All About… Freddie Tavares

Even if you’ve never heard of Freddie Tavares, you’ve almost certainly heard him. That was Freddie playing the iconic pedal-steel glissando at the start of the Looney Tunes theme tune in 1942, and he can also be heard strumming the ukulele on Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii. But there was much more to him than that.

Freddie Tavares was a Hawaiian designer, engineer and multi-instrumentalist who also played for Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, The Andrews Sisters, Henry Mancini and Lawrence Welk among countless others. What’s more, he was also a key figure behind the scenes at Fender across four decades.

Man of steel

Frederick Theodore Tavares was born on Maui Island, Hawaii, 18 February 1913. He began singing early on and when he was 12, Freddie’s eldest brother gave him a guitar. He clearly had natural ability because three years later he landed the rhythm guitar chair in Mary Kunewa’s orchestra. Having finished school, Freddie moved to Oahu, playing guitar three nights per week in Larry Bellis’ dance orchestra at the Alexander Young hotel. Soon after, Harry Owens offered Freddie the chance to play electric steel with the dance orchestra of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki.

At the time, Freddie couldn’t actually play the instrument that he would become most closely associated with, but Freddie told Owens, “I could easily learn to play one”. Armed with the arrangements, it took Freddie less than two weeks to learn all the steel guitar parts. (...)

In 1949, Freddie joined Wade Ray and his Ozark Mountain Boys on steel guitar, and began playing regularly at a club in Los Angeles called Cowtown. Over the next few years Freddie would write all the group’s arrangements, build their amplifiers and even figure out a way to amplify Ray’s violin. This facility with electronics led to a meeting with Leo Fender.

The fateful meeting

By 1953 the Fender factory was running at full capacity and Leo Fender was getting a bit burned out. He needed an assistant, preferably a professional musician, who could provide technical feedback from a player’s perspective. In March 1953, a mutual friend called Noel Boggs introduced the two men at Cowtown.

Freddie clearly wasn’t a fan of Fender amps and after the show he spent some time telling Leo what he thought was wrong with them. Rather than take offence, Leo took a screwdriver out of his infamous leather pocket pouch and opened up Freddie’s home-built amp on stage to check out how he had put it together. Leo was sufficiently impressed to offer Freddie a job as his assistant engineer.

Although Freddie was hired for his electronics expertise, at that time the Fender company was primarily focused on designing a new guitar to accompany the Telecaster. On Freddie’s second day at Fender he began his “first real project… to put the Stratocaster on the drawing board”. Working with Leo, Bill Carson and guitarist Rex Gallion, Freddie helped to refine and finalise the shape and contours of the Stratocaster body. However, it is widely accepted that Freddie’s most significant contribution to the Strat was his involvement with the design of the vibrato system.

Leo’s first design attempt was much closer to the vibrato that ended up on the Jazzmaster and Jaguar. Although it functioned pretty well, its roller bridge saddles reduced sustain and it had the tonal qualities of a banjo. Having already spent six months on development and $5,000 on tooling, this must have been a bitter pill for Leo, but the forthright Freddie talked him around.

Freddie realised that the bridge needed more mass, and he also advocated an integrated design based on a mechanical gram scale rather than one with a separate bridge. Freddie’s redesign was so effective, it has remained a feature of Stratocasters ever since, and the basic design principle was adopted for all the locking trems that came after.

For Freddie, it was a flying start and he went on to play a significant part in the development of the Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Jazz Bass and Bass VI. Despite Leo reverting to his original vibrato design for the Jazzmaster, it seems that model was the design Freddie liked best because he retained one from the first batch of three prototypes as his personal guitar.
Back to amps

Freddie was also heavily involved in amplifier design while at Fender, and was pivotal in the development of the 4×10 Bassman – arguably the most iconic and influential of all Fender amplifiers. Having helped to create the quintessential American rock amp, it’s ironic that Freddie disapproved of overdrive. In fact, it’s probably what bugged him most about TV front tweeds back in 1953.

His son, Terry Tavares, recalls Freddie complaining, “I’ve put my integrity and heart into the design of Fender amps, and they produce crystal-clear sound. These snot-nosed three-chord wonders now want them to sound like $39.95 Sears catalogue amps. One of these days I’m going to design a 10,000-watt amp and not tell them. When they turn the volume up to max and play their first chord, poof, they’ll just disappear.”

Freddie said that “all of the guitars were essentially Leo’s design”, and this natural self-effacement tallies with Dan Smith’s recollection of Freddie as “the most humble man I have ever known”. It’s probably fair to say he didn’t always get the credit or recognition he deserved, but Smith also described him as “outgoing by nature, funny and entertaining, articulate to a fault, continually in search of knowledge and unbelievably caring.” Others who worked closely with Freddie certainly did recognise his contribution to Fender’s history. John Page, who once headed up Fender’s Custom Shop, got his big break when Freddie recruited him as a design assistant in 1978.

“What a freakin’ honour, 23 years old and I was made a guitar designer at Fender working side-by-side with Freddie Tavares. Freddie became like a father to me. He even called me his third son. He taught me the ins and outs of guitar design, told lots of historical stories, made me take vitamins, and told lots and lots of really bad, old jokes. He would even do one-arm pushups when artists stopped by just to show them how spry he was. I loved him. What a great man”.

Guitarist and Fender executive Bill Carson, who was one of Leo Fender’s trusted consultants, said it all: “In my opinion, he was the greatest man in both musical talent and personal integrity that I ever worked with”. Even so, by the early 1980s, the management had stopped listening to Freddie, and some within the company regarded him as little more than a symbolic figurehead.

Life after Fender

Freddie stayed musically active throughout his career, keeping up the session work, recording movie soundtracks and playing with his brother Eddie in The South Sea Islanders. He was also a founder and long-serving treasurer of the Polynesian Society in California. Following his retirement in 1985 Freddie stepped up his gigging schedule, playing mostly for older people in nursing and retirement homes. It’s doubtful that any of them would have known that their entertainment was being provided by an inductee of the Fender Hall of Fame and the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame.

Referring to his mixed lineage, Freddie would proudly remark that, “the Portuguese makes me stubborn; Chinese makes me smart; English makes me high-class; Hawaiian gives me the music; Tahitian gives me the beat – I couldn’t ask for more.” Freddie died in Anaheim, California on 24 July 1990 at the age of 77 and he is buried in Nuuanu cemetery on Oahu.

by Huw Price, Guitar.com |  Read more:

Images: Fender Stratocaster (uncredited); and, Fred Tavares – Hawai`i’s Les Paul (Ho`olohe Hou Radio)

[ed. See also: Freddie & Ernest Tavares and their influence on modern music and the Stratocaster (Maui News)]

My Resignation

I have resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.

The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.

by Anne Boyer, Mirabilary |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Link credit: LitHub.]

Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants

Abstract

As a complement to vaccines, small-molecule therapeutic agents are needed to treat or prevent infections by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants, which cause COVID-19. Affinity selection-mass spectrometry was used for the discovery of botanical ligands to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Cannabinoid acids from hemp (Cannabis sativa) were found to be allosteric as well as orthosteric ligands with micromolar affinity for the spike protein. In follow-up virus neutralization assays, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid prevented infection of human epithelial cells by a pseudovirus expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and prevented entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells. Importantly, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid were equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha variant B.1.1.7 and the beta variant B.1.351. Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.

by Richard B van Breemen, Ruth N Muchiri et al., PubMed/NIH |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Good news for stoners. Also, in other research news: Experimental antibiotic kills deadly superbug, opens whole new class of drugs (ArsTechnica):]

The English Beat

[ed. One of my favorite 80s groups. See also: I Confess; Save It For Later; and End of the Party (... and many others).]

Trapped in Medicare Advantage Plans

"Timmins, though, discovered that his enrollment in a Premera Blue Cross Medicare Advantage plan would mean a limited network of doctors and the potential need for preapproval, or prior authorization, from the insurer before getting care. The experience, he said, made getting care more difficult, and now he wants to switch back to traditional, government-administered Medicare.

But he can’t. And he’s not alone.

“I have very little control over my actual medical care,” he said, adding that he now advises friends not to sign up for the private plans. “I think that people are not understanding what Medicare Advantage is all about.” (...)

“It’s one of those things that people might like them on the front end because of their low to zero premiums and if they are getting a couple of these extra benefits — the vision, dental, that kind of thing,” said Christine Huberty, a lead benefit specialist supervising attorney for the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources.

“But it’s when they actually need to use it for these bigger issues,” Huberty said, “that’s when people realize, ‘Oh no, this isn’t going to help me at all.’” (...)

David Meyers, assistant professor of health services, policy, and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, analyzed a decade of Medicare Advantage enrollment and found that about 50% of beneficiaries — rural and urban — left their contract by the end of five years. Most of those enrollees switched to another Medicare Advantage plan rather than traditional Medicare. (...)

“The problem is that once you get into Medicare Advantage, if you have a couple of chronic conditions and you want to leave Medicare Advantage, even if Medicare Advantage isn’t meeting your needs, you might not have any ability to switch back to traditional Medicare,” Meyers said.

by Sarah Jane Tribble, KFF Health News | Read more:
Image: DigitalVision/Getty
[ed. I've mentioned these deceptive Medicare Advantage plans before (see: Only Medicare is Medicare) but it's worth re-stating: don't do it! The answer, Healthcare For All, and if not that, at least Medicare For All. And for all the whiners who cry about cost (and the waste of their precious taxpayer dollars), see this (Twitter/X), and here:]

 "Congress has just passed a $1.59T spending bill for 2024, with a significant $886B for defense. With non-defense at $704B, defense now dominates 56% of spending."

[ed. That's 3/4 of a trillion dollars. Every year. I don't know how they spend it fast enough. Must be a big problem.]

Boeing: Safety Is Our Top Priority

[Boeing Representative] It’s a great pleasure, thank you.
[Interviewer] This aircraft that was involved in the incident over Oregon this week…
[Boeing Representative] Yeah, the one where the door fell off?
[Interviewer] Yeah.
[Boeing Representative] That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.
[Interviewer] Well, how is it untypical?
[Boeing Representative] Well, there are a lot of these planes going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen … I just don’t want people thinking that 737 MAX planes aren’t safe.
[Interviewer] Was this 737 MAX safe?
[Boeing Representative] Well I was thinking more about the other ones…
[Interviewer] The ones that are safe...
[Boeing Representative] Yeah...the ones where the door doesn’t fall off.
[Interviewer] Well, if this one wasn’t safe, why did it have 171 passengers on it?
[Boeing Representative] Well, I’m not saying it wasn’t safe, it’s just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones.
[Interviewer] Why?

[Boeing Representative] Well, some of them are built so the door doesn’t fall off at all

[Interviewer] Wasn’t this built so the door wouldn’t fall off?
[Boeing Representative] Well, obviously not.
[Interviewer] How do you know?
[Boeing Representative] Well, ‘cause the door fell off, and the cabin explosively depressurized, forcing an emergency landing. It's a bit of a give away. I would just like to make the point that that is not normal.
[Interviewer] Well, what sort of standards are these new civilian airliners built to?
[Boeing Representative] Oh, very rigorous … aeronautical engineering standards.

[Interviewer] What sort of things?
[Boeing Representative] Well the door’s not supposed to fall off, for a start.
[Interviewer] And what other things?
[Boeing Representative] Well, there are … regulations governing the materials they can be made of.
[Interviewer] What materials?
[Boeing Representative] Well, cardboard’s out.
[Interviewer] And?
[Boeing Representative] …No cardboard derivatives… (...)
[Interviewer] Like paper? [Boeing Representative]. … No paper, no string, no Scotch tape… [Interviewer] Rubber?

[Boeing Representative] No, rubber’s out ... Um, They’ve got to have a door stop. There’s a quality control inspection.

[Interviewer] What’s the minimum inspection requirement?

[Boeing Representative] Oh… one two minute session, I suppose.

[Interviewer] So, the allegations that these 737 MAX airplanes are just designed to profit as much as possible and to hell with the consequences, I mean that’s ludicrous…
[Boeing Representative] Ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. These are very, very strong vessels!

[Interviewer] So what happened in this case?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the door fell off in this case by all means, but that’s very unusual.
[Interviewer] But Mr. Representative, why did the door fall off?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the pressure hit it.
[Interviewer] The pressure hit it?
[Boeing Representative] A pressure wave hit the door.
[Interviewer] Is that unusual?
[Boeing Representative] Oh, yeah… during cabin pressurization?…Chance in a million.

[Interviewer] So what do you do to protect the environment in dangerous cases like this?
[Boeing Representative] Well, the door escaped outside its environment.
[Interviewer] Into another environment….
[Boeing Representative] No, no, no. it’s descended below the environment, it’s not in the environment.
[Interviewer] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Boeing Representative] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in any environment. It fell outside the environment.
[Interviewer] Well, what’s down there?
[Boeing Representative] Nothing’s down there…
[Interviewer] Well there must be something down there.
[Boeing Representative] There is nothing down there… all there is …. is houses…and cars….and buildings...
[Interviewer] And?
[Boeing Representative] And power lines.
[Interviewer] And what else?
[Boeing Representative] And birds.
[Interviewer] And anything else?
[Boeing Representative] And a Boeing 737 MAX-9 emergency exit door, but there’s nothing else out there.

[Interviewer] Mr. Representative, thanks for joining us.

[Boeing Representative] It’s a complete void.

[Interviewer] Yeah, well, we’re out of time.

[Boeing Representative] The environment’s perfectly safe. …. We’re out of time?.. Can you book me a flight?

[Interviewer] But didn’t you come in a Boeing press plane?

[Boeing Representative] Yes, I did, but

[Interviewer] What happened?

[Boeing Representative] The door fell off.

by Andi, Twitter/X | Read more:

Image: Boeing

[ed. Slightly modified from the old Clarke and Dawe skit "The Front Fell Off" (Y/T). See also, this:]

***

"The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on long-standing safety calls for longer in-flight recordings.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data."

~ Loss of Alaska cockpit recording rekindles industry safety debate (Reuters)

The Rest of the Details They Left to the Lawyers

​Claudine Gay was in Rome on a family vacation on Dec. 27 when Penny Pritzker, the leader of Harvard University’s governing board, called to ask: Did she think there was a path forward with her as the school’s president?

