Thursday, February 1, 2024
Is TikTok Over?
How much time do I spend on TikTok? I can tell you which chiropractor is demonstrating their technique without even seeing their face. I know which fashion content creator is partial to Rei Kawakubo, and who has a preposterous Carol Christian Poell collection. I know which New York City microinfluencers go on vacation together, and which creators are building a modest following joking about the music of a small scene of rappers who make Playboi Carti sound like Kendrick Lamar.
Through endless hours of scrolling — an hour a day, at least, for several years now — I’ve been accumulating hyperniche expertise predicated on my interests, conscious and subconscious. The result has been a gathering of online characters that, at this point, shape my cultural consumption far more than any celebrity or news source.
This is what TikTok intends to do, tapping into pure id, drilling down on what you know and what you might want to know in hopes that you never leave the app’s forever scroll. Of all the social media platforms, it holds the greatest promise of kismet. It’s the one that has seemed most in tune with individual taste and most capable of shaping emerging monoculture.
But increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.
This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty. (Some apps, like the TikTok precursor Vine, were shuttered before ever becoming truly tiresome.) Similarly, the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
It’s an unfortunate result of the confluence of a few crucial factors. Most glaring is the arrival of TikTok’s shopping platform, which has turned even small creators into spokespeople and the for-you page of recommendations into an unruly bazaar. The site is also seeing diminishing utility as an organic music discovery vehicle, weakening its connection to the one major entertainment industry that’s come to rely on it the most.
That fractured link has made it more challenging for TikTok to create and shift monoculture, which it had appeared poised to do over and over again in the early 2020s. (...)
Finally, and maybe most stubbornly, there’s TikTok’s personalization algorithm itself, which drives you further and deeper into your own taste, until it has been rinsed almost wholly dry — an asset that becomes, over time, a liability. All in all, you’re left wondering how a format designed for infinite scroll has come to feel so finite.
Just a handful of years ago, TikTok seemed destined to become the long-running platform for the short-form video revolution, the YouTube of phone-consumed content. Its most appealing videos have a homespun, almost accidental feel. You encounter them, get amused by them and then let them pass through. And yet some things stick around long enough to become true mainstream cultural successes: comedic routines, dance steps, slang. A vast decentralized conversation is taking place every day, and the promise of the app is that you might keep tabs on it while also being shown offramps to something new. (...)
"On Tuesday, a day before its licensing contract with TikTok was set to expire, Universal — the largest of the three major record companies — published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be “flooded with A.I.-generated recordings” that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.
TikTok confirmed early Thursday that it had removed music from Universal, and videos on the app began to show the effects of the broken partnership. Recordings by Universal artists were deleted from TikTok’s library, and existing videos that used music from Universal’s artists had their audio muted entirely. Universal songs were also unavailable for users to add to new videos.
A video posted by Kylie Jenner in September, for example, using a song by Lana Del Rey, who is signed to a Universal label was silent, with a note saying, “This sound isn’t available.” (Commenters to the video had remarked on the music.) Other videos carried similar statements, including “Sound removed due to copyright restrictions.”
Through endless hours of scrolling — an hour a day, at least, for several years now — I’ve been accumulating hyperniche expertise predicated on my interests, conscious and subconscious. The result has been a gathering of online characters that, at this point, shape my cultural consumption far more than any celebrity or news source.
But increasingly in recent months, scrolling the feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space in a way that blocks access to what you’re actually looking for.
This has happened before, of course — the moment when Twitter turned from good-faith salon to sinister outrage derby, or when Instagram, and its army of influencers, learned to homogenize joy and beauty. (Some apps, like the TikTok precursor Vine, were shuttered before ever becoming truly tiresome.) Similarly, the malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
It’s an unfortunate result of the confluence of a few crucial factors. Most glaring is the arrival of TikTok’s shopping platform, which has turned even small creators into spokespeople and the for-you page of recommendations into an unruly bazaar. The site is also seeing diminishing utility as an organic music discovery vehicle, weakening its connection to the one major entertainment industry that’s come to rely on it the most.
That fractured link has made it more challenging for TikTok to create and shift monoculture, which it had appeared poised to do over and over again in the early 2020s. (...)
Finally, and maybe most stubbornly, there’s TikTok’s personalization algorithm itself, which drives you further and deeper into your own taste, until it has been rinsed almost wholly dry — an asset that becomes, over time, a liability. All in all, you’re left wondering how a format designed for infinite scroll has come to feel so finite.
Just a handful of years ago, TikTok seemed destined to become the long-running platform for the short-form video revolution, the YouTube of phone-consumed content. Its most appealing videos have a homespun, almost accidental feel. You encounter them, get amused by them and then let them pass through. And yet some things stick around long enough to become true mainstream cultural successes: comedic routines, dance steps, slang. A vast decentralized conversation is taking place every day, and the promise of the app is that you might keep tabs on it while also being shown offramps to something new. (...)
With less common ground, users are increasingly seeing TikTok as a place to potentially monetize their online lives, an implicit acknowledgment that all this time spent online is a kind of labor. The D.I.Y. micro-ads that now clog the feed feel the most portentous — death by a thousand affiliate links. TikTok Shop began in September, and it quickly reoriented the app toward hawking. You can sell a product of your own, but most people make videos promoting products already in the shop, and then make a small commission if they lead to a sale.
The effect of seeing all of these quasi-ads — QVC in your pocket — is soul-deadening. Often, around two of every five videos are for products I don’t need: I have been offered a version of an ad for a specific magnetic phone charger over 100 times, easily, and I have seen people shilling for one specific oil-pulling dental health concoction even more often. The possibility of making a few bucks has turned ordinary people into creative directors and provided a steady flow of free advertising and marketing ideas for pennies on the dollar.
I knew the algorithm had fully broken me when I watched a video of a woman dismantling the lint trap on her dryer and immediately wondered why she hadn’t linked to TikTok Shop for the magnetic screwdrivers to rein in the tiny screws that were falling all over the place, or the slim cordless vacuum that would have sucked out the flyaway dust.
The speed and volume of the shift has been startling. Over time, Instagram became glutted with sponsored content and buy links, but its shopping interface never derailed the overall experience of the app. TikTok Shop has done that in just a few months, spoiling a tremendous amount of good will in the process.
But perhaps nothing has been as central to the TikTok experience as music; the app’s early era was accelerated by a merger with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, and “sounds” are one of the platform’s organizing principles, allowing users to sort videos by the background music they pick.
The ability to search clips by sound made TikTok perhaps the most sinisterly effective music distribution tool since terrestrial radio. It combined happenstance with vast audience, allowing music that people enjoyed, or were paid to enjoy, to explode on an immense scale. The randomness seemed to come from the bottom up: On any given day of media consumption, TikTok offered the best chance to be charmed by something utterly unexpected — say, a sped-up remix of a song by Miguel or Lil Uzi Vert, or a guy on a longboard listening to Fleetwood Mac and breezily drinking cranberry juice.
In the year or two before the pandemic, TikTok was unmatched as a music discovery tool. But Covid forced everyone onto their phones, creating a content deluge. When marketers and publicists realized that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed, turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl. (...)
The way visual content is developing on the app, though, appears to be de-emphasizing music, too. Legible short-form ideas like dance routines and outfit videos seem to have given way to videos that lend themselves to smooth-brained and extended viewing, like clips of taming an unruly lawn or cleaning a muddy area rug. This is visual A.S.M.R., no sound required. (TikTok has also been encouraging some creators to post longer, original videos less reliant upon the intellectual property of others.)
It all underscores a fundamental TikTok issue that remains unsolved: There hasn’t yet been an evolution in optimal content form. The narrative styles that will work best in this format haven’t been honed yet, at least not by professionals. For an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn’t demand much brainpower. That leaves TikTok vulnerable to the moments when viewers, to put it simply, snap out of it.
The effect of seeing all of these quasi-ads — QVC in your pocket — is soul-deadening. Often, around two of every five videos are for products I don’t need: I have been offered a version of an ad for a specific magnetic phone charger over 100 times, easily, and I have seen people shilling for one specific oil-pulling dental health concoction even more often. The possibility of making a few bucks has turned ordinary people into creative directors and provided a steady flow of free advertising and marketing ideas for pennies on the dollar.
I knew the algorithm had fully broken me when I watched a video of a woman dismantling the lint trap on her dryer and immediately wondered why she hadn’t linked to TikTok Shop for the magnetic screwdrivers to rein in the tiny screws that were falling all over the place, or the slim cordless vacuum that would have sucked out the flyaway dust.
The speed and volume of the shift has been startling. Over time, Instagram became glutted with sponsored content and buy links, but its shopping interface never derailed the overall experience of the app. TikTok Shop has done that in just a few months, spoiling a tremendous amount of good will in the process.
But perhaps nothing has been as central to the TikTok experience as music; the app’s early era was accelerated by a merger with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in 2018, and “sounds” are one of the platform’s organizing principles, allowing users to sort videos by the background music they pick.
The ability to search clips by sound made TikTok perhaps the most sinisterly effective music distribution tool since terrestrial radio. It combined happenstance with vast audience, allowing music that people enjoyed, or were paid to enjoy, to explode on an immense scale. The randomness seemed to come from the bottom up: On any given day of media consumption, TikTok offered the best chance to be charmed by something utterly unexpected — say, a sped-up remix of a song by Miguel or Lil Uzi Vert, or a guy on a longboard listening to Fleetwood Mac and breezily drinking cranberry juice.
