Devour the Flesh

In the sterile womb of Jersey City, if you sit and watch a while, you can bear witness to the beating heart of corporate America. Here, along the waterfront, where banks and commercial entities alike feign importance, you can watch this organ function in all its pulsating, bloody, slimy glory: senior managers in starchy button-downs, shouldering duffel bags, talking about frenetic nothings on the phone; junior analysts, hiding happy hour hangovers with oat lattes and Chill Mint nicotine gum; women wearing ballet flats and cropped fit Zara blazers; men disguising receding hairlines with gelled crew cuts, swaggering in and out of glass buildings with their artfully hidden secrets. Everyone has been reduced to the same amount of nothing—no more than cells delivering oxygen to the vascular organ, ciphers turning around and around in revolving doors. Everyone is equally insignificant in the face of A Business Plan. They coagulate into a viscous soup, being pulled through aortas that channel them from the train station to the office door. The line for Just Salad in the adjoining mall wraps around the floor during lunch. They have a system so you won’t ever have to wait more than fifteen minutes for your Crispy Chicken Poblano.

There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.

I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.

All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.

When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”

I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it. 

by Steffi Cao, It's Steffi |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always nice to discover a new young writer with talent, wit, and deadly aim. See also: The Whimsy War Manifesto:]

***

Here is my synthesis of 2025 so far: the status quo is a bad day, and the likelihood of a world-ending day is far likelier than a good one, so when a good day does come around, it feels like licking the Pearly Gates with your own parched tongue.

Most of this is because of politics. Politics, we say, tearing our hair out once more! Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy, intended to make news outlets and the public alike feel like we’re being whiplashed with news while explicitly and covertly executing fascist policy, has entered in full force in the first eight months of Donald Trump’s second term. Every day feels like you’re being bashed in the face like a birthday piñata: No more Department of Education! The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America! Tariffs! No tariffs! We’re gutting USAID and the CFPB—you didn’t know what they did for you as an America? No one taught you that in school? You didn’t read about it in the news that was paywalled because Marc Benioff bought TIME and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post? That’s your own fault! Fuck you! Tariffs again! Mass deportations! AI is gutting white collar jobs! They’re bombing Iran for fun! World War III! And now, here’s Elon Musk being ugly.

It is difficult to be online, to read the news, to open up your phone without your brain activating your fight-or-flight response because all of your synapses lit up like a Christmas tree. The future seems to be at a crossroads, every decision unsure and halting about what is really coming next. On the bad days, we are all just grasping to the last life raft of a boat being blown up by a bunch of the un-funniest losers you’ve ever seen in your life. Rent is skyrocketing, people are asking ChatGPT to make them weekly grocery lists, the rich are only getting richer. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin. Yet we scroll onto the next post anyway.

Nihilism and doomerism run rampant as a result. Trust in the government, in media and in society is at an all-time low. Everyone asks, are we cooked? For the first time in a long time, it really seems that way.

Zhang Daqian

via:

Ana Popovic (feat. Robben Ford)

Jane Goodall Chronicled the Social Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C.

The British-born Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when the National Geographic Society, which was financially supporting her field studies in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania, published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi and other members of the troop of primates she had observed.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described her struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika

On the scientific merits alone, Dr. Goodall’s discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).

Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her arduous research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.

Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the networks. In December 1965, CBS News broadcast a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.” (...)

And in becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women — including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson — came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.

by Keith Schneider, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jane Goodall Institute

Letters From An American: September 30, 2025

Last Thursday, September 25, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly announced he was calling about 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, to meet at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia, today. Such a meeting was unprecedented, and its suddenness meant military leaders across the world had to drop everything to run to Washington, D.C., at enormous financial cost for the country. Under those extraordinary circumstances, speculation about what Hegseth intended to say or do at the meeting has been widespread.

Now we know. This morning, in front of a giant flag backdrop that echoed the opening scene from the movie Patton, Hegseth harangued the career military leaders, pacing as if he were giving a TED talk. The event was streamed live to the public, making it clear that the hurry to get everyone to Washington, D.C., in person was not about secrecy.

In his speech, Hegseth reiterated his vision of a military based in what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Ignoring the military’s mission of preventing wars through deterrence, its professional and highly educated officer corps, and its modern structure as a triumph of logistics, he told the military leaders that today was “the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”

He claimed that “we have the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, and most prepared military on the planet. That is true, full stop. Nobody can touch us. It’s not even close.” But then Hegseth, who became defense secretary from his position as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel, complained that “our warriors” are not “led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders.”

