New York City, September 7, 2014
★★★★ The sky was a heartening blue, with a little dingy blue haze lower down. A cool breeze pushed into the apartment lobby, but the sun out on the avenues turned out to be hottish. In the Park, on the Sheep Meadow, the sawtooth oak sheltered its recurring rain puddle, but the turf was nearly dry. Amid the conflicting agendas, the two-year-old's desire to go to the tots' playground turned out to be the wisest, microclimate-wise. Sprinkler posts made a puddle and sent water trickling down the entrance path. The two-year-old climbed up the shiny tube slide, with reflected light filling his face. He knocked his head on the top a couple of times as he emerged. By afternoon, at the schoolyard playground, the sun was harmless. Children scrambled everywhere, white noise and Brownian motion, and attentive parents scrambled after them. The swings were full, with would-be riders waiting by the fence while a soft-faced brat bullied his obnoxious grandparents into giving him one last swinging session four or five times over. Uptown, after dinner, widely spaced cirrus clouds were pink on the still-blue sky. The light faded, and the two-year-old stepped deliberately, making his new light-up shoes glimmer white with every stride. Then he was off and running, feet flickering and kicking high, as he chased his brother down the sidewalk through the dusk.
FKA Twigs, "Stay With Me"
A cover of Sam Smith's unavoidable summer moan that alternates gracefully between entrancing and viscerally upsetting. It's a total aesthetic dismantling (and kind of a huge improvement!).
A Weekend at the Last Abortion Clinic in McAllen, Texas
The walk from the rear parking lot at Whole Woman’s Health to the entrance on Main Street is 100 feet down a sidewalk. The clinic is located in southwest McAllen, Texas at the corner of Main and Houston Streets—both of which are busy thoroughfares that run through the old medical area where Whole Woman’s is. People driving by on those streets have been honking their horns at patients and volunteers outside the newly re-reopened clinic all day.
Next to the clinic is an empty lot filled with wooden signs that say things like, “Abortion, The Ultimate Child Abuse.” This is the same lot where protesters recently built a miniature cemetery for unborn babies. A group of picketers follows each patient from the protection of the parking lot to the door. The sidewalk is public property and it’s the anti-choice picketer’s last chance to, maybe, change a mind. Stepping behind the concrete wall that hides the heavily tinted glass door entrance to the clinic’s waiting room feels like sanctuary. No one on Main Street can see in there—it’s safe. For the woman walking to the front door of a clinic that’s been empty for six months, the wait is almost over. She stands at the door until someone in the waiting room lets her inside.
The patients who came to Whole Woman’s Health McAllen this past weekend had been waiting a long time for assistance. On March 6, two Whole Woman’s Health locations—the one in McAllen and another in Beaumont, Texas—closed because they could no longer afford to stay open without being able to provide abortions.
House Bill 2, a Texas bill that went into effect on October 29, 2013, places highly restrictive provisions on abortion procedures, much like existing legislation in Mississippi. When HB2 went into effect last October, Whole Woman’s McAllen was among over 20 Texas clinics that had to either stop providing abortions or close. The bill has been opposed most prominently by Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Texas’ upcoming gubernatorial election. Davis recently released a memoir describing her own abortions.
Texas is suffering. With every added provision, more clinics are forced to close. Before HB2, Texas had 42 abortion clinics. Currently, counting the recently re-opened McAllen clinic, there are 20. Another Fifth Circuit hearing on September 12th could make Texas a state with over 26 million people and only seven abortion providers. This makes receiving an abortion in Texas devastatingly difficult for anyone living outside of Houston, Dallas or Austin. For women living in the Rio Grande Valley, it’s almost impossible. READ MORE
Laws of Nature
There are certain inexorable laws of nature that every building in New York City must abide by. For instance, the taller your building—and the higher your personal residence within it, well:
We've already seen the layouts for some of the lower full-floor apartments in superscraper 432 Park Avenue, but this unit, which takes up the entire 92nd floor, is the highest apartment in the building to be listed so far. It follows logically that it also has the highest price — $79.5 million. (The 87th-floor penthouse was listed for $74.5 million last month, but the listing was removed for unknown reason four days ago.) Unit no. 92 has all the customary 432 Park amenities, such as oak flooring and cabinetry, marble baths, and a wood-burning fireplace, but the really enticing part—besides the height—is the sheer number of rooms contained within its gargantuan floorplan. The 8,255-square-foot full floor contains six beds and seven-and-two-half baths in total, as well as a dining room and library.
The Problem With Relying on a Machine to Eat All Your Garbage
People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, New York Times technology writer Farhad Manjoo tells us more about what happens when you have a hi-tech electronic garbage can that keeps breaking.
Almost everything in my house is automatic/electronic in some way. But after three infrared-enabled automatic kitchen trash cans I’m done.