In the year or two before the pandemic, TikTok was unmatched as a music discovery tool. But Covid forced everyone onto their phones, creating a content deluge. When marketers and publicists realized that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed, turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl. (...)
The way visual content is developing on the app, though, appears to be de-emphasizing music, too. Legible short-form ideas like dance routines and outfit videos seem to have given way to videos that lend themselves to smooth-brained and extended viewing, like clips of taming an unruly lawn or cleaning a muddy area rug. This is visual A.S.M.R., no sound required. (TikTok has also been encouraging some creators to post longer, original videos less reliant upon the intellectual property of others.)
It all underscores a fundamental TikTok issue that remains unsolved: There hasn’t yet been an evolution in optimal content form. The narrative styles that will work best in this format haven’t been honed yet, at least not by professionals. For an app that claims a lot of attention, it doesn’t demand much brainpower. That leaves TikTok vulnerable to the moments when viewers, to put it simply, snap out of it.
by Jon Caramanica, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Stephen Dybus
[ed. See also: On TikTok, who owns a viral dance? (Vox); and, Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok (NYT):]"On Tuesday, a day before its licensing contract with TikTok was set to expire, Universal — the largest of the three major record companies — published a fiery open letter accusing TikTok of offering unsatisfactory payment for music, and of allowing its platform to be “flooded with A.I.-generated recordings” that diluted the royalty pool for real, human musicians.
TikTok confirmed early Thursday that it had removed music from Universal, and videos on the app began to show the effects of the broken partnership. Recordings by Universal artists were deleted from TikTok’s library, and existing videos that used music from Universal’s artists had their audio muted entirely. Universal songs were also unavailable for users to add to new videos.
A video posted by Kylie Jenner in September, for example, using a song by Lana Del Rey, who is signed to a Universal label was silent, with a note saying, “This sound isn’t available.” (Commenters to the video had remarked on the music.) Other videos carried similar statements, including “Sound removed due to copyright restrictions.”
One Big Reason Migrants Are Coming in Droves: They Believe They Can Stay
For decades, single young men, mainly from Mexico and later Central America, did their best to sneak past U.S. border agents to reach Los Angeles, Atlanta and other places hungry for their labor.
Today, people from around the globe are streaming across the southern border, most of them just as eager to work. But rather than trying to elude U.S. authorities, the overwhelming majority of migrants seek out border agents, sometimes waiting hours or days in makeshift encampments, to surrender.
Being hustled into a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle and taken to a processing facility is hardly a setback. In fact, it is a crucial step toward being able to apply for asylum — now the surest way for migrants to stay in the United States, even if few will ultimately win their cases.
Today, people from around the globe are streaming across the southern border, most of them just as eager to work. But rather than trying to elude U.S. authorities, the overwhelming majority of migrants seek out border agents, sometimes waiting hours or days in makeshift encampments, to surrender.
Being hustled into a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle and taken to a processing facility is hardly a setback. In fact, it is a crucial step toward being able to apply for asylum — now the surest way for migrants to stay in the United States, even if few will ultimately win their cases.
We are living in an era of mass migration — fueled by conflict, climate change, poverty and political repression and encouraged by the proliferation of TikTok and YouTube videos chronicling migrants’ journeys to the United States. Some six million Venezuelans have fled their troubled country, the largest population displacement in Latin America’s modern history. Migrants from Africa, Asia and South America are mortgaging their family land, selling their cars or borrowing money from loan sharks to embark on long, often treacherous journeys to reach the United States.
In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.
It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier. They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.
Forever.
And by and large, they are not wrong.
The United States is trying to run an immigration system with a fraction of the judges, asylum officers, interpreters and other personnel that it needs to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border and flocking to cities around the country each year. That dysfunction has made it impossible for the nation to expeditiously decide who can remain in the country and who should be sent back to their homeland.
“I don’t know anyone who has been deported,” Carolina Ortiz, a migrant from Colombia, said in an interview in late December at an encampment outside Jacumba Hot Springs, about 60 miles southeast of San Diego and a stone’s throw from the hulking rust-colored barrier that separates the United States from Mexico.
For most migrants, the United States still represents the land of opportunity. Many come seeking work, and they are going to do whatever it takes to work, even if that means filing a weak asylum claim, several lawyers said.
To qualify for asylum, applicants must convince a judge that returning to their home country would result in harm or death on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Ms. Ortiz, 40, said she intended to apply for asylum based on violence in Colombia. Her chances of winning are slim, because violence alone typically does not meet the standard for persecution. Even so, she will be shielded from deportation while her claim is pending and will qualify for a work permit.
Underfunded immigration courts that adjudicate claims are strained by the swelling caseload, so applications languish for years, and all the while, migrants are building lives in the United States.
Ms. Ortiz, a nurse, said she had borrowed “millions,” in Colombian pesos (several thousand dollars) to pay the smugglers who brought her to the doorstep of the United States, a gap in the wall championed by former President Donald J. Trump. She waited two days in the cold, desert winds lashing her tent, for agents to come and take her.
When agents showed up, they transported Ms. Ortiz to a facility where she was given paperwork that said she had entered the country illegally, had been placed in deportation proceedings and must appear before an immigration judge.
The court date was Feb. 19, 2026.
She was then released. In Ms. Ortiz’s mind, everything was going according to plan. “I wanted to do everything the right way,” she said, after arriving in Colorado a few days later. She had been assigned an “alien” number used to track immigration cases.
Most asylum claims are ultimately rejected. But even when that happens, years down the road, applicants are highly unlikely to be deported. With millions of people unlawfully in the country, U.S. deportation officers prioritize arresting and expelling people who have committed serious crimes and pose a threat to public safety.
In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.
It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier. They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.
Forever.
And by and large, they are not wrong.
The United States is trying to run an immigration system with a fraction of the judges, asylum officers, interpreters and other personnel that it needs to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border and flocking to cities around the country each year. That dysfunction has made it impossible for the nation to expeditiously decide who can remain in the country and who should be sent back to their homeland.
“I don’t know anyone who has been deported,” Carolina Ortiz, a migrant from Colombia, said in an interview in late December at an encampment outside Jacumba Hot Springs, about 60 miles southeast of San Diego and a stone’s throw from the hulking rust-colored barrier that separates the United States from Mexico.
For most migrants, the United States still represents the land of opportunity. Many come seeking work, and they are going to do whatever it takes to work, even if that means filing a weak asylum claim, several lawyers said.
To qualify for asylum, applicants must convince a judge that returning to their home country would result in harm or death on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Ms. Ortiz, 40, said she intended to apply for asylum based on violence in Colombia. Her chances of winning are slim, because violence alone typically does not meet the standard for persecution. Even so, she will be shielded from deportation while her claim is pending and will qualify for a work permit.
Underfunded immigration courts that adjudicate claims are strained by the swelling caseload, so applications languish for years, and all the while, migrants are building lives in the United States.
Ms. Ortiz, a nurse, said she had borrowed “millions,” in Colombian pesos (several thousand dollars) to pay the smugglers who brought her to the doorstep of the United States, a gap in the wall championed by former President Donald J. Trump. She waited two days in the cold, desert winds lashing her tent, for agents to come and take her.
When agents showed up, they transported Ms. Ortiz to a facility where she was given paperwork that said she had entered the country illegally, had been placed in deportation proceedings and must appear before an immigration judge.
The court date was Feb. 19, 2026.
She was then released. In Ms. Ortiz’s mind, everything was going according to plan. “I wanted to do everything the right way,” she said, after arriving in Colorado a few days later. She had been assigned an “alien” number used to track immigration cases.
Most asylum claims are ultimately rejected. But even when that happens, years down the road, applicants are highly unlikely to be deported. With millions of people unlawfully in the country, U.S. deportation officers prioritize arresting and expelling people who have committed serious crimes and pose a threat to public safety.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy!
Colorectal cancer is the second-most deadly cancer, killing over 1 million people per year around the world — 1.7% of all deaths. In the United States, where colorectal cancer causes 50,000 deaths per year, the foundation of the fight against it is the colonoscopy. Getting one periodically is recommended for everyone over the age of 45.
Colonoscopies are rarely used for screening elsewhere but have been standard in the U.S. for decades. There are many reasons to think that they should work. But they are also expensive, invasive, unpleasant, and rarely — but not that rarely — have serious side effects. Are they worth it?
Until recently we didn’t have any randomized controlled trials that directly tested how well colonoscopies work. We finally just got one and the results were — how can I describe them? Confusing? Ambiguous? Frenzy-inducing?
Let’s try to understand what to make of this trial, and why American gastroenterologists were so quick to criticize it.
Reminders About Tubes
After you swallow food, your body uses rhythmic waves of contractions to send it on a 4-meter (13-foot) journey through your esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. These extract most of the food’s nutrients and render it into a pulpy acidic fluid called chyme. The chyme then travels through your colon, a 1.5-meter (5-foot) tube that reabsorbs water and electrolytes, creating a solid mass that is then moved to your rectum for storage and eventual disposal. Yay!
The outermost layer of your inner colon is a single layer of epithelial cells whose job it is to let the good stuff through and keep the bad stuff out. Stem cells deeper inside the colon constantly divide to make new epithelial cells, which climb to the surface and live for four or five days before committing “suicide.”
