Monopoly: the Movie

When it was announced last week that Margot Robbie will follow up the success of Barbie with a film based on Monopoly, my heart sank, did not pass go, and did not collect £200. Robbie’s production company will partner with Hasbro, just as the Barbie film was an initiative from rival toy company Mattel. Barbie was criticised for being little more than a 114-minute toy ad, but it did so well at the box office – buoyed, significantly, by a $150m marketing budget, which was larger than that spent on making the film – that a glut of similar titles are planned: a Barney film produced by Daniel Kaluuya, a Polly Pocket film written and directed by Lena Dunham, and a film based on the card game Uno. Robbie is also making a film version of The Sims video game, while Hasbro has licensed a Play-Doh feature film, a cinematic adaptation of an inert substance. (...)

The Monopoly film seems a naked play for nostalgia, the easiest and laziest of wins, but it is also The Way Things Are Done Now. Hollywood’s risk-averse allergy to new scripts makes it easier to simply iterate a winning formula and a recognisable brand name over and over, until we all die of boredom. This has been a growing problem for the last 20 years (of the highest-grossing 50 films of all time, more than 40 are sequels, prequels, reboots or remakes, or form part of a bankable cinematic universe like Marvel or James Bond). Pop culture is increasingly reduced to a series of lukewarm ads, theatreland is all jukebox musicals, and even our emaciated high streets and public spaces are being filled up with “immersive brand activations”. In central London you can visit the escape room Monopoly Lifesized, or attend the Shrek’s Adventure! experience, or cringe your way through Faulty [sic] Towers: The Dining Experience.

This is an evolution in consumer capitalism whereby marketing departments make all the decisions, and product design is an irrelevant afterthought. It mirrors the infantilising idiocy of “brand collabs”, where two unlikely brands from different fields produce a one-off product. You might have noticed, on a recent trip to the shops, Lynx x Marmite deodorant, Mr Men x Carex Tutti Frutti hand wash, or Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing x Crocs (yes, that is salad dressing-branded footwear). It speaks to a malaise that goes beyond novelty deodorants and the films we watch. The author and academic William Davies summarised this absurd state of play in 2022: “Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future,” he wrote: abandoning investment in R&D, new ideas, skills, technologies and products, or innovation of any kind – instead wringing every last drop from the assets they already own.

Rather than an economy dedicated to forging new ideas, we have one better characterised as “rentier capitalism”, whereby income is generated not by productive activity, but through the ownership and renting out or licensing of a scarce asset of some kind – which could be housing, but could also apply to a beloved family board game. This risk-averse attitude has become increasingly dominant when it comes to intellectual property (IP) – whether that property is a child’s toy, the back catalogue of a dead pop star, or the proprietary recipe for a spreadable yeast extract. IP rentierism is the only show in town.

It’s not that great art or great produce can’t ever be made in these circumstances. The Lego Movie, released in 2014 – and probably responsible for a lot of the current “film of a child’s toy” sillinesss – was an entertaining and clever film. So was Black Panther, one of the many films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet there is something about IP rentierism that feels new and corrosive. It is as if consumer capitalism has understood its own creative limitations, and how easily distracted we are – thanks in no small part to its own technological innovations – and so only the most idiotic spin on a bankable and familiar product can grab our attention. It is at best unedifying, watching the masters of our economy squeeze every last meagre drop from the assets they own, and reducing the arts to unadulterated marketing. Is this what thousands of years of human storytelling was leading up to?

by Dan Hancox, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Barbie composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Alamy

How Billie Eilish and FINNEAS Created Oscar-Winning 'What Was I Made For'

[ed. So, I finally watched the movie Barbie last night (yeah, I know... so last year). It was ok. But this song is perfect, and its creation a really fascinating process. See also: this excellent cover.]

Safety Net

It’s my turn to wake up Carmen. (No, that’s not her real name.) Carmen has been living on the street longer than I’ve been a librarian, and her elderly head is currently resting on a study desk even though we’ve all already asked her to keep her head up. It’s our least popular and most enforced rule: we don’t allow people to sleep in the library. We know you’re tired, we know it’s warm, we know it feels safe. But someone who is dying also looks like someone who is sleeping, and we’ve all seen our share of overdoses. Also, if one person is allowed to do it, everyone will do it. So, no sleeping.

 

Carmen’s back and neck are perpetually bent at a right angle, her left shoulder humping up cockeyed thanks to years of untreated scoliosis. What she lacks in vitality, though, she makes up for in volatility; the last time we asked her not to sleep in the library, she called my coworker a “fat Jew.” I seem to set her off in particular. She accused me of being a Russian spy when we met, and if she sees my car driving down the street, she will throw a middle finger my way without hesitation.

Only one staff member has managed to break through Carmen’s shell after years of persistence, but they’re on lunch. I check the camera one more time. Carmen’s head is still down, arms wrapped around her ears like a kid in grade school. No time like the present.

I approach, our guard watching nearby. She’s already called him a pussy once; he’s not interested in hearing it again. I keep a table between myself and Carmen. I tap my fingers on the wood, near where she lays her head. I say her name.

She throws her head up. “What!” Just like that. No question, just exclamation.

“We’re just checking on you. You have to keep your head up while you’re in the library.”

“Why!”

“We need to know that you’re okay, that you’re not having a medical emergency.”

A flinty stare. “I need to keep my head up so you know I’m not having a medical emergency,” she repeats.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s the agreement of being in the library.”

She stares me down, crosses her arms. I back up.

“You won’t have to worry about that,” she says. “I won’t be back.” She says this like a rich woman who has been served the wrong meal at a fancy restaurant. Julia Roberts with all her shopping bags on Rodeo Drive. Big mistake. Huge.

“Okay,” I say.

She says something as I walk away, something meant to antagonize, to get me to come back and fight with her. I ignore it. I don’t give a shit what she says as long as she doesn’t give us a reason to kick her out. Summer is coming on, and it’s hot out. Back at my desk, I check the camera. Her head stays up.

She comes back the next day.

I am a public librarian. I currently work in an urban system, though I’ve done time in the ’burbs. We have a food bank to our left, court-ordered counseling clinics and shelters across the street, a fast-food chicken joint to the right, and a bus stop out front.

A good number of our regulars are either unhoused people waiting on shelter or people who have shelter but spend all day at the library because it’s safer. We know most of their names—if not their government names, their street names. Possum, Shorty Red, Baby Doll. If we don’t know those, we’ll come up with our own nicknames: Sparkle Boots, Hot Wheels, Orange Dreds. We’re not trying to be disrespectful; we’re trying to keep up with who is in the building. If we’ve learned anything about keeping the peace, we’ve learned that it’s imperative to know who’s here, who’s not, who has beef, who’s in hiding.

We do have a guard, but it’s dangerous to get too lazy about that guard. They’re there as a deterrent. A uniform, a badge, making rounds. The guard is unarmed, which is how we prefer it. The best security is to look people in the eye when they come in, say hello, give a nod that says I see you. To find out their name and give your name in return. To give grace because that’s all some of our people have.