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) August 25, 2014
Farhad! So what happened here?
I use machines for everything. I’m that kind of guy. I cook sous vide, I’ve got a Japanese bidet toilet with heated seats, my soap dispenser is automatic, and my plants are watered on a very precise timer. So when I have some garbage to throw away, you can bet I’m not going to bother with jamming on a pedal to open up some dirty, germ-laden trash vessel, like the way they used to do in medieval times. Nope, no manual labor for me, no sir. When I get home after a long day of typing words, my hands laden with trash, I want a machine to react to my very proximate presence, to open up like Ali Baba’s cave, a gaping, infrared-enabled maw just begging for my trash.
The Impossible Reddit
1. Business Insider:
The Fappening served as a dumping ground for the nude celebrity photos that were leaked last weekend. In a strange move, Redditors within The Fappening started donating to the Prostate Cancer Foundation "in honor of" Jennifer Lawrence, one of the celebrities who was affected by the massive hack.
2. Yishan Wong, CEO of Reddit, in a post titled "Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul":
We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize.Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.
The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. The role and responsibility of a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers.
Reddit, the social news site with a big Web footprint, is raising a big funding round — with help from some of the people who helped launch the site nine years ago, including co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other people associated closely with startup incubator Y Combinator.Sources said the almost-anything-goes site has reached a preliminary agreement to sell less than 10 percent of the company for more than $50 million. That could give the company a valuation of upwards of $500 million.
These investors likely include some of the biggest names in venture capital, some of whom are also invested in the image site Imgur, the primary host on which Reddit users posted and reposted the celebrity leaks. Without Reddit and Imgur, finding these images would have been much harder. With Reddit and Imgur, the photos were cataloged and promoted and made extremely easy to view, browse and comment upon.
Reddit characterizes itself as a sort of internet government; Reddit's largest shareholder is Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast, but it is raising money from venture capitalists who hope to make a large profit from their investment. Reddit hit "new traffic milestones, ones which [they would] be ashamed to share publicly," during the celebrity leaks; due to its size, Reddit is now apparently valued at half a billion dollars. Reddit's management can't seem to shut up; Reddit's reported investors are pathologically unable to shut up. This is completely and obviously untenable: You can't have both your vintage internet self-serving absolutism and your millions upon millions of new internet dollars. Either the money wins, or a toxic and convenient misappropriation of the concept of free speech wins. Everybody else on the greater internet, as usual, loses.
Update: Reddit's CEO apparently followed up with… I'm not even sure what to call this?
Indeed, my post's title contained an anachronistic usage of a gendered noun where modern usage would almost certainly have preferred "Person" or "Individual." Why in the world would I do that?…That is what the inclusion of "man" in the title means. I'm a man, and the blog post was written, inevitably, for the men who read it.
Is this the worst unforced public statement in recent internet history? Anyway, thanks to reader Peter for that one.
Image: The fastest-growing NSFW subreddits of the last 24 hours.
Correction: Advance Media is the largest shareholder in Reddit, which was spun out from the company. Reddit is no longer a full subsidiary.
The Costs of Living in Kazakhstan
The costs of moving to Kazakhstan were considerably more than the general costs of living in Kazakhstan. It's easy to live comfortably here in Astana. Though, I'm happy to have savings from my last job so that I can travel/easily escape.
Housing is covered by the library where I work, which is a relief because when I researched rental prices, they averaged about $700-800 for a modest one-bedroom apartment. I wouldn't have been able to afford that on my salary, which is about half of what I made at my last job in Vancouver, Canada.
I share an apartment with another international librarian. The apartment is much nicer than I had anticipated and I have en-suite laundry for the first time in my life. The panel is entirely in Russian and I'm not used to having so many options like selecting a spin cycle, which would make the machines difficult to use even if they were in English. I rely on a Youtube video of a British child giving a tour of his aunt's washer/dryer.
My workplace provides medical benefits for a yearly fee but I'm not sure what that actually entails. I used up all of the benefits from my last job before leaving because even if I get dental benefits here, I would be terrified to go to a dentist who doesn't speak English.
The organization also pays for a one-way ticket to Astana if the librarian has over three years' work experience (student jobs don't count). Even with my 3.5 years' experience, I still had to push to have the flight costs covered. READ MORE
The Huffington Post, a publishing company worth hundreds of millions of dollars that is nestled within AOL, a media company that has a market cap of nearly three-and-a-half billion dollars, has successfully convinced people to donate forty thousand dollars to it, as if it were a charity in need of the largesse of its readers, in order to "to ensure on-the-ground coverage from Ferguson remains a part of the national conversation." It is truly a golden age of journalism.
Line Between Sustenance and Happiness Actually Quite Thin
Are we approaching a senior food utopia, where evolving tastes and aging foodies will restore dignity to the elderly diet?