Colonoscopies rest on the adenoma-carcinoma hypothesis. The idea is that errors can arise in the DNA, resulting in epithelial cells that don’t die on schedule. If they do anything too weird, your T-cells will kill them. But some mutations fly under the radar, causing little clumps of cells to grow on the surface of the colon. These clumps, or “polyps,” are usually not cancer — they grow slowly, and won’t (yet) spread to neighboring tissues. But if these persist for many years, they can acquire additional mutations that make them start spreading.
To prepare for a colonoscopy, you must empty your colon. This is achieved by drinking some chemicals and enduring some spectacular biological functions. Then a doctor threads a 1.5-meter (5-foot) flexible tube with a light and camera to look at the entire colon and remove or sample any polyps. The idea is not just to detect cancer but, by removing precancerous polyps, prevent it.
The primary alternative to colonoscopies for colorectal cancer screening are “occult blood tests” that look for spooky hidden blood in the stool. The oldest of these use an extract of the guaiacum tree and have RCTs showing they reduce colorectal cancer mortality by 9%-22% when used for screening. Newer tests look for antibodies and/or genetic mutations. These are more sensitive, though we don’t yet have RCTs estimating how much they help with mortality.
Another alternative is an older procedure called a sigmoidoscopy, which is basically a “mini” colonoscopy with a 0.6-meter (2-foot) tube. Compared to colonoscopy, it is quicker, safer, less painful, and cheaper, but it can only look at the lower (“sigmoid”) colon. Still, randomized trials have shown that screening sigmoidoscopies reduce colorectal cancer deaths by 26%-30%.
In principle, colonoscopies should be better than either of these tests. Unlike blood tests, colonoscopies try to remove polyps before they become cancer. And unlike sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopies can examine the whole colon.
But how much does it actually help to remove precancerous polyps? Gastrointestinal doctors often point to the National Polyp Study, but this is not a true randomized comparison — the study did colonoscopies on all subjects and concluded, based on comparisons to base rates in other “similar” populations, that removing polyps helped. And how much does it help to screen the whole colon? Cross et al. compared sigmoidoscopy to colonoscopy in English patients with suspected colorectal cancer and found that sigmoidoscopy was sufficient to detect 80% of cancers.
Because of the cost, the lack of direct evidence for efficacy, and the fact that it’s hard to convince people to do colonoscopies, they are rarely used for cancer screening outside the United States and some parts of German-speaking Europe. So it would be really useful to have an RCT that tested how well screening colonoscopies work.
The Trial
That brings us to the star of our show. The Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) is a huge randomized trial aimed at rigorously measuring how much colonoscopies reduce cancer and death.
[ed. I've had two, and that's enough. Before the first, I asked my doctor how long would it take? He said "oh, about 6 feet". Everyone's a comedian.]
Until recently we didn’t have any randomized controlled trials that directly tested how well colonoscopies work. We finally just got one and the results were — how can I describe them? Confusing? Ambiguous? Frenzy-inducing?
Let’s try to understand what to make of this trial, and why American gastroenterologists were so quick to criticize it.
Reminders About Tubes
After you swallow food, your body uses rhythmic waves of contractions to send it on a 4-meter (13-foot) journey through your esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. These extract most of the food’s nutrients and render it into a pulpy acidic fluid called chyme. The chyme then travels through your colon, a 1.5-meter (5-foot) tube that reabsorbs water and electrolytes, creating a solid mass that is then moved to your rectum for storage and eventual disposal. Yay!
The outermost layer of your inner colon is a single layer of epithelial cells whose job it is to let the good stuff through and keep the bad stuff out. Stem cells deeper inside the colon constantly divide to make new epithelial cells, which climb to the surface and live for four or five days before committing “suicide.”
Colonoscopies rest on the adenoma-carcinoma hypothesis. The idea is that errors can arise in the DNA, resulting in epithelial cells that don’t die on schedule. If they do anything too weird, your T-cells will kill them. But some mutations fly under the radar, causing little clumps of cells to grow on the surface of the colon. These clumps, or “polyps,” are usually not cancer — they grow slowly, and won’t (yet) spread to neighboring tissues. But if these persist for many years, they can acquire additional mutations that make them start spreading.
To prepare for a colonoscopy, you must empty your colon. This is achieved by drinking some chemicals and enduring some spectacular biological functions. Then a doctor threads a 1.5-meter (5-foot) flexible tube with a light and camera to look at the entire colon and remove or sample any polyps. The idea is not just to detect cancer but, by removing precancerous polyps, prevent it.
The primary alternative to colonoscopies for colorectal cancer screening are “occult blood tests” that look for spooky hidden blood in the stool. The oldest of these use an extract of the guaiacum tree and have RCTs showing they reduce colorectal cancer mortality by 9%-22% when used for screening. Newer tests look for antibodies and/or genetic mutations. These are more sensitive, though we don’t yet have RCTs estimating how much they help with mortality.
Another alternative is an older procedure called a sigmoidoscopy, which is basically a “mini” colonoscopy with a 0.6-meter (2-foot) tube. Compared to colonoscopy, it is quicker, safer, less painful, and cheaper, but it can only look at the lower (“sigmoid”) colon. Still, randomized trials have shown that screening sigmoidoscopies reduce colorectal cancer deaths by 26%-30%.
In principle, colonoscopies should be better than either of these tests. Unlike blood tests, colonoscopies try to remove polyps before they become cancer. And unlike sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopies can examine the whole colon.
But how much does it actually help to remove precancerous polyps? Gastrointestinal doctors often point to the National Polyp Study, but this is not a true randomized comparison — the study did colonoscopies on all subjects and concluded, based on comparisons to base rates in other “similar” populations, that removing polyps helped. And how much does it help to screen the whole colon? Cross et al. compared sigmoidoscopy to colonoscopy in English patients with suspected colorectal cancer and found that sigmoidoscopy was sufficient to detect 80% of cancers.
Because of the cost, the lack of direct evidence for efficacy, and the fact that it’s hard to convince people to do colonoscopies, they are rarely used for cancer screening outside the United States and some parts of German-speaking Europe. So it would be really useful to have an RCT that tested how well screening colonoscopies work.
The Trial
That brings us to the star of our show. The Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) is a huge randomized trial aimed at rigorously measuring how much colonoscopies reduce cancer and death.
by Dynomite, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Karol Banach[ed. I've had two, and that's enough. Before the first, I asked my doctor how long would it take? He said "oh, about 6 feet". Everyone's a comedian.]
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
A Taste for Danger: The Hazardous History of Fugu
There is a scene in a 1977 instalment of the Torakku yarō (Truck Guys) series where the main character is buried in sand up to his neck as a cure for the effects of eating fugu blowfish. The protagonist, played by Sugawara Bunta, feels his whole body going numb after partaking of the fish—famously poisonous if prepared incorrectly—and submits to the surprising traditional remedy.
The film takes place in my hometown of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the fugu capital of Japan. Two years before its release, the kabuki star Bandō Mitsugorō VIII died from poisoning after overindulgence in his beloved dish of torafugu (tiger blowfish) liver at a Kyoto restaurant. This raised the profile of fugu and its life-threatening properties.
According to the Ministry of Health, even today half of all food poisoning deaths in Japan come from eating blowfish. In a typical year, some 50 people suffer fugu poisoning in around 30 incidents, some of which result in fatalities. (There are also cases of fugu poisoning in Taiwan, where a total of 11 people died in 15 incidents taking place from 1991 to 2011.) Blowfish contain tetrodotoxin, which causes symptoms of numbness and paralysis 20 minutes to three hours after ingestion. These spread to the whole body, in serious cases leading to death by respiratory failure. People take their life in their hands when eating fugu.
Detoxified Dinners
Is sand burial really a good way to cure fugu poisoning?
“It’s total superstition!” says Ueno Ken’ichirō, owner of the Shimonoseki restaurant Fuku no Seki, which specializes in blowfish—known in the local dialect as fuku. Formerly a fugu wholesaler, Fuku no Seki is now the parent organization for processing company Daifuku, so Ueno knows his blowfish.
There have been no poisoning cases in Yamaguchi Prefecture for decades. Would-be fugu cooks are required to get licenses in many Japanese prefectures, including Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Ōita, Tokyo, and Osaka. Ueno says, “There are very tight standards in Yamaguchi. We take pride in preparing blowfish safely.”
Four in five Japanese fugu caught in the wild or farm-raised—mainly in Nagasaki Prefecture—come to Yamaguchi, because of the numerous local processing companies. After toxic elements are removed in processing, the fish, rendered harmless, are shipped nationwide.
For this reason, the kind of scene depicted in the film is now almost unimaginable. Fugu served in a professional establishment very rarely causes poisoning. The vast majority of blowfish poisoning incidents in Japan occur when amateurs prepare the dish.
The case of Bandō Mitsugorō VIII was different. Probably many people now would find it difficult to understand how he considered toxic tiger blowfish liver to be a delicacy. Many gourmets of the time, however, dipped fugu sashimi into soy sauce mixed with fugu liver instead of wasabi. The poisonous elements made the tongue smart and go numb—sensations to savor while drinking. Befuddled by numbness and alcohol, Bandō consumed too much, overshooting his tolerance level and succumbing to death. Chefs would not allow this to happen today. (...)
