"This is a present from a white man who desires to see her eaten."

“This is a present from a white man who desires to see her eaten.”

In 1890, James S. Jameson, heir to the famed whiskey-distilling family’s wealth, was accused of a crime that was singular and sinister even by the standards of colonialism. Syrian translator Assad Farran testified that the peripatetic explorer paid African natives a number of handkerchiefs to kill and cannibalize a small girl. Jameson, it was alleged, desired to not only witness the heinous acts but to sketch them. From an article the November 14, 1890 New York Times:

London— The Times publishes the full text of Assad Farran’s affidavit. After describing Barttelot’s cruelties, it deals with the Jameson cannibal affair in Ribakiba.

Jameson expressed to Tippoo’s interpreter curiosity to witness cannibalism. Tippoo consulted with the chiefs and told Jameson he had better purchase a slave. James asked the price and paid six handkerchiefs.

A man returned a few minutes after with a ten-year-old girl. Tippoo and the chiefs ordered the girl to be taken to the native huts. Jameson himself, Selim, Masondie, and Farhani, Jameson’s servant, presented to him by Tippoo, and many others followed.

The man who had brought the girl said to the cannibals: ‘This is a present from a white man who desires to see her eaten.’

‘The girl was tied to a tree,’ says Farran, ‘the natives sharpening their knives the while. One of them stabbed her twice in the belly.

‘She did not scream, but knew what would happen, looking to the right and left for help. When stabbed she fell dead. The natives cut pieces from her body.

‘Jameson in the meantime made rough sketches of the horrible scenes. Then we all returned to the child’s house. Jameson afterward went to his tent, where he finished his sketches in water colors.

‘There were six of them, all neatly done. The first sketch was of the girl as she was led to the tree. The second showed her stabbed, with the blood gushing from the wounds. The third showed her dissected. The fourth, fifth, and sixth showed men carrying off the various parts of the body.

‘Jameson showed these and many other sketches to all the chiefs.'”

 

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The opening of a post at the Lefsetz Letter which offers a perfectly reasonable takedown of those who see Beyoncé’s record sales last week as anything but an extreme outlier, just a brief flash when an old paradigm still worked, a singular moment of calm before the sharks again turn the water red:

It’s a stunt. No different from Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Unrepeatable by mere mortals, never mind wannabes and also-rans.

That’s how desperate Apple is. It lets Beyonce circumvent its rules and release a ‘video album,’ so the record industry can have its bundle and the Cupertino company can delude itself into believing that it’s got a solution to Spotify, when the Swedish streaming company is chasing YouTube, not iTunes.

And the media is so impressed by numbers that it trumpets the story, believing its role is to amplify rather than analyze.

Yes, it was a story. The same way a bomb or SpaceX or anything new gets people’s attention. Only in this case, there was something to buy. Whoo-hoo! We got lemmings and fans to lay down their credit cards to spend money for the work of a superstar, as if this is a new paradigm.

And we’ve got Rob Stringer and the rest of the inane music business slapping its back, declaring victory.

What a bunch of hogwash.

The story of 2013 is cacophony.”

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Walter Isaacson, who’s writing a book about Silicon Valley creators, knows firsthand that sometimes such people take credit that may not be coming to them. So he’s done a wise thing and put a draft of part of his book online, so that crowdsourcing can do its magic. As he puts it: “I am sketching a draft of my next book on the innovators of the digital age. Here’s a rough draft of a section that sets the scene in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. I would appreciate notes, comments, corrections.” The opening paragraphs of his draft at Medium:

“The idea of a personal computer, one that ordinary individuals could own and operate and keep in their homes, was envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. After building his Differential Analyzer at MIT and helping to create the military-industrial-academic triangle, he wrote an essay for the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic titled ‘As We May Think.’ In it he conjured up the possibility of a personal machine, which he dubbed a memex, that would not only do mathematical tasks but also store and retrieve a person’s words, pictures and other information. ‘Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library,’ he wrote. ‘A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.’

Bush imagined that the device would have a ‘direct entry’ mechanism so you could put information and all your records into its memory. He even predicted hypertext links, file sharing, and collaborative knowledge accumulation. ‘Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified,’ he wrote, anticipating Wikipedia by a half century.