The Chefs there purée roasted, free-range chicken for residents who can’t eat solid food, then mold it into an approximation of the real thing, garnishing the plate with a reduction of balsamic vinegar… In a nation where food has become a cultural currency and the baby-boom generation is turning 65 at a rate of 8,000 people a day, it was only a matter of time before expensive ingredients, elevated cooking techniques and old-fashioned food snobbery hit the nursing home.
Or, actually, is it a refinement of the senior lifestyle dystopia, where, according to their means, some doomed people eat delicious food while others are coaxed into nourishment by apps?
For people with memory loss, waiters may use photographs on tablet computers to help them order and serve food on red plates. People tend to eat more when there’s a strong contrast between the food and plate, some studies show. For people who can’t eat solid foods, a consortium of European countries is investing in 3-D technology that can transform, for example, pineapple purée into something that looks like a pineapple ring on the plate.
“The race is on in senior housing,” explains a character in this short piece of speculative science fiction, published by the New York Times.
New York City, September 4, 2014
★★ The coolness was gone again, even at eight in the morning. Teens abled with their backpacks and another teen with a backpack hurried to catch up. A napkin flapped down to the plaza in the clear light. Cirrus clouds wisped this way and that on the sky. In the evening, a breeze pushed back on the way down into the subway steps, sustained like the air coming over a sailboat's prow. No such wind reached the midblock stretches east of Penn Station, becalmed in the oncoming dark.
Eat the Seeds
It’s easy, and not wholly unwarranted, to roll one’s eyes at the aisles of exotic, imported “superfoods” in your local yuppie grocery store. These superfoodstuffs are often flavorless, or even outright unpleasant. (Goji berries: worthless, shriveled, lame-tasting superfruits.) Sometimes their packaging claims holistic or magical properties like cancer prevention or weight loss, which is very clearly superbullshit. But seeds, even some of the trendy, irritating ones, like quinoa, are healthful and flexible and typically totally delicious. You should not ignore them just because they have misleading or silly packaging or because Jared Leto once said in an interview that he loves them in his morning smoothie with reclaimed grass clippings and powdered binturong urine.
As for what denotes a seed, well, I am going with the common culinary understanding rather than the scientific one, which defines seeds as an embryonic plant, concealed within a fruit. (Proper nuts, like chestnuts, hazelnuts, acorns are actually a combination of seed and fruit themselves, meaning they don’t have an external fruit. Walnuts, confusingly, are a seed, not a nut, but anyway.) In other words, I am limiting the definition of “seed” to “things which are commonly called seeds,” which excludes pine nuts, legumes like beans or peanuts, and cereals like oats or wheat. Here are some good or popular seeds and what to do with them, and, more importantly, what NOT to do with them, because it is more fun for me to tell you what you’re doing wrong than to tell you how to do something correctly.
The Cost of Five Days on Fire Island
The first time I went to Fire Island, it was on a whim. A friend told me that some friends of a friend had a room open in their house in Fair Harbor, and that it would be cheap. The promise of sitting by the ocean without having to carry everything I owned on the subway for an hour was all the convincing I needed. We spent three days swimming in the ocean and cooking dinner with a glass of wine in one hand. I met new people, got very tan in a short amount of time, and spent the equivalent of a cheap plane ticket to California in one long weekend.
Fire Island is the kind of place you see in Nancy Meyers movies, with big, weathered houses plopped right on the beach, with steps leading down to white sand and the ocean. Tina Fey summers there with her family, and on our last day on the beach, we sat next to her. She’s very thin, but seems nice. It’s the kind of place where shoes are optional and people ride beach cruisers along the boardwalks in their bathing suits.
Every business on the island is staffed by a cabal of disinterested teens, with long, sun-bleached hair and cheerleading sweatshirts, scanning your groceries with one hand while they gossip with the bagger next to them. At the one grocery store, women who you’d see at Fairway on the Upper West Side push carts through the narrow aisles, tossing in overpriced produce and boxes of Wheat Thins, content to eat the way one does on vacation: without a care in the world. One morning, while I was getting coffee, I watched as a pair of nine-year old boys purchased a handful of candy and some ice cream, unattended by parents, paying for their spoils with a crumpled bill and running down the street back to their house. READ MORE
Failed Flowers, "Summer Vacation"
If music's culture thresher is towed about two decades behind the tractor, the early 90s indie reconstitution is technically overdue. Will it come and go and then linger quietly, giving way to some sort of mutated alt-rock revival? Or will fuzzy guitars and slack male-female duets, issued on streaming sites and cassette tapes, be the hot musical trend of 2015? If so, why not pay homage to some old criticism, too: "This is not the forbidding experimentation of an aspiring vanguard," wrote Robert Christgau in 1993. "This is the fooling around of folks who like to go out on Saturday night and make some noise—and then go home humming it." (The embed is having a little trouble, so you may have to skip forward to get to the second track. Or listen through!)