He claimed that “foolish and reckless politicians” had forced the military “to focus on the wrong things” and that it had promoted too many leaders “based on their race, based on gender quotas.” “We became the woke department,” he said. “We are done with that sh*t.” He is loosening rules about hazing and bullying, changing physical fitness reforms with the idea that they will get women out of combat roles, and prohibiting beards, which will force Black men out of the service, for Black men suffer at a much higher rate than white men do from a chronic skin condition that makes shaving painful and can cause scarring.

He also said he was tired of seeing “fat troops” and “fat generals and admirals,” and that he would institute a second physical fitness test every year.

“[I]f the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”

The military leaders listened to Hegseth without expression, in keeping with the military’s longstanding tradition of rejecting partisanship. While Hegseth paused for applause that did not materialize, he seemed to be playing to the cameras rather than his live audience.

In contrast, when President Donald J. Trump took the stage, he seemed uncomfortable at the lack of audience participation in what was essentially a rally speech. “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he began. “This is very interesting. Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. You’re not allowed to do that. You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room.”

The president who received five draft deferments—four for college, one for bad feet—continued to a room full of career officers: “Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we’re all on the same team. And I was told that, sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room.”

For the next 70 minutes, he spoke slowly, slurring words, delivering to the hundreds of professionals who had rushed from around the world to attend this meeting a rambling, incoherent stream of words that jumped from what appeared to be prepared remarks to his own improvisation. He covered the “Gulf of America,” the seven or eight wars he claims to have ended, the “millions and millions of lives” he has saved, nuclear weapons (one of the two “n-words” he informed the military leaders you can’t say), his demanding “beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper” with “the real gold writing” when he signs things (“I love my signature. I really do. Everyone loves my signature,” he said), finding $31 billion on “the tariff shelf,” making Canada the 51st state, his dislike of the “aesthetics” of certain Navy ships, wild claims about his 2024 electoral victory, the press, America First, immigrants from prisons and mental institutions, and Venezuelans not daring to go out in boats for fear the U.S. will “blow [them] out of existence.”

The speech was highly partisan, attacking former president Joe Biden by name eleven times, calling him “the auto pen” and claiming his administration was really run by “radical left lunatics.” “We were not respected with Biden,” Trump said.

“They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”

Like Hegseth’s, Trump’s speech seemed to have been designed to announce a new mission for the military. He claimed the U.S. has domestic enemies, “insurrectionists” “paid by the radical left,” and said that cities “that are run by the radical-left Democrats…they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within…. And I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.” Trump told the audience that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”

A former defense official told Jack Detsch and Leo Shane III of Politico the meeting was “a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing. It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”

Either one of those speeches, in full view of the American public and foreign governments, would be enough to torpedo an administration before Trump. But the day was not over.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:

[ed. The quotes say it all. See also: The Silence of the Generals;  Doing Vlad's Business; and Collateral Damage: All from the same link:]

***

This Washington Post investigation into some of the human costs of the murder of USAID will take your breath away:

Fever ravaged the body of 5-year-old Suza Kenyaba as she sweated and shivered on a thin mattress in a two-room clinic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pigtailed girl who liked pretty dresses was battling malaria and desperately needed medication that could save her life.

That medication, already purchased by a U.S.-taxpayer-funded program, was tantalizingly close—a little more than seven miles away. But it hadn’t reached the clinic where Suza was being treated because President Donald Trump’s suspension of foreign aid had thrown supply chains into chaos.

The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.

Less than a week after her symptoms began, Suza was dead. Congolese government data shows that in Suza’s province, deaths caused by malaria nearly tripled in the first half of this year.

Pure cruelty. Pure waste. We’ve repeatedly written this year about the staggering damage done by DOGE’s clownishly arrogant annihilation of USAID: children starving to death in war zones while already-purchased food aid rotted on shelves because the people in charge of distributing it had been fired; babies dying of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa because Elon Musk’s crack team of geniuses decided treating them for pennies a day was too much bother—or, what might be worse, just callously turned off their spigot of money without bothering to figure out what it was for. The toll is unimaginable. We owe it to the dead to remember. We owe it to their loved ones to fix it.

Unreasonable

The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work. (...)

The head of the lab, Bogdan, moved here from Serbia a quarter century ago. He grows peppers in tomato tins on his office windowsill, and he has gathered us to discuss what he has termed the current macro-environment. It has been decreed, he tells us, that we must turn away three of the five Ph.D. candidates we’ve accepted. The federal funding for the Bee Diversity and Native Pollinator Surveys has been cancelled, though there is still state-level funding. The funding for the Sub-Saharan Pollinator Project is frozen, not cancelled, but it is unlikely to be unfrozen in time for us to make use of the hundred-and-seventy-seven bee boxes currently in the field, in anticipation of the late spring and summer. The project on the diversity and frequency of pathogens in wild solitary bees—which is funded mostly through the Department of Agriculture—is also on hold, even though hundreds of the bees in question have already been tagged with tiny radio trackers. Bogdan has made an emergency application to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but—he throws up his hands. What do people think?

