Noema: Italy; China; Maintenance; and Concrete

Italy is full of places like Arquà Petrarca. Microclimates and artisanal techniques become the basis for obscure local specialties celebrated in elaborate festivals from Trapani to Trieste. (...)

All these specialties are encouraged by local cooperatives, protected by local designations, elevated by local chefs and celebrated in local festivals, all lucrative outcomes for their local, often small-scale producers. It’s not so much a reflection of capitalismo as campanilismo — a uniquely Italian concept derived from the word for belltower. “It means, if you were born in the shade of the belltower, you were from that community,” explains Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of “Gastronativism,” a new book exploring the intersection of food and politics. “That has translated into food.” (...)

All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine. (...)

The Romans were really the first Italian culinary borrowers. In addition to the jujube, they brought home cherries, apricots and peaches from the corners of their vast empire, Parasecoli tells me. But in the broad sweep of Italian history, it was Arabs, not Romans, who have left the more lasting mark on Italian cuisine.

During some 200 years of rule in Sicily and southern Italy, and the centuries of horticultural experimentation and trade that followed, Arabs greatly expanded the range of ingredients and flavors in the Italian diet. A dizzying array of modern staples can be credited to their influence, including almonds, spinach, artichokes, chickpeas, pistachios, rice and eggplants.

Arabs also brought with them durum wheat — since 1967, the only legal grain for the production of pasta in Italy. They introduced sugar cane and citrus fruit, laying the groundwork for dozens of local delicacies in the Italian south and inspiring the region’s iconic sweet-and-sour agrodolce flavors. Food writers Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari argue that Arabs’ effect on the Italian palate was as profound as it was in science or medicine — reintroducing lost recipes from antiquity, elevated by novel ingredients and techniques refined in the intervening centuries. In science, this kind of exchange sparked the Renaissance; in food, they argue, one of the world’s great cuisines.

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema; Image: Roman Bratschi)

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Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken. Maintenance is about making something last. (...)

The industrial world is aging, and the sheer quantity and geographic extent of transportation, water and energy infrastructure presents an unprecedented challenge at the exact moment that climate change forces us to rethink material use. More robust maintenance practices could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids to insulated homes. But first maintenance has to be valued outside of austerity, and right now it’s unclear if our current economic system is capable of that. (...)

It’s hard to imagine a modern ritual that would be equal to the task of perpetually renewing steel bridges, concrete highways and cement buildings. It would require an entirely new industrial paradigm. One label for such a system is “circular economy,” which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which funds research on the topic, defines as “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design.” (...)

Sustainability, and the climate discourse in general, fails to disentangle the built environment in this way. The built and unbuilt environment are treated as totalities caught in a zero-sum conflict. One barrages the other with smokestacks and landfills, the other retaliates with forest fires and flooding. Climate change becomes a hyperobject, bearing down on all of humanity at once, condemning and forbidding it.

Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to material systems and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution. (...)

The incentives get even more distorted when stretched across industries and use cases. Here, again, maintenance distinguishes itself rhetorically from sustainability. Sustainability is a state; maintenance is a process. It requires work, and work of a certain type. Whatever its ultimate goal — safety, material efficiency, reducing carbon emissions — practical know-how and repetitive labor come first. This kind of pragmatism is sorely needed in the climate debate, which is so often preoccupied with end-states that it has no earthly or humanly way of achieving.

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance (Alex Vuocolo, Noema; Image: Scott Balmer)

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As Thomas Piketty and several others have observed, America is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology. Globalization did not deliver on its promise of prosperity for all Americans; instead, the outsourcing of production to countries like China profited multinational companies while hollowing out industrial towns. During the 2008 financial crisis, elites on Wall Street received bailouts from the government, while people on Main Street lost their jobs and savings. Exploiting popular discontent, Trump parachuted into the presidential race in 2016 with rallying cries to “bring jobs back home” and “drain the swamp” — and to everyone’s surprise, he won.

Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations.” Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system. Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners. Whereas Biden pledges to “build back better,” Xi dubs his campaign “common prosperity.

To say that the U.S. and China are similar, however, does not mean that they are identical. America is a democracy with constitutional protections of individual freedoms, whereas China is a top-down political system ruled by one party. Thus, the two countries are pursuing progressive reforms very differently. At the turn of the 20th century, when America was an emerging industrial power, its society fought graft and inequality through political activism, civil service reforms, new regulations and by voting corrupt politicians out of office. Today, facing a deindustrialized economy and outdated infrastructure, Biden’s agenda is focused on passing legislation on large public investment and raising taxes on corporations. Xi, on the other hand, is trying to stamp out capitalist excesses through commands and campaigns to punish graft, eliminate poverty and rein in the “chaotic expansion of capital.” Like Biden, Xi aspires for fairer development — but with the CCP firmly in control.

The narratives we choose shape the realities we experience. The “clash of civilizations” implies that the U.S. and China are culturally — or worse, racially — destined to fight each other, and everyone else must choose one side. If you buy this narrative, a new Cold War can be the only outcome. By contrast, the “clash of two Gilded Ages” reminds us that the U.S. and China are rivals who share similar woes at home. Their competition should not be over who trips and outruns the other, but rather who fixes their own problems first. Competition can be a force for self-renewal instead of mutual destruction.