Lifting the Fugu Ban
Shimonoseki became Japan’s fugu center in the late nineteenth century. Yamaguchi Prefecture lies at the western tip of the country’s main island of Honshū and is surrounded by water on three sides. From ancient times the area flourished through trade with China and Korea and was known as the “Kyoto of the West.”
Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Japan’s first prime minister, was born in the area. During one trip back home, he visited a restaurant called Shunpanrō. The sea was rough that day, so it was difficult to procure any good fish. The flustered restaurant proprietor’s wife decided to serve Itō blowfish. Although it had been prohibited by law since the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi three centuries earlier, locals had perfected the preparation method.
Itō enjoyed the dish so much that he lifted the ban on eating fugu in 1888. He also granted the very first license to serve it to Shunpanrō, considered the finest restaurant in Shimonoseki. In 1895, the establishment played a part in East Asian history when it was the venue for the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki by Itō and Chinese politician Li Hongzhang. The agreement brought an end to the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. (...)
by Sumiki Hikari, Nippon.com | Read more:
Image: Fugu ready for preparation. Courtesy Shimonoseki municipal government.
[ed. Enough venom to kill 30 people. Apparently fugu has claimed another victim, this time in Brazil.]
The film takes place in my hometown of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the fugu capital of Japan. Two years before its release, the kabuki star Bandō Mitsugorō VIII died from poisoning after overindulgence in his beloved dish of torafugu (tiger blowfish) liver at a Kyoto restaurant. This raised the profile of fugu and its life-threatening properties.
Detoxified Dinners
Is sand burial really a good way to cure fugu poisoning?
“It’s total superstition!” says Ueno Ken’ichirō, owner of the Shimonoseki restaurant Fuku no Seki, which specializes in blowfish—known in the local dialect as fuku. Formerly a fugu wholesaler, Fuku no Seki is now the parent organization for processing company Daifuku, so Ueno knows his blowfish.
There have been no poisoning cases in Yamaguchi Prefecture for decades. Would-be fugu cooks are required to get licenses in many Japanese prefectures, including Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Ōita, Tokyo, and Osaka. Ueno says, “There are very tight standards in Yamaguchi. We take pride in preparing blowfish safely.”
Four in five Japanese fugu caught in the wild or farm-raised—mainly in Nagasaki Prefecture—come to Yamaguchi, because of the numerous local processing companies. After toxic elements are removed in processing, the fish, rendered harmless, are shipped nationwide.
For this reason, the kind of scene depicted in the film is now almost unimaginable. Fugu served in a professional establishment very rarely causes poisoning. The vast majority of blowfish poisoning incidents in Japan occur when amateurs prepare the dish.
The case of Bandō Mitsugorō VIII was different. Probably many people now would find it difficult to understand how he considered toxic tiger blowfish liver to be a delicacy. Many gourmets of the time, however, dipped fugu sashimi into soy sauce mixed with fugu liver instead of wasabi. The poisonous elements made the tongue smart and go numb—sensations to savor while drinking. Befuddled by numbness and alcohol, Bandō consumed too much, overshooting his tolerance level and succumbing to death. Chefs would not allow this to happen today. (...)
Lifting the Fugu Ban
Shimonoseki became Japan’s fugu center in the late nineteenth century. Yamaguchi Prefecture lies at the western tip of the country’s main island of Honshū and is surrounded by water on three sides. From ancient times the area flourished through trade with China and Korea and was known as the “Kyoto of the West.”
Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), Japan’s first prime minister, was born in the area. During one trip back home, he visited a restaurant called Shunpanrō. The sea was rough that day, so it was difficult to procure any good fish. The flustered restaurant proprietor’s wife decided to serve Itō blowfish. Although it had been prohibited by law since the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi three centuries earlier, locals had perfected the preparation method.
Itō enjoyed the dish so much that he lifted the ban on eating fugu in 1888. He also granted the very first license to serve it to Shunpanrō, considered the finest restaurant in Shimonoseki. In 1895, the establishment played a part in East Asian history when it was the venue for the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki by Itō and Chinese politician Li Hongzhang. The agreement brought an end to the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. (...)
In Japan, fugu remains have been found at the kaizuka or “shell mounds” that served as garbage dumps for people around the country in the Jōmon period (ca. 10,000 BC–300 BC) and later. The endless deaths from eating the fish ultimately led to Hideyoshi’s sixteenth-century ban, which continued—if imperfectly enforced—until the modern era.
The appeal of hazardous blowfish cuisine was apparent since ancient times. Was the thrill of a brush with death really so entrancing? The boundless nature of human desire is enough to make one shudder. If fugu were not poisonous, they may not have become so highly prized.
The appeal of hazardous blowfish cuisine was apparent since ancient times. Was the thrill of a brush with death really so entrancing? The boundless nature of human desire is enough to make one shudder. If fugu were not poisonous, they may not have become so highly prized.
by Sumiki Hikari, Nippon.com | Read more:
Image: Fugu ready for preparation. Courtesy Shimonoseki municipal government.
[ed. Enough venom to kill 30 people. Apparently fugu has claimed another victim, this time in Brazil.]
Monday, January 29, 2024
Keto's Promising Clues
Patients say keto helps with their mental illness. Science is racing to understand why.
Iain Campbell was gazing out the bus window on his way to work when he first sensed something radical was reshaping how he experienced the world.
The inkling emerged from an altogether ordinary observation: He felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.
"I hadn't experienced that in a really long time, probably since I was a kid," says Campbell, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He put together a 45-minute video summing up the biological rationale for using the ketogenic diet in bipolar disorder and posted it on social media, not expecting much after that.
The inkling emerged from an altogether ordinary observation: He felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.
"I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I thought this might be what it feels like to be normal."
Campbell had lived with bipolar disorder for much of his life. Mental illness runs in his family, and he'd lost loved ones to suicide. Over the years, he tried different treatments, but it had become "increasingly difficult to live with."
What had changed? A few weeks earlier, he'd started a new diet.
Campbell dealt with unwanted weight gain and metabolic troubles, a common side effect of psychiatric medications.
In an effort to lose weight, he drastically cut back on carbs and instead focused on protein and fat. It turns out he'd unknowingly entered ketosis: A metabolic state where the body switches from glucose as its primary energy source to ketones, which come from fat.
He started learning about the ketogenic diet, which is high fat and very low carb, on podcasts and YouTube videos. Soon, he was tracking his ketone levels, courtesy of an at-home blood test.
"I realized it was actually the ketone level that was making this shift in my symptoms in a way that nothing else ever had," he says. "It struck me as really significant, like life-changing."
A career-launching moment
How exactly was a diet performing this alchemy? Campbell decided to pursue a PhD in mental health at the University of Edinburgh, hoping to do his own research and learn if it could help others.
Campbell had lived with bipolar disorder for much of his life. Mental illness runs in his family, and he'd lost loved ones to suicide. Over the years, he tried different treatments, but it had become "increasingly difficult to live with."
What had changed? A few weeks earlier, he'd started a new diet.
Campbell dealt with unwanted weight gain and metabolic troubles, a common side effect of psychiatric medications.
In an effort to lose weight, he drastically cut back on carbs and instead focused on protein and fat. It turns out he'd unknowingly entered ketosis: A metabolic state where the body switches from glucose as its primary energy source to ketones, which come from fat.
He started learning about the ketogenic diet, which is high fat and very low carb, on podcasts and YouTube videos. Soon, he was tracking his ketone levels, courtesy of an at-home blood test.
"I realized it was actually the ketone level that was making this shift in my symptoms in a way that nothing else ever had," he says. "It struck me as really significant, like life-changing."
A career-launching moment
How exactly was a diet performing this alchemy? Campbell decided to pursue a PhD in mental health at the University of Edinburgh, hoping to do his own research and learn if it could help others.
In online forums, people with bipolar disorder were sharing similar anecdotes — they were finding improvements in their mood, increased clarity and fewer episodes of depression. (...)
In early 2021, he started working with the eldest son of Jan and David Baszucki, a wealthy tech entrepreneur. Their son Matt had bipolar disorder and had been on many medications in recent years.
Jan Baszucki enlisted Palmer's help as her son gave the ketogenic diet a try.
"Within a couple of months, we saw a dramatic change," she says.
Inspired, she started contacting clinicians and researchers, looking to bring more visibility — and funding — to the treatment. Since rigorous data on the diet is still lacking, she wants to see researchers conduct large clinical trials to back up anecdotes like her son's recovery.
Soon a big-time philanthropist was in touch with Campbell, ready to pay for his bipolar study – and others.
Now, around a dozen clinical trials are in the works, testing the diet's effect on mental illness, most notably for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, but also for conditions like anorexia, alcoholism and PTSD.
"The research and the clinical interest is suddenly exploding," says Dr. Georgia Ede, a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, who began using the ketogenic diet in her own practice about a decade ago.
From epilepsy care to the mainstream
The classic ketogenic diet contains an eye-popping amount of fat, roughly 90% of calories coming from that alone. Other versions have come along that dial down the fat and allow more room for protein and slightly more carbohydrates.
Scientists search for more clues
The effect of ketosis on the mitochondria is one hypothesis for why keto diets could work, but it may not be the whole story.
Much of the data on how the diet affects the brain come from research into epilepsy and other neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Scientists find serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder share notable similarities with these conditions: Inflammation in the brain, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and issues with glucose and insulin.
