How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future

Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.

The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn't know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.

The material was a boon to Corning's fortunes, and soon the company launched Project Muscle, a massive R&D effort to explore other ways of strengthening glass. A breakthrough came when company scientists tweaked a recently developed method of reinforcing glass that involved dousing it in a bath of hot potassium salt. They discovered that adding aluminum oxide to a given glass composition before the dip would result in remarkable strength and durability. Scientists were soon hurling fortified tumblers off their nine-story facility and bombarding the glass, known internally as 0317, with frozen chickens. It could be bent and twisted to an extraordinary degree before fracturing, and it could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (Normal glass can weather about 7,000.) In 1962 Corning began marketing the glass as Chemcor and thought it could work for products like phone booths, prison windows, and eyeglasses.

Yet while there was plenty of initial interest, sales were slow. Some companies did place small orders for products like safety eyeglasses. But these were recalled for fear of the potentially explosive way the glass could break. Chemcor seemed like it would make a good car windshield too, and while it did show up in a handful of Javelins, made by American Motors, most manufacturers weren't convinced that paying more for the new muscle glass was worth it—especially when the laminated stuff they'd been using since the '30s seemed to work fine.

Corning had invented an expensive upgrade nobody wanted. It didn't help that crash tests found that "head deceleration was significantly higher" on the windshields—the Chemcor might remain intact, but human skulls would not.

After pitches to Ford Motors and other automakers failed, Project Muscle was shut down and Chemcor was shelved in 1971. It was a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise. (...)

The office of Wendell Weeks, Corning's CEO, is on the second floor, looking out onto the Chemung River. It was here that Steve Jobs gave the 53-year-old Weeks a seemingly impossible task: Make millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn't yet exist. Oh, and do it in six months. The story of their collaboration—including Jobs' attempt to lecture Weeks on the principles of glass and his insistence that such a feat could be accomplished—is well known. How Corning actually pulled it off is not.

Weeks joined Corning in 1983; before assuming the top post in 2005, he oversaw both the company's television and specialty glass businesses. Talk to him about glass and he describes it as something exotic and beautiful—a material whose potential is just starting to be unlocked by scientists. He'll gush about its inherent touchability and authenticity, only to segue into a lecture about radio-frequency transparency. "There's a sort of fundamental truth in the design value of glass," Weeks says, holding up a clear pebble of the stuff. "It's like a found object; it's cool to the touch; it's smooth but has surface to it. What you'd really want is for this to come alive. That'd be a perfect product."

Weeks and Jobs shared an appreciation for design. Both men obsessed over details. And both gravitated toward big challenges and ideas. But while Jobs was dictatorial in his management style, Weeks (like many of his predecessors at Corning) tends to encourage a degree of insubordination. "The separation between myself and any of the bench scientists is nonexistent," he says. "We can work in these small teams in a very relaxed way that's still hyperintense."

Indeed, even though it's a big company—29,000 employees and revenue of $7.9 billion in 2011—Corning still thinks and acts like a small one, something made easier by its relatively remote location, an annual attrition rate that hovers around 1 percent, and a vast institutional memory. (Stookey, now 97, and other legends still roam the halls and labs of Sullivan Park, Corning's R&D facility.) "We're all lifers here," Weeks says, smiling. "We've known each other for a long time and succeeded and failed together a number of times."

One of the first conversations between Weeks and Jobs actually had nothing to do with glass. Corning scientists were toying around with microprojection technologies—specifically, better ways of using synthetic green lasers. The thought was that people wouldn't want to stare at tiny cell phone screens to watch movies and TV shows, and projection seemed like a natural solution. But when Weeks spoke to Jobs about it, Apple's chief called the idea dumb. He did mention he was working on something better, though—a device whose entire surface was a display. It was called the iPhone.

Jobs may have dismissed green lasers, but they represented the kind of innovation for innovation's sake that defines Corning. So strong is this reverence for experimentation that the company regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D. And that's in good times and in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning's stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity.

"They're one of the very few technology-based firms that have been able to reinvent themselves on a regular basis," says Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Corning's history of innovation. "That's so easy to say, and it is so hard to do." Part of that success lies in the company's ability not only to develop new technologies but to figure out how to make them on a massive scale. Still, even when Corning succeeds at both, it can often take the manufacturer decades to find a suitable—and profitable enough—market for its innovations. As Henderson notes, innovation at Corning is largely about being willing and able to take failed ideas and apply them elsewhere.

The idea to dust off the Chemcor samples actually cropped up in 2005, before Apple had even entered the picture. Motorola had recently released the Razr V3, a flip phone that featured a glass screen in lieu of the typical high-impact plastic. Corning formed a small group to examine whether an 0317-like glass could be revived and applied to devices like cell phones and watches. The old Chemcor samples were as thick as 4 millimeters. But maybe they could be made thinner. After some market research, executives believed the company could even earn a little money off this specialty product. The project was codenamed Gorilla Glass. (...)

In just five years, Gorilla Glass has gone from a material to an aesthetic—a seamless partition that separates our physical selves from the digital incarnations we carry in our pockets. We touch the outer layer and our body closes the circuit between an electrode beneath the screen and its neighbor, transforming motion into data. It's now featured on more than 750 products and 33 brands worldwide, including notebooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. If you regularly touch, swipe, or caress a gadget, chances are you've interacted with Gorilla. 

by Bryan Gardiner, Wired | Read more:
Image: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

[ed. Speaking of glass, there's something new in the fashion world now called "aliengelic glass skin". Scary.]

I Don’t Want You to ‘Believe’ Me. I Want You to Listen.

I fear that the more I tell you, the less you will understand who I am.

I am not a private person — quite the opposite — but I do have two secrets. The first concerns some Bad Events that happened to me long ago (yes, it’s the sort of thing you are thinking of), and the second is an unrelated Fact about my neurological makeup.