When you don’t have money or a place to stay, but you do have an addiction, an abusive partner, or an exploitative job, you need to know where you can go. The church serves hot lunch on Mondays. The empty park behind the old Hardee’s is a good place to set up camp. The library will let you stay all day as long as you don’t sleep and you don’t have outbursts. Balance a book on your lap; if you’re gonna doze, make sure you doze sitting up. The librarians know who you are. The librarians see you.

I never wanted to be a librarian.

I was a kid who loved reading, but I liked writing even more. And while I liked helping people, I preferred when it came with an adrenaline rush—which didn’t square with my impression of libraries. I had fallen victim to the false, if enduring, tropes about librarianship: shushing people, valuing quiet contemplation, wearing combed hair in a tidy bun over a well-made dress, relishing the academic predictability of each civilized day.

As it turns out, though, graduating from college in the middle of a recession changes things: the public library offered me a slightly-higher-than-minimum-wage part-time job I immediately accepted. Turning that part-time job into a full-time job, would mean getting a master’s degree in Library Science; however, being a graduate student also let me place my already towering student loans into a deferment that wouldn’t collect interest. So, to library school I went. I got the degree. I got the full-time job. I also imagined a distant future in which I quit the library, my temporary placeholder career, for something much more fitting for me. Emergency services, social work, counseling, maybe vagabondry.

That I have been ambivalent about my librarianship career surprises most people. But you’re so good at what you do! You’ve always seemed like someone who has it figured out! It wasn’t until I started working at the library I’m at now—where I can have the nonemergency line on speed dial and Narcan in my backpack—that I felt like I found my place. There is no quiet here, no predictability to the days. There is instead a backdrop of low-grade chaos, funny in its Southern volatility. Telling a patron he can’t burn his trash behind the library building even if that’s how they do it in Mississippi. Telling another patron to lower their voice, only for them to apologize and deny in the same breath. Being accused of being a Russian spy, obviously. I mean, where else am I going to get stories like this?

I may never have wanted to be a librarian, but I love this job. This specific job. Not because of any kind of noble commitment to knowledge or love of books. I love it because every day requires me to meet humanity face to face. It reminds me that I am actually living in an actual society where I am responsible to other people. In one hour on the desk, I can help a child find every single book on frogs that we have and then turn around and give a tissue to a grown man sobbing over his deceased wife. I can give a tampon to a woman hiding in the restroom because she’s been living on the streets. I can listen to the HOA chair complain about being booted from our larger meeting room because we needed it to host FEMA after a tornado tore up another neighborhood a block over. Patrons recognize me everywhere I go in my neighborhood, like a minor celebrity. Library lady, library lady. They know I’m nice, that I try not to judge. They know I can be trusted. They know I’m good in an emergency. And these days, when you work as a librarian in America, there is no lack of emergencies.

Vulnerability doesn’t fit into America’s beloved bootstrapping ethos, and so Americans will try very hard not to see their vulnerable neighbors. When we walk down a street and see someone lying on a sewer grate to keep warm, the polite thing to do isn’t to check on the person—it’s to pretend we don’t see them and keep walking. If the person sits up and asks for help, we become momentarily deaf and walk faster. Anything to get away from the uncomfortable truth that our safety net is failing.

We love to remember the troops, never forget 9/11, be #BostonStrong, #ParklandStrong, #VegasStrong, #UvaldeStrong, etc., etc. Americans supporting Americans in their time of need surely proves that we are a nation of grace, a nation that takes care of its own, at least until the next hashtag comes along.

Some say we are a nation that cares for its “deserving” own and that deserving is defined by those who are in power, who are not vulnerable, who have wealth, privilege, status. I agree with this critique, but I’d posit another angle. We don’t choose who to help based on who deserves it; we choose who to help based on the amount of control we have over that help. We are, after all, a business-oriented nation. We love a deadline. (...)

I used to think a librarian’s most important job was to protect intellectual freedom. We must be militant against censorship in all its forms; that’s what was drilled into our heads in library school. It was always taught in a historical sense—the book-burning Nazis, the war propaganda, McCarthyism—something our professional forebears had battled before and firmly defeated. We protégés were to remain on guard for all the ways censorship could crop up in modern times: rating systems for children’s books, “restricted” sections, and insidious self-censorship where the librarian opts not to place material in a collection, anticipating backlash.

Books might be banned in some very rare and unfortunate circumstances, but more often they were “challenged,” where someone levels an accusation at a book and library leadership is compelled to reconsider its inclusion in the collection. Most times, library leadership would decide that, yes, the original collection decision had been correct. Or maybe it was correct but the book should be recatalogued into a different section, such as the usual case of young adult books that flirt with adult material. Only in extremely rare cases would library leadership actually pull a book from a collection.

That’s what we thought, at least. Never could we have imagined that state governments would send “approved” lists for librarians to purchase from. Or pursue criminal charges for a librarian who ignores the list. Where were those scenarios in library school? At the time, we’d almost pined for that kind of drama—the good old days, when someone would challenge a book and the community would rise up against the challenge and the library would remain victorious, respected. Are these the new good old days? Is this how the story ends? Most of us are fleeing the profession, seeking greener pastures where the pay is better and the shift ends at five o’clock.

by Lisa Bubert, Longreads | Read more:
Image: via

Tortured Poet: the Taylor Swift Monoculture Rolls On

It’s hard to imagine that we could possibly ever in this lifetime need to know anything more about Taylor Swift. I’ve joked often that we now live in a Swift monoculture, but it’s kind of true. I really didn’t think she could get more famous after Folklore and Evermore, but then she did Midnights, the Eras Tour, and emerged from a more than six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn to do pap walks all over New York City. Then she started dating Travis Kelce, and well, we all know what happened next.

It really feels like Swift is inescapable. No corner of my life is safe from constant discussion about her: not the internet, not my group chats, not shopping at boutiques, or going to coffee shops. Not only is every person seemingly obsessed with her, every business is too, or at least, obsessed with latching onto her now billion-dollar brand.

And it does not seem to be waning at all. In October, I wrote that I suspected a “Taylor Swift fatigue” was imminent, because her brand had become so saturated. I’m mature enough to admit that I was wrong, but it’s kind of insane just how wrong I was. Swift not only didn’t start to rub people the wrong way, she won the Grammy for Album of the Year. She literally took over the Super Bowl. Every event, from the Golden Globes to Coachella to the Met Gala, has been overtaken by questions of whether or not she will attend and if she does, she becomes the main attraction.

As Swift herself says, she’s a mastermind, and her total domination of our world is carefully crafted by her now unassailable marketing machine. It’s always been very obvious that this is what she wants. Swift makes no apologies for her ambition, saying in interviews and her Miss Americana documentary that she deeply cares about things like topping the charts, album sales, and winning awards, much more so than you’d think considering how successful she has already been.

by Stephanie McNeal, Glamour | Read more:
Images:Beth Garrabrant; YouTube
[ed. See also: Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department review – a whole lotta love gone bad (Guardian).]

Ohara Koson: Mallards and Moon

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Winslow Homer, "The Fog Warning" (1885)
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‘Paradigm-Shattering’: Bluey’s Biggest Episode Ever is Packed With Magic

You get nervous watching an all-time great show try something different. Too many sitcoms have dented their rep with a dud feature-length special; too many dramas have that extra season where the formula changed, it didn’t really work, and now their listing in the pantheon has a little asterisk beside it. But if any programme can be trusted to take a risk, it’s Bluey.