Ms. Pritzker sounded weary, and it was posed as an open question, two people with knowledge of the conversation said. But Dr. Gay understood what it meant. Her six-month tenure as Harvard’s president was over. On Jan. 2, she announced her resignation.

That marked the end of one of the most tumultuous periods in Harvard’s 387-year history, a controversy that thrust the school into the public debate after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Not only did the university’s president lose her job, but the secretive workings of its board, the Harvard Corporation, were laid bare.

For weeks the board had stood by its embattled president as she dealt with withering criticism of her tepid response to antisemitism on campus, her disastrous testimony before a House panel and mounting allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. Ms. Pritzker, who had led the selection of Dr. Gay as the school’s first Black president, was an especially ardent backer.

On Dec. 12, the corporation put out a statement in support of Dr. Gay, citing “our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

But within two weeks, the once strong support had begun to dissolve, according to interviews with a dozen people with knowledge of the discussions, including those who had spoken directly with Dr. Gay, Ms. Pritzker and other board members or were briefed on their thinking and actions. They requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak about the deliberations publicly. As the board members flew to ski towns and beaches for the holidays, they had a dramatic change of heart about their president.

A handful of the 12 members of the board, which included Dr. Gay, came from great American fortunes built on name brands. Others were self-made financiers, philanthropists or retired academics. All but one attended Harvard. Accustomed to a certain level of success, they had hoped that their Dec. 12 statement would signal a new beginning and show their commitment to righting the ship. (...)

Along with the public declaration of support they offered on Dec. 12, the board members privately asked Dr. Gay to help come up with a plan to turn things around, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. Over the next week or so, Dr. Gay and her staff created a plan they called a “spring reset,” one of the people said. Come the new year, she would appear all over campus, hold office hours and express her empathy. There would be task forces to address antisemitism and Islamophobia.

But before Dr. Gay could send the board additional details, more trouble erupted. On Dec. 19, new allegations of more than 40 examples of plagiarism in Dr. Gay’s academic work emerged, first reported in conservative media outlets. When she sent her latest plan to the board the next day, some members told her they liked it, but to others, it showed that she didn’t understand the urgency of the expanding crisis, according to people with knowledge of board members’ thinking. (...)

Dr. Gay has stood by the overall integrity of her work. Harvard has said she didn’t commit “research misconduct,” though she did offer to make minor changes to some of her prior writings in the wake of the allegations.

Cracks in the board’s support were starting to show. Especially concerned was Timothy R. Barakett, Harvard’s treasurer and a relatively new member of the corporation. From early on, he didn’t think keeping Dr. Gay was tenable. He told his fellow board members that Dr. Gay’s poor leadership and academic conduct might disqualify her from the presidency, those who spoke with him said.

Mr. Barakett didn’t think Dr. Gay’s apologies got it right and argued that she was failing to take full responsibility for her plagiarism, according to donors, professors and others who spoke with board members.

At first, Mr. Barakett was an outlier in the group. But his arguments slowly won supporters on the board. One was Paul J. Finnegan, a co-founder of Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm. In mid-December, he caught word of a recent closed-door session at the Harvard Club of New York City where Flynn Cratty, a prominent Harvard academic, pointedly criticized Dr. Gay’s and the university’s commitment to academic freedom. (...)

Corporation members also scattered to vacation homes and resorts around the world. Ms. Pritzker, a former secretary of commerce and an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, spent time in Aspen, Colo. Kenneth I. Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express, went to Miami. Mr. Barakett was also in Florida, while Karen Gordon Mills, a former leader of the Small Business Administration and an heir to the Tootsie Roll fortune, was at an economic conference in India.

The board members had received plenty of advice and criticism by others in their wealthy circles, Harvard alumni and donors. But when they arrived at their vacation spots around Christmas they were besieged by a new wave from friends and relatives. Some people told Ms. Pritzker that she might be forced to resign from the Harvard Corporation because she had helped choose Dr. Gay and stood by her.

More than one board member had children studying at Harvard. At least one worried that other students would harass them because of their parents’ roles on the board and the bad press, according to two people who spoke with corporation members.

It was clear that the controversies were not dying. On Christmas Eve, William Ackman, a hedge fund manager and a vigorous opponent of Dr. Gay, posted on X that she had been asked to resign — which was not true at the time. He also revealed that she had hired outside lawyers — which was true. Newspaper articles about Dr. Gay and the board kept coming.

At this point, Dr. Gay was somewhat removed from the situation. She called Mr. Chenault from Rome at Christmastime, and he was sympathetic and supportive, a person familiar with the conversation said. She reached out to Ms. Pritzker on Christmas Day.

By then the board action had shifted from formal meetings to a flurry of phone calls and email discussions among small groups of members, with Ms. Pritzker guiding many of the conversations. (...)

For weeks, the focus of board conversations had been on finding a way to keep Dr. Gay and end the crisis on campus. But by the day after Christmas, that had changed, people briefed on the events said. The board members agreed that they were dealing with a crisis of leadership and that the best path forward for Harvard was without Dr. Gay in the president’s chair. Everyone agreed it was time for Ms. Pritzker to call her.

On that Dec. 27 phone call, Dr. Gay said she would resign. Ms. Pritzker gave her the weekend to sort out her exit, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. In subsequent phone calls, the two began to hammer out the terms of Dr. Gay’s departure, including what the Harvard Corporation’s and her statements should say and an agreement that she would remain on Harvard’s faculty.

The rest of the details they left to the lawyers.

by Maureen Farrell and Rob Copeland, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sophie Park for The New York Times
[ed. Can't think of a better example of how 'elites' operate in the real world. This appears to muddy the waters between the Harvard Corporation and the actual Board. So what does that mean? Who knows? Damage control, all the way down.]

Peak Hydration

In 2023 Hydration Became a Lifestyle. Giant Stanley cups, WaterTok, Erewhon’s $26 luxury water. This year it seems we were thirstier than ever.

This September, Brooke Shields had a rough night at L’Artusi in Manhattan. She’d been preparing for her one-woman show, “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields,” by hydrating. A lot. Shortly after she entered the restaurant, everything started to go black. She was having a grand mal seizure. “I had had too much water,” she told Glamour. “I flooded my system, and I drowned myself.” Luckily, L’Artusi’s sommelier called an ambulance, and Shields made a full recovery at the hospital. “I didn't know. I just kept thinking I was hydrating," she said in a later interview.

You can hardly blame Shields for her overhydration. Drinking more water is good for us we’re always told, and hydration is the key to health. Drinking enough water each day has been a pillar of wellness advice for years, but in 2023, something tipped hydration culture into overdrive. The viral water brand Liquid Death is a cult favorite of Gen Z, and Liquid IV, which bills itself as a “hydration multiplier” and is used as a preemptive hangover cure, claims to be closing in on a billions dollars in net sales. Prime Hydration, the beverage line created by social media giants Logan Paul and KSI, is also on track to pass a billion dollars in sales this year, even as experts raise eyebrows at its caffeine content. A Le Creuset-like fandom has sprung up around those enormous and apparently indestructible Stanley reusable water bottles, and the widely panned AirUp bottle somehow went viral on TikTok, where #WaterTok also surged in popularity. In 2023, it seems we were thirstier than ever.