Let me be clear: I am not ashamed of either of these things. Keeping them secret creates, in me, an uncomfortable feeling, as though I were hiding something, as though I were ashamed, and that bugs me all the time, like a scratchy tag in my clothing. But I can’t tell you what The Fact is, because you won’t believe me; and I can't tell you about The Events, because you will I have barely told you anything about The Events, but I suspect that you have already started believing. You want to be someone who believes women; you see this as the belief-challenge you have been waiting for; you want to rise to it. When I first told a therapist about The Events, she said: “Of course. In retrospect it makes perfect sense of so many things …”

Later she apologized for this as therapeutic overreach. Even therapists can’t help themselves — they are off to the races, believing and believing. On this topic, so much gets packaged into “being believed” that I fear the more I tell you, the less you will understand me.

I don't want you to think you know the meaning of The Events; I don’t want to be classified as damaged; I don’t want you to feel good about yourself for believing me; I don’t want you to feel sorry for me; and most of all, I don’t want you to praise my courage for “coming forward” or for “surviving.” The prospect of receiving praise or honor for this revelation fills me with rage — when I imagine your admiration, I immediately imagine throwing it back in your face.

The Fact I’d like to tell you has to do with a difference between how we — you and I — think. But to get specific about this difference, I have to use a word you associate with people who don’t talk, who can’t take care of themselves, whose inner lives seem utterly obscure to you, people who harm themselves, people you struggle to see as human, people whose existence you see as a tragedy.

And you will find this comparison preposterous. You will tell me I shouldn’t use “that word,” you will helpfully offer me milder alternatives. You might acknowledge that I’m “quirky” or “idiosyncratic” — in a good way! — and that a few of those quirks may superficially resemble those people. But I have a professional career, a family. I can’t be like them. (Ask yourself: how much knowledge would you need, really, to be certain of this?)

You might be willing to budge a little if you could hear it from some medical professionals — though one might not be enough. You’d need a second and third opinion. Notice that if I told you I had cancer or diabetes or depression, or for that matter that I was left-handed, you would not insist on seeing my papers. You would not be inclined to think I was faking my left-handedness by having trained myself to use my left hand; or that I resembled depressed people only “in some respects.”

In the case of The Events, you are eager to assign victim status to me; in the case of The Fact, you are wary of assigning it to me. For you, there is only one question: how much suffering can she legitimately lay claim to?

You are so busy trying to answer this question — trying to serve as judge in the pain/suffering/disadvantage Olympics — that you cannot hear anything I am trying to tell you. And that means I can’t talk to you. No one can sincerely assert words whose meaning she knows will be garbled by the lexicon of her interlocutor. I don’t want privacy, but you’ve forced it onto me.

You might wonder why I have to tell you these things. Couldn’t I find a supportive community of people who endured similar Events, and wouldn’t I be believed by other Fact-Bearers? Yes, and individual connections of this kind are very valuable, but at the group level this kind of support has never worked for me.

Being surrounded by people who are supposedly like me inevitably leads me to feel maximally “different.” Probably my failure to benefit from such communities is a sign that I have not suffered so much, and deserve very little victim credit. So be it!

Solidarity is not my thing, openness is. It is a consequence of The Fact, for me, that I lean toward transparency in all contexts: I have to consciously prevent myself from oversharing (even more than I do), and I am honest from necessity rather than virtue.

There is a reason for all of this, which is that I am bad — really bad, you cannot imagine how bad — at figuring things out on my own. If I take too many steps in reasoning without the intervention of another person, I go very far wrong. So I have accustomed myself to reasoning in public as much as I can, to making sure to expose my mistakes to correction.

I know that I don’t know what corner assistance might come from. I don’t want to confide in a select group of people who grumble among themselves about how you misunderstand “us.” I want to talk to you, any and all of you, freely, so you can help me stop misunderstanding myself.

The truth is that I don’t know the meaning of The Events, for my life. Isn’t it at least possible that they simply don’t have any meaning? Or maybe the meaning will change once I am allowed to speak them out loud? Perhaps I really am scarred for life, but do we have to assume that from the outset?

If I could talk it through, I might have a hope of figuring this out. Because that is mostly how I figure out all the difficult problems of my life: I talk about them to whoever is available, whenever the problems seem relevant to something else I am thinking about; I listen; I rethink; I write; I circle back and write something else; over and over again; and over time I develop a stable picture.

With The Events, I am at sea. For so long I did not even allow myself to speak them to myself. Now that I can, it chafes at me that you have decided that if I want to talk about them with you, I have to follow your rules, and let you trample all over me. Perhaps more people who have experienced Events would talk about them with you if they thought you would do less “believing” and more listening. 

by Agnes Callard, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jesse Draxler

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The Difficulty In Dating Good Men

I’m supposed to find someone who makes me happy. I’m 33, I’m weird, and I’ve got some eggs frozen. Let’s go.

Despite the internet’s conservative confidence, I’m not too worried about the poly slut thing. I live in SF and in the cultures willing to invite me to their parties, it’s normal to casually overhear someone referring to their boyfriend and their husband in the same sentence. Every other person I meet is poly, and I know many decades-long married-with-kids poly relationships. When someone asks me “what do you do” and I say “sex work”, they say “cool my girlfriend’s a sex worker, you two should talk.” In my world, this is normal.

So, a cousin recommends a guy. She says "He's perfect for you." He looks good enough on paper, so I sit down for dinner. He’s a little older, and shorter than me, but I don’t mind. I watch him carefully. He tells me about his life, and I imagine what it’s like to be him. A part of my brain is running a low-fi model of his emotions, and lights up with curiosity when the model runs into a place it can’t predict. I say something like:

“Wait, you just said you got fired and then moved countries? Do you think if you hadn’t had such a sudden impetus, you would have moved at all? Like, would it have eventually snuck up on you anyway?”

He answers smoothly, comfortably, like he’s relaxing into a great armchair I’ve dusted off and wheeled over to him. He partially answers the question in the first twenty seconds and then continues to talk for another four minutes.

I want to understand him fast. I am paying close attention, looking for novel words to toss at him. It feels playful for me, like wrestling, or leaning into tension. I want to see the green under his bark, the places where he’s unpracticed. I slip in fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration. “Are you smarter than your coworkers” or “When your ex broke up with you, did you deserve it?” or “So when your mom died, did you feel bad about it?”

He answers all of these with surprise, like he is a child riding on the back of my hay wagon. I’m a bit sad that he seems surprised. I would have felt safer if he seemed at home among awkward questions.