Bluey is the second-greatest Australian TV show ever – after Mr Inbetween, obviously – and by far the country’s most popular television export. One of those very rare shows for primary-school kids (and those even younger) that is genuinely, unironically beloved by parents, it purports to tell simple stories about a seven-year-old talking blue heeler dog living in Queensland with her sister and their mum and dad.

What a world there is, though, just below the surface. While four-year-olds laugh along with a canine having childish good times, Bluey keeps hitting grownups with deep emotional wisdom – mainly about parenting, specifically how it can be a liberating adventure if properly embraced, but is more often allowed by silly mummies and daddies to be a knot of regret and anxiety. Bluey makes observations about the simple joys of life and of other people that your children’s childhood can unlock, if you will let it. It has plenty to say about friendship, marriage, ambitions, dreams, sadness, loss and love.

Yes, all this is in a cartoon about brightly coloured dogs who live in houses and drive cars. But not only that: it’s all in a cartoon about dogs whose episodes only last seven minutes. Every single one of the 152 instalments to date has been a masterclass in screenwriting economy. Bluey gambols in, has fun, makes a point that you’ll be lying awake thinking about hours after the little ones are all tucked up, then gallops off again – all in less time than it would take to put that overdue pile of laundry away.

Not now, though. Brand new episode The Sign is a wildly risky, paradigm-shattering 28 minutes in length. It’s epic. It’s animated Australian canines’ answer to Killers of the Flower Moon. But there is no need to be concerned: everything that makes Bluey magic is intact.

Big changes are afoot. Bandit, the indefatigably fun and imaginative father who has a tendency to make dads at home feel painfully inadequate, has got himself a better-paid job, but it’s in another city. A “for sale” sign is up outside the house. Bluey doesn’t want to move and, thanks to the best bit of wordless face acting (by a drawing of a dog) in the show since Pat realised Rusty had let him win at cricket, we see that Bluey’s mum, Chilli, doesn’t want to go either.

First, though, there is the business of Bandit’s brother Radley marrying his girlfriend (and Bluey’s godmother), Frisky. When Frisky gets cold feet and takes flight, Chilli, Bluey and Bluey’s cousins Socks and Muffin take a road trip to try to find her.

The life lesson here is that adults sometimes have to make major life changes, and that although these might look as if they will cause unhappiness, it is hard to know what is around the corner – especially since the grownups themselves don’t know either. At school, Bluey is told a story about a farmer who loses a horse, setting off a chain of events that seem to be either lucky or unlucky, but prove to be the reverse. That fable is woven with fine skill through the rest of the episode by Bluey’s genius creator/writer, Joe Brumm.

The school scene also features some of the sort of Bluey dialogue that parents around the world adore. Prompted to tell sad stories from their lives, one kid says: “My dad doesn’t live with my mum and now he’s lonely all the time.” Another replies, in a throwaway murmur: “Our mum likes your dad.” (...)

No (more) spoilers, but the ending moves from sad to happy and back again several times, rounding off the theme of events you cannot control creating emotions you should try not to take to heart. There is a lovely little twist, a revelation about a minor character that will have long-term adult fans cooing, and a steady stream of sturdy, funny jokes. Bluey is a classic, and there’s no sign of that changing any time soon.

by Jack Seale, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Ludo Studio

[ed. Bluey seems more boy than girl to me, which annoys my granddaughter to no end. But... whatever. It's a wonderful show. See also: The Surprise: secret Bluey episode drops around the world amid panic the cartoon is ending (The Guardian).]

Dark Matter

In the early aughts, Frank Warren ran a medical document delivery business in Germantown, Maryland. It was a monotonous job, involving daily trips to government offices to copy thousands of pages of journal articles for pharmaceutical companies, law firms, and non-profits. By his early forties, he had a house in a nice subdivision, a wife, a young daughter, and a dog. His family fostered children for a few weeks or months, and he felt a sense of purpose in helping kids who were suffering acute crises in their own homes. From the outside, things appeared to be going better than well. But inside, something was missing: A sense of adventure, or at least a little fun. An outlet to explore the weirder, darker, and more imaginative parts of his interior world. He’d never been one for small talk, preferring instead to launch into deep discussions, even with people he barely knew. He wondered if he could create a place like that outside of everyday conversation, a place full of awe, anguish, and urgency.

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.

Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

After his exhibit closed, the postcards took over Frank’s life. Hundreds poured into his mailbox, week after week. He decided to create a website, PostSecret, where every Sunday he uploaded images of postcards he’d received in the mail.

The website is a simple, ad-free blog with a black background, the 4x6 rectangular confessions emerging from the darkness like faces illuminated around a campfire. Frank is careful to keep himself out of the project—he thinks of the anonymous postcard writers as the project’s authors—so there’s no commentary. Yet curation is what makes PostSecret art. There’s a dream logic to the postcards’ sequence, like walking through a surrealist painting, from light to dark to absurd to profound.

I’m afraid that one day, we’ll find out TOMS are made by a bunch of slave kids!

I am a man. After an injury my hormones got screwed up and my breasts started to grow. I can’t tell anyone this but: I really like having tits.

I’m in love with a murderer… but I’ve never felt safer in anyone else’s arms.

I cannot relax in my bathtub because I have an irrational fear that it’s going to fall through the floor. (...)

For years, Frank has been interested in postcards as a medium of narrative. Before PostSecret, he had a project he called “The Reluctant Oracle,” in which he placed postcards with messages like Your question is a misunderstood answer into empty bottles and deposited them in a lake near his house. (A Washington Post article from the time said “The form is cliche: a message in a bottle,” but called the messages themselves “creepy and alluring.”)

What he considers his earliest postcard project, though, dates from his childhood. When he was in fifth grade, just as he was about to board the bus to camp in the mountains near Los Angeles, his mother handed him three postcards. She told him to write down any interesting experiences he had and mail the cards back home.

Frank took the cards. “It’s a Christian sleep-away camp, so of course a lot of crazy stuff happened, and of course I didn’t write my mom about any of it,” he said. But just before camp ended, he remembered the postcards, jotted something down, and mailed them. When he saw them in the mailbox a few days later, he wondered, Am I the same person that wrote this message days ago? The self, he had observed as a grade schooler, was always in a state of flux. (...)

PostSecret contains echoes of his time volunteering on the suicide prevention hotline. Like the hotline, the project draws attention to the ways people conceal parts of themselves, and encourages disclosure. But the postcards go even further: They’re public, available for anyone to see. They show us the types of stories people normally keep guarded, creating, in the aggregate, a living inventory of our taboos. (...)

Over the years, Frank has developed a process for selecting secrets. He sorts the most promising ones into a few boxes. A good secret involves a particular alchemy of art and content. He likes secrets he’s never heard before—there are fewer and fewer these days, but every once in a while something new will pop up—and secrets he has seen but which are presented in a surprising way. At this point, twenty years after the project began, he mostly relies on intuition to select those he posts to the website. He’s kept every postcard over the years, even during a cross-country move. (The secrets he’s posted in the past decade are stored in his upstairs closet and garage; the rest are mostly on loan to the Museum of Us, in San Diego.) Every postcard, that is, except one. He blames a relative for losing it.