The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.

That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.

Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.

When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.

So that explains it.

These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)

When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.

Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.

When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.

My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.

I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.

It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.

The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.

Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.

You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)

After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.

The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?

It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)

When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.

You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.

That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.

Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.

He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.

The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.

Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.

O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Stephen Doyle

Glenn Frey

[ed. Now this is really stepping out of your comfort zone. Who would've thought?]

Gen Z’s Dating Rules Are Making Them ‘Constantly Disappointed’

Lea Veloso, 26, has an ever-growing ick list.

If he spits on the ground, can’t cook, lies about his height, identifies as apolitical or doesn’t travel enough. If he’s weird about other men wearing makeup (“like, K-pop idols”), says he wants a “slightly autistic woman”, has no skincare routine or only likes songs that got famous on TikTok. It’s an ick if he doesn’t call his parents, sniffs every five seconds, is an unsuccessful DJ or is embarrassed to do karaoke. Recently, she uncovered a new one: if he’s saving himself for marriage. It’s now at the top of the checklist on her Notes app that she references whenever she starts seeing someone new.

“Three strikes, you’re out,” she said.

Between growing up on a steady diet of fan fiction and a never-ending parade of dating content on her feeds, where strangers share the just-because flowers they receive and beloved creator couples post their lengthy breakup announcements on YouTube, Veloso finds it harder to take in the nuance of a person when she’s dating them. The noise of who she should be dating is just too strong.

“For so long, I’ve been idealizing this one man who will drop everything for me, who will know my likes, and is someone who’s the perfect mold,” she said. “I think I’m constantly disappointed by real men.”

Gen Z have long faced accusations of being losers in the dating realm: young people are having less sex, meeting fewer new people, getting cringed out by even sending roses on Hinge. They are the most rejected generation and the loneliest generation. Most of these trends point to a big change in dating culture: social media has entrenched itself into our romantic reality, often informing our interpersonal relationships rather than the other way around. For young women like Veloso who have never dated without the internet’s input, that means the construction of a Dream Man informed by viral terms served to her by algorithms, social feeds and stories people share online more than her IRL dating life.

The phraseology is expansive and ever-evolving, and for many, wielded as a prescriptive rubric for tackling the thunderdome of heterosexual dating content. There is no shortage of ways to describe the kind of man who is a romantically superior kind of partner: a loser provider man with golden retriever energy who worships you because if he wanted to, he would. The health of a prospective match can be deemed on a red-to-green flag scale, from minimum effort and weaponized incompetence to getting the princess treatment from a real yearner, written by a woman. Your happily-ever-after can be ensnared with the red nail theory or the orange peel theory. The truest love, the ship, the OTP (one true pairing), is also increasingly championed on social media through tropes, whether it’s enemies-to-lovers or a slow-burn relationship arc.

This desire to develop theories that explain the painful steps of falling in love feels similar to older adages around dating, like the teachings of Cosmo magazine, Sex and the City, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But relational psychoanalyst Cynthia LaForte said there is also a generational trend of diagnosing and clinicalizing everything, often propelled by misappropriated therapy speak on social media, that is unique to gen Z and the digital era of dating.

“We’ve pathologized away personality,” LaForte said. “I think there’s a big narrative around ‘these are the types of people you date’ and ‘these are the people you break up with’ and it leaves little room for compassion.” (...)

Whether you are young or not, human relationships are fraught with emotional tripwires, and Dream Man content offers a safer way forward. But that means we are all dating under a panopticon, where virtues and sins can be broadcasted and scrutinized and farmed for engagement. There is a huge appetite for other people’s horror stories especially. Millions-strong Facebook groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy? and apps like Tea were specifically designed to catch cheaters in the act. Really any fuckboy behavior can be posted and reposted until daters are ubiquitously known across the internet as West Elm Caleb or the Couch Guy or the man from Reesa Teesa’s notorious 50-part “Who TF Did I Marry?” TikTok series. And online, it doesn’t matter if the crime was pathologically lying or not looking overjoyed enough when your girlfriend walked through the door – the deliberation and condemnation processes are the same.