Plain tap water isn’t enough because it’s not doing enough for us; drinking a glass of tap water only slakes our thirst for a moment. In our endless quest for hydration, we need Water Plus: It must have vibes, or taste like candy, or go through a rebranding process so mind-bending that it self-describes as a “nonalcoholic seltzer.” It’s no longer good enough to drink only when you’re literally thirsty. We’re told to consume our beverages, be they water, electrolyte solutions, or influencer-peddled caffeine bombs, more often and faster than ever. In exchange, we’re promised more energy, a better immune system, better sleep, a better life.

You might know Ophora water—”water for wellness,” as its website proclaims in large letters—from one of several TikToks that went viral this year. It’s sold at Erewhon for a bold $26. It is the ultimate Water Plus, the apex of uber-hydration. It starts with purity: Ophora claims to filter out contaminants like microplastics and potentially harmful chemicals that many other filtered waters still contain. It balances pH to make the water alkaline, and the big sell is its “hyper-oxygenation”—which means oxygen is stabilized in the h2O at a density of 40 parts per million, the company says. Ophora claims to have patents pending for the technology it uses to infuse the water with “high levels of molecular oxygen,” which creates water that allegedly increases energy, decreases inflammation, enhances cell detoxification, and reduces sports recovery time.

Ophora is more than just $26 bottled water: The company will install a complete water filtration system in your home, or set you up with an entire hot tub or pool filled with nothing but Ophora water. “The skin is the largest organ on your body,” a spokesperson says earnestly in one video. “Imagine soaking in a hot tub that's 102 degrees that has 30 parts per million of oxygen penetrating your body.” That’s a lot of penetration. Ophora says drinking and bathing in its water will lead to benefits including more energy and less sickness. Testimonials claim the water has led to weight loss, improved metabolism, and the sensation that “the ocean doesn’t feel as cold.” Meanwhile, water experts are skeptical.

For four days, I only drank Ophora water. Its bold claims of being “the world’s healthiest water” rang in my ears as I hoped that true hydration would be all it’s been promised to be. I had four jugs of 64 ounces that I would drink over four days. Near the cap, each jug had a single loop big enough for one finger to slip in—not ergonomic, but perfect for tilting it up to your mouth for a quick swill. I recorded my weight, body fat percentage, and resting heart rate at the start of my journey, feeling optimistic. (...)

With a pH level of 8, Ophora water is slightly basic. Studies on the effects of alkaline water on the body have shown mixed results—some studies (funded by companies that sell alkaline water) suggest it could improve hydration in athletes, but experts are doubtful of other claims, like detoxification. Still, I felt vindicated to learn that nausea, stomach aches, and even vomiting are side effects to drinking alkaline water as it can upset the pH balance of your body. Were four days of intense stomach pain simply the price I had to pay for the ocean to feel less chilly? (...)

Even if I did, not even Ophora could fill the colossal role we’ve created for hydration. Anistacia Barrak-Barber is a water sommelier (yes, it’s a real thing) and holds a Water Center Certificate from Columbia University—basically, she loves water and has studied its effect on our bodies. Barack-Barber is a great proponent in the supposed healing properties of mineral waters—specifically as it pertains to digestion and the absorption of minerals our body needs, like calcium. (Some mineral waters have been shown to aid in digestion, and have increased bioavailable calcium.) When it comes to Ophora, though, she’s a non-believer. “The scientific testing doesn't really bear out what Ophora promises,” she wrote in an email. Some research seems to agree. A 2006 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that “oxygenated water fails both quantitative analysis and practical physiological tests of exercise performance and recovery,” and that “significant intestinal absorption of O2 is unsubstantiated.” In other words, it acted a lot like normal water.

There have always been those who proselytize about the healing effects of water, but bottled water didn’t take off in America until the 1970s, when Perrier essentially created the market. In the 2000s, the big beverage makers Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola got into the bottled water game with familiar brands like Dasani and Aquafina. As more people became distrustful of tap water (rightfully so, in some regions), and diet culture became more prevalent in the American psyche, waters branded as speciality and small-batch, like Fiji Water, became more coveted. In the mid-2010s, brands like SmartWater that offer features like pH balance and added electrolytes defined what optimized water might look like—that is, water formulated for athletic performance. Now, we get our hydration from any number of products, from sports drinks to electrolyte powders to ionized, antioxidant-producing water.

by Sam Stone, Bon Appétit |  Read more:

Image: Qianhui Yu
[ed. See also: Why People Are Camping Out at Target for the Valentine’s Stanley Tumbler; and, #WaterTok: What Ever Happened to Just Drinking Water? (NYT); and, We’ve Reached Peak Beverage (BA):]

***

"At seemingly every supermarket and drugstore, I’ve tripped over a dozen hard seltzer displays spilling into the aisles. I kept my cool through the influx of cactus, hop, birch, aloe, probiotic, and adaptogenic waters; through the canned highballs, sake spritzes, and margaritas (a few quite good), flavored lattes, sparkling cold brews, and redundantly conceived “hard” kombuchas. I didn’t even overreact that time I brought home an energy drink I’d mistaken for tangerine-flavored sparkling water—mostly due to humiliation that I somehow missed ENERGIZE shouting in all caps on the box. (...)

The global ready-to-drink (RTD) market reached $89 billion as of 2022, according to research company Transparency Market Research. The firm also estimates that the North American RTD beverage market will hit somewhere between $13.9 and $22.3 billion by the end of this year. Between 2020 and 2021, premade, spirits-based RTD makers increased revenues by 42 percent in the US, no doubt buoyed by recurring periods of at-home happy hours due to the pandemic."

College Bowl Games: Send in the Memes

After winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., Kansas State’s football team gathered on the field around a garage-size toaster that was protected by a pair of mall cops wearing “Snack Security” shirts.

An unusual chant erupted — “Toast that mascot! Toast that mascot!” — as Strawberry, a giant Pop-Tart with limbs, climbed to the top of the toaster, bopping along to the disco-era beat of “Hot Stuff,” by Donna Summer.

“We will always love you, Strawberry,” the announcer Jason Ryan Perry said over the stadium’s public address system. “Can’t wait to eat you.”

For nearly three hours, Strawberry had worked the crowd as one of the surprise stars of the game — and of the entire college bowl season, which was no small feat for an anthropomorphized breakfast pastry. By the time Strawberry tossed aside a sign that read “Dreams Really Do Come True” so that it could happily slide through a slot and have its crust toasted to golden-brown perfection, the internet was about to crater.

Sure enough, Strawberry soon emerged from the toaster as an edible version of itself. The victorious players pounced, gorging themselves on Strawberry by the handful until all that was left — R.I.P., Strawberry — was its left eye.

“I think those guys were really hungry,” Heidi Ray, the senior director of brand marketing for Pop-Tarts, said in a telephone interview.

In a crowded marketplace, the Pop-Tarts Bowl — renamed this year after having previously been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Camping World Bowl and several other monikers — managed to do something special: elevate an otherwise ordinary game into a viral sensation.

Michigan and Washington will face off in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday night, but in an era in which there are more than 40 bowl games a season, with only two of them — the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, serving as national championship semifinals — carrying any sort of significance, the Pop-Tarts Bowl won the internet.

Or, at the very least, it shared the internet championship with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. (...)