Research suggests ketosis can be beneficial on these fronts, although human studies are limited. Some of the larger clinical trials now underway for keto diets will seek to pin down what's going on.
For example, Dr. Deanna Kelly is trying to determine if the diet's potential benefits emerge from the microbiome in the gut.
"You're potentially changing the way bacteria are functioning and that could affect your behavior and your brain," says Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, who's leading an inpatient trial on the ketogenic diet for schizophrenia.
Other scientists are studying the diet's effect on neurotransmitters like GABA — which acts as a kind of brake in the brain.
Dr. Mary Phillips, who has studied how dopamine affects the reward circuit in bipolar disorder, thinks that may help explain its therapeutic effects.
She hopes her clinical trial of bipolar and the keto diet, which launched recently, also gets at a very practical question:
"How do you know which people the ketogenic diet is going to work for?" says Phillips, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, "It's not the easiest diet in the world to get started on."
Jan Baszucki enlisted Palmer's help as her son gave the ketogenic diet a try.
"Within a couple of months, we saw a dramatic change," she says.
Inspired, she started contacting clinicians and researchers, looking to bring more visibility — and funding — to the treatment. Since rigorous data on the diet is still lacking, she wants to see researchers conduct large clinical trials to back up anecdotes like her son's recovery.
Soon a big-time philanthropist was in touch with Campbell, ready to pay for his bipolar study – and others.
Now, around a dozen clinical trials are in the works, testing the diet's effect on mental illness, most notably for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression, but also for conditions like anorexia, alcoholism and PTSD.
"The research and the clinical interest is suddenly exploding," says Dr. Georgia Ede, a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, who began using the ketogenic diet in her own practice about a decade ago.
From epilepsy care to the mainstream
The classic ketogenic diet contains an eye-popping amount of fat, roughly 90% of calories coming from that alone. Other versions have come along that dial down the fat and allow more room for protein and slightly more carbohydrates.
The diet's entrance into the mainstream has fed plenty of debate about its merits, with some medical groups raising concerns. Yet, there's also growing attention — and clinical trials underway — on its potential, not only for obesity but a variety of other conditions. (...)
Scientists search for more clues
The effect of ketosis on the mitochondria is one hypothesis for why keto diets could work, but it may not be the whole story.
Much of the data on how the diet affects the brain come from research into epilepsy and other neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Scientists find serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder share notable similarities with these conditions: Inflammation in the brain, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and issues with glucose and insulin.
Research suggests ketosis can be beneficial on these fronts, although human studies are limited. Some of the larger clinical trials now underway for keto diets will seek to pin down what's going on.
For example, Dr. Deanna Kelly is trying to determine if the diet's potential benefits emerge from the microbiome in the gut.
"You're potentially changing the way bacteria are functioning and that could affect your behavior and your brain," says Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, who's leading an inpatient trial on the ketogenic diet for schizophrenia.
Other scientists are studying the diet's effect on neurotransmitters like GABA — which acts as a kind of brake in the brain.
Dr. Mary Phillips, who has studied how dopamine affects the reward circuit in bipolar disorder, thinks that may help explain its therapeutic effects.
She hopes her clinical trial of bipolar and the keto diet, which launched recently, also gets at a very practical question:
"How do you know which people the ketogenic diet is going to work for?" says Phillips, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, "It's not the easiest diet in the world to get started on."
by Will Stone, NPR | Read more:
Images: Tina Russell/Katie Hayes
Feeding Frenzy
Insurance Companies Want Their Money Back For Lahaina Fire Claims
The global insurance industry has swept into Honolulu state court, seeking to collect reimbursements for claims paid to policyholders. Those total more than $1 billion in West Maui for residential property alone, according to the latest data from the Insurance Division of the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.
The plaintiffs include names familiar to Hawaii homeowners: insurers like State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., USAA Casualty Insurance Co., Island Insurance and Tradewind Insurance.
Also included are scores of additional companies, such as the French and Australian branches of the giant Swiss Re, Japan’s Mitsui Sumimoto Insurance, and Lloyd’s, the London-based marketplace known for insuring everything from ship cargo, fine art and space satellites to Bruce Springsteen’s voice.
According to the Hawaii Insurance Division, as of Nov. 30, insurers reported 3,947 claims for residential properties in West Maui, including 1,689 total losses. Estimated losses totaled $1.54 billion, of which insurers had paid $1.09 billion. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023)
Defendants include Hawaiian Electric, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and other unnamed parties the insurers allege were negligent in allowing the fires to start and spread.
It’s a predictable turn of events, says Robert Anderson, director of the Center for Risk Management Research at the University of California, Berkeley.
When a company like State Farm issues a policy to a homeowner, Anderson said in an email, State Farm typically buys reinsurance from another company like Swiss Re to cover the risk from catastrophic events, such as a hurricane hitting an urban area “or a wildfire that spreads and takes out a large number of homes, as happened in Lahaina.”
When such a catastrophe occurs, State Farm would typically pay claims to the insured property owners and get reimbursed by its reinsurers, Anderson said.
If the losses occurred because of negligence, the insurer and reinsurers can sue the negligent parties to recover the payments “in the same way that a health insurance company could seek to recover the costs of treating someone injured in an automobile accident,” he said.
Multiply that by thousands of claims, and it explains the enormous number of insurance company plaintiffs, spread out over 26 states and a half dozen countries, filing suit in Hawaii. It’s also a sign that the global insurance market is functioning adequately to spread the risk of a major catastrophe in Hawaii, said Sumner LaCroix, an economist with the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.
by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2023
[ed. Wonder where the affected local population rates in priority, and how long it'll be before they see anything (generations)?]
[ed. Wonder where the affected local population rates in priority, and how long it'll be before they see anything (generations)?]
Dr Strangelove at 60: Still the Greatest Big-Screen Satire?
Sixty years ago, Columbia Pictures released the first of two black-and-white movies with the exact same premise: what if American planes with hydrogen bombs were inadvertently ordered to drop their payload on targets in the Soviet Union, potentially triggering an all-out nuclear war that wipe out humanity? The Cuban missile crisis had pushed the superpowers to the brink of conflict less than two years earlier, and film-makers were unusually eager to face their cold war nightmares head on.
The release dates were like a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous line about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. The farce, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, came first. Then the tragedy, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, arrived in October. There was a lot of messy legal fallout over the common origins of the two films, but they complement each other beautifully, with only a slight difference in perspective on our inability to manage weapons of such god-like destruction.
The message of Fail Safe: human beings are fallible. The message of Dr Strangelove: human beings are idiots.
On balance, Kubrick’s message is more persuasive. Dr Strangelove remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of the cold war, with two saber-rattling superpowers escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. There’s absolutely no question, for example, that the top military and political brass have gamed out the catastrophic loss of life in a nuclear conflict, just as they do in the war room here. Perhaps they would even nod sagely at the distinction between 20 million people dead v 150 million people dead. All Kubrick and his co-writers, Terry Southern and Peter George, have to add is a wry punchline: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”
Part of the genius of Dr Strangelove is how deftly it toggles between the satirical and the silly without losing any of its power. You can picture the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker team behind Airplane! snickering and taking notes over funny names like Brig Gen Jack D Ripper and Col “Bat” Guano, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff taking a call from his lover in the war room. (“Look, baby, I can’t talk to you right now. My president needs me.”) At the same time, the film doesn’t need to put that much spin on the ball. Is there really much of a difference between Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launching a nuclear strike over fears of the Russian tainting “our precious bodily fluids” and the QAnon fantasies of the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who occupied a much higher position as Donald Trump’s national security advisor?
Kubrick knows when to pull back, however. Dr Strangelove doesn’t try to be a laugh-a-second spoof, because plausibility is its most important weapon. Nothing in the setup is any funnier than Fail Safe: B-52 bombers with a nuclear arsenal are flying a routine airborne patrol two hours from Soviet targets, awaiting the usual code to return to base. Instead, their superior, Gen Ripper, issues the code for “Wing Attack Plan R”, which not only leads them into the USSR but reduces communications to a three-letter code known only to Ripper. At the war room in the Pentagon, the ineffectual president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), summons the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen “Buck” Turgidson (George C Scott), and other military luminaries to deal with the crisis. How could this happen? And what, if anything, can be done to stop it?
The straightforward premise is a lesson in the importance of structure in satire, which is established here not only in the solid parameters of the plotting but in black-and-white photography that presents its own rigorous deadpan. The obsessive precision of a Kubrick production doesn’t stifle the comedy in Dr Strangelove but liberates it, much like Buster Keaton holding a stone face while chaos erupts around him. Because we believe that the “Wing Attack Plan R” code would set up a top secret protocol like the one Major TJ “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) carries out on his B-52, we can laugh when his survival kit includes prophylactics, lipstick and three pairs of nylon stockings. (“Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”) (...)
Watching Dr Strangelove today, in light of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, is to recognize all the more acutely the human flaws that are baked into weapons of mass destruction, starting with the chief architect of the atom bomb. Some of the best bits in the film barely have to reach for a joke: Kubrick merely has to point out the folly behind modern man’s greatest fear. Hubris may kill us all, but we can get a good laugh out of it first.
The release dates were like a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous line about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. The farce, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, came first. Then the tragedy, Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, arrived in October. There was a lot of messy legal fallout over the common origins of the two films, but they complement each other beautifully, with only a slight difference in perspective on our inability to manage weapons of such god-like destruction.