On the website, the scrolling experience is simple enough—scroll, rectangle, scroll, next rectangle—but within the rectangles, something else is happening: a cacophony of colour, scrawl, scribble, cross-outs, stickers, stamps, maps, photographs, sketches. Once, I saw locks of hair taped to a postcard; the writer said they collected the hair of children they babysat. The spectre of tactility, if not tactility itself, reminds the viewer that there are thousands of people behind these postcards, and thousands of hours over the course of twenty years were spent creating them.

Is this sociology? Psychology? Voyeurism? The postcards are shaped like little windows, glimpses into someone’s life, devoid of context. Frank likes to think of them, in the collective, as a cross-section of human nature, and each week he tries to select a range of moods, including a smattering of lighthearted secrets to round out his postcard representation of the psyche, even though most of what he receives is dark. I wondered if reading all these secrets gave him some sort of unique lens into who we are, but he’s not sure. Everyone has different parts of themselves or their lives that they’re afraid to acknowledge. Today, most secrets he receives are about relationships—either feeling dissatisfied with a partner or revolving around loneliness.

“My hope is when people read the secrets each week they have no idea what I think about religion, politics, or feminism. I want to be across the board, so anyone can see themselves in a secret,” he said. “If it’s strong and offensive, guess what, people keep offensive, racist secrets in their heart. That’s part of the project—exposing that.” He doesn’t intentionally seek out racist or sexist secrets, and doesn’t post anything that’s “hardcore racist,” but he thinks there’s value in representing the less-than-savoury aspects of human nature, because that’s a true representation of who we are as a whole. (...)

Frank told me, “Most of our lives are secret. I think that in the same way that dark matter makes up ninety percent of the universe—this matter that we cannot see or touch or have any evidence of except for its effect on gravity—our lives are like that too. The majority of what we are and who we are is kept private inside. It might express itself in our behaviours, and our fears, and even in human conflict and celebration, but always in this sublimated way.”

by Meg Bernhard, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: Frank Warren

The Rise Of The Bee Bandits

The foundational story of the modern American West is riven with tales of animals slaughtered or plundered: bison gunned down by the million, wolves cast out, horses purloined, cattle rustled. Today, a rather different flavor of animal crime has become ascendent — the theft of bees.

Every year, the bloom of thousands of almond trees in California spurs one of the world’s largest, albeit artificial, migrations of animals; as billions of honeybees are loaded onto trucks and sent to deliver lucrative pollination fees for their human keepers. This insect odyssey ensures paydays for often struggling beekeepers, the production of most of the world’s almonds, and increasingly, an opportunity for enterprising thieves.

Standing in the way of the bee rustlers — often alone — is Rowdy Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office in California’s Central Valley. Freeman is a steely sort of bee detective. Angular, with a shaved head and fond of wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the taciturn deputy is a beekeeper himself and is aghast at how hive thefts have become so ubiquitous.

Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record of more than 2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley. This year’s thefts could easily surpass that number, with Freeman recording nearly 2,000 hives stolen already. Despite the growing scale of this crime, Freeman is typically the only law enforcement officer working with beekeepers to track the stolen hives and their thieves.

“I’m trying to get more help for this because it’s become a major problem, it’s getting out of control,” Freeman said. While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of horses or cattle, no such task force exists for bees, he notes with no small amount of envy and frustration. The federal government is also uninterested in the issue, despite what Freeman describes as clear-cut evidence that stolen hives have been transported over state lines.

“It’s just me,” he said. “The state of California has done nothing to help.”

The Honeybee Era

Horses and cattle may be the antecedents to bees in terms of human thievery, but the scale involved here is very different. Farmers have carpeted huge swathes of prime Central Valley land with serried ranks of almond trees. The annual budding of this sought-after nut and its burgeoning pollination needs means up to roughly nine out of every 10 commercial honeybee hives must be sent here from all corners of the U.S.

For some time at the start of each year, the Central Valley becomes a sort of giant, mechanized jamboree of honeybees, with 18-wheelers and semis bearing several million hives traversing this monoculture and depositing their cargo in orchards to propagate the crop. We are accustomed to aggregating sheep and cows and, to a lesser degree at home, our cats and dogs. But in terms of the sheer numbers — 2.7 million hives, according to Wenger, or a lowball estimate of some 54 billion bees to support this year’s almond crop — there is little to compare to the annual seething mass of bees clustered in California outside of enthralling wild scenes like the African migration of wildebeest.

“It makes you think you’re reading an old western about moving 7,000 head of cattle across the high plains,” said Jacob Wenger, an entomologist at California State University, Fresno. “But even then, it wasn’t 90% of all the beef cattle in the United States.”

Despite the numbers of hives involved and the lucrative fees beekeepers can now charge growers for their tiny winged contractors, security around this enterprise is usually fairly lax. Hives are trucked in, often by third-party crews, and unloaded in orchards or holding lots that are rarely gated, fenced or guarded, and easily visible from the road.

Amid the frenzy of this seasonal activity, semi-trucks will sometimes load or unload hives in the dead of night. Given Central Valley farmland’s sprawling, horizon-busting nature, a visitor might not even be seen at all. In such conditions, a truck, a smattering of local knowledge and opportunism is all that’s needed to spirit away tens of thousands of dollars of humming property. (...)

Bee Thief Gangs

As a detective working these cases, Freeman looks for clues like tire tracks in the mud. But most leads come through the information bouncing around the fraternity of mostly male beekeepers who congregate in California each year. The reality is that given the specialized knowledge necessary to handle loading millions of buzzing flying creatures speedily and safely onto trucks at night, such thievery almost certainly involves an inside man — another member of this beekeeping brethren.

Lately, the talk in beekeeping circles has been about whether the surging thefts are the work of the typical solo opportunists wanting to supplement a bad year, or a larger and more organized effort. The theft of hundreds of hives in one go, like in Steinbrugger’s case, pointed to the latter. Such an efficient heist points to a level of organization that only a criminal group, or gang, could pull off.

The closest police have come to breaking up such a gang was after Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper, received a tip in 2017 that some of her stolen hives might be found in a patch of scrubby land a few miles outside Fresno, California. Pavlov jumped on a plane and went straight to the site, which police later described as a “chop shop for bees.” Clouds of bees flew around dozens of scattered boxes belonging to different beekeepers, some of which appeared to be in the process of being split apart. Nearby, a gaunt 51-year-old Pavel Tveretinov, was spotted tending to this Frankenstein-like apiary. Pavlov contacted police who subsequently arrested and charged Tveretinov along with an accomplice, Vitaliy Yeroshenko.

The haul was extraordinary. There were more than 2,500 hives, valued at nearly $1 million, belonging to a dozen beekeepers, stolen over several years. (...)

The Ideal Mobile Pollinator

The Western honeybee — or apis mellifera — is among the most successful of all migrants to America. First brought over on wooden ships by European settlers in the 17th century, honeybees have since established themselves not only as a crucial cog in the agricultural system, but they have also flourished in the public imagination.

Conjure up thoughts of a bee and you’ll likely think of a black and yellow striped creature with a stinger that lives in a hive with thousands of comrades making honey. But that image of a honeybee is just one of around 20,000 species of bee, most of them solitary and wild. “There are relatively few bee species that get love and care from humans,” said James Nieh, a bee expert at the University of California, San Diego. “The word ‘bee’ is boiled down to honeybee.” (...)