As time passes, it becomes rapidly clear that he is not paying much attention to me. I decide to count the amount of questions he asks me, and I eventually realize with growing disappointment that he just… isn’t asking any questions at all.

But I figure if I want something from the conversation - him to know about me - I shouldn’t sulk and be mad that he’s not giving it to me; I shouldn’t just expect him to read my mind, I should be an adult and reach for what I want. So after he finishes talking, I try to volunteer information. I force myself to ramble a bit. I tell him “yeah, my own biggest change was this time when I was nineteen in Idaho and decided to move by myself to Australia. It was real scary.”

I’m vaguely uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m aware he didn’t ask me, and I’m not sure he wants to know. But I say it anyway. When I’m done, he replies by telling me he went to Australia once, and he liked the surfing. He tells me about the fight he had with his boss during a surfing trip. He tells me about the importance of speaking up for yourself.

We get the check, and I offer to split but he pays. I give him a hug and leave. He seems like a perfectly nice person. No part of me feels a desire to see him again. Maybe he feels that way about me too, maybe I’m the weird question girl.

I’m discouraged. But I figure if I don’t go on dates with anyone, then I’ll never end up dating anyone. And I would like to get married + kids at some point, that seems cool. Happily married people seem like they’re having a great time, and I’d like to join their ranks.

The next guy wasn’t a date, he ended up in a uber in hour-long SF traffic with me ride sharing back from a party. I suspect he might be interested in me, because of the way he moves his hands and eyes and the quickness of his laughter. So I Investigate.

I ask him many questions - less aggressively than I did to my date last week, because I’m tired - but still ones that are gently trying to build a model of him, his desires, ambitions, insecurities.

I like him. He is funny, and seems smart. But after many minutes I notice that, much like my last date, he has asked me no questions. I imagine his factory’s figure-out-the-gaps-in-models-of-other-people gears are rusted and covered in cobwebs. I’m sad about this as a pattern. I don’t know why this is happening. This time, instead of forcibly talking about myself, I tell him that I’m sad he’s asked me no questions.

He says “Oh, I’m sorry” and seems awkward. As our conversation continues, he starts deliberately inserting questions.

“So, uh, what do you like doing for hobbies?”

I’m glad he’s at least trying, but his questions seem performative, like he’s searched for a premade question script and is reading down them, like I could be swapped out with any other woman and it wouldn’t change much. There is no locus of hot itching curiosity shining from behind his eyes, or at least not one that I can find here in this uber. I realize he’s not deeply trying to understand me. He's unattuned. I find my body does not trust him. I think I want a relationship where we can sink in together, touch souls or something. I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.

Or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Have I been misled by some romance-movie ideal of becoming As One, where two people deeply understand each other down to their cores, where the fibers of their minds get woven together? I sort of think that’s what love is. But maybe this idea just comes from porn, a fantasy meant to get women off but is not a realistic idea of men’s wants or needs. Am I the girl equivalent of a gooner who locked on hard to the notion he deserves a perfect fucktoy and won’t settle until he has it?

Not sure. I gently watch this theory out of the corner of my eye.

At social events, I keep lowkey evaluating lots of men I have faint brushes with. I notice signs of coolness - competence or bravery or something - and any time a whiff of it floats by I follow it to chat with them at parties.

But my body does not like them. One man talks about his failures in a tone that implies he's uncomfortable with himself, like somewhere deep down a part of him believes he's a bad person, and it seems that many of his bids for social approval are attempts to be reassured that he is in fact okay.

I get it, humans - me included - are like this sometimes, and I have a great deal of compassion for it, but I do not want to be in a relationship with someone who's straining against themselves. Judgment is never isolated; if I become one with them, their inward violence will slam up against me, too. I don't want to be put in a position where my affection is the thing they use to prove to themselves that they are worthy. I want to be an equal, not a crutch.

Another guy… I’m not sure what his problem is exactly, but he seems to warp around me. He agrees with what I say a little too fast. He laughs at my jokes immediately. His hands twitch with nervous energy. He seems nice enough, but he seems afraid of me, and like he’s putting in a huge amount of effort to make himself seem not afraid of me. His body tension reminds me of the way I feel when I’ve appeared on high-pressure public shows and I don’t want people to know that I’m really scared right now. I feel as though my presence towers above him, and I have to be delicate with him, like if I speak too honestly he'll crumble in my hands. (...)

This is.... pervasive. Most people with whom I sit down and dig show devastating cracks in their psyche. They are not whole.

It’s not that these men aren’t good people. They seem very disproportionately good. They have learned that the goodest thing to do is to reassure people when they hurt, to demonstrate self-flagellation upon failure, to say a lot of interesting things for many consecutive minutes when a woman asks them a question. Pain is bad, ew, grrr. Nice things are good, yay! They are top tier, A+ at being Good People.

While I might be assessing them for a marriage I’d be happy in, I rarely feel judgment towards them. It makes a whole lot of sense to be a primate with ancient hardware that’s learned from thousands of generations of violence that social ostracization means death, that showing vulnerability will not pass on your genes, that you had better know your place in the hierarchy or else. It’s probably very hard to be a man, who by default are thrust into the sea and told ‘swim or die.’ I don’t fault them for it. If I were born them, I would be uttering the exact same words and flinching away from the exact same mind-pieces as they are. I would be, very reasonably, attempting to be the Goodest Person too. Perhaps this is a strategy that’s already worked well for them and they have no reason to try anything else.

But next to them, I feel like a sprawling seeping hunk of organic flesh with tendrils that uncurl into horror as readily as they do loveliness. I am uncultivated.

Maybe in their eyes, I’m a girl with a weird digging compulsion. Maybe they very much enjoy casual, lighthearted questions, and conversations where both people ramble over each other, where their idea of love is something like sitting next to each other on a beach in old age, existing comfortably adjacent to someone whose insides you don’t need to know, because whatever they are is good to you and leads to a beautiful life, and that’s what matters.

Probably my desires are arcane. Dating men who are curious and self-accepting doesn’t mean the relationship works out, and of course there’s lots of things on top that are important too, like being really kind and competent and compatible with me in general lifestyle and values. And it’s true that people with huge cracks in their psyche go on to live happy lives with long, fulfilling relationships.

