Everyone’s a Sellout Now

When Rachael Kay Albers was shopping around her book proposal, the editors at a Big Five publishing house loved the idea. The problem came from the marketing department, which had an issue: She didn’t have a big enough following. With any book, but especially nonfiction ones, publishers want a guarantee that a writer comes with a built-in audience of people who already read and support their work and, crucially, will fork over $27 — a typical price for a new hardcover book — when it debuts.

It was ironic, considering her proposal was about what the age of the “personal brand” is doing to our humanity. Albers, 39, is an expert in what she calls the “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online. She’s talking about the hustle bro “gurus” flaunting rented Lamborghinis and promoting shady “passive income” schemes, yes, but she’s also talking about the bizarre fact that her “65-year-old mom, who’s an accountant, is being encouraged by her company to post on LinkedIn to ‘build [her] brand.’”

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.

We like to think of it as the work of singular geniuses whose motivations are purely creative and untainted by the market — this, despite the fact that music, publishing, and film have always been for-profit industries where formulaic, churned-out work is what often sells best. These days, the jig is up.

Corporate consolidation and streaming services have depleted artists’ traditional sources of revenue and decimated cultural industries. While Big Tech sites like Spotify claim they’re “democratizing” culture, they instead demand artists engage in double the labor to make a fraction of what they would have made under the old model. That labor amounts to constant self-promotion in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs, too.

“Authors are writing these incredible books, and yet when they ask me questions, the thing that keeps them up at night is, ‘How do I create this brand?’” says literary agent Carly Watters. It’s not that they want to be spending their time doing it, it’s that they feel they have to. “I think that millennials and Gen Xers really feel like sellouts. It’s not what they imagined their career to look like. It inherently feels wrong with their value system.”

Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform;” we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky. (...)

You can see this tension play out in the rise of “day in my life” videos, where authors and artists film themselves throughout their days and edit them into short TikToks or Reels. Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch. You’ll see a lot of cottagecore-esque videos where the writer will sip tea by the fireplace against the soundtrack of Wes Anderson, or wake up in a forest cabin and read by a river, or women like this Oxford University student who dresses up like literary characters and films herself working on her novel. Videos like these emulate the Romantic ideal of “solitary genius” artistry, evoking a time when writing was seen as a more “pure” or quaint profession. Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.

It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand. There’s been a fair amount of backlash to this imperative, recently among musicians on TikTok. (...)

The system works great for record labels or publishing houses, who can hand over the burden of marketing to the artists themselves. But that means, as Montgomery says, “If you have absolutely no knowledge of video creation, good fucking luck.” The labor of making TikToks — and if you want to reach the most people in the shortest amount of time, TikTok is pretty much the only place to go — requires both tedium and skill. You’ve got to get used to the app’s ever-evolving editing features, understand the culture of the platform, make yourself look presentable but not too presentable or risk coming off as inauthentic, prepare for and practice what you’re going to say, but again, not too much. And you’ve got to do it again and again and again, because according to every single influencer ever, the key to growing your audience is posting consistently.

More than that, you’ve got to actually spend your time doing this stuff on the off chance that the algorithm picks it up and people care about what you have to say. You’ve got to spend your time doing this even though it’s corny and cringe and your friends from high school or college will probably laugh as you “try to become an influencer.” You’ve got to do it even when you feel like you have absolutely nothing to say, because the algorithm demands you post anyway.

by Rebecca Jennings, Vox | Read more:
Image: Eleni Kalorkoti for Vox
[ed. Plus, it helps if you're good looking. See also: Are These Recipes Good, or Is the TikTok Chef Just Good-Looking? (NYT):]

"In an article for IZA World of Labor titled “Does It Pay to Be Beautiful?” Eva Sierminska and Karan Singhal explained that “empirical results support the fact that ‘better-looking’ people receive a wage premium, while those with ‘below-average’ looks incur a wage penalty.” In their overview of the research on the beauty premium, they said that men actually faced a greater plainness penalty than women did. They also found that being attractive was especially important in jobs dealing with customers, because customers preferred to deal with attractive salespeople and waiters, and that as a result, more attractive people gravitated toward those kinds of jobs.