The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages (Yuen Yuen Ang, Noema; Image: Xinmei Liu)

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To make concrete, you need cement. To make cement nowadays, kilns are heated to more than 1,400 degrees Celsius — similar to the temperature inside a volcano. Into the kilns goes a combination of crushed raw materials (mainly limestone and clay). The heat causes a chemical reaction that creates a new product, clinker, which is then ground down to create the grey powder you see in cement bags. This is then mixed with sand, gravel and water to create concrete.

Concrete is now the second-most consumed substance on Earth behind only water. Thirty-three billion tons of it are used each year, making it by far the most abundant human-made material in history. To make all that, we now devour around 4 billion tons of cement each year — more than in the entire first half of the 20th century, and over a billion tons more than the food we eat annually.

Such a monstrous scale of production has monstrous consequences. Concrete has been like a nuclear bomb in man’s conquest of nature: redirecting great rivers (often away from the communities that had come to rely on them), reducing quarried mountains to mere hills, and contributing to biodiversity loss and mass flooding by effectively sealing large swathes of land in an impermeable grey crust. The other key ingredients all bring their own separate crises, from the destructive sand mining of riverbeds and beaches to the use of almost 2% of the world’s water.

But most significantly, the carbon-intensive nature of cement has been catastrophic for the atmosphere. The kilns used to heat limestone are commonly run on fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gases, and as it heats up, the limestone itself releases more CO2. Every kilogram of cement created produces more than half a kilogram of CO2. The greenhouse gas emissions of the global aviation industry (2-3%) are dwarfed by those of the cement industry (around 8%). If concrete was a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter, behind only the U.S. and China. In Chile, the region that houses most of the cement plants, Quintero, has become so polluted that it was nicknamed “the sacrifice zone.”

Sacrifice is a fitting word for this paradox: On the one hand, we have the destruction wrought by concrete, and on the other is our desperate need for it to exist. It’s been estimated that to keep up with global population growth, we need to build the urban equivalent of another Paris each week, another New York each month.

Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. (Joe Zadeh, Noema; Image: Newnome Beauton)

via:

Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya, Pink

[ed. Love this song, and performances.]

‘Unexpected Item’

How Self-Checkouts Failed to Live Up to Their Promise

When the first self-checkout kiosks were rolled out in American stores more than three decades ago, they were presented as technology that could help stores cut costs, save customers time, and even prevent theft.

Businesses still fret over these issues, and against a tight labor market, more companies are making self-checkouts the norm. But the machines failed to live up to their promises. This week, Walmart’s CEO said that thefts “are higher than what they’ve historically been”, which many staff and customers link to self-checkouts. On top of that, the machines have made things harder for the workers who they were supposed to replace. (...)

In 2018, just 18% of all grocery store transactions went through a self-checkout, rising to 30% last year. Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General, and Albertson’s are now among retail chains testing out full self-checkout stores.

That’s not something we should get excited about, says Christopher Andrews, a sociologist who examined the kiosks in his 2018 book, The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy. Despite what grocery stores and kiosk manufacturers claim, research shows self-checkouts aren’t actually any faster than a regular checkout line, Andrews says. “It only feels like it because your time is occupied doing tasks, rather than paying attention to each second ticking away.”

Neither have they reduced the need for workers: despite the increase in self-checkouts, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the number of cashiers employed in the US has remained virtually the same over the last 10 years. And any reduction in low-wage workers has been offset by the need to pay technicians to maintain the kiosks, Andrews says – and the kiosks can cost as much as $150,000 for a single row.

So if self-checkouts are so ineffective, why do we have them at all?

The self-service policies of modern supermarkets have largely been “imposed by the companies, not because of customers asking for it”, says Andrews. Before the 20th century, shoppers typically purchased goods directly from clerks standing behind counters. That changed in 1916, when Clarence Saunders opened the first modern supermarket: a Piggly Wiggly in Texas where customers were asked to take items off of the shelves themselves – and received a discount for doing so.

Andrews says his research has found that the majority of people don’t actually want self-checkouts. The real reason stores use them, he says, is because their competitors do. “It’s not working great for anybody, but everybody feels like they have to have it. The companies think: ‘If we can just convince more people to do this, maybe we can start to reduce some overhead.’”

Meanwhile, self-checkouts have become a prime target for fraudsters, who use a variety of tactics to beat anti-theft measures. Weight sensors can be defeated by ringing up expensive items – like king crab legs – as cheap items like apples. James, the cashier in Washington, says he saw a customer trying to buy a $1,600 grill for $5 by hiding one item inside another and switching the barcodes.

That has led to an arms race of sorts as some retailers have responded with increasingly strong measures. Walmart is known for aggressively prosecuting shoplifters and has installed AI-powered cameras near its self-checkout areas with a “missed scan detection” feature. “It turns what’s supposed to be a leisurely activity of shopping into a quasi-TSA, airport-style security check,” says Andrews.

by Wilfred Chan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Mike Blake/Reuters

This Was the Perfect World Cup for Our Strange Era

Whatever happens in the World Cup final this Sunday, Europe will remain the dominant power of global football. An Argentinean victory over France will not change the facts of economic globalization. The English Premier League alone usually turns over more money every season than the quadrennial World Cup, and European football towers over the rest of the world, which is why half of the players at the tournament play in just five big European leagues. Yet something will have changed, too.

It is now 16 years since a World Cup final was played in Europe, as some of the rising powers of the Global South — South Africa, Brazil and now Qatar — have taken their turn. South Africa 2010 carried Pan-African aspirations that for a moment seemed to become reality, with Ghana poised to make a semifinal. Brazil 2014 was a celebration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil, and by association the leftist governments that had transformed the continent, though it ended up as more of a wake.