The message of Fail Safe: human beings are fallible. The message of Dr Strangelove: human beings are idiots.
On balance, Kubrick’s message is more persuasive. Dr Strangelove remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of the cold war, with two saber-rattling superpowers escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation. There’s absolutely no question, for example, that the top military and political brass have gamed out the catastrophic loss of life in a nuclear conflict, just as they do in the war room here. Perhaps they would even nod sagely at the distinction between 20 million people dead v 150 million people dead. All Kubrick and his co-writers, Terry Southern and Peter George, have to add is a wry punchline: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”
Part of the genius of Dr Strangelove is how deftly it toggles between the satirical and the silly without losing any of its power. You can picture the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker team behind Airplane! snickering and taking notes over funny names like Brig Gen Jack D Ripper and Col “Bat” Guano, or the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff taking a call from his lover in the war room. (“Look, baby, I can’t talk to you right now. My president needs me.”) At the same time, the film doesn’t need to put that much spin on the ball. Is there really much of a difference between Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launching a nuclear strike over fears of the Russian tainting “our precious bodily fluids” and the QAnon fantasies of the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who occupied a much higher position as Donald Trump’s national security advisor?
Kubrick knows when to pull back, however. Dr Strangelove doesn’t try to be a laugh-a-second spoof, because plausibility is its most important weapon. Nothing in the setup is any funnier than Fail Safe: B-52 bombers with a nuclear arsenal are flying a routine airborne patrol two hours from Soviet targets, awaiting the usual code to return to base. Instead, their superior, Gen Ripper, issues the code for “Wing Attack Plan R”, which not only leads them into the USSR but reduces communications to a three-letter code known only to Ripper. At the war room in the Pentagon, the ineffectual president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), summons the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen “Buck” Turgidson (George C Scott), and other military luminaries to deal with the crisis. How could this happen? And what, if anything, can be done to stop it?
The straightforward premise is a lesson in the importance of structure in satire, which is established here not only in the solid parameters of the plotting but in black-and-white photography that presents its own rigorous deadpan. The obsessive precision of a Kubrick production doesn’t stifle the comedy in Dr Strangelove but liberates it, much like Buster Keaton holding a stone face while chaos erupts around him. Because we believe that the “Wing Attack Plan R” code would set up a top secret protocol like the one Major TJ “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) carries out on his B-52, we can laugh when his survival kit includes prophylactics, lipstick and three pairs of nylon stockings. (“Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”) (...)
Watching Dr Strangelove today, in light of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, is to recognize all the more acutely the human flaws that are baked into weapons of mass destruction, starting with the chief architect of the atom bomb. Some of the best bits in the film barely have to reach for a joke: Kubrick merely has to point out the folly behind modern man’s greatest fear. Hubris may kill us all, but we can get a good laugh out of it first.
by Scott Tobias, The Guardian | Read more:
Videos: Dr. Strangelove/Sony Pictures
[ed. Sixty years. Time really does fly (kinda like a B-52 bomber; same end result). One of my all-time top 10, with a couple all-time top favorite acting performances (Peter Sellers x 3; George C. Scott).]
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Access News Articles for Free: A Guide to Unlocking Paywalls
Are you trying to read a news article that requires a subscription? Even if you do support great journalism, it can be pricey to subscribe to every publication you want to read. If you're not ready to commit to a subscription, there are several ways to access any news article for free—even if it's behind a paywall. This wikiHow article will teach you 12 easy tricks for reading any news articles online without a subscription.
Image: uncredited
[ed. Well, it looks like The New York Times has added another brick in their (pay)Wall, which seems pretty effective at preventing unsubscribed access. I've been using two Chrome extensions Cookie Remover and Quick Javascript Switcher for a while now but find they're now no longer functional at the NYT website. The only thing that has worked so far is the advice given above (pasting headlines into Google). Don't know how long that'll last.]
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Paul Beatty: Unmitigated Blackness
Paul Beatty is a hugely significant comic writer: one of only a few contemporary novelists whose work is consistently satirical. His most recent novel, The Sellout, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, shares DNA with other irreverent, iconoclastic masterpieces like Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five. The novel traces the tribulations of his protagonist, Me (nickname Bonbon), as he tries to both reinstate and resegregate his hometown, Dickens, a poverty stricken, largely Black enclave in LA. The resegregation idea is triggered by Bonbon’s friend Hominy, the aging star of an early Hollywood show, who, habituated to ‘the domineering white presence’ craves the overt white supremacy of the old days and insists upon becoming Bonbon’s slave. The satirical conceit of resegregation is obviously an exaggerated gesture, as is Hominy’s desire for enslavement, but both devices, while extreme, are arrived at through logical means, and serve as a way of examining the effects of white supremacy and the tendency for the recognition of racism to become blunted over time.
The iconoclasm of the novel is perhaps most marked in Beatty’s mockery of an African American intelligentsia whose demand for respectability and decorum includes an insistence upon a sanitised version of the history of racist representations. As Bonbon puts it, these paternalistic figures ‘present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone n—–s in front of you are starting from scratch.’ One of the overt projects of the book is to work against this denial and reassert the history of ridicule and stereotype both in order to better explain that ‘woebegone’ nature and then to examine the repercussions of that history: the despair, the poverty, the internalised self-hatred. The demand for decorum also imposes expressive restrictions, with a dominant literary style that privileges what Beatty, in his anthology of African American humour, hokum, calls a ‘moral, corporeal and prosaic’ approach, which originates, in part, ‘out of a tradition of abolitionist “And ain’t I an intellect?” activism aimed, then as now at whites’. In hokum, Beatty traces an alternative lineage, a Black comic tradition which offers a counter to the insistence upon sobriety, and avoids the doom-laden didacticism of an approach like that of Maya Angelou, whose work Beatty finds both ‘maudlin’ and oppressive. The alternative tradition captures ‘the black bon mot, the snap, the bag, the whimsy upon which “fuck you” and freedom sail’.
The challenge Beatty sets himself in The Sellout is an honest accounting of Black history and experience rendered in a way that, in its irreverence, is true to the vernacular tradition he demonstrates in hokum. And while the approach may be comic, the suffering he delineates remains clear. In a passage when Bonbon is reminiscing about his father, the ‘n—-r-whisperer’ coaxing locals back from the brink of suicide, for example, his descriptions capture the anguish of Friday nights after payday when it all gets too much: the ‘teeming hordes of bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products … then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle – fried, dyed, and laid to the side – they’d chose that Friday to commit suicide, murder, or both’.
It’s funny but also not. The rhythms and the pacing are comic, as is the observational humour, which has an unabashedly insider quality with the feel of stand-up, but the picture of despair is far from funny. And later, Bonbon is in demand due to the growing success of the segregation, as the overt racism makes the community newly respectful towards one another, forcing them to realise ‘how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go’. He’s in discussion with a local kids’ sports organisation and asks if they have any money:
“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star”
“I thought they only did things for dying kids?”
“Exactly.”
It’s interesting, however, that a growing unease about comedy is noticeable in his responses to the commentary on the novel. While he initially freely acknowledges the satirical impulse in his work, later, Beatty speaks mistrustfully of the implications of the term: the way it seems to limit a work to a particular time period and how it suggests exaggeration rather than commentary (which risks becoming mere entertainment rather than anything deeper) – both of which can allow for the work to be dismissed. We need only think of the legion of satirical news programmes to understand what he’s worried about – in this context, satire is eminently disposable. He’s also spoken about his discomfort at being called a comic writer, suggesting that the focus upon humour allows readers and commentators to ignore the sadness and the anger that his work attends to. Perhaps the comedy does risk obscuring the tragedy, and perhaps the general air of comic resilience risks disguising the pain.
The challenge Beatty sets himself in The Sellout is an honest accounting of Black history and experience rendered in a way that, in its irreverence, is true to the vernacular tradition he demonstrates in hokum. And while the approach may be comic, the suffering he delineates remains clear. In a passage when Bonbon is reminiscing about his father, the ‘n—-r-whisperer’ coaxing locals back from the brink of suicide, for example, his descriptions capture the anguish of Friday nights after payday when it all gets too much: the ‘teeming hordes of bipolar poor, who having spent it all in one place, and grown tired and unsated from the night’s notoriously shitty prime-time television lineup, would unwedge themselves from between the couch-bound obese family members and the boxes of unsold Avon beauty products … then having canceled the next day’s appointment with their mental health care professional, the chatterbox cosmetologist, who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle – fried, dyed, and laid to the side – they’d chose that Friday to commit suicide, murder, or both’.
It’s funny but also not. The rhythms and the pacing are comic, as is the observational humour, which has an unabashedly insider quality with the feel of stand-up, but the picture of despair is far from funny. And later, Bonbon is in demand due to the growing success of the segregation, as the overt racism makes the community newly respectful towards one another, forcing them to realise ‘how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go’. He’s in discussion with a local kids’ sports organisation and asks if they have any money:
“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star”
“I thought they only did things for dying kids?”
“Exactly.”
It’s structured like a joke: with a punchline that reveals the children’s prospects with great economy.
