an industry already reeling from high fuel and fertilizer costs, and other issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now local growers are stepping up with a public education campaign urging people to buy locally grown mac nuts.

In the works is a partnership between a local growers’ association and an international firm that tests chemical and molecular properties of things like food and textiles to determine their origin. In the meantime, last week the farmers took out half-page ads in Big Island newspapers calling on consumers to make sure the nuts they were buying were grown in Hawaii.

The ad from the Macadamia Growers of Hawaii didn’t single out Hawaiian Host or any other company, but instead implored readers to check product labels.

“The truth about products you buy,” the ad said, “isn’t hard to crack.”

After seed crops, such as genetically modified corn grown to produce seeds for farms elsewhere, mac nuts were Hawaii’s second most valuable crop in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hawaii macadamia nut farmers produced 51 million pounds of nuts valued at $62.7 million from 17,000 acres, the USDA reported.

But this year looks bleak, said Brad Nelson, director of the Macadamia Growers of Hawaii, who is also president and chief executive of Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards, a 5,000-acre operation that employs 180 workers on the Big Island.

“Millions of pounds of macadamia nuts are on the ground and won’t be harvested this year,” Nelson said in an interview.

If the situation continues, Nelson said, the Hawaiian macadamia nut industry could go the way of sugar cane and pineapple: once important crops that have largely disappeared from Hawaii’s economy.

“This is make or break, really,” he said.

Prices Drop Amidst Global Supply Glut

Complicating the situation further, Nelson said, is that Hawaiian Host and Mauna Loa are beloved brands that not only promote Hawaii as a macadamia nut region but also, in other years, buy a lot of Hawaii nuts. Nobody wants to see the brand damaged, Nelson said.

“Up until this year, I would say Mauna Loa would do everything they could to buy local macadamia nuts,” he said.

But that changed with the plant closing. Current farms face two problems now, Nelson said. First, he said, there simply is not enough processing capacity on the Big Island to make up for the lost facility. Second, Nelson said, even if a company like Island Harvest could quickly scale up, Island Harvest likely couldn’t find space on store shelves, which are dominated by Mauna Loa and Hawaiian Host products. 

by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Stewart Yerton

[ed. Reminds me of the Kona Coffee branding debacle.]

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Erupts

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Erupts (Seattle Times)

Image: Mark Nowlin/Seattle Times

They May as Well Grow on Trees

On Aug. 18, 2053, Tyson Foods unveiled its much-anticipated product, Well Beef, at a benefit dinner in Lower Manhattan. Well Beef, a genetically engineered animal product derived from what the company is calling “Welfare-Enhanced Cows,” is the third GE food product that Tyson has released and comes just a year on the heels of Ecopig.

“It’s exceptional!” exclaimed Grant Willis, the company’s CEO, dabbing at his chin with a napkin. “We have finally achieved the Big Three. We have enjoyed phenomenal success with Pure Chicken and Ecopig, and now we are ushering in the era of Well Beef.” Willis gestured toward the room, where guests eddied about the tables surveying and sampling Tyson’s array of genetically engineered foods. The chefs had transformed the Well Beef into carpaccio woven into the shape of roses. Interspersed were silver trays of Ecopig sliders and Pure Chicken pâté nestled among garlands of fruit and salad greens.

As Pure Chicken celebrates half a decade of success this year, Well Beef is the first commercially available GE beef product that claims to be cruelty-free. “Genetic engineering for increased welfare” boasts a banner draped behind the podium. Light from the chandeliers shimmered across the marbled beef, giving the meat a dewy sheen. Lush bouquets of flowering sweet pea vines were placed throughout the rooms. “An homage to trait selection,” Herbert Muller, an attending geneticist from Tyson, tells me. “On this day, it is worth reflecting on humanity’s journey through the labyrinth of heredity.”

Unlike these pea vines, whose differences are largely cosmetic, what makes Well Beef distinct from traditional meat goes beyond appearances. By using CRISPR and other gene editing technology, companies like Tyson can make targeted modifications to the genome in order to delete or insert new genes. While those who selected favorable variants in the past were doing so in ways that were molecularly indiscriminate, today’s food engineers have gone from merely interpreting the gene to manipulating it. (...)