An Extensive Catalogue of Bodily Impulses
The summer I was 22, I tagged along with a group of samba percussionists to a music festival at an organic farm in southern Ontario. My ride would be free so long as I assumed the role of “Bus Captain” on the decrepit yellow school bus they'd rented for the occasion.
I was about to enter the fifth year of my undergrad degree—an attempt at postponing Real Life. I'd just returned from a summer of data entry temp work in my Midwestern hometown and was not quite a grown-up but definitely, somehow, a woman. The cubicles that had neighbored mine in the office complex were occupied by lifers of secretarial school vintage. There was the meticulous brunette whose current weight loss scheme involved a plot to contract salmonella from that season's national outbreak of contaminated tomatoes, and—my favorite—the whip-smart grandmother who'd introduced herself by verifying that I was, in fact, related to the same long-retired Dr. Korducki who had once been her OBGYN. “He delivered all three of my babies!” she kvelled. “Such a good doctor, so old-school and gentle. Even though, between you and me, he had serious sausage fingers.”
In our break room, our conversations all had the frank familiarity of a group with little in common apart from the intermittent hilarities of being women. Half-hearted exchanges on muggy weather found their stride only after talk turned to boob sweat (“If they don't turn up the AC I'm gonna have the Rio Grande running down my top”) or how much the Pill sucked in the '70s (“Dried you out so bad, you could start a campfire down there”).
So when, on the yellow bus, a girls' school biology teacher in her late-twenties explained that her students' first assignment each year was to take a hand mirror to their buttholes and “really let yourself take it in,” I got where she was coming from. READ MORE
August Never Ends
INT. OFFICE — DAY
In the gleaming, unblemished offices of an internet media company, located in a revitalized industrial district now home to seed-funded start-ups, dozens of young people sit in front of computers. The computers seem angry; the office looks like the inside of a soda can. A calendar reads “August 15.”
DEREK sits in front of one of these computers. He’s wearing a collared shirt and jeans. He tried to wear a denim jacket once, but he felt like a cowboy, in a bad way.
Derek is talking to GWYN, who he would like to sleep with, but also respects, as a person.
DEREK: It’s horrible.
GWYN: Yeah.
DEREK: It’s all so horrible.
GWYN: Yeah.
DEREK: The Internet is like a garbage can.
GWYN: I guess so.
DEREK: I feel like I’m always putting garbage in a garbage can.
GWYN: I’m going to go get Sun Chips.
DEREK: Can you grab me a seltzer?
GWYN: Sure.
Gwyn leaves. Derek turns to face his computer. TweetDeck blinks back at him.
Derek had a dream about TweetDeck the night before. He tried to have sex with it.
In the send box of TweetDeck, Derek types: “August needs to end.” He clicks send. The tweet is favorited nine times, once by an editor Derek admires and once by a girl he is in love with, although he’s never met her. No retweets.
Derek reaches for his seltzer, but it isn’t there yet.
GUS rolls up in his chair, which has wheels on the bottom so that Gus can roll up to Derek in it. Gus is dressed exactly the same as Derek is. This is a figure of speech, usually, but today, it was embarrassing: they were dressed exactly the same.
Do you know where your children are… getting healthy by blowing off steam?
The health rave is a place to freak out, to get swept up in the emancipated spirit; it’ll get you riled up enough to dance like an idiot, to do somersaults and swing on a rope over a bunch of strangers and not give a hoot who’s watching. It offers you an opportunity to just be yourself, unbound by the repressive mores of the world outside.
But? But.
But it confines transgression to a padded room where no harm can be done and where nothing gets in the way of the penetrating force of productivity. In fact it channels nightlife’s wasted libidinal energy and converts it into a force for spiritual, emotional, and physical self-optimization. Rather than wasting the value produced—spilling it like sperm on the floor—the health rave saves and harnesses that expenditure, streamlining the ritual for optimal results.
Intentionally enjoying yourself is a nightmare. (Photo via Morgan Harrison.)
New York City, September 3, 2014
★★★★ Smells moved individually on the air currents, rather than hanging together in one stale accumulated stench. The sun had a little sharpness to it, but high clouds screened the worst of it and it no longer had the angles to unleash its full power. Summer's late bid at awfulness had collapsed like all its previous attempts. The roof was pleasantly warm, mingling with moments of pleasant coolness. Ample late light reflected gold here, copper there. Only in the subway platforms and the apartment building's back hallway was the air still close and hot.
CFCF, "Prisma"
CFCF flirts with ambient music but usually stops short of becoming it. So "Prisma," CFCF's contribution to a forthcoming ambient compilation, is a pleasant surprise: a loose, cyclic drone that floats somewhere between New-age spa music and William Basinksi's Disintegration Loops.
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