These instances demonstrate the freedom of Beatty’s approach: the unvarnished, forthright statement about life expectancy, the observational material which defiantly plunders the privacy of black life. Even the running gag throughout the novel about the characters greedily eating the fruit that Bonbon grows on his farm, is an insistence upon the freedom to reclaim the racist trope about watermelons (and thus return the fruit to its original symbol as the means to community and self-sufficiency). The politics of respectability require that such matters be approached with reverence and discretion, but Beatty, recognising the degree to which such pieties are defined in opposition (to racist stereotypes, to the white presence), wishes to forge a new path that is genuinely self-created.
In the novel, Bonbon articulates this pursuit of freedom in his description of the evolution of Black identity, from the Neophyte Negro ‘afraid of his own blackness’ (exemplars include Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice), to Stage 4, ‘Unmitigated Blackness’ which ‘is simply not giving a fuck’ (Richard Pryor, David Hammons, Chester Himes). (...)
These instances demonstrate the freedom of Beatty’s approach: the unvarnished, forthright statement about life expectancy, the observational material which defiantly plunders the privacy of black life. Even the running gag throughout the novel about the characters greedily eating the fruit that Bonbon grows on his farm, is an insistence upon the freedom to reclaim the racist trope about watermelons (and thus return the fruit to its original symbol as the means to community and self-sufficiency). The politics of respectability require that such matters be approached with reverence and discretion, but Beatty, recognising the degree to which such pieties are defined in opposition (to racist stereotypes, to the white presence), wishes to forge a new path that is genuinely self-created.
In the novel, Bonbon articulates this pursuit of freedom in his description of the evolution of Black identity, from the Neophyte Negro ‘afraid of his own blackness’ (exemplars include Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice), to Stage 4, ‘Unmitigated Blackness’ which ‘is simply not giving a fuck’ (Richard Pryor, David Hammons, Chester Himes). (...)
It’s interesting, however, that a growing unease about comedy is noticeable in his responses to the commentary on the novel. While he initially freely acknowledges the satirical impulse in his work, later, Beatty speaks mistrustfully of the implications of the term: the way it seems to limit a work to a particular time period and how it suggests exaggeration rather than commentary (which risks becoming mere entertainment rather than anything deeper) – both of which can allow for the work to be dismissed. We need only think of the legion of satirical news programmes to understand what he’s worried about – in this context, satire is eminently disposable. He’s also spoken about his discomfort at being called a comic writer, suggesting that the focus upon humour allows readers and commentators to ignore the sadness and the anger that his work attends to. Perhaps the comedy does risk obscuring the tragedy, and perhaps the general air of comic resilience risks disguising the pain.
by Dr Emma Sullivan, Humour in the Arts | Read more:
Image: Picador USA via
[ed. This always happens. Whenever I find a book I love it takes me forever to finish it. I go slowly and savor it, jump back and forth and re-read certain passages and chapters, look for quotes I don't want to forget, and just generally avoid letting it come to a conclusion. This is one of those books. Other reviews: here, here and here.]
War Game Shows a Simulation of a Coup After the 2024 Election
The Results Are Not Reassuring.
“You have six hours to prevent a civil war.”
With that ominous prompt, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s documentary War Game gets underway. The movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, shadows a training exercise in which veterans of the armed forces, intelligence services, and state and federal government play out the possibility of an organized attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2024 presidential election. Conducted on the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, in a mock-up of the White House situation room, the simulation confronts the sobering possibility that even after that object lesson in the fragile nature of our democracy, the nation may not be fully prepared for what comes next. As Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council official and Trump whistleblower, who helped design the exercise, explains, the defenders of democracy have learned the lessons of 2021—but so have the “democracy offenders,” the people hellbent on overturning the lawful government of the U.S.
The 2025 insurrection is instigated by a paramilitary group called the Order of Columbus, a loose amalgamation of the Oath Keepers and QAnon. It’s led by a fictional war hero based on Michael Flynn and conceived by Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran who now runs a nonprofit that keeps tabs on the extreme right. He shakes his head as he describes how many people still underestimate the imminent danger of American fascism—a movement that he could, under different circumstances, see himself joining—and he adopts a similar tone during the simulation as he moves his pieces around the board. The main new element in this hypothetical is that the Order of Columbus has factions within the U.S. military itself that are activated as it becomes clear that the incumbent president, played by former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, will be certified the victor over his right-wing opponent. Members of the D.C. National Guard turn their weapons on their comrades, and other members of the military follow suit across the states, leaving in question what exactly the commander in chief is in command of. The president and his allies are particularly slow to reckon with the infinite megaphone of social media, which the insurgents use as a means to rally their troops until, more than halfway through, someone in the situation room thinks to place a call to Mark Zuckerberg. (When the Transition Integrity Project, in summer 2020, gamed out possible disruptions to that year’s upcoming election, the establishment made a similar error, and corrected for it in later rounds.)
What’s most fascinating in War Game is the ongoing tension between the interventionist forces urging the president to take swift and decisive action and those counseling him to act more delicately, weakening the threat without risking an overt show of force that could add more fuel to the fire. The Order of Columbus isn’t trying just to overturn the election, but to create martyrs for the cause, proof that the incumbent is the tyrant it claims. Goldsmith points out that while the Jan. 6 attacks didn’t succeed in ousting Biden, they did achieve the critical goal of undermining faith in the electoral process, with a majority of Republicans either believing or suspecting that the election was illegitimate.
As the president’s senior adviser, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp pushes the idea that the greatest danger is for the government to underreact to the threat: This is, after all, how military coups are made. In the control room, you can see Janessa Goldbeck, whose nonpartisan organization Vet Voice is responsible for staging the simulation, almost fighting the urge to egg Heitkamp on as the casualties mount, because she knows just how bad both this fictional situation and its real-world equivalent can get.
Bullock, however, remains a figure of almost Sorkinesque stoicism. (There are shots that suggest he could have been Martin Sheen’s stand-in on The West Wing.) The crisis spreads to the states, and as official communications become confused, it’s difficult to tell whether statehouses have already fallen to the insurgency. The simulation’s six-hour time frame, further compressed by Moss and Gerber into a 94-minute movie, underlines the terrifying sense of just how quickly the contagion can spread, and from how many directions at once. It’s like a tower defense game with the world’s highest stakes, trying to calculate not just where the threat is but where it will grow and at what speed. As the situation worsens, Bullock is urged to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to nationalize state forces and override the prohibition against using the military to enforce the law. (The act has certainly been invoked for less, including by George H.W. Bush during the Rodney King riots.) But he hesitates over the ramifications for both the short and long term. What better way to prove himself the despot the Order of Columbus calls him than by turning the country’s military against its own citizens? And in the event that his opponent, or someone like him, becomes president, what’s to stop them from citing Bullock’s example to invoke the Insurrection Act for their own fascistic purposes?
Two weeks before Sundance, Moss and Gerber hosted a screening of War Game in New York, followed by a discussion with several of its participants: Bullock, Heitkamp, and retired Gens. Wesley Clark and Linda Singh, who play the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of the National Guard Bureau, respectively. (The Sundance screening was accompanied by a virtually identical panel.) Clark forcefully pushed back against the idea that members of the U.S. military could be involved in any attempt to disrupt the lawful workings of government, citing the camaraderie his disparate unit showed under fire in Vietnam. But there is ample evidence of extremist elements in the military, which, Heitkamp pointed out, does not even screen recruits’ social media profiles for their political views. “I think the biggest threat is denial,” she said. “We have a problem that we’re not acknowledging.”
With that ominous prompt, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber’s documentary War Game gets underway. The movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, shadows a training exercise in which veterans of the armed forces, intelligence services, and state and federal government play out the possibility of an organized attempt to disrupt the certification of the 2024 presidential election. Conducted on the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots, in a mock-up of the White House situation room, the simulation confronts the sobering possibility that even after that object lesson in the fragile nature of our democracy, the nation may not be fully prepared for what comes next. As Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council official and Trump whistleblower, who helped design the exercise, explains, the defenders of democracy have learned the lessons of 2021—but so have the “democracy offenders,” the people hellbent on overturning the lawful government of the U.S.
What’s most fascinating in War Game is the ongoing tension between the interventionist forces urging the president to take swift and decisive action and those counseling him to act more delicately, weakening the threat without risking an overt show of force that could add more fuel to the fire. The Order of Columbus isn’t trying just to overturn the election, but to create martyrs for the cause, proof that the incumbent is the tyrant it claims. Goldsmith points out that while the Jan. 6 attacks didn’t succeed in ousting Biden, they did achieve the critical goal of undermining faith in the electoral process, with a majority of Republicans either believing or suspecting that the election was illegitimate.
As the president’s senior adviser, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp pushes the idea that the greatest danger is for the government to underreact to the threat: This is, after all, how military coups are made. In the control room, you can see Janessa Goldbeck, whose nonpartisan organization Vet Voice is responsible for staging the simulation, almost fighting the urge to egg Heitkamp on as the casualties mount, because she knows just how bad both this fictional situation and its real-world equivalent can get.