As it turned out, computers did not evolve the way that Bush envisioned, at least not initially. Instead of becoming personal tools and memory banks for individuals to use, they became hulking industrial and military colossi that researchers could time share but the average person could not touch. In the early 1970s, companies such as DEC began to make minicomputers, the size of a small refrigerator, but they dismissed the idea that there would be a market for even smaller ones that could be owned and operated by ordinary folks. ‘I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own,’ DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether to create a smaller version of its PDP-8 for personal consumers. As a result, the personal computer revolution, when it erupted in the mid-1970s, was led by scruffy entrepreneurs who started companies in strip malls and garages with names like Altair and Apple.

Once again, innovation was spurred by the right combination of technological advances, new ideas, and social desires. The development of the microprocessor, which made it technologically possible to invent a personal computer, occurred at a time of rich cultural ferment in Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, one that created a cauldron suitable for homebrewed machines. There was the engineering culture that arose during World War II with the growth of defense contractors, such as Westinghouse and Lockheed, followed by electronics companies such as Fairchild and its fairchildren. There was the startup culture, exemplified by Intel and Atari, where creativity was encouraged and stultifying bureaucracies disdained. Stanford and its industrial park had lured west a great silicon rush of pioneers, many of them hackers and hobbyists who, with their hands-on imperative, had a craving for computers that they could touch and play with. In addition there was a subculture populated by wireheads, phreakers, and cyberpunks, who got their kicks hacking into the Bell System’s phone lines or the timeshared computers of big corporations.

Added to this mix were two countercultural strands: the hippies, born out of the Bay Area’s beat generation, and the antiwar activists, born out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. The antiauthoritarian and power-to-the-people mindset of the late 1960s youth culture, along with its celebration of rebellion and free expression, helped lay the ground for the next wave of computing. As John Markoff wrote in What the Dormouse Said, ‘Personal computers that were designed for and belonged to single individuals would emerge initially in concert with a counterculture that rejected authority and believed the human spirit would triumph over corporate technology.'”

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Ronnie Biggs of Great Train Robbery infamy–which morphed in time into pure fame–was good at robbing trains, escaping from prison and eluding authorities, but he was a genius at the ways of cultivating celebrity before such things were common knowledge. From Margalit’s Fox’s New York Times obituary of Biggs:

“Mr. Big­gs’s en­dur­ing rep­u­ta­tion stemmed not so much from the heist it­self as from what hap­pened af­ter­ward. Tried and con­vict­ed, he es­caped from prison and be­came the sub­ject of an in­ter­na­tion­al man­hunt; spent the next 36 years as a fugi­tive, much of that time liv­ing open­ly in Rio de Ja­neiro in de­fi­ance of the British au­thori­ties; and en­joyed al­most preter­nat­ur­al luck in thwart­ing re­peat­ed at­tempts to bring him to jus­tice, in­clud­ing be­ing kid­napped and spir­ited out of Brazil by yacht.

The fact that the rob­bery hap­pened to take place on Mr. Big­gs’s birth­day al­so did not hurt.

Dur­ing his years at large, Mr. Big­gs, aid­ed by the British tab­loid press, cul­ti­vated his im­age as a work­ing-class Cock­ney hero. He sold mem­o­ra­bilia to tourists, en­dorsed prod­ucts on tele­vi­sion and re­corded a song (‘No One Is In­no­cent’) with the Sex Pis­tols, the British punk band.

As much as any­thing, Mr. Big­gs’s story is about the con­struc­tion of ce­leb­rity, and the ways in which ce­leb­rity can be sus­tained as a kind of cot­tage in­dus­try long af­ter the world might rea­son­ably be ex­pect­ed to have lost in­ter­est.”

________________

“No One Is Innocent”:

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Apollo astronauts knew they’d always have a job in government or aviation or academia or corporate America if they made it back to Earth alive from their missions, but the actual job didn’t pay very well, even by the standards of the 1960s. From Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon“Of course, most of the astronauts worked for only thirteen thousand dollars a year in base pay. Not much for an honored profession. There are, of course, increments and insurance policies and collective benefits from the Life Magazine contract, but few earn more than twenty thousand dollars a year.”