In a sense, when anyone puts a video on social media, anyone who consumes it is a customer. But on top of individual human preferences for beauty, there is also an algorithm’s invisible sorting. (...)

That said, he thought there’s more pressure lately for people with all sorts of expertise (or no expertise) to put themselves in their content. So let’s say you’re an expert in Excel spreadsheet hacks. Whereas once you might have just put the spreadsheet on the screen, now you’re putting your mug on there, too. “I’ve definitely spoken to many younger people on TikTok, and they say that there’s more pressure to put your face on the internet to make a TikTok,” Chayka said. “You need to put yourself, your full corporeal body online in a way that wasn’t necessary with Twitter, for example, or Tumblr or even early-days Instagram.”

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[ed. See also: What Paris Jackson and Doja Cat’s latest red carpet looks say about tattoos today (CNN).]

Bad dog
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Julian Lage; Billie Eilish (2024 Grammys)

[ed. See also: Grammy Awards 2024: See the complete list of winners (EW). There were 94 categories (yes, 94!), with five finalists in each.]

What Does Being Sober Mean Today?

 For Many, Not Full Abstinence.

Mike Reed, a musician and Uber driver in Arizona, said he quit drinking alcohol more than a decade ago when his roommates got so fed up with his unruly behavior that they threatened to kick him out.

Sobriety became such a core part of Mr. Reed’s identity that he launched an online dating website called “Single & Sober,” but in 2020, Mr. Reed, a Navy veteran, said he found himself struggling as his sister, who had Down syndrome, was dying of cancer.

Mr. Reed, 43, began smoking marijuana. More recently, he went to a clinic for infusions of ketamine, and tried tiny doses of psychoactive mushrooms. Mr. Reed said those substances improved his mood — and he still regards himself as sober, because he remains alcohol free.

Notions of what constitutes sobriety and problematic substance use have grown more flexible in recent years as younger Americans have shunned alcohol in increasing numbers while embracing cannabis and psychedelics — a phenomenon that alarms some addiction experts.

Not long ago, sobriety was broadly understood to mean abstaining from all intoxicating substances, and the term was often associated with people who had overcome severe forms of addiction. These days, it is used more expansively, including by people who have quit drinking alcohol but consume what they deem moderate amounts of other substances, including marijuana and mushrooms.

“Just because someone has a drinking problem doesn’t mean they have a problem with every single thing,” Mr. Reed said.

As some drugs come to be viewed as wellness boosters by those who use them, adherence to the full abstinence model favored by organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous is shifting. Some people call themselves “California sober,” a term popularized in a 2021 song by the pop star Demi Lovato, who later disavowed the idea, saying on social media that “sober sober is the only way to be.”

Approaches that might have once seemed ludicrous — like treating opioid addiction with psychedelics — have gained broader enthusiasm among doctors as drug overdoses kill tens of thousands of Americans each year.

“The abstinence-only model is very restrictive,” said Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who specializes in medical cannabis and is a recovering opioid addict. “We really have to meet people where they are and have a broader recovery tent.”

It is impossible to know how many Americans consider themselves part of an increasingly malleable concept of sobriety, but there are indications of shifting views of acceptable substance use. (...)

Dr. Nora Volkow, a psychiatrist who since 2003 has led the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said she was trained to think that “the only way out of an addiction is total and full sobriety.” Over the years, she said, she came to see that as unrealistic for some patients. Reduced use, or replacing highly addictive drugs like opioids with cannabis, may be a decent outcome for certain people, she said in an interview.

“You come to realize that there are people that are able to recover and yet they are not absolutely free of every substance,” Dr. Volkow said.

Weighing Risks

The concept is shaking up the field of addiction medicine.Adherents of the full-abstinence model, which include Narcotics Anonymous, follow a 12-step process that includes turning to a higher power to regain “sanity.” Members often celebrate sobriety milestones with tokens or coins to reflect how long they have abstained from using alcohol or drugs.