Qatar 2022, by contrast, was always about Qatar — its visibility, its reputation and its strategic survival. Despite criticisms of the country’s treatment of migrant workers and disregard for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, it has achieved much of what was intended. After four weeks of near-constant football, and the sometimes bitter off-field conversations that accompanied it, Qatar’s position in the world is palpably stronger.

Yet as the first World Cup in an Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, it also aspired to stand for something more. In its timing, its crowds and its narratives, the tournament offered a version of the world in which the Global South, in all its myriad complexities, is more present and more powerful. This, truly, was a World Cup for our era.

The Southern Hemisphere is used to a winter World Cup, but in the North, especially in Europe, watching the tournament is a monthlong summer fiesta of outdoor revelry in public spaces and beer gardens. Even FIFA, though, couldn’t face the prospect of playing in the heat of a Gulf summer, air-conditioned stadiums or not, and rearranged the entire world football calendar around Qatar’s climate. The upshot is that Europe right now is cold and indoors; although viewing figures are good, there is much less sense of the World Cup as a collective ritual. The considerably warmer streets and squares of Dakar, Rabat, Rosario and Riyadh, by contrast, have been flooded by celebrations.

The crowds in Doha, inside and outside the stadiums, reflect this global recalibration. Of course, what we see of them on the screen has been carefully curated. Qatar recruited its own “ultras” — highly organized soccer fans who can be found across the globe — from Lebanon and from among Arab migrants to Doha, and paid for groups of fans to travel from every qualifying nation. But we have still seen enough to know that these are the most diverse World Cup crowds on record — and despite the earsplitting volume of the stadiums’ public-address systems and the relentless music they emit, it is still the crowd, its voices and energies, that is the living heart of the spectacle. (...)

If France wins, we’ll be heralding the first back-to-back winners in 60 years; if Argentina prevails, it will be Lionel Messi’s ascent to divinity that concerns us. Either way, this has been the most closely scrutinized and culturally contested World Cup ever, and that is a good thing. The personal, cultural and political presence of the Global South has been made tangible and that, too, is important. Perhaps the tournament’s biggest legacy will be a global media and public more critically sensitized to the political and cultural meaning of spectacle? 

by David Goldblatt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Martin Meissner/Associated Press via

[ed. The crowds watching worldwide are amazing. Must be in the billions. Truly a global phenomenon. See also: Qatar Gets the World Cup Final It Paid For. And, The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around. (New Yorker):]

"On Sunday, a global audience of a billion plus will tune into the World Cup final to behold the most transfixing spectacle in sport: a small man walking back and forth. The Argentina-France match, at Lusail Stadium, in Lusail, Qatar, will be a showdown between two of the world’s great footballing powers that holds the potential for all sorts of thrilling action and endeavor. (...)

Yet the telling difference may be found in the least dramatic, least kinetic activity on the field. Sunday’s result might well turn, as so many games have before, on the meandering movements of Lionel Messi, who will spend much of the ninety minutes simply walking around—drifting here and there, wandering the field at the pace, and with the apparent dreamy purposelessness, of a flâneur on a psychogeographic dérive.

Messi is soccer’s great ambler. To keep your eyes fixed on him throughout a match is both spellbinding and deadly dull. It is also a lesson in the art and science of watching a soccer match."

UPDATE: Argentina wins it in what some are calling the greatest World Cup Final of all time.

The Next Time Wikipedia Asks for a Donation, Ignore It

No one wants to be a bad person, and you probably felt pretty bad when you saw the heart-breaking appeal and just carried on clicking. Wikipedia is midway through a six-week fund-raising drive in Anglophone regions including the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. The banner ads beg for “just £2”, which doesn’t sound like much, for all that free information. But before you start feeling too guilty, it’s worth considering some facts.

These banner ads have become very lucrative for the NGO that collects the money — the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. Every year the NGO responsible for the fundraising adds tens of millions of dollars to its war chest. After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March. It created an endowment, managed by the Tides Foundation, which now holds well over $100 million of that. The Foundation wanted to hit that figure in ten years, but found it had sailed past it in just five. In 2021, the appeals raised a total of $162 million, a 50% year-on-year increase. Yet the running costs of Wikipedia are a tiny fraction of the amount raised each year.

Indeed, in the 2012/13 year the Foundation budgeted for $1.9m to provide all its free information on tap.

“WMF has operated in the past without staffing and with very minimal staffing, so clearly it’s _possible_ to host a high traffic website on an absolute shoestring,” acknowledged the Foundation’s then VP of engineering, Erik Möller, in 2013. He put the running costs at $10 million a year. Being generous, as some costs fall every year, let’s double that. Wikipedia can operate quite comfortably with the cash it has already, without running another banner ad, for twenty years. So where does the money go?

Not on the people doing the actual work on the site, of course. Wikipedia’s Administrators and maintainers, who tweak the entries and correct the perpetual vandalism, don’t get paid a penny — they’re all volunteers. What has happened is that the formerly ramshackle Foundation, which not so long ago consisted of fewer than a dozen staff run out of a back room, has professionalised itself. It has followed the now well-trodden NGO path to respectability and riches. The Foundation lists 550 employees. Top tier managers earn between $300,000 and $400,000 a year, and dozens are employed exclusively on fund-raising.

by Andrew Orlawski, Unherd |  Read more:

Image: aslysun/Shutterstock (Licensed) Remix by Jason Reed

[ed. This story's been going around for a while now (and the banner ads continue). See also: Wikipedia is swimming in money—why is it begging people to donate? (Daily Dot); also these Twitter and Hacker News/ycombinator threads.]