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“Now, at 19, I have a huge data set.”

“Now, at 19, I have a huge data set.”

I’m selling my sex data (Upper West Side)

Ever since 15 years old, when I lost my virginity, I kept track of every time I’ve had sex (reasons why are another story). I mark down: The date itself including day of the week, the person’s first name, age at the time, my age at the time, the number of times (or days) this is for me, the number of times I’ve done it with this person, whether we used protection/not, and what state it took place in. Obviously, I wouldn’t disclose to you the names but if you wanted a certain characteristic, like their race/where I met them/where THEY’RE from, we could work something out, and I’d replace their name with a letter of the alphabet and corresponding characteristics.

Now, at 19, I have a huge data set, and an interesting one at that. I was thinking someone somewhere could use this in one way or another, and I need some extra cash anyway. I’ll answer any questions you have about the set (after seeing it) as long as I don’t feel they’re too personal. I won’t reveal to you my name either, but I’ll tell you the crucial facts (especially if you’re using it for a personal study of some sort).

We can talk more, if you have any questions. For the record (no pun intended) I don’t include oral sex, anal sex, and any type of sex with females.

The fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination brought no closure to the many questions that have festered since that horrible day in Dallas. Here’s two clips of Jim Garrison (with lousy volume, unfortunately), the Orleans Parish District Attorney who was never satisfied with the Warren Report, speaking to Johnny Carson in 1968 about his personal investigation into the murder. Garrison was the anti-Vaughn Meader, shot to prominence in the wake of the shocking death and was ultimately portrayed by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s hogwash. Johnny, however, was clearly disappointed by the conversation. 

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While Muhammad Ali was suffering through his Vietnam Era walkabout, he “boxed” retired great Rocky Marciano in a fictional contest that was decided by a computer. Dubbed the “Super Fight,” it took place in 1970. Marciano dropped a lot of weight and donned a hairpiece to provide viewers with some semblance of his younger self. The fighters acted out the computer prognostications and the filmed result was released in theaters. Marciano awkwardly stumbled onto a great description of this Singularity moment: “I’m glad you’ve got a computer being the man that makes the decision.”

I frequently post videos from Boston Dynamics, the best and scariest robotics company on the planet. I’ve been surprised that Google or Amazon, with such deep pockets, didn’t acquire it, instantly becoming  leader in a sector that could help it with order processing and things far beyond that. But recently Google took the plunge and is now the company’s owner. What does it want from its newest division? From Samuel Gibbs at Guardian:

“Boston Dynamics is not the only robotics company Google has bought in recent years. Put under the leadership of Andy Rubin, previously Google’s head of Android, the search company has quietly acquired seven different technology companies to foster a self-described ‘moonshot’ robotics vision.

The acquired companies included Schaft, a small Japanese humanoid robotics company; Meka and Redwood Robotics, San Francisco-based creators of humanoid robots and robot arms; Bot & Dolly who created the robotic camera systems recently used in the movie Gravity; Autofuss an advertising and design company; Holomni, high-tech wheel designer, and Industrial Perception, a startup developing computer vision systems for manufacturing and delivery processes.

Sources told the New York Times that Google’s initial plans are not consumer-focused, instead aimed at manufacturing and industry automation, although products are expected within the next three to five years.”

___________________________________

From Boston Dynamics.

Petman:

Petman’s best friend:

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The opening of a Quartz article by Christopher Mims detailing what needs to be established before the Internet of Things can take off:

“As Quartz has already reported, the Internet of Things is already here, and in the not too distant future it will replace the web. Many enabling technologies have arrived which will make the internet of things ubiquitous, and thanks to smartphones, the public is finally ready to accept that it will become impossible to escape from the internet’s all-seeing eye.

But a critical piece of the internet of things puzzle remains to be solved. What engineers lack is a universal glue to bind all the of the ‘things’ in the internet of things to each other and to the cloud.