The danger of abusing opioids and alcohol has become increasingly clear in recent years. But questions remain in the medical community about the risks of some drugs now often touted as wellness enhancers rather than guilty pleasures — cannabis products as sleep aids, ketamine infusions to treat depression, and psychoactive mushrooms to ease anxiety.

Addiction treatment centers have responded with concern to the shifting definitions of sobriety.

Dr. Joseph Lee, the president of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit addiction treatment provider, said that people with severe substance use problems are generally the least equipped to make wise decisions about drug use.

“One truth about risk in people is that we all do a very poor job of assessing our own risk,” he said. He added that he had grown concerned about claims from new cannabis and psychedelic ventures as they compete for business. “They know exactly who they are targeting, and those people who are being targeted are misassessing their risk,” he said. (...)

Individual Paths

Maya Richard-Craven, a journalist from Pasadena, Calif., said she has thought a lot about mitigating risk since she went to rehab in 2019 after her alcohol use became a problem.

She said she relapsed in 2020, consumed by anxiety early in the pandemic, and later turned to cannabis, regarding it as a healthier way to take the edge off. By 2021, she said she was smoking excessively, “to the point where I wanted to not feel anything.” That prompted her to “put down the pipe” and publish an essay warning about the risks of California sober.
 
More recently, Ms. Richard-Craven, 29, said she has resumed using marijuana but with greater restraint, typically smoking no more than half a joint at the end of the workday and the rest before bedtime. She credited cannabis with helping regulate her appetite, improving her sleep and, most of all, easing distress after a sexual assault. Still, Ms. Richard-Craven said she believed people with serious addictions should steer clear of all substances for at least their first year of recovery.

“That first year, you’re all over the place,” she said.

Others, like Connor Hunter-Kysor, 29, of Philadelphia, said that while he does not doubt that some people who have struggled with addiction can find a healthy approach to substance use, he has concluded that full abstinence is the right answer for him.

Addiction runs in his family, he said, and past efforts to consume drugs in moderation always failed.

“It’s a disease,” Mr. Hunter-Kysor said. “I know myself and I don’t want to play with fire any longer.”

Tiffany Fede, of Austin, Texas, once held similar views, but her outlook changed after her husband died in 2020.

Seeing him struggle with opioid addiction, Ms. Fede said she did what she had learned in the addiction recovery circles where their romance began years earlier: She watched him like a hawk, persuaded his dealer to stop supplying pills and balked when her husband suggested that taking psychoactive mushrooms might be helpful.

“I put my foot down,” said Ms. Fede, 43. “I was indoctrinated by this belief system that held that that would be harmful.”

Still, Ms. Fede said, her husband died of a methadone overdose.

Grieving, Ms. Fede said she began using magic mushrooms herself, an experience that led her to recalibrate her approach to mind-altering substances. Ms. Fede said she took three grams of psilocybin mushrooms, a trip that “helped me to not feel lonely for the first time.”

Ms. Fede said she no longer regards terms like sobriety useful and has ceased to think of herself as a recovering addict. (...)

Ms. Fede said she had stopped obsessing over the events that led to her husband’s death. One question, though, continues to tug at her: If she had indulged his desire to try treating his opioid addiction with magic mushrooms, would he still be alive?

by Ernesto Londoño, NY Times | Read more:

Image:Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

[ed. The concept of meeting people 'where they're at' is a central tenet of Harm Reduction-based strategies, and in my experience, the last thing doctors actually do. I don't know what they're teaching in med school these days or the last few decades (data entry?) but it sure isn't listening, or treating each patient as a unique individual and not just a basket of symptoms. Patients have no agency in the decision-making/risk assessment/treatment process. All the easier for AI to take over soon; then what services will doctors provide?]