“Social media makes me scared shitless to date,” Nicole said. “Everyone is on the wave of holding people accountable, which I do very much support, and because of this, people are highlighting more of the abusive side of things to raise awareness to it. But it also drowns out the hopeless romantics.”

by Steffi Cao, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Laura Edelbacher
[ed. Posted mostly for the links (all new to me - don't do social media). See also: It's a loser boy summer (It's Steffi):]

***

Something is brewing in the murky waters of our crumbling society. Everyone is battling loneliness and existential dread. We’re all physically or spiritually chaste, but somehow still trying to be hedonistic brats in the club. Sex and the City is being studied on social media like a fossilized relic of a bygone dating era. Romantic morale is dissolving like saltine crackers under the wet, baking sun. Everywhere, every hour, someone is at a bar or up on Twitter, talking about yearning. (...)

Last year, I wrote about the medium ugly boyfriend and his meteoric ascent as romance’s hottest status piece. The appeal was clear—in the external trappings of your relationship, the medium ugly boyfriend ensured that you would always be perceived as the glamorous and altruistic heroine. He seems to know that you’re out of his league and will, to any passerby in a Uniqlo, always make you look good. But now, a new phenomenon has expounded upon the fertile soil of the boyfriend status symbol: the nonchalant cool man is out, and the loser boy is in. Medium ugly boyfriends of last year have opened the floodgates to a new dawn, and it is unequivocally the era of loser boys. Men who proclaim to “only date models” are as dead in the water as the Shein microtrends of 2020. In the relentless heat of August, we are too tired to deal with texts that say “I mean, you can come if you want,” and we are now searching for the person that will get down on both knees, put their hands together in prayer, and beg for a woman to look their way. (...)

To be clear, I mean “loser” in a very laudatory way. There are a million other names for him: he’s a yearner. He’s a worshipper. He’s a real eater. He’ll cherish you and love you even if you were a worm. “Loser” is simply the ironic digest of these personality traits that have historically been considered undesirable by traditional masculinity. (...)

Within the context of patriarchal oppression, loser boys are the very antithesis to the red-pilled manosphere that seems to grow bigger each year. Loser boys are really lover boys—the ones who are conscious enough to identify a hegemonic dog whistle and act accordingly.

It makes sense why this has happened. Over the years, the Joe Rogan–Andrew Huberman–Sneako enclave of digital masculinity has peddled the ideologies of homophobic, racist chauvinism to millions of men. Young women are skewing more progressive as young men skew more conservative, and a huge factor has to do with the content they are fed on their feeds. And of course, there are interpersonal impacts. I hear stories from women who more frequently encounter direct forms of such alpha male ideology on dating apps or during IRL dates—men swiping up just to tell them that they’re ugly, men directly telling women during first dates what they perceive to be wrong with their looks, men actively putting down women for their interests, professions, and beliefs. For having sex with them, for not having sex with them.

It’s disrespectful, yes, but also incredibly boring. It’s so boring to get disrespected again and again by the same genre of man who has shit to say about your looks while he’s nursing a hairline that’s got two years left before it takes permanent PTO. The loser boy phenomenon is indicative of women wanting more—they want someone who, at a very baseline level, understands that they deserve to be treated above a level of degradation and dehumanization.

[ed. PTO? Had to look it up (paid time off). Lol.]

Tilly Norwood

Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI ‘actor’? 

It takes a lot to be the most controversial figure in Hollywood, especially when Mel Gibson still exists. And yet somehow, in a career yet to even begin, Tilly Norwood has been inundated with scorn.

This is for the simple fact that Tilly Norwood does not exist. Despite looking like an uncanny fusion of Gal Gadot, Ana de Armas and High School Musical-era Vanessa Hudgens, Norwood is the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) talent studio called Xicoia. And if Xicoia is to be believed, then Norwood represents the dazzling future of the film industry.

Unveiled this weekend at the Zurich film festival, Norwood has been touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, with studios apparently clamouring to work with her and a talent agency lined up to represent her. Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Well, this sucks.]

The Aloha Spirit Has Its Limits

When hate speech is too much.

In October 1964, George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the group called American Nazi Party, came to speak to the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Rockwell was invited by the Associated Students of the University of Hawaiʻi as part of a program to hear from political leaders representing diverse perspectives.

This is what Rockwell did. He went to college campuses, spouted off about his political views, and got a lot of attention for being provocative. He also liked media stunts, as when he tried to organize a “white power” march to counter Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington, but that didn’t amount to much. He told the UH crowd that no one paid any attention to him until he started wearing a swastika.

 
“Now, people turn out because they want to see that Nazi. When I was a nice guy, that didn’t happen,” he said.