To understand how important these standards will be, it helps to know a bit about the history of the web. When the internet was born, it was a mishmash of now mostly-forgotten protocols designed to accomplish different tasks—gopher for retrieving documents, FTP for sending and receiving files, and no standard for social networking other than email. Then the web came along and unified those protocols, and made them accessible to non-geeks. All of this magic was possible because the internet is built on open standards: transparent, agreed-upon ways that devices should communicate with one another and share data.”

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Google certainly aspires to be the Bell Labs of our age, but is it doing that level of work? Two contrasting opinions: David Litwak (who is pro) and Zak Kukoff (who is con).

From Litwak:

“Bell Labs was the research division of AT&T and Western Electric Research Laboratories, originally formed in 1925 to work on telephone exchange switches. However, over the next 50 years or so, their research won 7 Nobel Prizes, for things very loosely connected to telephone switches, if at all. Among their inventions are the transistor, the laser, UNIX, radio astronomy and the C and C++ programming languages.

Under various ownership structures and names, Bell Labs spit out truly groundbreaking inventions for 50+ years. They still enjoy a measure of success, but by most opinions their best days are behind them, and many of their ~20 locations have been shuttered.

Google is the only tech company who has devoted significant resources to not just figuring out what the next big thing is, but figuring out what the big thing will be 15 years from now, much like Bell Labs used to.”

From Kukoff:

“I won’t argue with much of the article, because I think David makes some compelling points. Google is doing some compelling and interesting work, especially at Google X. But one big point missed by David (and many who agree with him) is that Bell Labs operated in no small part for the public good, producing IP like UNIX and C that entered the public domain. In fact, despite being a part of a state sanctioned monopoly, Bell Labs produced a staggering amount of freely-available knowledge that moved entire industries forward.”

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“The dog stupefied the family by replying in a deep, masculine tone.”

Because everyone in 1910 was apparently an alcoholic, The New York Times reported in that year that a talking dog had been discovered in Germany. The prosaically named Don, an allegedly loquacious setter, soon came to America to share his supposed six-word vocabulary with vaudeville audiences, even once sharing a bill with Harry Houdini. Don would bark his last words five years after the Times story ran. “You all smell like wine,” I’m sure people imagined he said. The story:

Berlin–The scientific sensation of the hour in Germany is the talking dog Don, a dark-brown setter belonging to a royal gamekeeper named Ebers at Thiershütte, near Hamburg. Don promises to become as celebrated an attraction as the horse Clever Hans, which startled the sociological savants of Europe eight years ago with his alleged mathematical feats.

Karl Hagenback, the world-famed animal dealer, has offered Don’s master $2,500 for the privilege of exhibiting the dog in the Hagenback outdoor menagerie at Hamburg. The dog’s vocabulary, it is said, already embraces six words.

His alleged elocutionary powers came to light early this week as the result of reports from the United States that Prof. Alexander Graham Bell had succeeded in teaching a terrier to speak. It was declared that Germany not only possessed a dog with similar gifts but a dog which had been talking for five years, in fact, ever since he was six months old.

The story was first considered a joke, but Thiershütte all the week has been the Mecca of interested inquirers, who have come away convinced that Don is a genuine canine wonder. His callers included a number of newspaper men, who went to Thiershütte to interview the dog. The gamekeeper, Ebers, affirms that the dog began talking in 1905 without training of any kind. According to his owner, the animal sauntered up one day to the table where the family were eating, and, when his master asked, ‘You want something, don’t you?’ the dog stupefied the family by replying in a deep, masculine tone, ‘Haben, haben,’ (‘Want, want’). The tone was not a bark or growl, it is declared, but distinct speech, and increased in plainness from day to day as his master took more interest in the dog’s newly discovered talent. 

Shortly afterward, the story goes, the dog learned to say ‘Hunger’ when asked what he had. Then he was taught to say ‘Küchen,’ (cakes) and finally ‘Ja’ and ‘Nein.’ And it is added that he is now able to string several of these words together in sensible rotation and will say ‘Hunger, I want cakes,’ when an appropriate question is addressed to him.

The New York Times correspondent has caused inquiries regarding Don to be made though trustworthy authorities at Hamburg. He is assured that the dog is an unqualified scientific marvel.

Don’s owner is overwhelmed with applications from circus and music-hall managers, who are outbidding one another for the privilege of exhibiting the dog.”