Mind Games: Crystal Hefner on Life in the Playboy Mansion

There was this bathroom in the Playboy Mansion, just off Hugh Hefner’s bedroom, that was clad in black marble, with a black marble tub, black toilet and heavy curtains to shut out the light. The way Crystal Hefner (née Harris) describes it, this room sounds like a manifestation of the darkest part of Hefner’s mind. When she moved into the mansion as one of his three live-in girlfriends (she became his third wife in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86), she’d work out which nights he expected sex because, instead of his regular dinner of tinned chicken noodle soup, crackers and cream cheese, he’d order a BLT. He took so much Viagra it made him deaf. Afterwards, the girlfriends and any other blonde guests Hef had invited up from the party would shower off the baby oil he insisted they use for lube, despite their recurring infections, and Crystal would watch the two lovebirds that lived in a cage in the corner. (...)

Crystal moved into the mansion to replace Holly Madison, previously Hefner’s “number one girlfriend” of three he had at the time. In 2008, after sending in her photograph, Crystal had been invited to one of his infamous Playboy parties. She moved in soon after, quitting her psychology degree for a different kind of education. “Once you went in,” she writes, “it was so hard to find a way out.”

Her book is named after a promise she made to Hefner. Does it suggest, I ask, that he knew you were unhappy? She breathes, contemplative, then slowly shakes her head. “I honestly don’t know. Now it seems like a threat. But I do remember someone asking him, ‘What if these women are just after you for your money?’ And he said, ‘Well, as long as they’re after me!’ Hef was on the extreme side of narcissism, so I truly believe that he thought everybody really wanted to be there. Really enjoyed the sex, really enjoyed the old movies, loved literally everything he enjoyed.”

She chuckles lightly. “It was his friends’ country club. They came and got the free buffet and the staring-at-the-girls, and brought articles about him to him and it was just the Hef show.” For years Crystal only said good things; she cared for him, she brushed away criticism, she built relationships with his four adult children. But now, six years after his death at 91, she’s decided to talk about her life “imprisoned” in the Playboy Mansion and, in doing so, ask questions about abusive relationships, identity and the impact of a libertarian culture Hefner helped usher in.

This is not the first time one of Hefner’s girlfriends has spoken out. In a 2022 documentary, Karissa Shannon (who was 18 when Crystal joined her and her twin sister in the mansion) said she’d had an abortion at 19 because he refused to use condoms. Susie Krabacher, who moved in at 18, said Hefner drugged and raped her. In Holly Madison’s 2015 memoir she wrote that at the depths of her despair she contemplated drowning herself in his bathtub.

The difference between their stories and Crystal’s is partly in the timing; she has written this in the long shadow of #MeToo, with all the politics and therapeutic reckonings that entails. Partly it’s that, as his wife, she had a particular, peculiar insight. And partly it’s that this is not a shocking tell-all: though there are revelations about sex and cash, it’s a story about power, celebrity and, in a mansion that looked grand from a distance, but inside was mildewing and falling apart, the dark truths that glamour can hide. (...)

The girlfriends had to be home every evening for a 6pm curfew and none were allowed to work. Hefner would make them queue up to receive a weekly allowance (“gas money”). “The whole mansion had this gross vibe to it. All the misogynistic actors that preyed on women – this was their meeting ground. And I just thought, that’s how people are.” And to be fair to her, many were: she was humiliated on chatshows, blackmailed, controlled.

Even when Crystal led a season of the hit reality show, The Girls Next Door, which followed Hefner’s girlfriends about their syntheticised daily lives, his production company received $400,000 an episode and she received nothing. This was the last mainstream hurrah for the Playboy brand: six seasons of telly that were equally banal and fascinating, with the girlfriends laughing and bickering and grooming themselves. It revealed how being a giggling, beautiful blonde was a full-time job. And the sight of geriatric “Hef” sliding in and out of scenes in his silk pyjamas somehow made him seem even older.