So maybe my desire is luxurious. Maybe I should lower my standards? But this is a clean, sleek thought, which is sensible to look at and interacts with nothing else. The physical wariness creeps into my muscles without me asking for it. I’m a slave to my own desire.

by Aella, Knowingless |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

***

I have a $100,000 bounty on my marriage. If you introduce me to someone who I end up marrying, I’ll pay you $100k upon marriage*.

There’s some details here: (...)

It also counts if you get them to fill out my Date Me survey, just make sure they list your name in the ‘who recommended you’ question.

How Impermanence Became Central to Japanese Thought

Nothing Lasts. How Do We Face It? (NYT)

Images:Moe Suzuki
[ed. On Japanese impermanence. Other topics: Fashion, Cuteness, Monsters, Seasonality, Walking, Iterations, Fandom, Milky, Boxes, Citrus, Koreans, Pop Music, Matcha, Ozu, America, Fermentation, Purin.]

April 22, 2025: Earth Day

Today is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.

DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.

Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.

When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson's sanity.

But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.

Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.

In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.

Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”

Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.

Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.” (...)

Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.

In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals. (...)

Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America's balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It's 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That's the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: via/USFWS/William Anders/NASA

[ed. When I was a kid, every month or two a truck would come through the neighborhood spewing plumes of DDT to keep the mosquitoes down. We'd run and play in the clouds, chasing the truck down the street. Crazy. But, who knew back then? Also, the Santa Barbara oil spill was a catalytic event in my young and emerging awareness of environmental issues. Imagine having the opportunity 20 years later to direct the cleanup of a spill orders of magnitude larger and more damaging? (Exxon Valdez)]

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Why Did DoorDash Win?

The business school version of why DoorDash won is that they had the right strategy. They launched in the right markets, acquired the right restaurants, and designed the marketplace the right way.

The Silicon Valley hustle culture version is that they out-executed everyone else. They just shipped faster until they had better selection, a better product, and more reliable delivery.

The financial markets version is that they got lucky. Grubhub and Uber were both public and playing with a hand tied behind their back during the most pivotal moment in the fight.

The reality is that you can’t understand what happened without all three perspectives. Increasingly, success in every competitive market will require the right strategy, rapid execution, and good luck.

Strategy

Strategy turns on a few big decisions. For DoorDash, three of them really mattered.

The first was recognizing that owning delivery was the key to unlocking supply. Most restaurants can’t support the economics of running their own delivery fleet, so the Grubhub model of just routing orders to restaurants was bound to hit a wall.

DoorDash was the only company that launched with the business model that everyone now uses. The initial idea for Uber Eats was to load cars with fresh meals made at scale so they could be delivered as fast as possible. Postmates started with packages, not food.

DoorDash recognized the importance of logistics from the start. (...)

The second big decision was seemingly at odds with the first. Rule #1 of building a logistics business is to increase network density and thus driver utilization. This led everyone else to major city centers.

But DoorDash realized the suburbs were a better place to start. There, the alternatives to delivery were much worse, customers were more affluent, and average order values were higher. Customers immediately understood the value prop and spent enough to make delivery economics work.

Most importantly, no one else was in the suburbs yet. (...)

To win in a market, you can’t just be the market leader. You have to be the market leader by a lot. This creates a flywheel in which you have much more demand, which allows you to bring on more supply, which in turn compounds your demand advantage. Every market in food delivery was ultimately hard fought, but DoorDash’s initial wedge in the suburbs gave them an advantage no one else had.

Finally, DoorDash recognized that the most important thing was a wide selection of restaurants, even if that meant sacrificing other things that customers cared about, like delivery speed and price.

They realized that as long as they could deliver in about 40 minutes, there were limited gains from being faster. Uber tried to optimize for faster delivery, which led to the wrong decisions, including launching with the wrong business model in the first place.

DoorDash was also willing to initially make the service more expensive for consumers, which allowed them to give commission breaks to important restaurants to convince them to join. Uber instead wanted a flat customer fee, which required them to play hardball with restaurants. Later, DoorDash did begin to win on price (in particular through DashPass and lower markups on food items), but only once they had great selection.

Execution

DoorDash had the right strategy, and still almost failed.

They exploded out of the gate, raising a Series A from Sequoia in 2014. Legendary investor John Doerr effectively came out of retirement to lead their Series B in 2015 at a $600M valuation.

But then the music stopped. They were burning cash fast, and Tony couldn’t find a lead for their next round for six months. In 2016, Sequoia ultimately had to step in and lead their Series C at a $700M post-money valuation—a down round. By the end of 2017, they were almost out of money again and had to do a $60M bridge round just to keep the company alive.

Uber and Grubhub had much deeper pockets during this time. DoorDash only survived through incredible speed of execution.

by Dan Hockenmaier, Dan Hock's Essays | Read more:
Image: DonHock.com/Bloomberg/McKinsey/public financials

Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers Guitarist Goes Deep in New Memoir

Mike Campbell was the late Tom Petty’s chief lieutenant in the Heartbreakers during the 41 years of the band’s existence.

The guitarist co-produced several of the group’s albums as well as all three of Petty’s solo sets, and he co-wrote hits such as “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “You Got Lucky,” “Runnin' Down a Dream” and more. (He’s also helmed some posthumous releases, including “Live at the Fillmore 1997”).

Outside of the Heartbreakers, meanwhile, the Florida-born Campbell has amassed credits with Bob Dylan, Don Henley (co-writing “The Boys of Summer”), Johnny Cash, Jackson Browne, the Wallflowers, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, Chris Stapleton and a great many more.

Since Petty’s death in 2017, Campbell has toured with Fleetwood Mac and brought his side band, the Dirty Knobs, to the fore, releasing three albums and touring extensively with the quartet.

With that kind of track record Campbell, 75, clearly has stories to tell -- and he does, with great depth and detail, in his new book “Heartbreaker: A Memoir” (Grand Central Publishing).

Co-written with novelist Ari Surdoval (“Double Nickels”), its 464 pages are packed with behind-the-scenes specifics about his life and career that will please and surprise fans -- and make some guitar aficionados and studio nerds drool over its insights. It tracks his journey from an impoverished, single-parent upbringing to international stardom, ultimately triumphant despite hardships, setbacks and some tragedies along the way ...