With so many mostly meaningless bowls — the Guaranteed Rate Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl and the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl — the most intense competition is not necessarily between teams on the field but among the brands that are hoping for a fleeting (and profitable) moment of virality. (...)

When Duke’s Mayo, a condiments company based in Richmond, Va., began sponsoring the game in 2020 — it had previously been sponsored by, among others, Meineke Car Care Center — the feeling was that the company “needed to do something different to make mayonnaise cool again,” said Joe Tuza, the condiments president of Sauer Brands, which owns Duke’s Mayo. In partnering with college football, the brand has sought to capitalize on its share of made-for-the-internet moments, both planned and unplanned.

Since 2021, the winning coach of the game has gotten drenched with a cooler full of mayonnaise as Tubby, the brand’s aggressively eyebrowed mascot, triumphantly raises his arms and Mr. Tuza stands nearby with a cartoon-size check. The incentive for the coach is that $10,000 goes to a charity of his choice.

“Every time I’m up onstage with the trophies, the players start chanting, ‘Mayo dump! Mayo dump!’” Mr. Tuza said. “It’s like a payoff for them to see their coach get doused after all the hard work they’ve put in.”

And while various skeptics, including Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, a noted mayonnaise hater, have questioned whether it is actually mayonnaise, Mr. Tuza and Mr. Yoho both vouched for its authenticity.

“It’s 100 percent mayonnaise,” Mr. Yoho said. “I’ve smelled it. They have to stir it to get the viscosity right.”

by Scott Cacciola, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Reper/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
[ed. Grumpy old man comment: appalling. Beyond the corporate branding of nearly everything in life, this'll probably be the last game most players in these bowls ever play. Imagine working all season (all your life actually) building toward a goal and be awarded the Pop-Tarts Championship and trophy (to show your grandkids)? Ackk.]

via:
[ed. Blog maintenance]

Down In the Groove

 

“Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump,” Ray Wylie Hubbard says. “I’m just hanging around, and things happen.”

Like Forrest Gump, the character played by Tom Hanks in the 1994 film of the same name, Hubbard has a history of seemingly stumbling into connections with famous people. His past albums have contained guest appearances by Lucinda Williams, Eric Church, Joe Walsh, Chris Robinson, Ronnie Dunn, Patty Griffin, Tony Joe White and Ashley McBryde, His newest album, Co-Starring Too, features Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Randy Rogers, James McMurtry, Hayes Carl and Wynonna Judd.

It’s easy to get the wrong impression from this roster of guests. While it’s true that Hubbard hasn’t chased after these big names, neither is it true that the collaborations were as accidental as Gump’s. When you’re 75 years old and have been releasing albums for 57 of those years, your music has a way of sneaking into places you’d never suspect. “When you put these records out,” Hubbard marvels over the phone from his home in Wimberly, “you never know who’s listening to them.”

A case in point is his unexpected friendship with Starr. “About eight years ago,” Hubbard recalls, “someone told me, ‘Ringo’s been talking you up on his website.’ I went to the site, and Ringo had written, ‘This is what I’ve been listening to: some mono Beatles tracks that George Martin sent me, the new Dylan thing, and this guy from Texas going, ‘Snake farm, ooh-woo-woo.’

“A few months later, my drummer Rick Richards and I are playing McCabe’s in California, and Brent Carpenter, the guy who does all of Ringo’s videos, is there. He says, ‘Ringo’s at the Greek Theatre tomorrow night, and he wants you to come.’ So we go, and I introduce Rick as ‘my band.’ Ringo liked that my whole band was a drummer. He asked me to come on stage and sing ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ with him at the end of his show.

“Six months after that, my wife Judy is opening the mail, and she says, ‘Damn, I have to lose seven pounds.’ Why’s that? I ask. ‘Because we’ve been invited to the wedding of Joe Walsh and Marjorie Bach.’ It turns out that after his divorce, Joe was living with Ringo and his wife Barbara Bach. When Ringo put ‘Snake Farm’ on, the two Bach sisters started dancing around, and when Joe’s eyes met Marjorie’s, the rest was history.”

Like Gump, Hubbard presents a mirror that allows other people to see themselves. In contrast to Gump, whose very blankness invited reflection, however, Hubbard presents a mirror crowded with paradoxical aspects to identify with. Hubbard’s song “Snake Farm,” for example, championed by Starr and recorded by Paul Thorn, Bobby Bare, Waymore’s Outlaws and many more, has something for everyone.

If, like Starr and Bare, you have a weakness for jovial humor, you’ll enjoy the song’s suggestion that the Texas tourist trap “just sounds nasty” and it “pretty much is.” If, like Hubbard’s Red Dirt disciples, you enjoy barroom sing-alongs, the song’s “ooh-woo-woo” refrain is hard to beat. If, like Thorn, you appreciate the more gothic aspects of Southern culture, the song’s python-tattooed, malt-liquor-swilling, ticket-taking protagonist Ramona is made for you. And if, like the song’s original producer, Gurf Morlix, you savor a greasy blues groove, this song boasts one of the best.

“Ray is deep down in the mud with those grooves,” says Morlix, who plays bass and/or guitar on six of the new album’s 11 tracks. “All the emotions are mixed in — it’s the lowdown rhythm of the earth itself. It’s the blues, of course, but it’s also that dirty beat. There are a handful of songwriters I know of who can approximate that same feeling with the rhythm, but none can write lyrics like Ray does. No one. Dylan could maybe come close, but … no … not even him.” 

There’s a song on the new album simply called “Groove” that explicates the musical side of Hubbard’s appeal. Opening with the funkiest of bass lines by the late George Reiff and supplemented by Bukka Allen’s high-pitched organ squeal, the song practices what it preaches. The groove, Hubbard sings, “came about when a woman was walkin,’ sashayin’ down like she owned the street. A man with a guitar emulated that and fabricated a lowdown beat.” (...)

The roots of Hubbard’s two recent, guest-loaded albums go back to 2019. He was playing a show in Nashville, when Julian Raymond, an A&R rep for Big Machine Records, Taylor Swift’s original label and Tim McGraw’s current home, asked Hubbard what he’d been up to.

“I’ve been making a record,” the singer-songwriter replied, “and I’ve got a song with a Beatle, an Eagle, a Black Crowe and a Was (Not Was) on it.” He wasn’t lying. The album he was cutting for his own label, Bordello Records, opened with the song “Bad Trick,” which featured help from Starr, Walsh, Chris Robinson and Don Was. “I’d like to hear that,” replied Raymond. That’s how the album, Co-Starring, and this year’s sequel, Co-Starring Too, both wound up on Big Machine Records rather than Bordello.

So it wasn’t like this Nashville major label paired Hubbard with a bunch of guest stars. The collaborations were the result of folks volunteering to work with Hubbard on a record intended for his own small label. And they do so because songs like “Snake Farm” stand out like islands in an ocean of mere cleverness and competence. The lyrics are so surprising and visual and the music so slinky and catchy, fellow musicians want to be part of those songs. (...)

The devil makes three appearances on Hubbard’s 2017 album, Tell the Devil I’m Gettin’ There as Fast as I Can. On the title track, the devil is the promoter of a show at Austin’s Continental Club, and the narrator keeps calling from the interstate to say he’s running late — not just for the show but also for every dream he’s ever had. (...)