After Crystal had been promoted to main girlfriend, she felt important. But, “I quickly started thinking, ‘How can this person really love me when they want four other people in the bedroom with us?’” She describes the weekly sex as if it was a degrading chore, unkeen to dwell on details – she says she’s easily “grossed out” today. “I did things that I wasn’t comfortable with. I wasn’t physically attracted to an 80-year-old man. I was just trying to get through it. And the other girls? Nobody liked each other. But we’d just be there for Hef.” Things changed for her when, “I realised I had no freedom. Everything was based on Hef’s schedule and I never got a say. Which,” she coughs discreetly, “is the opposite of the liberation and freedom that, supposedly, Playboy was meant to be about.” (...)

Obituaries reignited a long debate about his cultural legacy as an architect of the sexual revolution. But as Crystal explains, detailing the ways he’d pat her head and tell her to dye her roots, loudly compare the girlfriends’ bodies, encourage plastic surgery and play them off against each other, it became clear how little his grand project had to do with sex and how, in fact, it was all about power.

She buried him in the plot he’d bought next to Marilyn Monroe (another businessman bought the crypt above her, where he was buried, as per his wishes, face down). The symbolism was deafening. Hefner’s early success had been down to Monroe: at 27, he launched Playboy with a naked photograph that he ran without her consent. Crystal shakes her head. “I went along with everything for so long, but I was brainwashed, really. How was that all OK? I was in the middle of it for a decade and I’m still trying to figure it out. Like, how did he get away with this?” Another small cough.

When he proposed, he offered the ring in a music box that played a song from The Little Mermaid, the story (Crystal writes) of the princess who so wants to belong to a different world that she “trades her voice for a chance to walk around on human legs and find love”. She signed a prenup, almost grateful, perhaps, that this time the disparity was in black and white. Because the worst part about the transactional relationships she and her fellow girlfriends maintained, was that they never made explicit. “You went into his orbit offering all of yourself, and you had no idea what you’d get back.” It might be “gas money”, it might be a Playboy spread, or fame.

“Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity,” she writes, “and generosity is insidious when it’s a camouflage for control. And both power and generosity are confusing when they gaslight you into believing they could be love.” 

by Eve Wiseman, Crystal Hefner, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: HMH Foundation

Toilet Plume

Toilet plume: A toilet plume is the dispersal of microscopic particles as a result of flushing a toilet. Normal use of a toilet by healthy individuals is considered unlikely to be a major health risk. However this dynamic changes if an individual is fighting an illness and currently shedding out a virulent pathogen in their urine, feces or vomitus. There is indirect evidence that specific pathogens such as norovirus or SARS coronavirus could potentially be spread by toilet aerosols, but as of 2015, no direct experimental studies had clearly demonstrated or refuted actual disease transmission from toilet aerosols. It has been hypothesized that dispersal of pathogens may be reduced by closing the toilet lid before flushing, and by using toilets with lower flush energy. (Wikipedia). More here.

[ed. See also: Should you flush with toilet lid up or down? Study says it doesn’t matter (Ars Technica).]

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Groundhog Days

In Woodstock, Ill., where Groundhog Day was filmed, hundreds of fans gather every year, year after year, to celebrate their favorite movie.

At 6:00 this morning, I set out for Woodstock Square by foot. The clerk at the Best Western called a cab for me, but there was no answer. It’s four degrees outside, and windy, so when I see a building labeled police department, I walk in to ask for a ride. After some questioning, my request is granted, and I find myself in a police cruiser with Officer David. There were no cabs, I tell him apologetically. “Oh, there’s one guy,” he says. “But, you know, he’s been busy with the storm and the Super Bowl and all.” He grants my request to sit in the front seat and drops me at the square, just in front of Starbucks.

In Starbucks, I run into Rick Bellairs, the organizer of the Groundhog Days festival. I ask him if he expects a large turnout. “No,” he says, laughing. He suspects the weather will keep people away. Bellairs invites me next door, to the Stage Left Cafe, where the polka band and committee members are warming up. It’s here that I get a different sense of the event. Before it was Groundhog Days, the multi-day celebration, it was an annual breakfast, just an opportunity for local participants to gather and tell stories about their days working on the film. The mood at Stage Left is convivial, neither totally earnest nor ironic. Here in the Midwest, inclement weather means one might go weeks without seeing friends—this time of year, I can go weeks without seeing my next-door neighbor—and Groundhog Days is, to locals, something to do in February.