What was the story you wanted to tell with “Heartbreaker?”

Campbell: I didn’t want to write a sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll book. ... the naughty, stupid things that every rock star writes about. I don’t find that very interesting. I wanted to talk about the creative energy for the songs and the personal relationships between me and my bandmates. And I wanted to show the struggle that it took to get where we got; it wasn’t just handed to us, and I wanted to tell the whole story -- how we started out really poor and sacrificed for many years before we saw any income. But mostly I wanted to touch base on the creative mystery of songs and where they come from and that sort of thing.

It doesn’t feel like you pull punches, though. You write about the good and the bad, the inner-band politics, people’s drug addictions. It’s very frank.

Campbell: Well, I wanted to be real, and I wanted to be truthful. I kind of set those boundaries at the beginning. I didn’t want to dwell on other people’s drug and alcohol problems, but they were there. It’s a fine line to walk. I wanted to respect them as people, and their families. I didn’t want to disrespect anybody or embarrass anybody. I tried not to be that guy. But I also wanted to let people look behind the curtain and see a little bit of what it was like being in a band like this. And aside from that I wanted to illuminate my relationship with my brothers in the Heartbreakers -- Tom especially, and Ben (Benmont Tench) and Stan (Lynch) and Ron (Blair). We all come from the South and we grew up in similar ways, and I wanted to show how special that brotherhood was. (...)

What kind of overall, rearview perspective did you get from writing this?

Campbell: It kinda made me feel old, to be honest (laughs), and to see how much I’ve done -- all the miles I’ve covered and the stages I stomped across and the records I worked on. There’s a lot, and I kept thinking, ‘Wow, I did all that? I guess I did.’ I got an overall sense of pride. I think the work is really good. I think the songs hold up and will hold up for a long time after I’m gone, ‘cause I think the quality of the work and the art is really strong, and I was really proud to revisit that.

It was interesting to read in “Heartbreaker” how much you would take blame on yourself when things were going wrong, or bad. Where do you think that comes from?

Campbell: That’s a therapist question. I think maybe if I dig deep and look at it, maybe my parents' divorce affected me in a very deep way, where my whole world was broken apart. Throughout my whole life I’ve tried to build a world that won’t break up, and keep it together -- my band and my marriage. So maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s genetics. I don’t really know the answer, but ... I’m still here doing it, so I think I’m dealing with it all right.

Did you get a boost from co-writing “The Boys of Summer” for Don Henley and have that be a hit? That was a pivotal moment that pushed you outside of and beyond the band.

Campbell: I think it gave me a lot of confidence, yeah; even Tom said at one point, ‘That song must’ve really been good for your confidence,' ‘cause I tend to be maybe a shy, reserved type of person. But having that song connect with Don and then connect with the whole world ... It’s an amazing song, and how lucky was I to have that pretty much be my first foray into writing outside of my band? It was truly just kind of a miracle. But it’s a great song, and I’m very proud of it. At that point in our career Tom was doing a solo record here and there and I was involved with that, and we were beginning to work outside the group a little bit -- but never to the detriment of the group. As a matter of fact, I brought that confidence back into the group. I think that’s a healthy thing.

Are you able to ever step back and look at everything you’ve done, and if so how does that make you feel?

Campbell: I say in the book, in different places, that while things are happening that are kind of over the top, I just look around and go, ‘How did I get here?’ When a song would come it’s like, ‘Why me? How did I get so lucky that this song just came out of the air to me, of all people?’ There have been a lot of those, ‘How did I get here?’ kind of moments.

There’s a great cast of characters in the book, as you mentioned before. Who’s the most surreal to think that you crossed paths with.

Campbell: Probably Bob Dylan. He is a mystery genius, a beautiful creature (laughs). He’s so enigmatic, but so brilliant. I’ve met a lot of my heroes, from George Harrison to Johnny Cash; they’re all intimidating and have the aura. And I try to learn from everybody I work with. But Bob has this special thing around him that’s intriguing ‘cause he’s so brilliant and he’s so mystical and so hard to read. But he’s so good. And he came across the band’s path when we were kinda at odds with each other, and he reminded us that, ‘Y’know, you got a good band. Keep it together. Don’t fight all the time. Just play.'

It seems like your relationship with George Harrison was meaningful, too -- you close the book with him, even.

Campbell: I think I speak a lot about him in the book ‘cause he’s a very special human being, and he made a profound impression on me as a person as well as a musician. For some reason he really liked me; he thought I was really good, which blew my mind. (laughs) Being around him was just very inspiring.

by Gary Graff, Cleveland.com |  Read more:

Image: Pinterest via

[ed. One of the most respected and versatile lead guitarists ever, always played just the right thing (and nothing more). See also: 'It Stung a Little Bit' Mike Campbell on How the Heartbreakers Navigated Tense Band Dynamics' (American Songwriter).]

The Rise of the Infinite Fringe

The past decade of politics, to put it bluntly, has been batshit. The past week of politics has been batshit. Heck, the past week of everything in the world that has anything to do with political decisions — diplomacy, trade, manufacturing, having a 401k, owning a car or a computer or a phone or a T-shirt — has been batshit.

But if you were asked to use a word that was not a swear, and were given about five minutes to calm down, a good second choice would be “disintegrated.” There’s no clear answer, however, as to why — why it seems like people are living in their own separate realities; why our leaders seem to operate via conflicting conspiracy theories and obscure philosophies; why it feels like a screaming, ephemeral electronic blob called the internet is actually running the world instead of the people supposedly in charge of it.

There is an actual, human person at the center of it, and his name is Robert Welch — a right-wing figure more influential than Alex Jones, QAnon, and Ronald Reagan combined. His influence is so silent, though, that you won’t find his content online: no podcasts, no livestreams, no social media accounts; no Mar-a-Lago selfies on Instagram or X posts defending the latest malpractice in the Trump administration. You might even have a hard time finding an image of his face because Robert Welch has been dead for nearly 40 years.