Ambience

Images: YouTube
[ed. Winter driving you crazy? I've been cycling through ambience videos lately on YouTube (some up to 12 hours long, or longer). I knew about coffee shops, fireplaces, beaches, streams, forests (snowy, lush, otherwise), etc. but really, there's an unbelievable selection of just about anything you can imagine (thousands): acquariums, oceans (above and below), starship screens/spaceship windows, planets, various unfathonable machines, even (above) a Blade Runner loop (there may be more). And this doesn't include travel videos. A great distraction and calming sleep aid if you need it. My current favorite: jellyfish in space.]

How to Negotiate Lower Medical Bills

Here’s how you can navigate high medical costs.

Get an itemized bill

Ask for an itemized bill, so that you can review it and make sure the charges are correct, suggested McClanahan, a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

There can be errors, such as incorrect patient, provider or insurance information, as well as incorrect codes for the procedures and duplicate billing.

For instance, Medliminal, a company that identifies medical billing errors, generally finds that 25% of the charges on the bills it has reviewed are not billable.

Look for other sources of payment

You may have overlooked ways to cover your bills.

“I often had people eligible for Medicaid or subsidized insurance that they were able to get,” said Jenifer Bosco, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

“In some states, when you qualify for Medicaid, there is retroactive eligibility.”

If you have no insurance, check with your providers to see if they offer a discount to uninsured patients.

There are also federal requirements for nonprofit hospitals to provide financial assistance programs for low-income patients. The aid varies depending on the state and the institution.

However, 45% of nonprofit hospital organizations routinely send out bills to patients who have income low enough to qualify for charity care, according to an analysis by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation

Ask to lower the bill

Once you have explored all the options for payment, it’s time to see if you can get your bill lowered.

“Consumers may not realize that you can contact the health-care provider or the hospital and ask to negotiate,” Bosco said.

Reach out, be nice, and tell the provider that you can’t afford to pay the bill. Then, ask for a reduction.

Uninsured patients are usually charged the master rate, or the maximum that the hospital would charge for a particular procedure, Bosco noted.

She suggests asking to pay the Medicare rate, which health-care providers are generally very familiar with.

You can also check out the estimated costs of the procedure in your area on Healthcare Bluebook.

Remember, it’s not the doctor you’ll be dealing with but the billing department.

“The billing people have gotten so used to negotiating that they expect it,” McClanahan said.

Don’t expect to be successful at first, she noted.

Harness was able to get his bill down after filing a grievance with the hospital. In November, he was given a 30% discount for both surgeries, bringing the cost down to $56,152.40, he said.

He and Novick-Smith continued to follow up with the hospital to try to lower the bill. They argued he shouldn’t have to pay for the second surgery since it was most likely a complication from the clipping and stapling of the appendix tissue during the first surgery.

In May, the hospital reduced the bill to $25,143.20. Harness responded by offering $12,000, based on what Healthcare Bluebook noted was a fair price for an appendectomy The couple then got their bill knocked down to $22,304.17.

After Harness and Novick-Smith brought their story to Kaiser Health News, the hospital came back with their final offer: $19,335.

Request a payment plan

Once you have your final, negotiated bill you can still request to go on a payment plan.

Be very careful and make sure that the monthly payments are ones you can afford, Bosco advised.

“Try to come up with a realistic payment plan,” she said.

Harness is now on a plan to pay off his final bill. It is still a big chunk of his monthly income, but fortunately some friends set up a GoFundMe account to help him out.

“It felt really great that people cared to give a portion of what little they had to help me out in this situation,” he said.

Harness now has insurance through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He said he has also been approved for VA disability benefits for his hearing loss and has applied for benefits for spinal and knee issues due to his time in service.

by Michelle Fox, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Brian A. Jackson|Getty Images
[ed. We'll all have this experience at some point (maybe mulitple times). What a scam system - having to negotiate for your life or life savings. Referred here from: The hospital wants $83,135 for saving my wife. She’s worth it – but where did that figure come from? (The Guardian).]

Neon Nights

Liam Wong, HK Mansions; Still Life, Chongqing

via:

Imagine a Different History for Alaska

Imagine a different history for Alaska. These long-ago visionaries did. (Charles Wohlforth - Anchorage Daily News)

Image: Loren Holmes

[ed. From the three-part series: How to turn Alaska around (Charles Wohlforth - ADN). I got to know Charles ("don't call me Charlie") starting way back in 1989 during the Exxon Valdez oil spill when he was a young reporter just beginning his career (I was supervising the cleanup). This is an excellent sketch of Alaska from 1969 - present. And to be clear, it wasn't like people didn't forsee this result decades ago, especially after the state terminated its income tax. Crazy. It's a different place now.]

Les Paul & Steve Miller (and Mary Ford)

[ed. Most people know Les Paul simply as the inventor of a pretty good electric guitar. But he was also an amazing player in his days along with his fabulous partner Mary Ford. See here and here. Steve Miller also had some success with his band.]