After the prognostication, we adjourn to the Moose Lodge for the annual Groundhog Breakfast. The polka band plays. Groundhog Day is running, muted, on the televisions in the corners of the rooms. I am finally eating a real meal. Bob Hudgins, the location manager, who came in from Austin, gets up to speak. He’s been coming to the fest for more than a decade, but looks humbled and happy, standing before a packed room. This town’s got a bit magic, he says. “The fact that we are here, and it’s all because of a silly movie. Harold Ramis made a good one.”

On Friday night, at the annual Groundhog Dinner and Dance at the Moose Lodge in Woodstock, Ill., Theresa from Sun Prairie, Wis., approaches my table after noticing my recorder and notebook. Visiting the town where her favorite movie, Groundhog Day, was filmed, she tells me, was on her bucket list, and she was surprised to learn she wouldn’t need to travel all the way to Punxsutawney to cross it off. She and her husband drove down earlier in the afternoon, and are staying through the weekend.

She becomes flustered when I pick up my recorder. “Am I going to be on TV?” she asks. She declines to state her last name with a wave of her hands, declaring she is not important enough to be interviewed. But she does have some advice for me.

“Here’s what you can say in your story: Hey, campers! You don’t need to go all the way to Punxsutawney. You can come right here to Woodstock, where Bill Murray made the film and it’s so special.”

Theresa’s response is far from unusual here at Groundhog Days, a five-day celebration of the filming of the 1993 movie in Woodstock, 50 miles northwest of Chicago. The attendees can be divided into two camps, each as enthusiastic as the other: the tourists, who are rapturous about the film, and the locals, who are rapturous about their town.

by Jennifer Rice Epstein, TMN | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Rice Epstein for The Morning News
[ed. This gives me a chance to repost one of my favorite Groundhog Day movie essays: Love and Death (DS).]

The Point of “Point Break”

There are certain images that slither past good taste and politics and sink their teeth straight into the subconscious. For instance: a man dressed in a tuxedo and a Ronald Reagan mask, using a gasoline pump as a flamethrower. He is torching his getaway vehicle and taking his time; the scene isn’t shot in slow motion, but I always remember it that way. In about thirty seconds, a cop will tackle him, prompting a long foot chase, but for now he waves his weapon like a kid with a sparkler on New Year’s Eve. We can’t see his expression, but Reagan’s face is grinning, and I’d like to imagine that the face underneath is, too. Don’t all bad guys dream of being children again?

The masked man is Patrick Swayze, the cop is Keanu Reeves, the woman who has sicced one on the other is the director Kathryn Bigelow, and the thing that binds them all together is “Point Break.” Those of us who love the film, which is showing in a new restoration, at Metrograph, talk about it in much the same way that others talk about “Showgirls”—i.e., as what used to be called a cult movie, before it became clear that there are only cults of varying sizes. It was released in 1991, the year of “Nevermind” and Desert Storm, though you could also think of it as the era when everyone in Hollywood movies looked slightly wet—appropriate here, since “Point Break” is about surfing. Also law enforcement and skydiving.

Describe any film too briskly and you risk turning it into a screwball comedy. (“Phantom Thread”: she feeds him poisonous mushrooms, but he digs it.) That said, the crucial thing to know about “Point Break” is that Keanu Reeves plays a star quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes named Johnny Utah who becomes an F.B.I. agent and goes undercover with a gang of surfers—led by Swayze’s character, a lion-maned fellow by the name of Bodhi, as in Bodhisattva—who dress up as ex-Presidents and rob banks. It sounds weird, but then all action thrillers—all genre movies—are weird, albeit in a way that we spend our lives learning to ignore. Not “Point Break,” which wears its weirdness so cockily that its cousins start to seem like the real oddballs. (...)