At the Mānoa campus, he spoke at Kennedy Theatre in the morning, Andrews Amphitheatre at noon, and took questions later in the day at Hemenway Hall. He visited the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo later that week, where he was met by large crowds and protest signs that read, “No Room For Fascism in America.” A grainy old newspaper picture shows him wearing lei he received and his signature corncob pipe jutting from his teeth.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin sounded smirky in its coverage of Rockwell’s Mānoa visit:

“George Lincoln Rockwell, American Nazi leader, found it difficult to sell his political ideology yesterday to some 5,000 University students who heard his three talks …The students listened attentively, enjoying Rockwell’s flamboyant and outspoken remarks. But it was clear from their frequent laughter that they didn’t take the Nazi commander seriously.

“The cordial reception and natives in the crowd also seemed to fluster the 47-year-old leader of 700 American Nazis. It was obviously disconcerting to insist before an audience representing Hawaii’s diverse racial community, that ‘racial mixing is a sin against nature.’”

One student asked Rockwell how he can justify his racial bigotry.

“A bigot,” Rockwell replied, “is a vile person. The only thing I’m against is someone who is against me… the Jews who seize communications and suppress information, and the Negroes who are trying to push me out of American civilization … Bigotry is stupid, and I am not stupid.”

Rockwell’s speech apparently hopped from one thought to another “like a flea on a hot griddle,” as one person described it. He yelled about the ills of American government, which he said was fast headed left toward anarchy, rioting and terrorism.

Rockwell understood, though, that he was speaking to a decidedly different audience.

“From what I’ve seen from you folks — you Japanese, Hawaiians and Chinese — you are the most courteous I’ve ever seen … I have nothing in my heart for you but love … You here in Hawaii have proved to me you fit together and live peacefully, if you go to the Mainland you see one group, the Negroes, that doesn’t fit,” Rockwell told the Mānoa audience.

The tone of the event was not one of outrage, though. Neither was it of acceptance. It was as if what he was saying was so outrageous and horrible that the students took it as theater of the absurd. (...)

This plays into the idea we still cling to about the aloha spirit being the antidote to hate. Perhaps we still believe because it’s true. Perhaps it’s a power that we don’t always know how to summon. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking.

The Star-Bulletin coverage of Rockwell’s Mānoa speeches said that the loudest reaction from the audience came when Rockwell said, “This is the nicest place I’ve ever been. I think I’ll move here.”

The crowd groaned in unison. You can visit but don’t bring that stuff here to stay. The aloha spirit has its limits.

Rockwell, who had served in the Navy and had been stationed in Hawaiʻi for a short time, never did move to Hawaiʻi. Three years after his visit, Rockwell was shot and killed by John Patler, a former member of his American Nazi Party, which he had renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party. Patler had been a devotee of Rockwell, but the relationship had unraveled in the year prior to the shooting.

by Lee Cataluna, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Scientists Unlock Secret to Venus Flytrap’s Hair-Trigger Response

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Naturfoto Honal|Getty

Jeremy Miranda (American b.1980), Cooking, 2024

via:

The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers

An oral history

The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies, the ramifications of building a master database to track and surveil immigrants are just beginning to be felt, and its cadre of Musk protégés and tech entrepreneurs remain embedded in agencies throughout the executive branch. The possibilities this opens up—of private takeovers of government operations, of the government embracing Silicon Valley’s ethos of moving fast and breaking things—remain open.

WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers across dozens of agencies to gather the most comprehensive picture yet of how the American government got to this point, and where it may go from here. Many sources requested anonymity because they fear retaliation. They told WIRED not just what has been going on inside the federal government at a time of unprecedented change—but what it’s been like to experience those changes firsthand.

The following is the story, in their words, of what happened when the world’s most powerful man unleashed the world’s richest one on the world’s most complex institution.

by Zoë Schiffer, Leah Feiger, Vittoria Elliott, Makena Kelly, Kate Knibbs, David Gilbert, Molly Taft, Aarian Marshall, Paresh Dave, and Jake Lahut, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Yonk

Emmylou Harris

[ed. Love this old Chuck Berry classic (especially this version by Emmylou and Albert Lee). See also: this excellent cover by Elle and Toni.]

You Never Can Tell (C'est La Vie)

It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They furnished off an apartment with a 2-room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale,
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
700 little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They bought a souped-up jitney, was a cherry red '53
And drove it down to Orleans to celebrate their anniversary
It was there where Pierre was wedded to the lovely mademoiselle
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

They had a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie," say the old folks, "it goes to show you never can tell"

via:

I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me.

“Please hold,” the caller said, “while I transfer you to my supervisor.”