“I believe in spiritual awakening, not religious conversion,” says Hubbard, trying to explain his personal philosophy. “As an agnostic guy who believes in voodoo, you hope someone’s praying for you. I’ve resigned myself to the four possible outcomes: heaven, hell, nothing or reincarnation. All the comparative religions’ idea of hell is scary. I don’t know if I want to go to heaven because of the clientele. So I prefer reincarnation. I don’t understand it, but it’s as logical as the other three. I try not to steal anxiety from the future.”

by Geoffrey Himes, Texas Music |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube/Ray Wylie Hubbard

[ed. My buddy Jerry (from Texas) turned me on to this article. We're both big RWH fans and he just got back from a concert road trip to Luckenbach, Texas. Been enjoying Ray's music ever since his Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother got named dropped by Jerry Jeff Walker on his famous Viva Terlingua album (recorded in Luckenbach), which pretty much put country outlaw music on the map and shot it into orbit.]

Academia Will Not Love You Back

I have always loved academia. I am the only child of an academic, and I grew up thinking that the academy was the “last good place,” where there was intellectual freedom and inquiry coupled with a modest, middle-class income. I loved college. I admired my professors. I wanted to be like them. When I began graduate school in the 1990s, I was assured by my advisors that there would soon be a job boom: all of the faculty who were hired in American academia’s decades of expansion were about to retire. There would be a need for assistant professors in all fields, nationwide.

That did not happen.

Instead, as this older generation retired, university administrations replaced them with adjunct faculty, to whom they did not have to pay benefits and could pay a paltry wage, with non-tenure-track instructors, who would teach heavy course loads for low pay, and with graduate students, who cost next to nothing. As I went on the job market, there were often hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job. (One very polite and considerate rejection letter informed me that the search committee was very impressed with my work, but that there were over seven hundred applicants for the position. I have since served on such committees, and it’s heartbreaking so see all of the wasted talent.)

The academic job market did not grow. It shrank—drastically.

It has since gotten much, much worse. I was one of the lucky ones—at least in one sense—because I landed a tenure-track job, one of the few available nationally in my field the year that I went on the market. I was fortunate enough to place an article in a top journal in my final year of graduate school, and that was just the edge that I needed. Since then the faculty in our department has aged in place, with very few hires. We have lost our specialists in the eighteenth century and British Romanticism to retirement, and these lines have not been replaced. With falling enrollments in the field, we cannot justify the hires, and we must cover those areas as well as we can with the faculty we have.

Our university administration clearly sees humanities faculty as a (barely) necessary annoyance, as is the case in most public universities these days. It is all about STEM fields and professional schools and grant money, especially as state appropriations for higher education have shrunk. The only values are economic. Students have gotten the message and are avoiding the humanities like the plague. We have had only one small raise in the last ten years (which amounted to less than one year of inflation), and we do not receive cost-of-living adjustments, so while I have no desire for great wealth, I find myself in the process of becoming poorer and poorer every year as I gain seniority in my profession, as my spending power diminishes to the point that a middle-class life seems to be slipping away. Again, I’m one of the lucky ones. My non-tenure-track colleagues are in even worse financial straits.

Meanwhile, the university has built a new football stadium and a deluxe football practice facility, has bought a second hospital, and has hired numerous vice presidents (don’t ask me what they do all day; they certainly don’t teach), all of whom make well into six figures. Our president (who does not hold an advanced degree and is not an academic but a former politician) is one of the most well-compensated of any regional public university in the country and makes a base salary of more than half a million dollars a year, not including perquisites. We have a brand new, luxurious alumni center. This is a national trend: see this recent article from The New York Times.

And here is the thing: our administration knows that they have us over a barrel. They hold all the cards. Pick your metaphor. They know that the job market is so bad that tenured faculty don’t have options if they want to remain in the field, so they don’t have to pay us a reasonable salary. And if we did end up leaving, they really wouldn’t care. Either they would replace us with even cheaper labor, or they wouldn’t replace us at all. (And I mean cheap labor. Our graduate students’ annual teaching stipends amount to $8000, a number that has not changed in over two decades. Adjunct pay is far below the poverty level, with no benefits and no health insurance.)

by John Halbrooks, Personal Canon Formation |  Read more:

Image: Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

[ed. I don't know. Seems like general stupidity and civic/political buffoonery are at epic levels these days and somehow universities keep wading into that swamp up to their necks (see post below about Harvard). Why? Why make political statements at all if you can avoid them? And these armies of bureaucratic paper shufflers. Dropping humanities programs left and right but infusing curricula with more and more DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) courses/policies, while STEM graduates face a bleak AI future. The whole enterprise is looking more corporate and lost every year. See also: Are Harvard Graduates Better Than Harvard Dropouts? (THB); and, Why the Humanities are Indeed Worth Teaching (NYT).]

Singing the Blues

Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?

A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.

I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).

Why should this be?

Let’s review control theory, ie the theory of homeostasis and bodily set points.

Many of your body systems have set points. For example, your temperature set point is usually around 98.6 degrees F. If you’re out in the snow and get colder than 98.6, your body will kick in various heating mechanisms (like shivering) until it’s back at the set point. If you’re out in the desert and get hotter than 98.6, it will kick in cooling mechanisms (like sweating) until it’s back.

Your inner thermostat acts through both conscious and unconscious processes. The examples above - shivering and sweating - are mostly unconscious. The conscious process is that when your body goes too far below 98.6, it makes “your conscious mind” “feel” “cold”. That “incentivizes” “you”, the “conscious” “actor”, to do things like go indoors, or put on a jacket, or turn on your space heater. You can think of the feeling of coldness as the conscious projection of the wider homeostatic drive to become warmer.

Although specific set points (eg 98.6) are set by evolution, they’re not hard-coded. Master regulatory systems can change set points in response to changing demands. For example, when you get infected by a heat-sensitive pathogen, your immune system might choose to boil it away, and increase your inner thermostat to (let’s say) 102 (instead of 98.6). Now you have a fever.

The funny thing about fevers is that you feel cold. Someone with a fever shivers. They demand to cover themselves in blankets. All of this makes sense, right? Your inner thermostat notices you’re at 98.6, and that’s colder than the desired temperature of 102. So it activates unconscious regulatory processes (like shivering) and conscious regulatory processes (like making you feel cold). Since you consciously feel cold, you engage in heat-seeking behaviors. You cover yourself in blankets, or turn up the space heater. This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!) but it’s perfectly logical from the control theory perspective. (...)

Now let’s take it all the way:

In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. (...)

Depression is often precipitated by some psychosocial event (like loss of a job, or the death of a loved one). It’s natural to feel sad for a little while after this. But instead of correctly activating regulatory processes to get mood back to normal, the body accepts the new level as its new set point, and tries to defend it.

By “defend it”, I mean that healthy people have a variety of mechanisms to stop being sad and get their mood back to a normal level. In depression, the patient appears to fight very hard to prevent mood getting back to a normal level. They stay in a dark room and avoid their friends. They even deliberately listen to sad music!