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The opening of “A Model World,” Jon Turney’s Aeon article about computer models, which he reminds are not all created equal:

“Here’s a simple recipe for doing science. Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally. If the results fit the predictions, then the theory might describe what’s really going on. If not, you need to think again. Scientific work is vastly diverse and full of fascinating complexities. Still, the recipe captures crucial features of how most of it has been done for the past few hundred years.

Now, however, there is a new ingredient. Computer simulation, only a few decades old, is transforming scientific projects as mind-bending as plotting the evolution of the cosmos, and as mundane as predicting traffic snarl-ups. What should we make of this scientific nouvelle cuisine? While it is related to experiment, all the action is in silico — not in the world, or even the lab. It might involve theory, transformed into equations, then computer code. Or it might just incorporate some rough approximations, which are good enough to get by with. Made digestible, the results affect us all.

As computer modelling has become essential to more and more areas of science, it has also become at least a partial guide to headline-grabbing policy issues, from flood control and the conserving of fish stocks, to climate change and — heaven help us — the economy. But do politicians and officials understand the limits of what these models can do? Are they all as good, or as bad, as each other? If not, how can we tell which is which?”

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I don’t agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s logic in diminishing the importance of satire, but I’m on board with him in this Grantland exchange with Bill Simmons about the hypocrisies in the discussion of performance-enhancing drugs:

Malcolm Gladwell:

As you know, I’ve had mixed feelings for years about doping. It’s not that I’m in favor of it. It’s just that I’ve never found the standard arguments against doping to be particularly compelling. So professional cyclists take EPO because they can rebuild their red blood cell count, in order to step up their training. I’m against ‘cheating’ when it permits people to take shortcuts. But remind me why I would be against something someone takes because they want to train harder?

Bill Simmons:

Or why blood doping is any different from ‘loading your body with tons of Toradol’ or ‘getting an especially strong cortisone shot’? I don’t know.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Exactly! Or take the so-called ‘treatment/enhancement’ distinction. The idea here is that there is a big difference between the drug that ‘treats’ some kind of illness or medical disorder and one, on the other hand, that ‘enhances’ some preexisting trait. There is a huge amount of literature on treatment/enhancement among scholars, and with good reason. Your health insurance company relies on this distinction, for example, when it decides what to cover. Open heart surgery is treatment. A nose job, which you pay for yourself, is enhancement. This principle is also at the heart of most anti-doping policies. Treatment is OK. Enhancement is illegal. That’s why Tommy John surgery is supposed to be OK. It’s treatment: You blow out your ulnar collateral ligament so you get it fixed.

But wait a minute! The tendons we import into a pitcher’s elbow through Tommy John surgery are way stronger than the ligaments that were there originally. There’s no way Tommy John pitches so well into his early forties without his bionic elbow. Isn’t that enhancement?”

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From Mark Pack’s well-rounded take on autonomous vehicles, which are being developed at an ever-accelerating pace and must now be a consideration during the planning of all long-range transportation projects:

“Think just how quickly driverless cars have developed in the last five years alone – and then think how long it takes to get planning permission, let alone build or fit out, a big public transport project. Public transport plans now should already be factoring in the high likelihood of a near future in which cars no longer need humans to drive them.

Some of the benefits like to accrue from this are brilliant – but do not require policy changes. A further improvement in road safety is likely for, as we have seen in other areas where automated machinery replaces humans in repetitive tasks, computers are more reliable, less sleepy and never drunk. Brilliant news for humanity (road deaths killed more people than genocides during the twentieth century after all), a useful saving for the NHS but not something which much knock-on policy impacts.

Other changes are likely to be more troubling.”

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January is the graveyard for movies that turned out to be turkeys, a month for studios to clear the slate. But it wasn’t always that way. Summer used to be the season to forget. That changed because a beach-themed film wanted to attract beachgoers. After that film (Jaws, of course) proved it was a winning time of year, the warm months gradually became the big stage for blockbusters. From Priceonomics:

Why didn’t Hollywood think to distribute their biggest pictures during the summer? Executives thought that people had better things to do with their time than sit in a dark room watching movies all summer. As the Financial Times writes:

Back then June, July and August were the movie industry’s low season. By day, everyone was on the beach; by night, eating, drinking, dancing and carrying on. Who wanted to go rectangle-eyed in the dark, watching movies? That was a winter thing.