To grow a lot of almonds you need a lot of bees. The plants need plenty of cross-pollination and will keep producing nuts until they start falling off the tree. The global growth in demand has prompted farmers across the Central Valley to blanket the countryside with these distinctive, white-blossomed trees. Today, around 1.4 million acres, mostly in the Central Valley, is used to produce roughly 80% of the world’s almonds.

Troubling Times For Bee Shepherds

The industrialized honeybee has replaced the bucolic image of honey-producing homesteaders. Each honeybee hive can now command up to $225 in pollination fees, a sizable jump on what it once was.

But while there are financial rewards for beekeepers, it’s harder for the bees. Almond pollination occurs in January and February when the hives’ bees are at the groggiest and weakest points in their lifecycle; they must be spurred into shape by a procession of treatments and feeds. The bees are loaded onto trucks to make their prolonged journeys to the Central Valley, in some cases traveling more than 1,000 miles. This forced migration, with its fumes and vibrations, can also harm the tiny passengers. (...)

“My biggest stress is keeping my employees alive,” said Jeffrey Lee, a beekeeper in North Carolina who estimates that he loses 10% of his bees each time he sends them to California. Lee describes himself as a “bee shepherd,” who guides his indentured workers on a tour around the country for different pollination demands — blueberries in Maine, almonds in California, then cucumbers back in North Carolina. (...)

Unlike wild bees, honeybees have been mostly shielded from catastrophic colony loss by their human guardians. Meanwhile, the American bumblebee, once the most commonly observed bumblebee in the U.S., has suffered an 89% drop in abundance and vanished from at least eight states over the past two decades, according to a 2021 petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and a group of Albany Law School students arguing that the American bumblebee should be listed as an endangered species.

Honeybees may be a good mascot for a campaign to save the bees, but they’re “kind of like the chickens of the bee world,” Wenger said. “They really are bred for human purposes. It’s like saying we are protecting bird diversity by putting in more chicken farms.”

by Oliver Milman, Noema |  Read more:

Image: Alex Valentina for Noema Magazine
[ed. But, also: Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? (WaPo):]

"Where in the unholy heck did all these bees come from?!

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over. (...)

Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined. (...)

Dennis Herbert wouldn’t strike you as a political mover and shaker. A retired wildlife biologist, Herbert, 75, boasts of no fancy connections and drops no names. But in 2011, after keeping bees for a few years, he went to the Texas legislature and laid out a simple hypothetical.

“You own 200 acres on the other side of the fence from me, and you raise cotton for a living. You get your ag valuation and cheaper taxes on your property. I have 10 acres on the other side of the fence and raise bees, and I don’t receive my ag valuation. And yet my bees are flying across the fence and pollinating your crops and making a living for you,” Herbert said. “Well, I just never thought that quite fair.”

In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.

Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners. (...)

While Herbert never intended it, Texas bee exemptions have become big business." (...)

But even with its army of small producers, Texas still ranks only sixth in the number of actual bee colonies. To find the true core of the bee boom, we had to make like the Village People and go west.

When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop “demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year.”

Utagawa Hiroshige: Mariko Mabutsu Chaya

via:

America’s Animal Shelters Are Overwhelmed

Monday mornings at the Mendocino Coast Humane Society, the northern California animal shelter where I work part-time, are chaotic.

The frenzied beeping of anesthesia monitoring equipment echoes as I dodge Coco, one of the resident shelter cats with a penchant for ankles, and tiptoe down a freshly mopped hallway with a bleachy smell that makes my eyes water.

A man in worn flannel and workboots waits at the front counter, face drawn; his elderly catahoula dog is waiting in the back seat of his car for an 11am euthanasia appointment. Somewhere in the clinic, a newly spayed dog is howling as she wakes.

I say good morning to Sierra, one of our animal care workers. Her partner, Michael, is tugging off his waders in the supply closet after hosing down our 26 kennels, hands rough from constant immersion in water. I swing open the door to the office, where the executive director, Judy Martin, is on the phone negotiating a transfer of 12 puppies from Covelo, a hamlet 77 miles east of us that has a growing dog overpopulation problem.

“Covelo has at least two roaming dog packs,” she says after hanging up, “running through people’s yards and killing pets. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a child.”

Last year, rescuers found a pair of Covelo litters under a decaying trailer. Two of the puppies were dead, rotting under piles of their living siblings. This was not the first time.

Coco, for example, came from Point Arena, a city an hour to the south of us, towards the far end of our service area. She was brought in with “a string hanging out of her rectum” which proved to be her intestines. Vet staff initially thought they might need to euthanize her due to the complexity of her case and the resources available, but she proved so sweet that they took a chance, tacking her intestines in place.

Last year, we took in 694 animals, from animal cruelty cases to unwanted litters, and we are drowning. We hear that animal care and control is telling people to leave found animals where they are because they don’t have the capacity to handle them. Those people turn to us or Inland Valley Humane Society, a foster-based rescue that is similarly inundated. As closed admission shelters, we can decide to turn animals away if we lack space, even though we strive to prevent it, knowing what may happen to those we do not accept.

The list of people waiting to surrender animals is always growing.

It is workers such as Sierra and Michael who make our services possible. They’re the unseen, unheralded heroes of animal sheltering across the country, a workforce on the frontlines of a pet overpopulation crisis that has been steadily building over the last four years.

Getting people to understand that crisis sometimes feels impossible. Most members of the public are only interested in one thing: euthanasia.

In 2023, 690,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in shelters across the US. For many members of the public, this calls to mind healthy, adoptable animals euthanized for space in open admission (so-called “kill”) shelters – those required to accept all animals, even if there’s no room. But shelters also have to cope with owner-requested euthanasias, behavioral problems and animals who are so sick or injured that a gentle death is the most positive outcome.

The issue we and many other shelters are facing is this: after a record low of 5.5 million in 2020, animal intakes are slowly increasing, and they aren’t leaving – in 2023, 6.5 million animals entered, and only a little over 6 million left. Animals are lingering for weeks, months and sometimes years in the shelter. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of animals waiting to get out of shelters increased by 177,000.

For us, these numbers have faces, such as Sophie (intake 8/11/22), Asia (4/14/23), and Annie (4/21/23). We’re also being hit by the tight job market, which makes it hard to hire and retain personnel, creating even more strain for staff: more animals, fewer people. (...)

Shelter workers are at the frontlines of this crisis, providing daily care to cats and dogs in environments ranging from capacious, well-funded private rescues to crowded municipal shelters where dogs bark frenziedly through rusting fences and cats coil, terrified, in small metal cages.

They aren’t doing this work for the money. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kennel attendants and animal care workers earn a median wage of $29,790, often with limited benefits. (...)

But logistical issues such as trying to make their paychecks match living expenses is only part of what deeply affects shelter workers. The same stories that go viral on social media for being sad are also sad for the workers caring for those animals, many of whom grow deeply attached to their charges and experience empathy for even the briefest lives. A kitten so beloved by the staff that they carried him around in a sling is buried under a plum tree outside the shelter.