The feverish person feels too cold, and the anorexic person feels too fat, so we might expect the depressed person to feel too happy. I think something like this is true, if we put strong emphasis on the “too”. One of the official DSM symptoms of depression is “feelings of guilt/worthlessness”. A depressed person will frequently think things like “I don’t deserve my friends / job / money / talents.” In other words, they believe they’re too happy! They think they deserve to be sadder! (...)

Psychologists already suspect the existence of a happiness set point (thymostat?); this is the principle behind ideas like the "hedonic treadmill". So my theory here is that at least some cases of depression involve recalibrated happiness set points. A set point can either recalibrate randomly (ie for poorly understood biological reasons) or after a specific shock (ie interpreting a prolonged period of sadness as "the new normal"). Once a patient has a new, lower, happiness set point, their control system works to defend it. It enlists both biological systems (possibly changing the levels of various neurotransmitters?) and behavioral systems to defend the new set point. If it "succeeds", the person maintains an abnormally low mood.

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Video: Tony Joe White/YouTube

[ed. Here's Tony feeling better: Undercover Agent for the Blues.]

Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own: Harvard's Claudine Gay Resigns

In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.”

Testifying at a congressional hearing in early December with two other university presidents — only one of whom, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., still has her job — she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York; Harvard ’06) whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment.” Dr. Gay replied that it might, “depending on the context,” a formulation she reiterated when Ms. Stefanik rephrased the question. Dr. Gay later apologized for those remarks, but they had already entered the media bloodstream, making her and her fellow witnesses an overnight meme representing the insensitivity and cluelessness of elite academic leadership.

Now that Dr. Gay is out (following M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned shortly after the hearing), there is more than enough context to go around. Her career, until last July a steady, brisk climb through faculty and administrative ranks to the pinnacle of American higher education, has become a punditic bonanza and a culture-war Rorschach test. (...)

The Israel-Hamas conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. No mention is made of Congress, or Gaza, or anything that might actually explain what happened. “We live in difficult and troubling times,” the corporation’s letter asserts, “and formidable challenges lie ahead.” The nature of the trouble is mainly left unspoken, in keeping with an overall commitment to abstraction, as if bland, nonspecific language could wash away the difficulty. It’s only when the letters note what the corporation calls the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol” Dr. Gay faced as Harvard’s first Black president that they register some of the rawness and rage of contemporary reality. (...)

What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”

The clouds of mystification gather early. Can a nearly 400-year-old entity that began as a seminary for young Protestant men and grew into a global educational brand with a $50 billion endowment be said in any meaningful sense to constitute a community? The sentence then succumbs to a storm of clattering prose and conceptual incoherence. It’s hard to know just what or how many things Harvard is committed to, or what new ways of affirming that commitment might be found.

by A.O. Scott, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Adam Glanzman for The New York Times
[ed. Covered previously here, in this post: 'The Only War is Culture War'. Now: Harvard Must Learn The Lessons of President Gay’s Troubled Tenure; and, The Rise and Fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay (Harvard Crimson). Finally, see also: Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Harvard Crimson):]

***

"Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do? (...)

For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”

Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.

Such a ridiculous process may seem relatively harmless, but the aggregation of these frivolous, bureaucratic time-and-money-wasters may have made college as outrageously expensive as it is. In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide. Rather, the increased cost seems to lie within the administration and its tendency to solve problems by hiring even more administrators. In a 25-year timespan within the same window, American colleges added over 500,000 administrators at a hiring rate double that for faculty."

Hula Girl Obsessions

How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i (Collector's Weekly)

You’ve seen her hanging around tiki bars, swiveling her hips seductively but woodenly indifferent to the scene around her. She’s often found bobbing and playing ‘ukulele on the dashboard of cars, dangling from key rings, lounging under palm trees on matchbook covers, and thanklessly holding up lampshades. Often scantily clad or topless, her uniform may include a grass skirt, a coconut bra, bright floral fabrics, and flowers in her hair. She beams from Hawaiian tourism brochures, and her most modest incarnation meets travelers arriving by plane or ship, lovingly placing a lei around their necks.

She’s the comely Hula Girl, the ever-present icon beckoning Westerners to Hawai‘i—and she’s about as grounded in reality as Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Certainly, the hula is an actual ancient Hawaiian dance form, which has shifted and morphed during 200-plus years of Western contact. But popularized images of female hula dancers have deviated far from their origins, perpetuating stereotypes that have had devastating impacts on perceptions of Hawai‘i.

Image: Universal Fruit & Produce Co.

Disjunction & Surprise

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.

What happens in the first three lines of this familiar poem? In the first line the scene is set. The reader and the speaker are rowing a boat. Note how the repetition of the word ‘row’ and the repetitive rhythm textually mirror the real-life act of rowing. The sentence of the first line continues on the second line. Where are we? We are still in the stream. Still rowing. ‘gently down the stream’ modifies all those verbs ‘row’ in the first line. Again, note how the rhythm is expressive of the act – which does a lot to put us, as readers, in the world of the poem, with the speaker. The lines are moving with the pace and feel of a boat being rowed through water. What happens on the third line? A bunch of ‘merrily’’s over and over. Are we still in the stream? Certainly. Merrily modifies or describes the emotional state of the rowing.

But what about the fourth line? It’s a pretty grand declaration – about the nature of existence, no less – and one that has little, specifically, to do with boats and rowing. In some ways this poem, as a whole, is built entirely to set us up for a surprise ending. To lull us into a state of dreamy, lazy ‘merriment’ – only to pull the rug out from under us at the end with a deceptively simple commentary on the fleeting, and possibly even false, nature of life itself. Is life ‘but a dream’?

Mark Leidner, University of Iowa | Read more:
Image: uncredited via

[ed. I know, not rowing, and those aren't boats. Disjunction and surprise. See also: The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A Study of Disjunctive Method and Definitions in Contemporary English‑language Haiku (Haiku Research); with a more concise/understandable summary here.]

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?

The wheel began to shake in my hands; the road had grown slick, as though with oil. I thought something was wrong with the car and I slowed down, then pulled over. There was no traffic; my solitude was total. I got out to look at the tires. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what I was seeing, what I was standing on. There were these very large, very black crickets everywhere, a dark sensate carpet covering the road, extending hundreds of yards into the distance on either side of me. I must already have crushed thousands of them. They were perfectly indifferent to my presence; without adjusting their pace, they moved over my shoes. If I’d had a smartphone, I would have protected myself by taking a video, establishing a frame. A slow black wave spilling over the highway and across the arid soil. My car was still on, the audiobook still playing: Here are three tools for identifying implicit metaphor.

The mass of migrating insects, the sound of the voice in the empty car talking of inducers and concurrents over the engine noise—in my mind, this is where this story began. There was simply no contact between the language filling the car and the world to which it supposedly referred. It was as though I heard the recorded voice the way the crickets might, not through my ears, but through tympanal organs on my leg that vibrate in response to vibrating air. Or maybe I heard the voice in the car as mere stridulation, and the prominent linguist was the insect. Needless to say, all of these words are wrong. But as I stood there—dusk was falling, or dusk was rising from the ground, from the innumerable exoskeletons—the terms of my own life reached a point of total unintelligibility. It began with the crickets, although Wikipedia says that what I saw were not “true crickets,” but a kind of shield-backed katydid.