The Best Margarita Mixes, Ranked

Backyard parties, Taco Tuesdays, Friday night drinks—few cocktails fit a celebratory occasion as well as the margarita. You don’t need a store-bought mix to make a good margarita at home, but if you’re having a big gathering and preparing your own is too time consuming, or you like the convenience or sweeter taste of a premade mix, it’s a quick and easy option.

We tested 12 margarita mixes to find our favorites, focusing on options with widespread availability throughout the country. A store-bought mix will never taste as natural or fresh as a margarita you can make from scratch, and many of the mixes we tried exuded artificial flavors ranging from lime candy to lemon Pledge. But a few tasted natural enough to pass as real margaritas, and our top recommendations also provide the best value of price to serving. (...)

[ed. Recommendations follow]

How to make a margarita from scratch

A good tequila, a bottle of triple sec, and a couple of ripe limes are all you need to make a classic margarita that tastes more natural than any store-bought mix ever will. Some people may prefer the sweeter taste and thicker texture of a premade margarita mix, but all of them lack the zest of a fresh-squeezed lime. If you’re making a margarita for your own enjoyment, the process is simple enough for home bartenders of all experience levels. If you have the time to batch margaritas before a big party, you and your guests will likely be happier with the results.

There are two prevalent margaritas recipes: the classic margarita and the Tommy’s margarita. Both are prepared the same way (shaken with ice, strained, and served on the rocks with or without a salt rim), but the classic version uses triple sec while the Tommy’s recipe calls for agave nectar instead. It’s completely up to you which recipe you use; some people think the Tommy’s has a cleaner taste that spotlights the tequila, and others like how the triple sec rounds out the cocktail. You can use any triple sec or curaçao you like in a margarita, but we recommend Cointreau because it has an aromatic orange-peel flavor and a dry finish, and it’s a higher quality than some cheaper triple secs you can find. Additionally, it’s most common to see blanco tequila used in a margarita, but you can use any reposado or añejo you’re partial to.

For a classic margarita, we like the version from renowned cocktail bar Death & Co, which uses both triple sec and agave nectar. If you don’t have agave on hand, it’s okay to omit it for a slightly tarter margarita (which is the recipe that we used in our testing):

• 2 ounces tequila
• ¾ ounce triple sec, preferably Cointreau
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• ¼ ounce agave nectar

To make a Tommy’s margarita, the recipe is as follows:

• 2 ounces tequila
• 1 ounce fresh lime juice
• ½ ounce agave nectar

To batch from-scratch margaritas, multiply either recipe by as many drinks as you want to make, combine all of the ingredients in a container, stir without ice, and refrigerate until you’re ready to serve. For the best result, shake the cocktails with ice and strain into a glass to remove any citrus pulp or ice chips. If that’s not possible, serving it straight over ice does the job. We don’t recommend adding ice to batches ahead of time, as you run the risk of overdiluting your drinks.

by Haley Perry, Wirecutter |  Read more:

Images: Connie Park

[ed. Also on topic (sort of): Pouring Through a Crisis: How Budweiser Salvaged Its World Cup. Taken by surprise by Qatar’s decision to ban beer at stadiums, the company remade its marketing strategy in real time (NYT).]

Vladimir Pozner: How the United States Created Vladimir Putin

[ed. How sad and infuriating. Such an important opportunity missed. "Our mistake was that we trusted you too much, and your mistake was trying to take advantage of that." (32:00). Other segments: 10:12 - 19:20; and 26:25 - 29:30. All well and good. Still, I wonder what Russia's end game actually is? It doesn't feel like the kind of world domination the US is pushing for - spread of democracy and opening of capitalist markets - but it still has to be something more than just security? See also: Why Did Russia Launch This Catastrophic War? (Current Affairs).]

Is That All There Is? How Neuroscience Confirms the Most Ancient Myths About Music

How Neuroscience Confirms the Most Ancient Myths About Music (Honest Broker)

People often talk to me about music, so I’m not surprised when friends ask me about specific songs. But I found it uncanny—and actually unsettling—when two elderly individuals very close to me, both in poor health and near death, mentioned the same obscure song.

These two individuals never met each other, and lived thousands of miles apart, but in their final days they both wanted to talk about the same record from more than fifty years ago. They told me that the lyrics of this pop tune captured their melancholy reflections on what had gone wrong in their lives.

The song in question, “Is That All There Is?,” had been a modest hit for vocalist Peggy Lee in 1969, but never quite reached the top ten. I’m hardly surprised by that. It was the era of Woodstock and psychedelic rock, and a gloomy song of this sort had nothing in common with the upbeat youth movement that was defining the musical culture of the day.

The track is mostly a semi-spoken monologue, interrupted by sung interludes on the meaninglessness of life—capped by a complaint that “I’m not ready for that final disappointment.” I consider it the mirror image of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a more successful hit of the same era, which celebrates a triumphant life full of victories and self-actualization.

If you never got the chance to do things your way, this is your song.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Video: Peggy Lee/YouTube

[ed. Definitely worth a full read. See also, this official video of Peggy Lee's "Fever" (yow).]

Project Wedge: Confidential Records Show a Saudi Golf Tour Built on Far-Fetched Assumptions

Early in 2021, consultants working for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund studied an audacious idea: The desert kingdom wanted to become the world leader in the hidebound realm of men’s professional golf.

If the idea seemed unlikely, records show that the benchmarks for success bordered on the fantastical. A new Saudi league would need to sign each of the world’s top 12 golfers, attract sponsors to an unproven product and land television deals for a sport with declining viewership — all without significant retaliation from the PGA Tour it would be plundering.