It was a Wednesday in August, a little before lunch. The call came from a 212 number, which for a New Yorker could be almost anything — the school, the pharmacy, the roof guy — so I answered.

The caller asked for me by name and stated in measured tones that he was from Chase Bank and he wanted to verify transfers being made from my account to someone in Texas.

Wrong number, I said. I don’t have a Chase account.

But one was recently opened in your name, he replied, with two Zelle transfers. And minutes ago, someone tried to transfer those funds, $2,100, to San Antonio.

Now, this carried the whiff of plausibility. I’m one of some 150 million people who have access to Zelle, the payments platform that lets you send and receive money from your phone. But my scam radar was also fully operational and pinging.

“How do I know this isn’t a scam?” I asked, sounding like that guy in every movie who asks an undercover cop if he’s a cop.

He had a quick answer. Look at the number showing on your phone and Google it, he replied. “Now look up the Chase branch at 3 Times Square,” he instructed. “See the office phone number?” I did, and it matched the one on my phone’s screen.

Then he added, “Here at Chase, we’ll never ask for your personal information or passwords.” On the contrary, he gave me more information — two “cancellation codes” and a long case number with four letters and 10 digits.

That’s when he offered to transfer me to his supervisor. That simple phrase, familiar from countless customer-service calls, draped a cloak of corporate competence over this unfolding drama. His supervisor. I mean, would a scammer have a supervisor?

The line went mute for a few seconds, and a second man greeted me with a voice of authority. “My name is Mike Wallace,” he said, and asked for my case number from the first guy. I dutifully read it back to him.

“Yes, yes, I see,” the man said, as if looking at a screen. He explained the situation — new account, Zelle transfers, Texas — and suggested we reverse the attempted withdrawal.

I’m not proud to report that by now, he had my full attention, and I was ready to proceed with whatever plan he had in mind. 

Internet fraud has grown steadily, with 2024 setting new record-high losses — “a staggering $16.6 billion,” the F.B.I.’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center wrote in a recent report. These crimes include elaborate cryptocurrency schemes and ransomware attacks on entire cities, but phishing and spoofing — the cloning of an actual phone number — still lead the list of some 860,000 complaints last year.

Are these scams entering some sort of improved, 2.0 version of the old-school Nigerian-prince-type setup?

“I wouldn’t call it an improvement,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant special agent in charge of the New York offices of the F.B.I. “It’s an adaptation. As the public becomes more aware of schemes, they need to adjust.”

The man claiming to be a Chase supervisor asked me to open Zelle. Where it says, “Enter an amount,” he instructed me to type $2,100, the amount of the withdrawals he was going to help me reverse.

Then, in the “Enter phone number or email” window — where the other party in a Zelle transaction goes — he instructed me to type the case number the first caller had given me, but to leave out the four letters. Numbers only. I dutifully entered the 10 digits, but my skepticism was finally showing up.

“Mr. Wallace,” I said, somewhat apologetically. “This case number sure looks like a phone number, and I’m about to send that number $2,100.”

No, he replied, because of this important next step. In the window that says “What’s this for? ” where you might add “babysitter” or “block party donation,” he told me to enter a unique code that would alert his team that this transaction should be reversed.

It was incredibly long, and he read it out slowly — “S, T, P, P, six, seven, one, two …” — and I typed along. Now and then he even threw in some military-style lingo: “… zero, zero, Charlie, X-ray, nine, eight …”

Once we were done, he had me read the whole 19-character code back to him.

Now, he said, press “Send.”

But one word above the “What’s this for?” box containing our special code with the X-ray and the Charlie kept bothering me: “Optional.”

Then I had an idea, and asked the supervisor if he was calling from 3 Times Square. Yes, he said.

I’ll come to you, I said, and we’ll fix this together.

By then it will probably be too late, he said.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and he said that would be fine, and I hung up.

I called my bank and confirmed what I’d come to suspect. There had been no recent Zelle activity.

My jaw dropped when I went back and looked at my call history. Sixteen minutes — that’s how long they had me on the line.

In decades as a crime reporter, I’ve covered many, many scams — psychic scams, sweetheart swindles, real-estate scams, even the obscure “nanny scam,” where a fake mother reaches out to a young caregiver to try to rip her off.

I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes?

I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jordan Speer/Chase

Crossing the Line

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — The backstroke was aborted as a “F*** YOU RORY” arose from the right side of the fourth green. Shane Lowry came over to comfort Rory McIlroy, who had walked away from his ball after the shout, shaking his head in dazed resignation that the Ryder Cup had come to this. Lowry whispered some encouragement while McIlroy composed himself and returned to his eagle attempt, but the jeers resumed before his ball had even begun its journey toward the cup. When the putt missed, the hostile shouts transformed into mocking cheers. McIlroy continued shaking his head, every gesture suggesting a man who desperately wanted to be anywhere else. 