The linguist had founded a think tank to bring his ideas about framing into progressive politics. You can’t argue effectively against something called “tax relief” from a left perspective because the metaphorical frame makes taxation an affliction. If a progressive assents to that frame—and so finds herself having to argue for “less relief,” more affliction—she has already lost. We have to generate new frames: taxation is patriotic investment.

Let’s say that I, having looked for any excuse to flee Brooklyn, had moved to the East Bay for a “new-media fellowship” at the linguist’s institute. I rented the first apartment I looked at, a studio I couldn’t afford in the rear of a yellow Arts and Crafts building on Derby Street, half a mile from the Berkeley campus. My windows opened onto a back garden with lemon and magnolia trees. I went to the Ikea in Emeryville and then, praying nobody would steal my boxes, had a ten-minute consultation in downtown Oakland with a doctor my sister had recommended, so I could get my medical marijuana prescription. Back “home” in my apartment, I unloaded and assembled a coffee table, two chairs, and a queen-size bed. See the little hex key. I’m alarmed to recall I got my mattress for free off Craigslist from a floridly insane woman who was wearing a bathrobe over her sweatshirt and jeans. I did not get bedbugs, but that first night in my apartment I seemed to dream the woman’s dreams. A man was chasing me (but I wasn’t me) down Telegraph with a knife, yelling that the knife was mine, that he just wanted to return it to me.

On my first day at the institute, a smiling man in his sixties named Anderson (I would never learn if this was his first or last name) who wore an I HEART ARUBA baseball cap and thrice mentioned his PhD in cog sci introduced me to the “team” (the linguist wasn’t there; nobody from the board was there) and then showed me to my desk, which was basically a library carrel. That they placed their New Media Fellow in a ponderous wooden structure (not even a cubicle) that could have been from the nineteenth century allowed me to relax about how badly I’d exaggerated my “tech savvy” in my application. (...)

I did an okay job talking about getting up to speed on the institute’s research (I’m particularly taken with the recent work around “tax relief”), its online presence, the lay of the land. I used some vocabulary from her books, but in a fashion that suggested I’d so thoroughly internalized her work that I was not aware of the homage I was paying it. I was performing like a person, but the periphery of my vision contracted just a little as I spoke, the crickets closing in. We are very hopeful that with your experience, Dr. Hofmann said, you can help us to figure out how best to leverage new technologies to get our message out. I did a lot of nodding. I wondered what she thought of as my relevant experience. Did “new technologies” mean anything more specific than the internet? “Settling in,” “up to speed,” “lay of the land,” dead metaphors; I vibrated in response to vibrating air. Perhaps at our group meeting the following month I would walk us through my plan.

I need another character so let’s say my cousin introduced me over email to a woman named Tam who taught social studies at Berkeley High. Even as I walked to the coffee shop I wasn’t sure I’d go in. I actually liked the musical staff tattoo she had on her left bicep, how there weren’t any notes. She had her niece’s EKG around the other. We took a walk in the rose garden and got high and when she asked about my work I cracked her up by telling her the truth: I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. The Ikea bed frame I’d assembled with a hex key barely held. I had not been with anyone but the woman in Brooklyn in several years. And for the past year or so it was always shadowed with the impasse over kids. I saw my room through the eight eyes of the yellow garden spider whose large circular web was just outside my window when I came. I can tell you’ve been carrying a lot of pain, Tam said. I picture her as in a long-term open relationship with a woman who was in Bolivia doing fieldwork for her PhD.

We were in bed one night in the third month of my fellowship, passing the vape balloon back and forth, real cats or raccoons setting off the fictional backyard motion lights at intervals, lighting up the foliage, the star-shaped flowers. She told me she’d had a funny experience in her summer-school class. A kid had clearly plagiarized his paper on Malcolm X. She googled the suspiciously coherent if not particularly well-written paragraphs and there they were, word for word, on Wikipedia, which was at that point relatively new. (New enough that I remembered that a lawyer friend had been absolutely scandalized to discover that a colleague had had it open on his desktop; he thought it was worse than porn, that the colleague should be fired.) Tam confronted the student in class about the plagiarism a day or two later and he denied it. So she walked him to the computer center and summoned the page to show him the passages. But they were gone. The kid’s smile, Tam said, made clear that he’d deleted or radically altered the text in question. Tam didn’t have any idea how to look at the edit history of the page so she just let it go. We laughed at his mixture of ingenuity, bravado, stupidity (wasn’t this more work than just writing a couple of boilerplate paragraphs?), and the strange mutability of sources now, with the dawn of open source. We went to sleep.

An hour later I sat up, wide awake. I went to the coffee table and opened my laptop and googled Malcolm X. Of course the first hit was Wikipedia; it had become the first hit for everything. Contained in Tam’s story were several things I’d only half-known at the time: People, especially young people, had begun to go first to Wikipedia for any and all information. Wikipedia was apparently so easy to edit that a failing student in summer school could do it. And even pages on major historical figures were alterable, up for grabs, not just the entries on obscure athletes or operas.

I spent an hour creating and editing a page for Elaine Hofmann, then made a page for her institute, adding links to Hofmann and the institute to a variety of other Wikipedia pages—I had no particular computer aptitude but the edits were easy enough to make. Then I turned my attention to “tax relief.” First and foremost I made it so that “tax relief” redirected you to a larger page called “tax loopholes.” I organized all the material in a way that emphasized—with various levels of subtlety—evasion, structural inequality, the patriotic importance of investing in the future. I added a slew of progressive sources from other websites. By dawn I was familiar with almost every aspect of the editorial interface and had some sense of how the talk pages—the pages behind the pages, where editors debate changes that they’ve made—functioned. When Tam, wearing one of my shirts, brought me coffee, I asked her to do me a big favor: I need her to assign the students an extra credit paper where they researched “tax relief” (her class had a unit on “government”). I explained why, probably making little sense. But she said she would and I asked her to show me anything that quoted Wikipedia or might be plagiarized from it.

At the institute’s all-group meeting a week later I presented a PowerPoint. A couple of slides about Wikipedia becoming the world’s “largest clearinghouse for information,” its scale, its reach. A slide of the old “tax relief” entry. A slide of the new one. And then I showed them slides from the student papers, demonstrated the uptake: “according to Wikipedia, what is often described as ‘tax relief’ is actually a type of ‘tax evasion,’ in which . . . ”; I highlighted language I’d written (stoned, in my underwear) and put it beside unattributed language in a second paper about taxation as patriotic. I kept pausing, thinking somebody would say something; others kept looking at Hofmann, who’d put her glasses on, and whose personal page (before and after) I now pulled up to flatter her. In their stunned silence, birdsong was audible. Only I could hear the silence of the crickets.

What we need, what I’m going to establish, is an ever-expanding phalanx of Wikipedia editors to create, reframe, and defend these pages, which are treated by more and more of the human population as both encyclopedia and news source. Of course, there will be challenges, complexities. But the fact that you have had, Dr. Hofmann, your groundbreaking insights into the importance of metaphorical framing at the precise moment when all existing frames are up for grabs at Wikipedia—well, I’ve been so excited about this project I’ve been finding it very hard to sleep.

by Ben Lerner, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Dima Kashtalyan
[ed. A wild west story about early Wikipedia editing. More fascinating than you might think, and excellent writing!]

Banksy, champagne bottle rat
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