The proposal, code-named Project Wedge, came together as Saudi officials worked to repair the kingdom’s reputation abroad, which hit a low after the 2018 assassination of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents. The plan was the foundation for what became LIV Golf, the series whose debut this year provoked accusations that Saudi Arabia was trying to sanitize its human rights record with its deep pockets, former President Donald J. Trump’s country clubs and a handful of big-name golfers. Some of those golfers have publicly played down Saudi abuses, as has Mr. Trump.

The league’s promoters say they are trying to revitalize the sport and build a profitable league. But hundreds of pages of confidential documents obtained by The New York Times show that Saudi officials were told that they faced steep challenges. They were breaking into a sport with a dwindling, aging fan base — if one with plenty of wealthy and influential members — and even if they succeeded, the profits would be a relative pittance for one of the world’s richest sovereign wealth funds. Experts say that these make clear that Saudi Arabia, with a golf investment of least $2 billion, has aspirations beyond the financial.

“The margins might be thin, but that doesn’t really matter,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of sport and geopolitical economy at Skema Business School in Paris. “Because subsequently you’re establishing the legitimacy of Saudi Arabia — not just as an event host or a sporting powerhouse, but legitimate in the eyes of decision makers and governments around the world.”

The documents represent the most complete account to date of the financial assumptions underpinning LIV Golf. One of the most significant was prepared by consultants with McKinsey & Company, which has advised the kingdom’s leaders since the 1970s. McKinsey, which has worked to raise the stature of authoritarian governments around the world, was key to Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to diversify the kingdom’s economy and turn it into a powerful global investor. Worldwide sports have become a pillar in that plan, with Saudi officials even discussing the possibility of someday hosting the World Cup. 

The wealth fund did not comment.

McKinsey, which declined to comment, analyzed the finances of a potential golf league, but pointedly said in its report that it was not examining whether it was a strategically viable idea. And many of Saudi Arabia’s rosy assumptions, McKinsey added, “have been taken for granted and not been challenged in our assessment.”

Indeed, LIV Golf appears far from meeting the goals that the Project Wedge documents laid out. After an inaugural season that cost in excess of $750 million, the league has not announced major broadcasting or sponsorship deals. And its hopes for a surrender by, or an armistice with, the PGA Tour have instead collapsed into an acrimonious court battle. (...)

Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s 37-year-old de facto ruler, often gravitates toward splashy ventures and has repeatedly said that he sets sky-high targets in hopes of motivating officials to achieve a fraction of them. In its analysis, McKinsey called the golf league “a high-risk high-reward endeavor.”

The consultants detailed three possible outcomes for a franchise-driven league: languishing as a start-up; realizing a “coexistence” with the PGA Tour; or, most ambitiously, seizing the mantle of dominance.

In the most successful scenario, McKinsey predicted revenues of at least $1.4 billion a year in 2028, with earnings before interest and taxes of $320 million or more. (Federal records show that the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit, logged about $1.5 billion in revenue and posted a net income of almost $73 million for 2019.)

By contrast, a league mired in start-up status — defined as attracting less than half of the world’s top 12 players, navigating a “lack of excitement from fans,” reeling from limited sponsorships and confronting “severe response from golf society” — stood to lose $355 million, before interest and taxes, in 2028.

For now, LIV’s standing tilts sharply that way. Its tournaments have not commanded large crowds, and its broadcasts are largely limited to YouTube. The PGA Tour suspended players who defected, and it is not yet clear whether the organizers of the four major men’s tournaments will allow LIV golfers to participate. (...)

McKinsey’s work on the golf project is part of a longstanding pattern of foreign consultants providing rationales for Gulf States’ multibillion-dollar projects, some of which become white elephants. When the crown prince announced plans to build a futuristic city called Neom, McKinsey was among the companies that helped envision proposals for robotic dinosaurs, flying taxis and a ski resort that officials say will host the Asian Winter Games in 2029.

by Alan Blinder and Sarah Hurtes, NY Times | Read more:
Image: John David Mercer/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

[ed. McKinsey. Always near the bottom of every sludgy deal. Pete Buttigieg's old employer.]

On Speaking Spanish

Myriam Gurba: What made you want to discuss this subject?

Maria Bustillos: Well, my mom died … It’s going to be two years ago. And I used to speak Spanish with her every day, or pretty much every day. And now I don’t speak Spanish, like at all; I mean (a) I’m in Scotland right now, and (b) I’m estranged from most of my family, because they’re mostly Republicans, and the ones who aren’t Republicans don’t speak Spanish.

I was the first one of my family born in this country, and I had a rebellious attitude about participating in Latin American culture until I became an adult. I was taught to “assimilate,” and found my whole soul in English, as a teenager. But I still always spoke Spanish. I took that for granted. And I really miss it now; there’s a dimension of my psyche that has just sort of evaporated. I’ve come to realize that there’s so much more to all of this than politics, or “ESL” or immigration, or assimilation.

So tell me what your relationship is with Spanish.

MG: So, Spanish has been a part of me … It was a part of me before I was born, you know? Because my mother was born and raised in Mexico, speaking Spanish. When I was born, my mom was still in the process of learning English. And she’s told me that she didn’t work, I think, for maybe the first year of my life. And my mother is an extreme extrovert. She has no introversion—everything’s externalized, do you know what I mean? The woman lives inside-out. She needed somebody to talk to, and so I became her audience.