But he plays a critical role in modern American history, both for the story of his rise and the means of his decline. Back in 1958, during the height of the Red Scare, Welch, a wealthy candy magnate, joined forces with businessman Fred Koch (yes, the dad of those Kochs) to create the John Birch Society, a membership-only group meant to carry out their lifelong fight against communism in America. But unlike Joseph McCarthy, who razed Hollywood, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, which singled out federal employees, Welch thought that the most “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” was actually President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The list of alleged White House Soviets soon grew to include Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA director Allen Dulles, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Harry Truman, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds (of course), Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles de Gaulle, Woodrow Wilson, and so forth.

Despite being led by a man who thought the president was secretly a Soviet plant, the John Birch Society grew popular in the early 1960s — so popular, in fact, that it made up a significant portion of the growing American conservative movement. And none feared the Birchers more than William F. Buckley, the editor-in-chief of National Review, who was trying to mainstream this ideology inside the Republican Party along with presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater. Like his fellow ideologues, Buckley was terrified of the rise of communism and its attendant philosophies: socialism, moral relativism, and progressivism. (As he famously said, “A conservative is one who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”) Like Welch, a onetime friend, he feared that liberals sympathetic to these ideas would bring Soviet elements into the federal government. But as he wrote to a friend, there was a difference between the paranoid “unreality” of the John Birch Society and the informed suspicion of “responsible conservatives.” And that posed an existential problem: if Birchers were too visibly associated with conservatism — if Birchers were the first thing voters thought of when they heard the word “conservatism” — the Republican Party, already in a civil war between Northern moderates and traditional Southern conservatives, would view Goldwater as a liability and his movement as just a bunch of kooks.

If their intent had not been clear enough, the cover literally said “AGAINST TRUMP” in gilt gold letters

Over the course of several years, Buckley ran a tireless campaign against the Birchers, both in his private conversations with Republican Party leaders, politicians, and writers and donors, and in dozens of editorials, columns, and essays in National Review, which, at the time, had over 44,000 subscribers. His anti-Bircherism was so thorough that he even spent time writing antagonistic letters back to subscribers who had canceled their publications over his stance. (He wrote a lot of letters: Birchers made up a large percentage of the Review’s readership, to say nothing of the Review’s donors.) The Birchers’ influence on the right slowly began to wane, relegating them to the edges of the party, nowhere close to influencing the agenda being rapidly adopted by the Republican mainstream. (Welch did himself no favors by writing an essay in 1966 declaring that communism was an Illuminati plot dating back to the time of ancient Sparta, alienating the slightly fringier right-wing magazines that still ran his work.) By the time Welch died in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president, the right-wing intelligentsia controlled the GOP, and the few thousand remaining Birchers were calling Earth Day a Leninist plot and claiming that chemical compounds extracted from apricot pits could cure cancer. Buckley, now the de facto intellectual voice of the Republican Party, was hailed as the ultimate conservative gatekeeper — a man who could successfully push right-wing nutjobs out of the Republican Party and cultivate a serious movement based on Values and Principles.

And that was the fate of poisonous conspiracy theories back then. If a ludicrous idea started building momentum, the ringleader and their affiliates would get pushed out of an organization, then another one, and another one, before being deemed so poisonous that society in general would exile them to some tract of rural land to farm beets and / or start a cult. If they were still interested in spreading their ideas, their options were limited to the physical media they could afford to purchase — a monthly pamphlet sent through the mail, a ham radio, or a sign on the side of the road. Barricaded from the tightly controlled mass communication networks of print distribution and broadcast signals that informed the nation and the leaders they chose, they were forever stuck on the fringes.

That was where “crazy” used to die.

For the next five decades, National Review maintained its power in the Republican Party as the arbiter of what was considered acceptable conservative thought. True, they’d gained new competitors over the years, whose dominance in nonphysical media could reach massive audiences faster than a magazine could go to print. Rush Limbaugh could rile millions of Americans listening to him on AM radio, Newt Gingrich could pontificate about Bill Clinton on C-SPAN, Matt Drudge could change the George W. Bush agenda with the right hyperlink, and Fox News could hyperventilate about Waco or jihad or Barack Obama for hours. But National Review was written by smart, serious people. This print magazine was for the thinkers who generated the ideas that the broadcasters could spread and the politicians could enact. And National Review was, by 2015, horrified at Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican Party.

by Tina Nguyen, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Verge staff

The Epic Cinematic Sci-Fi Art of Paul Chadeisson 

via:

[ed. More at the link.]

The Great Elephant Migration in Houston

The Great Elephant Migration in Hermann Park. How the 100 sculptures got to Houston. (Houston Chronicle)

Images: Brett Coomer

[ed. Very cool (and apparently for sale).]

The cows (female elephants), bulls (male elephants), tuskers (male elephants with tusks) and a few little calves arrived in Houston earlier this spring. And they're for sale: prices range from $8,000 for babies to $26,000 for tuskers with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Hermann Park Conservancy.

"They're all based on real elephants, and they all have names," shared Roslyn Bazelle Mitchell, conservancy board chairman. "We got the largest tusker making his debut in Houston; his name is Matt." (...)

They're made from dried Lantana plants and weigh between 800-900 lbs. a piece. Placing and securing all 100 took roughly five days. "You can touch them," Mitchell said. "Just don't climb on them."

An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.

When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.

When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.

When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.

The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar — think of Blockbuster Video, the pay phone and other early victims of the digital transition. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.

This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.

That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.

Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.

Mere eccentricity doesn’t guarantee survival: There will be forms of resistance and radicalism that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends. But normalcy and complacency will be fatal.

And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction. 

The Fatal Progression

But first we have to understand what we are experiencing.

It starts with substitution: The digital age takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen. For romance, dating apps supplant bars and workplaces and churches. For friendship, texting and DMing replaces hanging out. For entertainment, the small screen replaces moviegoing and live performance. For shopping and selling, the online store supplants the mall. For reading and writing, the short paragraph and the quick reply replace the book, the essay, the letter.

Some of these substitutes have meaningful upsides. There are forms of intellectual and scientific work that were impossible before the internet annihilated distance. Remote work can be a boon to family life even if it limits other forms of social interaction. The online popularity of long podcasts might betoken a retreat from literate to oral culture, but it’s at least counterexample to the general trend of short, shorter, shortest.