Moments later, Lowry sank his own eagle putt from distance, pointing toward a pocket of European supporters while appearing to direct choice words back at the American hecklers. McIlroy sought out the match referee and a marshal, frustrated by their apparent indifference to the abuse being hurled his direction. What made the scene shocking was not its divergence from what golf is, but that it had become the status quo for what McIlroy suffered throughout Saturday afternoon. (...)

At the first fairway, McIlroy stood over his approach shot as a wall of boos cascaded from the grandstands during his practice swings. American assistant captain Webb Simpson frantically gestured for silence, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. McIlroy's pitch had barely left the clubface before the verbal assault resumed with renewed venom. He walked toward the green to mark his ball, taunts erupted from spectators lining Round Swamp Road. "Choker!" they screamed in unison. "Remember Pinehurst!" The grandstands flanking the green transformed into a countdown timer, fans bellowing numbers as McIlroy deliberated over his birdie putt. "You're taking too damn long!" one roared, attempting to weaponize their own impatience. When McIlroy's attempt slid past the cup, the cheers exploded into slurs: "Leprechaun!" "Overrated!" “Take out the Irish trash!”

The fourth hole has been a break in the crowds all week, with fans typically gravitating toward the clubhouse and closing holes instead. But Saturday afternoon brought exploration, and with it, more hostility. McIlroy crushed his drive down the fairway only to receive a "F*** you, little man!" in return off the tee. The mathematics were something: By this reporter's count, 30-something f-bombs had been hurled at McIlroy in the first four holes alone. The tallies for "You suck" and "Pinehurst" references became impossible to track. (...)

These scenes shouldn't have surprised anyone. New York golf tournaments have long been breeding grounds for fan disturbances, and Bethpage carries its own notorious reputation. The European team had arrived prepared, boasting about VR headset training sessions designed to simulate crowd hostility. They claimed to be ready for the worst. But no simulation could replicate the toxic alchemy at work here: alcohol mixed with entitlement, rudeness fused with xenophobia.

by Joel Beall, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Vaughn Ridley
[ed. Pride and support are one thing, but crudeness and jingoism are everywhere these days, and not just in sports. Shows how classless a lot of this country has become. Update: USA loses 15 - 13: US fan ugliness at the Ryder Cup was merely a reflection of Trump’s all-caps America (Guardian):]

***

By the time Europe finished the job, finally, on Sunday, the golf had the last word. But, until the thrilling denouement, the lasting memory of this Ryder Cup threatened not to be a single swing of the club so much as the ugly backdrop: galleries that drifted from partisan into venomous and the organizers who let the line slide until it snapped. (...)

There’s a difference between atmosphere and interference, and Bethpage spent too much of the weekend blurring the two. Boos during practice swings and the sing-song “YEW-ESS-AY! YEW-ESS-AY!” after a European miss were tiresome, but survivable. What crept in on Saturday was different: insults aimed at players’ wives, homophobic slurs, cheap shots at McIlroy’s nationality dripping with tiresome stereotypes, gleeful reminders of Pinehurst the moment McIlroy crouched over anything inside five feet.

Europe answered with performance. So much for home advantage: for two years the Bethpage sales pitch was the snarling, uniquely American cauldron that would rattle Europe. Message received, but the idiots took it literally. Add the optics of Donald Trump’s fly-in on Friday – fist bumps, photo-ops, galleries dotted with Maga hats and a certain politics of humiliation playing to its base – and the swagger slid easily into license. That doesn’t make the Ryder Cup a referendum. It does explain how quickly the rope line starts to feel like a boundary you’re invited to test. (...)

But treating Bethpage as a one-off misses the larger point. What happened here didn’t invent the tone of American life so much as reflect what’s been an incremental breakdown in public behavior. The country now lives in all-caps, from school-board meetings that sound like street rallies and comment sections that have spilled into the street. The algorithm bankrolls outrage, the put-down is political vernacular and the culture applauds “saying the quiet part out loud”. In 2025 you can say almost anything in public and be cheered for it (unless you’re Jimmy Kimmel). Put a rope line and a microphone in front of that mix and you get exactly what you got at the Ryder Cup: people testing boundaries not because the moment needs them to, but because they’ve been told volume is virtue. Some might argue golf, in the US particularly, has always been a sport for white conservatives, but it’s hard to remember galleries calling opposing players “faggots” and openly deriding their wives until recently. What could have changed?