She’s said that she’d just speak to me all day long, and I’d just sort of nod along. And then I quickly became really hyperverbal, I think because I was around the world’s, or at least California’s, most prolific chatterbox. And so it just rubbed off on me. Do you know what I mean?

MB: Yeah. I mean your English is so stupendous, I love your English. But you spoke Spanish first?

MG: Yeah. Like in the house specifically, with my mother, and then my parents made a decision to raise all of their children bilingually. They decided that our father would speak to us in English, and our mother would speak to us in Spanish. They really, really, really abided by that agreement. I’m 45, and my dad still talks to me in English, and my mom in Spanish. The only time that I hear my mother speaking English is with people who are unable to speak Spanish. Or on an extremely rare occasion, she’ll speak English when she’s angry.

And so I get scared when I hear her speak English, because I’m like, “Somebody’s in trouble, and I don’t know if it’s me.” So that’s like my alarm, that’s my warning system; is the woman speaking English? If she’s speaking English, there’s trouble. So …

MB: How’s her English?

MG: Her English is great. She has an accent that is very noticeable, and she’s not at all interested in losing it. And so when she speaks, it’s clear to everybody who has heard Mexican speakers of English where she’s from, but she really owns it. She taught elementary school for 20 years.

My favorite mistakes that my mother makes in English happen when she confuses proverbs, or aphorisms or adages. And I think that she often improves them. Once she was looking at my friend and me and with a totally serious face, she goes, “It’s the law of the cookie and the way the jungle crumbles.” And it was beautiful.

MB: Poetry.

MG: I was like, “This is better.”

MB: My mom used to explain that a meddling person was “getting into my case.” So lovely.

So, you’re very close with your mom.

MG: Yeah. I love my mom a lot. (...)

MB: (...) How’s your writing, and do you read Spanish?

MG: I can read Spanish, but I need a lot of help writing it. I don’t have any formal education in Spanish composition. So I can read it competently and often do, but I struggle to write.

MB: Same.

MG: And I cannot accent it for the life of me. My mother has tried to teach me several times and I just sort of … I just treat the accents like pepper, wherever it falls, it falls.

[Both laughing helplessly]

MB: Go for it. That looks good! Oh man. (...)

MB: Yeah I love them. People ask me, do you speak Spanish fluently? And my stock reply is like, yeah, but like a really foul-mouthed eight-year-old.

MG: That’s what public fluency is, there are I think infinite ways to be fluent in a language and I think people who can understand everything but struggle to speak are fluent, but they experience extreme anxiety prior to speaking, and I think that anxiety is like… it’s socioculturally produced.

MB: Agreed. There’s a psychological moment to participating as a speaker in any culture. I know a lot of people, native speakers in various languages, who cannot have a conversation without gigantic anxiety because they’re being called on to produce language, and it’s frightening to them.

MG: It’s really terrifying for certain groups of people. I noticed that, when I was teaching high school, that basic—what we might call small talk, it seemed very challenging for about half of my students, and it wasn’t necessarily because these students spoke one language at home and another at school. They were unaccustomed to verbally socializing with one another, and they were really unaccustomed to low-stakes socializing verbally, low-stakes chatting. So I did a couple of lessons on small talk, because I was a social studies teacher—I taught civics and economics and history, but I would have, sometimes, these life skills components that I would weave into class.

MG: I explained how small talk is useful, I gave them examples of it and then I would have them practice with one another, and then I would also invite them to practice with me if they wanted to.

MB: Maybe the concept of triviality is native to people like us who are just naturally blabby, but there’s a certain kind of personality that considers speech significant and important, formal, it’s a commemoration of their lives at that moment, so they’re unable to unite that with triviality. People like us just look at that and think, what’s your problem? This all bullshit, none of it matters.

MG: My male students were especially challenged, because boys are not culturally or socially encouraged to engage in low-stakes chatter and so I really encouraged them. I had put down a list of common small talk subjects and encouraged them to practice with one another, because that way they wouldn’t have the added anxiety of talking to a girl.

I remember one time this student came up behind me, and he tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and I was like, “Yes José, what can I help you with?” And he’s like, “I’m here for some small talk.”

[Both howling]

MB: Oh my God, that’s priceless.

MG: One of those golden teaching moments.

MB: It explains why there’s sports, because otherwise they would be lost.

MG: Exactly. They need human contact, but they create these limits around how they can socialize, and they’re just such artificial silly limitations and barriers that are so easily removed, because they’re just really absurd fictions.

by Maria Bustillos, POPULA |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Another Maria post. I love her writing and didn't realize this is where she hangs out.] 

Free Falling

via:

[ed. Fire for you (Cannons).]

Save Seattle Music

Your favorite band is not okay.

Your favorite club is struggling to maintain staff, sell tickets, and reliably fill their calendar every month.

Rent is higher than ever; the cost of gas increased 49% in the first half of the year. The health care system continues to be a prohibitively expensive and inaccessible mess.

These problems are not unique to Seattle! Nor are they unique to the music industry. Bluntly: Shit is fucked everywhere. But Seattle was a thriving, energizing, musical city. It was synonymous with Sub Pop and KEXP. It was home to literally hundreds of rock, pop, hip-hop, soul, hardcore, metal, and experimental acts, and music fans flocked here to bear witness to the greatness that reliably rose from the damp, foggy shadows of the Pacific Northwest.