But in many cases, the virtual substitutes are clearly inferior to what they’re replacing. The streaming algorithm tends to yield artistic mediocrity compared with the movies of the past, or even the golden age television shows of 20 years ago. BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love. Online sources of local news are generally lousy compared with the vanished ecosystem of print newspapers. Online friendships are thinner than real-world relationships, online dating pairs fewer people off successfully than the dating markets of the prior age. Online porn — well, you get my point.

But this substitution nonetheless succeeds and deepens because of the power of distraction. Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. Swipe-based online dating is less likely to find you a spouse, but it still feels much easier than flirting or otherwise putting yourself forward in physical reality. Video games may not offer the same kind of bodily experience as sports and games in real life, but the adrenaline spike is always on offer and there are fewer limits on how late and long you can play. The infinite scroll of social media is worse than a good movie, but you can’t look away, and novels are incredibly hard going by comparison with TikTok or Instagram. Pornography is worse than sex, but it gives you a simulacrum of anything you want, whenever you want it, without any negotiation with another human being’s needs.

So even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. Thus under digital conditions social life attenuates, romance declines, institutions lose support, the fine arts fade and the popular arts are overrun with slop, and the basic skills and habits that our civilization took for granted — how to have an extended conversation, how to approach a woman or man with romantic interest, how to sit undistracted with a movie or a book — are transmitted only weakly to the next generation.

Then, finally, as local embodied experience becomes less important than virtual alternatives, the power of substitution and distraction feeds a sense that real-world life is fundamentally obsolete.

Online life allows for all kinds of hyper-intense subcultures and niches where this sense of obsolescence is less of an issue. But for the average internet surfer, the normie afloat in the virtual realm, digital life tends to elevate the center over the peripheries, the metropole over the provinces, the drama of celebrity over the quotidian.

The result is a landscape where national politics seems incredibly important and local politics irrelevant; where English can seem like the only language worth knowing and an American presidential election feels like an election for the presidency of the world; where the life of small countries and local cultures seems at best anachronistic; where the celebrity influencer half a world away takes the place in your mental space that friends and neighbors used to occupy.

All this means that even though reality is in fact more real than the virtual world, people may still feel disappointed when they re-enter the everyday after marinating in the digital — the potential mates are less beautiful than the Instagram models, the stakes of a local mayor’s race less significant than whatever Donald Trump is doing now.

That letdown creates a special political problem for liberal democracy, which depends on egalitarian ideas about the importance of the common person, the ordinary citizen. It encourages a fashionable antihumanism, an impulse to justify suicide and expand euthanasia, and a general sense of personal and cultural futility that’s especially apparent when you visit the geographic locales that are aging and depopulating fastest. There’s a palpable feeling in these places that history once happened here, but that now it’s happening only in America and inside your phone — so why would any people bother to build a future for themselves in provincial Italy or rural Japan, or on Caribbean islands outside of the resorts, or in the Balkans or the Baltics?

All of this describes our trajectory before artificial intelligence entered the picture, and every force I’ve just described is likely to become more intense the more A.I. remakes our lives. You can have far more substitution — digital workers for flesh-and-blood colleagues, ChatGPT summaries for original books, A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends and companions. You can have far more distraction — an endless stream of A.I.-generated content and entertainment and addictive slop from a “creator” whose engine never tires. And you will absolutely have a stronger sense of human obsolescence or superfluity — economic and social, artistic and intellectual — if A.I. travels just a little bit farther along its current lines of advance. It’s as though all the trends of the digital era have been building up to this consummation of its logic.

How much survives?

Nothing I’ve described is universal: Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books.

But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884)

[ed. See also: The collapse is coming. Will humanity adapt? (MIT Press).]

Mt. Hood morning
via: markk

Supermarket Salmon

via:

[ed. Friends don't let friends eat farm-raised Atlantic salmon. Alaska wild stock, only.]

Saving Potlucks One JPEG At A Time

At the beginning of the pandemic when the lockdowns started, Jennifer Hasegawa was feeling anxious and disconnected, as we all were. Far away from the Hilo community where she grew up, Hasegawa looked around her San Francisco apartment for some sort of comfort or inspiration. Her gaze landed on an old red cookbook held together with a rubber band, “More of Our Favorite Recipes” published in 1964 by the Maui Home Demonstration Council. Those recipes represented Hawaii to her. It represented family and community and a sense of well-being.

“I remembered that I’d meant to scan the book before the book eventually disintegrated into powder. And I thought, maybe I should scan it and put it online somewhere,” Hasegawa said. “I wondered if anyone else even cared about these books or if it was just me.”

She reached out to a group of friends she met in high school — Kris Kaneshiro Stanton, Michelle Saito and Joy Nishie. They had been on the Hawaiʻi State Student Council together, a leadership program for civic-minded teens. She asked her friends what they thought of her project. They loved the idea and they each had vintage cookbooks of their own that they wanted to share. “The first book I added, the red book, I scanned on an old printer/flatbed scanner I had around the house. The printer was broken, but the scanner still worked — just barely.” Hasegawa said.

The website Hasegawa and her friends created, Kau Kau Chronicles, now has recipes from dozens of out-of-print Hawaiʻi cookbooks that were published by community groups, schools, and as office projects. The most visited cookbook is the oldest one, The Hilo Woman’s Club Cookbook, published in 1937. Hasegawa wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in old Hawaii recipes, but now the site gets around 50,000 visits a year with 176,000 page views.

Many of the recipes from the old books contain the name of the person who contributed the recipe, so the site serves as a kind of historical record of the “who’s who” of a particular time and place. This makes the content feel personal and special. It’s pretty exciting to find the recipe for a cake your relative used to bake with your relative’s name on it.

Grape juice chiffon pie

Anyone is welcome to contribute recipes or share a vintage cookbook. Directions for how to send in recipes are listed on the site. All it takes is a cell phone camera and an email address.

“From the start of the project, I tried to defy my usual perfectionist tendencies. Getting as many cookbooks preserved as quickly as possible is more important than all of the files being in the same format and with a minimum resolution,” Hasegawa said. “Having Aunty’s cascaron recipe in a slightly blurry JPG is better than not having it at all.”