***

and this: Rory McIlroy endured hell at Bethpage—and came out the other side a deserving winner

No player in modern Ryder Cup history endured the relentless, systematic dehumanization McIlroy faced on Saturday. It was one of the most shameful spectacles this event has seen—a sustained campaign of cruelty that should embarrass every golf fan and American. For five hours, they questioned his manhood, recited the lowest moments of his career, screamed personal rumors as truth. Every five minutes brought fresh torrents of F-bombs hurled like grenades. They bellowed and booed as he lined up shots, sometimes even mid-swing, violating the gallery code. Every Ryder Cup spawns its share of knuckle-dragging behavior, but never has the abuse been this thunderous, this universal, this unrelenting.

And the fans weren't even acting alone. A first-tee emcee weaponized the crowd, imploring them to chant "**** YOU RORY!" like some deranged cult leader. Volunteers and rules officials stood by with indifference, deaf to McIlroy's pleas for decency, allowing the circus to spiral. For a guy who has always treated the Ryder Cup as sacred, he spent Saturday afternoon looking like a prisoner of war—bewildered by how the event he cherished had morphed into public execution, devastated that a country where he’s lived would savage him so completely.

There's Just Too Many Damn Elites

In a recent piece on James Burnham we discussed the rise of managerialism, or the idea that society is dominated neither by capitalists/owners or workers/proletariat.

Instead they are run by a middle layer of managers who have entirely different incentives from the owners or the shareholders. (...)

While Burnham introduced the concept of managerialism, Barbara Ehrenreich coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” in her similarly-titled 1977 essay. Since her piece, the PMC has only grown in power: eating up most of the money in our society while acting rebellious and aggrieved while doing it.

Marc Andreessen called the PMC the ‘laptop class’:

Laptop Class (noun): Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs.

The professional–managerial class tends to have incomes above the average for their country, with major exceptions being academia and print journalism." [Who are compensated with power instead.]

The PMC exists somewhere between what we think of as the traditional working class and the ruling class. While they aren’t capitalists and don't own the means of production, they do play a big role in upholding and extending capitalism’s reign.

In other words, managers are a specific type of employee that are materially on the side of labor—but symbolically on the side of capital.

What Ehrenreich noted was a bifurcation: On the higher end more commercial PMCs were peeling off to join the elite tier of wealthy CEOs and managers, while on the lower end the PMCs were suffering from a collapse of many of their preexisting professions (e.g. academics, journalists, etc).

And so the academics and journalists had to make a choice: they could either join the traditional working class to fight against the capitalists or they could join the capitalists against the working class in the hope of getting rich in the process.

Post 2008, we saw the PMC join the working class to fight the capitalists in the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The majority of Occupy’s participants were college grads who had experienced massive student debt, unemployment, and downward mobility during the economic downturn. The language of “We are the 99%” reflected the fact that the movement’s participants saw themselves as part of the exploited masses.

But the Occupy movement quickly came and went. Corporations obviously didn’t support it because unlike more recent social movements, Occupy required real sacrifice on the part of the corporation. Bernie Sanders ended up losing to Hillary and that was that.

In an attempt to create these new social conflicts (anti-racism, anti-fascism, the gender wars), the PMC altogether ignored and suppressed class wars. When Nike says they’re committed to fighting anti-racism or anti-semitism, it buys them social capital that allows them to deflect against inquiries into how they treat their workers.

Over the next decade that PMC would eventually switch from working class to social justice rhetoric. After all, Wall Street couldn’t support Occupy Wall Street or broader unionization efforts while remaining in business, but they could fund activist efforts with billions of dollars while signaling to the type of elites they’d like to hire and do business with.

To further distinguish the PMC from the working class, colleges initiated the PMC into this esoteric language which made non-college goers feel left out and left behind. A great deal of what constitutes activism is an elaborate set of rules about what you can and can’t say about this or that group. The complexity of the rules is itself strategic — it’s a way of doling out power to the college grads who learned all the rules while taking away power from the non-elites who didn’t.

Activism became not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker. As David Brooks once put it, “You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx”. More specifically, you have to go to college to learn those words, which excludes two-thirds of the country.

Activism also became a strategy for professional advancement beyond college. By calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them in the corporate pecking order, young elites became able to intimidate Boomer administrators and usurp power from them.

This isn’t all just ideological posturing, it’s also a practical necessity. The truth is that we have too many college educated people without technical skills who expect high-status and high-paying jobs and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them.

by Erik Torenberg |  Read more:

Image: uncredited