Now, venues are dark. Musicians are moving away, and those who remain are finding it harder and harder to prioritize their creative efforts over what's necessary for day-to-day survival. There's no growth. There's no energy. There are those who made it and those who did not.

It's time to turn things around. It's time to save Seattle's music scene.

Dave Segal spoke to six talent-buyers from venues, including the Crocodile, Neumos, Sunset Tavern, and the Royal Room to get the cold, hard truth about their current stressful state.

Kathleen Tarrant talked to a number of musicians who are struggling to find reliable mental health care, and how that impacts their ability to make art.

The organizers of Black Fret and SMASH, two aid organizations that launched in February 2020, share how difficult its been trying to fundraise and support artists during these volatile times, and two local musicians—one established and new to town—share their stories of how the lasting impact of the pandemic only fortified problems that existed before 2020.

But it's not all bad news! Ma’Chell Duma shares an idea that, frankly, could change the city forever—and it’s one I’ve heard others echo for years. Our music community needs the people in Seattle with money—the ones who established themselves and their businesses here because they were drawn to its energizing, melting pot of art, culture, and music—to invest back into the communities that brought them to the city in the first place.

And to see a local arts program that is working, read Matt Baume’s story about the 5th Avenue Theater’s First Draft program, an 18-month musical theater development camp that gives writers access to everything they need to develop the first draft of their musical. It offers peer support and access to workshops and meet-and-greets with industry experts. Most importantly, participants are paid for their time.

It's unanimous: Seattle’s music scene is broken. It's time to take a hard look at how we got here and ask ourselves: “What can we do to fix this?”

by Megan Seling, The Stranger |  Read more:

Image: Anthony Keo

[ed. Series here.]

John Batiste

[ed. Obviously loves playing and is good at it.]

Psychedelic Therapy Arrives in the PNW

Among tall Douglas fir and oak trees, surrounded by a winding creek that feeds into the Clackamas River, a new kind of therapist is being minted in Oregon.

The aptly named InnerTrek is one of many companies that take local mental health professionals, health care workers, and alternative healers through a six-month course that will allow them to seek certification from the Oregon Health Authority to become some of the first guides to administer psilocybin to people in the United States. On Friday at a retreat center in Damascus, east of Portland, about 30 people gathered to learn how to counsel people through a psychedelic experience.

While psychedelic drugs remain federally illegal, Oregon’s Measure 109 was passed by voters in 2020 and will allow for the authorized administration of psilocybin at approved service centers in the state by licensed guides starting next year.

 

The industry’s launch in Oregon gives a glimpse at what a potential rollout could look like in other states, including Washington. While a legalization bill during Washington’s past legislative session failed to gain traction, the efforts are likely to resurface.

Most recently, voters in Colorado followed in Oregon’s steps, and already local municipalities across the country, including Seattle, are decriminalizing the use of psychedelics, while dozens of ketamine and MDMA-assisted therapy courses are enlisting mental health professionals to jump headfirst into a psychedelic renaissance.

But with certification courses costing thousands of dollars, and thousands of people seeking care among a national mental health crisis with shortage of workers, how will this first wave of treatment play out?

 
Mushrooms’ “magic”

There are over 200 varieties of psychedelic fungi across the globe. If ingested, psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — creates a mind-altering experience, often described as intense, euphoric or mystical. It sometimes includes visual hallucinations or in rare cases synesthesia, a neurological condition where senses are experienced differently and a person can taste colors, for example.

Compared with drugs like alcohol, psychedelic mushrooms are generally considered safe with low potential for abuse and no known lethal dose. Though they’re not advised for people with severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, for people with depression, PTSD or trauma, there’s a growing body of research that’s found significant therapeutic benefits.

Researchers at the John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, for example, found that two doses of psilocybin provided relief for people with major depressive disorder for up to a year in some cases. The study, though small, was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in early 2022. Other researchers are investigating the value of psychedelics in helping people quit smoking, those with chronic illness or anorexia, and even health care workers experiencing burnout. (...)

 
Facilitators must complete at least 120 hours of training and an additional 40 hours of practicum or hands-on experience by an approved training program. Their training ranges from the ethics and responsibility of being a guide, to topics of consent when touching clients, how to deal with people undergoing a difficult trip, and general facilitation skills before, during and after a psychedelic experience, as well as self-care for the guide.

During the class Friday at InnerTrek (owned by Tom Eckert, architect of Measure 109), future facilitators discussed how varied the psychedelic experience can be for each person. Educators likened it to a flight: After ingesting psilocybin, the drug can take up to 75 minutes before takeoff — that’s where people can expect some “turbulence” with feelings of breathlessness or anxiety. The peak of the drug hits at around three to four hours, with the descent coming in at hour five or six, often coming in waves of clarity. (...)

The training programs currently cost about $8,000 to $10,000; facilitators must then pass a state exam before being licensed. (...)

While the Oregon Health Authority will start accepting applications for facilitators, service centers, labs and manufacturers on Jan. 2, it’s unlikely many will be ready soon. Starting this new supply chain will take time — educators think things will be up and running fully by summer or fall 2023.

Psychedelic aficionados also bring up concerns that plague the mental health field in general — how the workforce is largely white, despite psilocybin’s use among Native and Indigenous people, and barriers to accessing care. This form of treatment is not reimbursable by insurance and the high cost means some people that would most benefit from the care, are the least likely to be able to afford it.

by Esmy Jimenez, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Esmy Jimenez/The Seattle Times