One happy surprise the group discovered through their work is that the beloved collection of Honpa Hongwanji Hawaiʻi Betsuin cookbooks dating back to the 1970s are still available for sale. Instead of posting those recipes, there’s a link from the Kau Kau Chronicles site to purchase the books directly from the church.

“This is a strict rule we have, which is that if a cookbook is still being sold by the original publishing organization, we don’t share it because it is still a source of income for the organization,” Hasegawa said.

There is also a Kau Kau Chronicles Facebook Group with over 7,000 members where people share recipes and stories and help each other track down something they remember eating at a party long ago. It’s all very congenial and wholesome, something you don’t see much of on social media these days.

That commitment to good-natured sharing goes back to that old red cookbook and the feelings it inspired. It was part of a collection of recipe books that chronicled an abiding aloha in the community that seemed much more present generations ago.

“I think they are the first books that managed to really capture the recipes of a golden age of food in Hawaiʻi,” Hasegawa said. “The recipes are half foods from ‘the old country’ and half foods from ‘the new country.’ You can see recipes for nishime, lau lau, vinha D’alhos, kau yuk and cascaron right alongside recipes for Swedish meatballs, French dressing, beef stroganoff and sauerbraten. I love seeing this juxtaposition.

by Lee Cataluna, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Kau Kau Chronicles; Grape Juice Chiffon Pie
[ed. So good. Thank you ladies, all.]

Harry M. Mamizuka Invitational

For generations of swimmers in Hawai‘i, Harry M. Mamizuka was more than a coach — he was a mentor, a disciplinarian, and a second father to many. His lessons extended far beyond the pool, shaping young athletes into responsible adults with the values of hard work, perseverance, and integrity.

On April 26-27, the 43rd Annual Harry M. Mamizuka Invitational will once again celebrate his enduring impact, bringing together hundreds of swimmers from across the islands to compete at the K. Mark Takai Veterans Memorial Aquatics Center in Waipahu.

This meet is not just a competition — it is a community event, a tribute, and a reminder of what youth sports should be about. It continues the work that Mamizuka dedicated his life to: giving young swimmers, regardless of background, the opportunity to challenge themselves, push their limits, and grow as individuals.

A Coach Who Built More Than Champions

Born and raised in Hawai‘i, Harry Mamizuka understood the struggles many local kids faced — especially those from working-class families. He knew that swimming, like life, required discipline, consistency, and self-belief.

Mamizuka coached at Pālama Settlement, McKinley High School, and Mānoa Aquatics, where he founded the club to make swim training accessible to youth from all walks of life.

He was known for his no-nonsense coaching style, setting high expectations for his swimmers, but always balancing it with deep care and unwavering support.

Even after a life-changing accident in 1989 left him paralyzed, Mamizuka remained dedicated to the sport, coaching from his wheelchair on the pool deck. His resilience and commitment became a lesson in itself: setbacks do not define us — our response to them does.

Through the years, many of his swimmers have gone on to receive college scholarships, become coaches, teachers, and leaders in their communities — all carrying forward the values instilled by Mamizuka.

Why This Event Matters

Hawai‘i has a rich history of producing elite swimmers, from Olympians to collegiate champions. But events like the Mamizuka Invitational are about more than just competition. They serve as:

• A Platform for Young Athletes. Many swimmers use this meet as a stepping stone to qualify for regional and national competitions.

• A Community Gathering. Families, coaches, and former athletes come together to celebrate Hawai‘i’s swimming tradition.

• A Tribute to a Local Hero. The event keeps Mamizuka’s legacy alive, inspiring new generations to uphold his values of discipline and perseverance.

middle, second row

This year’s invitational will feature a full lineup of age-group races, where young competitors — some as young as 9 years old — will swim alongside seasoned high school athletes hoping to post personal bests and qualify for bigger meets.

Beyond the races, the event serves as a reminder of the impact a single individual can have on a community. Mamizuka’s influence continues not just through the competition that bears his name, but in the countless swimmers he coached, many of whom now return as parents, coaches, and mentors themselves.

Keeping Harry Mamizuka’s Spirit Alive

The Mamizuka Invitational is more than a swim meet. It is a testament to one man’s belief that sports can transform lives. It is a celebration of young athletes, a gathering of families and mentors, and a reminder that in sports — and in life — hard work, resilience, and community support make all the difference.

As we approach April 26-27, let’s take a moment to reflect on what events like these truly mean — not just for the swimmers, but for Hawai‘i as a whole. When we support youth athletics, we are investing in the future of our islands, helping to shape the next generation of leaders, athletes, and community builders. (...)

Let’s make this year’s meet not just about competition, but about continuing a legacy that has uplifted generations of Hawai‘i’s youth.

by Kanekoa Crabbe, DeRoy Lavatai, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: Gov. Neil Abercrombie/2013. Hawaii Swimming Hall of Fame
[ed. Love this. Mami (as he was known to everyone back then) was my assistant football and head swimming coach for 3 years in high school. As much as he was known for his swimming acumen, he was probably best known for his creative swearing and dirty joke telling. I mean the guy had no peers. Plus, the most outrageous stories you could imagine (actually, never imagine), mostly about his sexual exploits. I wanted to go to McKinley high school in Honolulu because all my friends were going there, the best public school in Hawaii, and that's where I'd practiced when I was playing Pop Warner football. But, because I lived out of district, the only way I could do that was to apply for a district exception, and the only excuse my folks and I could come up with was to claim that I wanted to swim (the high school I was supposed to go to didn't have a pool at the time). And it worked! Anyway, after my first football season wrapped up Mami found me and told me to get my ass up to the pool. I told him...no, no, that was just an excuse... I'm really not a swimmer. But no excuses. Get up there! So for the next three years I swam on the varsity swim team under his abuse guidance. Those practices were so brutal, worse than football, sometimes two a day, the first at 6 am before school started (in a freezing, heavily chlorinated pool outside), the second for two hours after school. He was such a funny and unpredictable guy, but had a malevolent temper that could explode at any time. You did not want to be on his bad side (or find out he'd had a bad day at work). Nevertheless, we all loved him, and vice versa. Deeply missed.]