Those lives do not blur together. We remember all of them.

Our surrender waiting list is bulging at the seams; after a man threatened to “throw them against the wall”, we hastily made room for Kiwi, Raspberry and Strawberry, three clearly feral kittens who huddle, traumatized and hissing, in the back of their intake kennel, exploding like popcorn if you open the door. The staff member who handled the intake was shaken, her hands trembling as she recounted the story.

Animal care workers like her are confronting a form of moral injury, in which they may struggle with being asked to do things that go against their consciences, or circumstances expose them to feelings of helplessness or betrayal. In open admission shelters, some are coping with the caring-killing paradox, described in 2005 in a study exploring the heavy impact of euthanasia on shelter workers, who may play with a dog in the morning and euthanize it in the afternoon. Both phenomena are associated with issues such as anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance use disorder as people struggle to process traumatic events.

The public, however, doesn’t see Sierra’s face falling as one of our permanent shelter cats, Oscar, gets sicker and sicker until the sad Friday afternoon when we have to euthanize him. Nor do they see Michael speaking animatedly on behalf of a dog with behavior issues.

“I hear about stories where shelter staff or managers get death threats because they’re euthanizing animals,” says Dr Kathleen Cooney, director of education at the Companion Animal Euthanasia Training Academy. She’s speaking to negative public attitudes about shelter workers, sometimes stereotyped as callous for the hard, dirty parts of their jobs.

Meanwhile, they experience the incredible emotional strain of “seeing the worst of the worst, the worst side of humans, having to see pets suffering”, says Jerrica Owen, executive director of the National Animal Care and Control Association (Naca), which is working to develop consistent professional standards and training in the field.

“Animal control officers are first responders,” Owen says, but ACOs don’t have the hero status of firefighters and paramedics. Instead, they’re treated like glorified janitors, ignoring the catastrophic mental health issues in the field, with animal care workers more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and experiencing high rates of burnout and so-called “compassion fatigue” because of the secondary and primary trauma they face in their work.

by SE Smith, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Cassandra Young Photography/Courtesy Mendocino Coast Humane Society

Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility

What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good? The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements. (...)

Back in the day, a TV was a TV, a commercial was a commercial, and a computer was a computer. They have now been mixed into an unholy brew by the internet and by opportunistic corporations, which have developed “automatic content recognition” systems. These collect granular data about individual watching habits and log them into databases, which are then used to serve ads or sold to interested parties, such as politicians. The slow surveillance colonization of everyday electronics was normalized by free internet services, which conditioned people to the mentality that our personal information is the actual cost of doing business: The TVs got cheaper, and now we pay with our data. Not only is this a bad deal; it fundamentally should not apply to hardware and software that people purchase with money. One Roku customer aptly summed up the frustration recently on X: “We gave up God’s light (cathode rays and phosphorus) for this.”

And this phenomenon has collided with another modern concern—what the writer and activist Cory Doctorow evocatively calls “enshittification.” The term speaks to a pervasive cultural sense that things are getting worse, that the digital products we use are effectively being turned against us. For example: Apart from its ad-stuffed streaming devices, Roku also offers a remote-control app for smartphones. In a Reddit post last month, a user attached a screenshot of a subtle ad module that the company inserted into the app well after launch—gently enshittifying the simple act of navigating your television screen. “Just wait until we have to sit through a 1 minute video ad before we can use the remote,” one commenter wrote. “Don’t give them any ideas,” another replied.

Part of Doctorow’s enshittification thesis involves a business-model bait and switch, where platforms attract people with nice, free features and then turn on the ad faucet. Roku fits into this framework. The company lost $44 million on its physical devices last year but made almost $1.6 billion with its ads and services products. It turns out that Roku is actually an advertising company much like, say, Google and Meta. And marketing depends on captive audiences: commercial breaks, billboards that you can’t help but see on the highway, and so on.

Elsewhere, companies have infused their devices with “digital rights management” or DRM restrictions, which halt people’s attempts to modify devices they own. I wrote last year about my HP inkjet printer, which the company remotely bricked after the credit card I used to purchase an ink-cartridge subscription expired. My printer had ink (that I’d paid for), but I couldn’t use it. It felt like extortion. Restrictive rights usage happens everywhere—with songs, movies, and audiobooks that play only on specific platforms, and with big, expensive physical tech products, such as cars. The entire concept of ownership now feels muddied. If HP can disable my printer, if Roku can shut off my television, if Tesla can change the life of my car battery remotely, are the devices I own really mine?

The answer is: not really. Or not like they used to be. The loss of meaningful ownership over our devices, combined with the general degradation of products we use every day, creates a generally bad mood for consumers, one that has started to radiate beyond the digital realm. The mass production and Amazon-ification of cheap consumer goods is different from, say, Boeing’s decline of quality in airline manufacturing allegedly in service of shareholder profits, which is different from televisions that blitz your eyeballs with jarring ads; yet these disparate things have started to feel linked—a problem that could be defined in general by mounting shamelessness from corporate entities. It is a feeling of decay, of disrespect.

In some areas, it means that quality goes down in service of higher margins; in others, it feels like being forced to expect and accept that whatever can be monetized will be, regardless of whether the consumer experience suffers. People feel this everywhere. They feel it in Hollywood, where, as the reporter Richard Rushfield recently put it, the entertainment industry is full of executives “who believe the deal is more important than the audience”—and that consumers ultimately “have no choice but to buy tickets for the latest Mission Impossible or Fast and Furious—because they always have and we own them so they’ll see what we tell them to see.” People feel it in unexpected places such as professional golf: Recently, I was surprised to read an issue of the Fried Egg Golf newsletter that compared NBC Sports’ weak PGA Tour broadcasts to the ongoing debacle at Boeing. “Is there a general lack of morale amongst people right now?” the author wrote. “Does anyone take pride in their work? Or are we just letting quality suffer across all domains for the sake of cutting costs?”

These last two examples aren’t Doctorowian per se: They are merely things that people feel have gotten worse because companies assume that consumers will accept inferior products, or that they have nowhere else to go. In this sense, Doctorow’s enshittification may transcend its original, digital meaning. Like doomscrolling, it gives language to an epochal ethos. “The problem is that all of this is getting worse, not better,” Doctorow told me last year when I interviewed him about my printer-extortion debacle. He was talking about companies locking consumers into frustrating ecosystems but also about consumer dismay at large. “The last thing we want is everything to be inkjet-ified,” he said.

Doctorow’s observation, I realize, is the actual reason I and so many others online are so worked up over a theoretical patent that might not come to fruition. Needing to do a hostage negotiation with your television is annoying—enraging, even—but it is only a small indignity. Much greater is the creeping sensation that it has become standard practice for the things we buy to fail us through subtle, technological betrayals. A little surveillance here, a little forced arbitration there. Add it up, and the real problem becomes existential. It sure feels like the inkjets are winning.

by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Shutterstock

[ed. Our politics and financiers have cobbled together a Frankenstein monster with one singular purpose: enhancing shareholder returns. Who cares what it means for society (I think we all know, there are millions of examples). But the money machine keeps on percolating, exploiting every available niche.]

Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls

How many times has it happened? You’re on your computer, searching for a particular article, a hard-to-find fact, or a story you vaguely remember, and just when you seem to have discovered the exact right thing, a paywall descends. “$1 for Six Months.” “Save 40% on Year 1.” “Here’s Your Premium Digital Offer.” “Already a subscriber?” Hmm, no.

Now you’re faced with that old dilemma: to pay or not to pay. (Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.) And it’s not even that simple. It’s a monthly or yearly subscription—“Cancel at any time.” Is this article or story or fact important enough for you to pay?

Or do you tell yourself—as the overwhelming number of people do—that you’ll just keep searching and see if you can find it somewhere else for free?

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America’s leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option.

Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.

The problem is not just that professionally produced news is behind a wall; the problem is that paywalls increase the proportion of free and easily available stories that are actually filled with misinformation and disinformation. Way back in 1995 (think America Online), the UCLA professor Eugene Volokh predicted that the rise of “cheap speech”—free internet content—would not only democratize mass media by allowing new voices, but also increase the proliferation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, which would then destabilize mass media.

Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the premier scholars on mis- and disinformation, told me he knows of no research on the relationship between paywalls and misinformation. “But it stands to reason,” he said, “that if people seeking news are blocked by the paywalls that are increasingly common on serious professional journalism websites, many of those people are going to turn to less reliable sites where they’re more likely to encounter mis- and disinformation.” (...)

Digital-news consumers can be divided into three categories: a small, elite group that pays hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for high-end subscriptions; a slightly larger group of people with one to three news subscriptions; and the roughly 80 percent of Americans who will not or cannot pay for information. Some significant percentage of this latter category are what scholars call “passive” news consumers—people who do not seek out information, but wait for it to come to them, whether from their social feeds, from friends, or from a TV in an airport. Putting reliable information behind paywalls increases the likelihood that passive news consumers will receive bad information.

In the short history of social media, the paywall was an early hurdle to getting good information; now there are newer and more perilous problems. The Wall Street Journal instituted a “hard paywall” in 1996. The Financial Times formally launched one in 2002. Other publications experimented with them, including The New York Times, which established its subscription plan and paywall in 2011. In 2000, I was the editor of Time.com, Time magazine’s website, when these experiments were going on. The axiom then was that “must have” publications like The Wall Street Journal could get away with charging for content, while “nice to have” publications like Time could not. Journalists were told that “information wants to be free.” But the truth was simpler: People wanted free information, and we gave it to them. And they got used to it.

Of course, publications need to cover their costs, and journalists need to be paid. Traditionally, publications had three lines of revenue: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand sales. Newsstand sales have mostly disappeared. The internet should have been a virtual newsstand, but buying individual issues or articles is almost impossible. The failure to institute a frictionless mechanism for micropayments to purchase news was one of the greatest missteps in the early days of the web. Some publications would still be smart to try it.

I’d argue that paywalls are part of the reason Americans’ trust in media is at an all-time low. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have “a fair amount” or a “a great deal” of trust that the news is fair and accurate. A large percentage of these Americans see media as being biased. Well, part of the reason they think media are biased is that most fair, accurate, and unbiased news sits behind a wall. The free stuff needn’t be fair or accurate or unbiased. Disinformationists, conspiracy theorists, and Russian and Chinese troll farms don’t employ fact-checkers and libel lawyers and copy editors.

Part of the problem with the current, free news environment is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year, according to CNN, Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic (and others more). Threads, Meta’s answer to X, is “not going to do anything to encourage” news and politics on the platform, says Adam Mosseri, the executive who oversees it. “My take is, from a platforms’ perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [news] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The platform companies are not in the news business; they are in the engagement business. News is less engaging than, say, dance shorts or chocolate-chip-cookie recipes—or eye-catching conspiracy theories. (...)

Now AI-created clickbait is also a growing threat. Generative AI’s ability to model, scrape, and even plagiarize real news—and then tailor it to users—is extraordinary. AI clickbait mills, posing as legitimate journalistic organizations, are churning out content that rips off real news and reporting. These plagiarism mills are receiving funding because, well, they’re cheap and profitable. For now, Google’s rankings don’t appear to make a distinction between a news article written by a human being and one written by an AI chatbot. They can, and they should.

The best way to address these challenges is for newsrooms to remove or suspend their paywalls for stories related to the 2024 election. I am mindful of the irony of putting this plea behind The Atlantic’s own paywall, but that’s exactly where the argument should be made. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably paid to support journalism that you think matters in the world. Don’t you want it to be available to others, too, especially those who would not otherwise get to see it? [ed. Yeah...except who decides what's newsworthy?]

Emergencies and natural disasters have long prompted papers to suspend their paywalls. When Hurricane Irene hit the New York metropolitan area in 2011, The New York Times made all storm-related coverage freely available. “We are aware of our obligations to our audience and to the public at large when there is a big story that directly impacts such a large portion of people,” a New York Times editor said at the time. In some ways, this creates a philosophical inconsistency. The paywall says, This content is valuable and you have to pay for it. Suspending the paywall in a crisis says, This content is so valuable that you don’t have to pay for it. Similarly, when the coronavirus hit, The Atlantic made its COVID coverage—and its COVID Tracking Project—freely available to all.

During the pandemic, some publications found that suspending their paywall had an effect they had not anticipated: It increased subscriptions. The Seattle Times, the paper of record in a city that was an early epicenter of coronavirus, put all of its COVID-related content outside the paywall and then saw, according to its senior vice president of marketing, Kati Erwert, “a very significant increase in digital subscriptions”—two to three times its previous daily averages. The Philadelphia Inquirer put its COVID content outside its paywall in the spring of 2020 as a public service. And then, according to the paper’s director of special projects, Evan Benn, it saw a “higher than usual number of digital subscription sign-ups.”

by Richard Stengel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I'm all for getting rid of paywalls, but with so many workaround apps they're more a nuisance than anything else. And I understand the economic reasons. See also: Is it moral to lock writing behind paywalls? (Intrinsic Perspective) - which itself is behind a paywall, but makes the short case that bookstores are paywalls in a sense too (you want to read a book, you have to pay for it). But hey, if money is more important (and necessary) than wide disemination of your ideas, go for it. I'm not judging, it's your work.]

via:

Long Bombs and Short Pitches

[ed. These guys are good, and Tiger is an encyclopedia of golf knowledge. See also: this Tiger clinic with Freddy Couples on 50 yd. pitches.]

Shohei Ohtani’s Former Translator Accused of Stealing $16 Million

On Thursday, federal prosecutors formally charged Ippei Mizuhara, the longtime translator of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, with bank fraud stemming from what is described as the theft of more than $16 million from Ohtani’s bank account to support Mizuhara’s gambling addiction. It represents the latest turn in a scandal that has engulfed baseball’s biggest star in recent weeks and offers substantial new information in a saga that has seen dramatic revelations and even more dramatic reversals.

The 37-page complaint details a yearslong pattern of theft for nearly quadruple the amount Mizuhara had previously confessed to stealing. The money was allegedly used to pay off bookmaker Mathew Bowyer, with the first payments occurring in 2021. The complaint appears to support Ohtani’s claims, made during a press conference last month, that he was unaware of the payments and did not place any bets himself; online sports gambling is illegal in California, where Ohtani and Mizuhara live. Initially, Mizuhara had claimed that Ohtani had made the payments himself on Mizuhara’s behalf.