Working with the cinematographer Donald Peterman, Bigelow packs “Point Break” ’s first act with dull, grayish-blue interiors that seem not filled with but made of L.A. smog: banks, offices, a sad indoor pool. One reason that the ensuing plot swerves feel right is that, after fifteen minutes of this, you welcome some fresh air and sunshine. As Utah embraces the ways of the surfer, the color palette moves from grayish to yellowish, and then, when Bodhi hips him to skydiving, from yellowish to cloudless blue. For the final scene, in which Bodhi finally gets his comeuppance, Bigelow takes us back to the beach, but also to those miserable smoggy grays, as though to suggest Utah’s world swallowing Bodhi’s whole.

Taken together, this can all feel like a string of vivid tableaux: a nighttime orgy of beach football; Reeves all pink and dewy, cuddling with his love interest in a black-sheeted bed; Swayze (well, mostly his stunt double Matt Archbold) riding giants, longboard muddying the air with seminal spurts of seawater. When you’re not gulping down a set piece, you’re starved for the next one—which is only right, since chasing the next big rush is more or less the point of “Point Break.” One particular rush is conspicuously un-chased: nobody watches this film without wondering why Bodhi and Utah don’t just sleep together. (“You want me so bad, it’s like acid in your mouth,” the surfer tells the cop.) But you could make a similar observation about almost any macho American movie of the period—compared with Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers horsing around in the surf in “Rocky III,” Reeves and Swayze look practically monkish. Besides, “Point Break” is the rare action flick that explains why its homoerotic subtext never becomes text: with death sports, Bodhi and Utah have discovered something better than sex. The catch is that their thrill-seeking is non-fungible and thus ultimately solitary; in “Point Break,” there is only you and your bottomless appetite. Surfing leads the adrenaline junkie to bank heists, and onward to free-falling, kidnapping, and bigger waves. Utah’s partner orders two meatball subs and then, before he’s taken a bite, regrets not ordering three.

“Point Break” is all about pushing it to the limit, so allow me to take this a step further. Once you’ve been numbed to the oddities of the plot and dialogue, what jump out at you, paradoxically, are the bits you already recognize. Consider Keanu Reeves’s voice. In all likelihood, you have been hearing this voice for years; it’s Keanu Reeves, the guy who speaks an obscure dialect of English called Uh, the actor who, in the early nineties, was known to millions as half of Bill and Ted. Which makes it all the more fascinating that Reeves is playing a straight-edged detective who is pretending to be a SoCal guy. There is a brief, early scene in which Utah, dipping his toe into his undercover persona, affects a surfer-bro accent, i.e., his own but even drawlier. It is a genuinely disorienting moment—reminiscent of the famous tale of how Charlie Chaplin entered a Chaplin lookalike contest and got second—so that when Reeves returns to his “normal” voice in the next scene, it’s as though you’re hearing him for the first time. Each “uh” is a symphony.

As with Keanu Reeves’s voice, so with everything you know, or thought you knew, from other movies: the disillusioned hero throwing his badge in the muck; the novice turning into a pro in a single montage; the detective with a heart of gold mourning his partner’s death with a “Noooooo” so long you could stand up, leave the theatre, answer some work e-mails, walk back to your seat, and still be less than halfway through. To ask what Bigelow does, exactly, to make these things seem so jarring is to miss the point. She doesn’t have to do anything.

by Jackson Arn, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: via: Shutterstock; Getty Images; Melissa Herwitt/E! Illustration

The Michelangelo preset

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byebyetrixcom, ©2016

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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. (...)

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.

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.”

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[ed. How to do it. Much nicer.]

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.

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.

by Miriam Jordan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erin Schaff for The New York Times

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.

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.]

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. (...)

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.

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.]

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Annie Leibovitz; Elvis Presley's TV, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee
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[ed. Bi-partisian agreement?]

Katie Fuller, everything perfect is already here

via: Claire Rousay