Bullock, however, remains a figure of almost Sorkinesque stoicism. (There are shots that suggest he could have been Martin Sheen’s stand-in on The West Wing.) The crisis spreads to the states, and as official communications become confused, it’s difficult to tell whether statehouses have already fallen to the insurgency. The simulation’s six-hour time frame, further compressed by Moss and Gerber into a 94-minute movie, underlines the terrifying sense of just how quickly the contagion can spread, and from how many directions at once. It’s like a tower defense game with the world’s highest stakes, trying to calculate not just where the threat is but where it will grow and at what speed. As the situation worsens, Bullock is urged to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to nationalize state forces and override the prohibition against using the military to enforce the law. (The act has certainly been invoked for less, including by George H.W. Bush during the Rodney King riots.) But he hesitates over the ramifications for both the short and long term. What better way to prove himself the despot the Order of Columbus calls him than by turning the country’s military against its own citizens? And in the event that his opponent, or someone like him, becomes president, what’s to stop them from citing Bullock’s example to invoke the Insurrection Act for their own fascistic purposes?
Two weeks before Sundance, Moss and Gerber hosted a screening of War Game in New York, followed by a discussion with several of its participants: Bullock, Heitkamp, and retired Gens. Wesley Clark and Linda Singh, who play the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of the National Guard Bureau, respectively. (The Sundance screening was accompanied by a virtually identical panel.) Clark forcefully pushed back against the idea that members of the U.S. military could be involved in any attempt to disrupt the lawful workings of government, citing the camaraderie his disparate unit showed under fire in Vietnam. But there is ample evidence of extremist elements in the military, which, Heitkamp pointed out, does not even screen recruits’ social media profiles for their political views. “I think the biggest threat is denial,” she said. “We have a problem that we’re not acknowledging.”
by Sam Adams, Slate | Read more:
Image: Wolfgang Held
Friday, January 26, 2024
The DIY Guitar Pedal Culture Edition
Amongst electric guitarists, effects pedals can be an obsession. These small, sound-distorting aluminum enclosures offer a wide range of effects across curious categories, from optical phasers and rotary flangers to auto-wahs, bitcrushers and fuzz sustainers. And all of them typically contain a printed circuit board (PCB), requisite components, power, and a few audio jacks.
Practically there can be very little, if anything, distinguishing a homemade pedal from a factory or boutique maker. Indeed the allure of cheap replicas is strong, and the DIY community has gone from veroboards and point-to-point soldering, to sites now offering fully pre-made PCB boards citing the retail pedals they directly copy. While it might be tempting to see this as blatant theft, circuit schematics themselves are not protected under copyright or trademark. Furthermore, the reverse-engineering of circuits is not regarded as a trade-secret. Scant are patents in the guitar effects world. This lack of legal protection has caused some manufacturers to “goop” their pedals, wherein they douse the components in thick black epoxy to completely obscure components in a sticky ooze.
While wildly tedious, it is possible to remove this layer in a process known as “de-gooping.” Many in the DIY community see gooping as an affront to consumer transparency. The practice obscures not only the components, but the possibility of a pedal itself being a clone, not to mention the general quality of the workmanship.
With the abundance of clones, some makers have taken to peddling their wares online, offering custom acid-etchings, direct-clones, desirable circuit mods, and frankensteining effects together. Many modern boutique pedal makers got their start in the DIY community, and many new manufacturers make pedals with nods towards those grassroots contributions. The relationship between the DIY community and pedal manufacturers is mostly harmonious.
Perhaps the most notable example of a DIY guitar pedal being cloned by a big name manufacturer is the Klon Centaur. The “Klon” as it is known, was originally released in 1994 by boutique builder Bill Finnegan. A clean-boost pedal, it provided a transparent extra umph to a rig’s setup, and quickly became a staple on many legendary artists’ boards including Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Jeff Beck, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Nels Cline of Wilco and John Mayer. As word spread, so did demand. Finnegan was unable to keep up with orders, and prices on the used market went stratospheric, reaching at times above $7,000 for a pedal that originally sold for $225. The Klon was famously gooped, but as prices rose, the collective lust of gear hungry guitarists became too strong. Once again, the DIY community was on the job. Across forums the painstaking de-gooping began, and by 2008 the Klon’s schematic had been mapped. DIY builders sprinted to build their own, followed by a tidal wave of Klon-clones hitting the open market. Now, big name manufacturers were meeting pent-up demand with pedals like Wampler’s Tumnus, Electro-Harmonix Soul Food, and MXR’s Sugar Drive. In a matter of years the Klon went from unobtanium to a $99 staple on nearly every single pedal board, thanks to this reverse-cloning. Bill Finnegan would finally release his own Klon Clone - the KTR (at $269) featuring the same circuit albeit made in a way that allowed for mass manufacturing.
For decades, effects pedals have helped define and inspire musical genres. From Pink Floyd using a Colorsound Power Boost and Binson Echorec to sculpt psychedelic landscapes on Dark Side of the Moon, to Kurt Cobain popularizing the woozy and watery EHX Small Clone Chorus in Smells Like Teen Spirit, to the near mandatory use of a dimed-out Boss HM-2 to achieve peak Swedish death-metal “chainsaw” tones, specific pedals are seen as inescapable staples in every genre. (Stompboxes like the Fuzz Face, Uni-Vibe, Big Muff, and Tubescreamer have iconic tones featured on equally iconic tracks like Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Pink Floyd’s Breathe, Smashing Pumpkins’ Cherub Rock, and Metallica’s Fade to Black.)
Guitarists spend years questing to find their own amalgamation of grail worthy tones: trying to identify the precise effects used on their favorite track; snapping photographs of pedalboards at live gigs; endlessly listening to reviews on a myriad of YouTube channels; or lusting after legendary (and expensive) pedals made by long defunct manufacturers. And while certain brands like Electro-Harmonix, Boss, and Dunlop have always lined music store shelves, the last decade has seen a frenzy of boutique guitar pedal manufacturers offering a dizzying array of effects, with elaborate graphics and names like Astral Destiny, Rabid Mammal, Lizard Queen, and Tonal Recall, all serving up a true smorgasbord of tonal-manipulation.
Why is this interesting?
Because as people have become ever more passionate about their pedals, DIY pedal builders—a seasoned community of guitarists, electronics enthusiasts, makers, collectors, and at times entrepreneurs—are making their own. While many guitar effects pedals can cost hundreds of dollars retail, they can be made at home for as little as $10 in parts, provided one knows how to solder and can identify the positive lead on a diode. Forums abound with clones, mods, schematics, and debates on the tonal nature of germanium vs.silicon transistors. Pedal making is akin to sonic cross-stitching, hours spent softly soldering resistors, A/B testing components, and tweaking potentiometers until they’re just right. While DIY pedals may offer aural perfection, often the telltale sign of a homemade pedal is its stark blank aluminum enclosure. Occasionally, if you make a keeper, it will get custom spray paint or even an acid-etching.
Why is this interesting?
Because as people have become ever more passionate about their pedals, DIY pedal builders—a seasoned community of guitarists, electronics enthusiasts, makers, collectors, and at times entrepreneurs—are making their own. While many guitar effects pedals can cost hundreds of dollars retail, they can be made at home for as little as $10 in parts, provided one knows how to solder and can identify the positive lead on a diode. Forums abound with clones, mods, schematics, and debates on the tonal nature of germanium vs.silicon transistors. Pedal making is akin to sonic cross-stitching, hours spent softly soldering resistors, A/B testing components, and tweaking potentiometers until they’re just right. While DIY pedals may offer aural perfection, often the telltale sign of a homemade pedal is its stark blank aluminum enclosure. Occasionally, if you make a keeper, it will get custom spray paint or even an acid-etching.
While wildly tedious, it is possible to remove this layer in a process known as “de-gooping.” Many in the DIY community see gooping as an affront to consumer transparency. The practice obscures not only the components, but the possibility of a pedal itself being a clone, not to mention the general quality of the workmanship.
With the abundance of clones, some makers have taken to peddling their wares online, offering custom acid-etchings, direct-clones, desirable circuit mods, and frankensteining effects together. Many modern boutique pedal makers got their start in the DIY community, and many new manufacturers make pedals with nods towards those grassroots contributions. The relationship between the DIY community and pedal manufacturers is mostly harmonious.
Perhaps the most notable example of a DIY guitar pedal being cloned by a big name manufacturer is the Klon Centaur. The “Klon” as it is known, was originally released in 1994 by boutique builder Bill Finnegan. A clean-boost pedal, it provided a transparent extra umph to a rig’s setup, and quickly became a staple on many legendary artists’ boards including Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Jeff Beck, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, Nels Cline of Wilco and John Mayer. As word spread, so did demand. Finnegan was unable to keep up with orders, and prices on the used market went stratospheric, reaching at times above $7,000 for a pedal that originally sold for $225. The Klon was famously gooped, but as prices rose, the collective lust of gear hungry guitarists became too strong. Once again, the DIY community was on the job. Across forums the painstaking de-gooping began, and by 2008 the Klon’s schematic had been mapped. DIY builders sprinted to build their own, followed by a tidal wave of Klon-clones hitting the open market. Now, big name manufacturers were meeting pent-up demand with pedals like Wampler’s Tumnus, Electro-Harmonix Soul Food, and MXR’s Sugar Drive. In a matter of years the Klon went from unobtanium to a $99 staple on nearly every single pedal board, thanks to this reverse-cloning. Bill Finnegan would finally release his own Klon Clone - the KTR (at $269) featuring the same circuit albeit made in a way that allowed for mass manufacturing.
by Chris Moon, Why Is This Interesting | Read more:
Image: Mitchell-Strauss/Gear Page; Reddit
[ed. Been thinking of a Klon clone myself.]
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