Tyson’s Pure Chicken was the first GE animal engineered not to perceive pain. Using CRISPR and other proprietary technologies, bioengineers were able to manipulate the chickens so they had brain function sufficient for maintaining growth but not for supporting mental states or psychological experiences. These chickens, which lacked beaks, eyes and feathers, also had ablations to their anterior cingulate that disrupted the affective dimensions of pain. Their secondary somatosensory cortex was left intact, rendering them able to eat and drink, and even to react instinctually to stimuli. But when exposed to adverse stimuli, rather than exhibiting nociceptive behavior, they remained serene. They resembled something between an animal and a fruit, an observation that is encapsulated by the product’s official slogan: “They may as well grow on trees.”

Although the product had its critics, its immediate commercial success left no doubt about the industry’s trajectory. Within months of its debut in 2048, Pure Chicken became the industry standard. Non-genetically engineered chicken simply could not compete with Pure Chicken for taste or efficiency. And whereas traditionally bred chickens are prone to pecking one another’s eyes out when too tightly confined, Pure Chickens are equanimous and placid. From temperament to taste, cruelty-free chicken outmatched non-GE poultry.

In the ebullience that followed the commercial success of Pure Chicken, companies like Tyson and Cal-Maine Foods turned their attention to bioengineering a larger array of more complex livestock animals. The methods that researchers used were similar, focusing on disrupting the neural pathways so that they could alleviate pain while not stunting growth. Three years ago, in the spring of 2050, a team of animal science researchers from California Polytechnic State University discovered that folic acid deficiency during embryogenesis could lead to a neural tube defect that disrupts pain signaling in the brain. They first implemented this strategy in pigs, which led to a spate of GE pork products, including Ecopig, before turning their attention to modifying cattle.

Well Beef is thus the tour de force of GE livestock. The welfare-enhanced cows from which Well Beef is manufactured are a genetic hybrid of Holstein and Angus cattle. Large and muscle-bound, their architectonic bodies ripple with prime cuts. The most pronounced distinction between these beef cows and their forebears is their heads, which develop with a concave brain but retain a partial skull, including the face.

According to Tyson, these cattle eat, grow, live and die without a vestige of pain. Even the most skeptical evaluators confirmed this appraisal. Upon visiting Tyson’s headquarters last month, Maxwell Harder, an investigator with the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, marveled that he had “plausibly borne witness to the largest reduction of suffering ever undertaken.”

by Xander Balwit, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Natalya Balnova

Xi Jinping: The Making of a Dictator

Xi Jinping: the Making of a Dictator (The Economist)
Images: During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards beat, tortured and killed anyone they saw as an enemy. Many members of the party elite, including Xi Jinping’s father, were publicly denounced in the Cultural Revolution. Students relied on public notices to find out which leaders were no longer in favour. Like many educated youths, Xi was sent to the countryside in the 1960s. In 1985 Xi spent two weeks in America with a Chinese delegation. (uncredited)

He likes football, claims to swim 1,000 metres a day and is a fan of “Sleepless in Seattle”, “The Godfather” and “Saving Private Ryan”. These are among the short, carefully choreographed list of details we know about the world’s most powerful man. Beyond a veneer of openness – he carries his own umbrella, shuns suits for anoraks, pays for his own meal at a dumpling shop – he is an enigma. Leaders of the world’s most influential countries go on tv to debate their rivals and are interrogated in interviews about the minutiae of their policy statements; the comings and goings of their ministers are documented by a gleeful media. Yet even Xi’s speeches are often released only months or years after the event. His advisers are just as remote; sometimes we don’t even know their names.

We have far more detail on his official backstory – the hardships he suffered when, along with millions of other urban Chinese, he spent years toiling in the countryside in a remote village in the 1960s. These fables tell us how Xi wants to be seen: a man who withstood great pain before rising to his rightful place in the highest office. Read more:

Medieval Autographs

Woman’s name and tiny sketches found in 1,300-year-old medieval text (The Guardian)

Image: Eadburg? The manuscript also contains tiny, rough drawings of figures – in one case, of a person with outstretched arms, reaching for another person who is holding up a hand to stop them.

[ed. Appears to be a woman's signature, so it can't be Bob. See also: It ain’t me babe: Bob Dylan apologises for using a machine to autograph ‘hand-signed’ books (Guardian).]