To call Mizuhara, who was fired by the Dodgers after initial reports of the payments emerged, merely a translator doesn’t paint the full picture. Since Ohtani moved to the United States in December 2017, he and Mizuhara were rarely seen apart. In addition to performing translating duties, Mizuhara was a jack-of-all-trades personal assistant, working as Ohtani’s porter, training partner, business manager, and chauffeur; they were widely described not just as employer and employee, but as best friends. Ohtani is famously ascetic and reclusive. For years, Mizuhara functioned as something like his buffer for all things not immediately related to a baseball diamond.

It adds a complex emotional element to the fraud charge: If Ohtani’s account of what happened and the charges in the federal complaint are accurate, this represents not just a massive swindle, but also something akin to personal betrayal. The complaint suggests that Mizuhara was all too aware of this fact, stating that he texted Bowyer in the days after the first reports of the payments emerged, “Technically I did steal from him. it’s all over for me.”

What We Know

Prosecutors say that Mizuhara began making wagers with Bowyer in September 2021 and placed approximately 19,000 bets between December 2021 and January 2024. The total amount of money involved is staggering: The complaint says that records of Mizuhara’s wagers “reflect total winning bets of $142,256,769.74, and total losing bets of $182,935,206.68.” This means that, in all, Mizuhara is alleged to have lost more than $40 million.

The numbers suggest that Mizuhara was making wagers at a dizzying rate. Prosecutors say that he placed an average of almost 25 bets daily for an average of $320,000 per day. Winnings were deposited in Mizuhara’s personal bank account, according to the complaint.

Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara paid “at least” $15 million to Bowyer via wire transfers from Ohtani’s bank account. Additionally, investigators found that Mizuhara had used Ohtani’s account to pay for things other than gambling, including more than $325,000 on eBay and the shopping platform Whatnot, which the complaint says was spent on more than 1,000 collectible baseball cards that prosecutors say Mizuhara intended to resell. The bank fraud charges against Mizuhara carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison and/or a maximum fine of $1 million.

Ohtani’s Involvement—or Lack Thereof

The complaint details how Mizuhara went to extreme lengths to pose as Ohtani and then hide the proceedings from him. Prosecutors allege that Mizuhara entered Ohtani’s bank account online and changed the settings to link the account with Mizuhara’s phone number and an anonymous email account connected to Mizuhara. On multiple occasions, Mizuhara was recorded making calls to Ohtani’s bank, falsely claiming to be the player in order to authorize wire transfers, prosecutors say, including one call during which he fraudulently claimed the funds were for a car loan. Per the complaint, Mizuhara bypassed Ohtani’s security questions during another call by relaying the player’s “biographical information.”

All of this seems to address some of the biggest questions surrounding the scandal to this point: Was Ohtani, who signed a 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, aware of the gambling debts? And if so, what was his involvement?

In an interview with investigators, Ohtani said the same thing that he did in his March 27 press conference: that he first learned of the alleged theft last month, when, following an address by Mizuhara to Dodgers players in English, Mizuhara met privately with Ohtani. During their conversation, the complaint says, the translator “disclosed to Victim A”—Ohtani—“for the first time that MIZUHARA had substantial debts from illegal gambling, and that MIZUHARA had been paying his bookmaker with funds” from Ohtani’s bank account.

A Homeland Security Investigations special agent fluent in Japanese “reviewed approximately 9,700 pages of text messages between Victim A and MIZUHARA between 2020 and 2024” that contained no mention of Bowyer or his associates and no mention of “odds, wagering, or any other reference which might indicate Victim A’s knowledge of MIZUHARA’s gambling with” Bowyer. Additionally, while investigators found gambling records for Mizuhara with MGM, DraftKings, and FanDuel, none of the companies had records under Ohtani’s name, and Ohtani’s browser history “did not contain any evidence that Victim A had ever accessed the gambling websites used by” Bowyer. In all, this supports Ohtani’s account that he had no knowledge of Mizuhara’s illegal gambling or debts and that he has not been active in gambling, illegal or otherwise, himself.

Apart from allaying the concerns around Ohtani’s potential involvement in the scheme, the complaint clears up another potential headache for Major League Baseball. Prosecutors say that they have found no evidence that Mizuhara placed any bets on baseball, nipping what had the potential to become a colossal scandal for the sport in the bud.

Among the complaint’s most shocking revelations is that prosecutors say Bowyer nearly revealed the alleged theft directly to Ohtani. In November 2023, Bowyer allegedly texted Mizuhara, “Hey Ippie, it’s 2 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know why you’re not returning my calls. I’m here in Newport Beach and I see [Victim A] walking his dog. I’m just gonna go up and talk to him and ask how I can get in touch with you since you’re not responding? Please call me back immediately.”

This suggests that Bowyer may have been physically pursuing Ohtani, who was living in Newport Beach. Whether or not Bowyer believed that Ohtani was aware of the wire transfers, the revelation that Bowyer might have been monitoring him is creepy at best and outright threatening at worst. “You’re putting me in a position where this is going to get out of control,” Bowyer texted Mizuhara in January 2024, according to the complaint. “If I don’t hear from you by the end of the day today it’s gonna [sic] be out of my hands.”

by Claire McNear, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty Images/Ringer illustration

They're Looting The Internet

In America, 83% of adults use YouTube, 68% of them use Facebook and 47% of them use Instagram. Each platform boasts over two billion users and, over the last three years, Meta and Google have made over half a trillion dollars in revenue from advertising on these platforms.

I now want you to go on Facebook, scroll down, and see how quickly you hit an advertisement. In my case, after one post from a friend, I was immediately hit with an advertisement for some sort of food supplement, then a series of reels, then a suggested group called "Walt Disney Magic," followed by an ad, followed by a post from a friend.

 

On Instagram, I saw one post from a person I followed, followed by an ad for the same food supplement, followed by two posts from people I followed, followed by another ad. When I clicked an Instagram story, I saw one post from my friend before an ad for the very same food supplement, another two posts from a friend, and then an ad for a game that features a regular trope of the genre — footage of gameplay that isn't actually in the game. (...)

This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."

On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.

It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. (...)

Tech companies have found every imaginable way to monetize every imaginable thing we do, all based on the idea that they're providing us with something in return. And when you really think about it, they haven't provided a service at all. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google are platforms that only have as much utility as the content they host, which is created by billions of (mostly) unsupported and unpaid users. The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.

Yet the state of the internet is now far simpler: the cost of using free platforms is a constant war with the incentives and intentions of the platforms themselves. We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer "search" Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad. Twitter, in its prime, succeeded by connecting real people to real things at a time when the internet actively manufactures our experience and interactions with others.

 

The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don't really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don't contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in "quality," just "more," making them extremely poor arbiters of what "good" looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they've built is a profit excavator dressed as a service.

by Edward Zitron, Where's Your Ed At |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Links galore. The problem has gotten so big so fast that it's almost impossible to comprehend. I'm so glad I got off of all social media over a decade ago (although I do continue to use YouTube for instruction videos, and of course Google, but trying to give DuckDuckGo a go). And it's only going to get worse: Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI (Intrinsic Perspective).]