Jaws was the first film to challenge this conventional thinking. One reason for the then unorthodox timing? The Times also notes that the producer stated, ‘The release of the film was deliberately delayed till people were in the water off the summer beach resorts.’ Director Steven Spielberg wanted the fear to be as real as possible, and that apparently included making sure that as many viewers as possible came from the beach to the film.”

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No one outside of NYC literary circles may care about this, but over the last couple of weeks there’s been a debate in that world about the value of satire and its pesky little sibling, snark. It started with Tom Scocca’s Gawker essay “On Smarm” which argues that those opposed to impolite humor are really just trying to protect an unfair status quo that profits them. A few days later, Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker blog post “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful,” retorted that satire actually aids the powerful even if it’s aimed at them. Two quick thoughts starting in reverse order with Gladwell’s piece. 

1) There’s a gigantic pothole in Gladwell’s reasoning that satire is ineffectual and that more serious criticism is preferable. He quotes a famous Peter Cook line (via a Jonathan Coe essay) about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.” Um, no, stage satire didn’t stop the Nazis, but you know what else didn’t prevent that horror? Serious criticism, op-eds and solemn political speeches. German resistance groups were likewise unable to stop Hitler’s ascent. Does that mean that serious criticism and protest are meaningless? Of course not. They just sadly didn’t work in this case. But they are good and useful things that have helped open eyes, hearts and minds in many other moments and so has humor.

Satire isn’t the main action but a call to action. It’s the weather report that tells us it’s pouring outside before most of us have yet taken notice of a cloud in the sky. (Though, no, it won’t unfold your umbrella for you.) It’s the first salvo, not the coup de grâce. It’s written about the present with an eye toward the future. And it doesn’t need to deflate dissent unless it’s written that way, and the best of it is not. There’s no measurement to quantify how much satire has helped accomplish, but it seems a trusty tool in the long march toward progress.

Ultimately, I think Gladwell is trying to knock down what he feels is a false narrative with a false one of his own.

2) That being said, I take an argument that there’s a dangerous effort to upend satire with the same seriousness as I take the so-called “War on Christmas.” Yes, there are some hypersensitive souls who confuse a punchline for an actual punch, but there has never been more satire or snark in the country than now, nor more channels, stages and outlets to practice this “dark” art. It’s under no threat and an argument that worries about it excessively seems hysterical. There is certainly no consensus against biting criticism. It, not smarm, is actually the hallmark of our times. I think that’s a reassuring thing.•

The opening of Scocca’s piece:

Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed’s newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of ‘the scathing takedown rip,’ Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.

A community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against. BuzzFeed’s motto, the attitude that drives its success, is an explicit ‘No haters.’ The site is one of the leading voices of the moment, thriving in the online sharing economy, in which agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value. (Upworthy, the next iteration, has gone ahead and made its name out of the premise.)

There is more at work here than mere good feelings. ‘No haters’ is a sentiment older and more wide-reaching than BuzzFeed. There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called ‘snark.'”

From Gladwell:

Earlier this year, in the London Review of Books, the English novelist Jonathan Coe published an essay titled ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea.’ It is a review of a book about the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. And in the course of evaluating Johnson’s career, Coe observes that the tradition of satire in English cultural life has turned out to be profoundly conservative. What began in an anti-establishment spirit, he writes, ends up dissipating into a ‘culture of facetious cynicism.’ Coe quotes the comedian Peter Cook—’Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’—and continues:

The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the quotation, ‘sniggering’). Of the four Beyond the Fringe members, it’s always Peter Cook who is described as the comic genius, and like any genius he fully (if not always consciously) understood the limitations of his own medium. He understood laughter, in other words – and certainly understood that it is anything but a force for change. Famously, when opening his club, The Establishment, in Soho in 1961, Cook remarked that he was modelling it on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’.

‘Laughter,’ Coe concludes, ‘is not just ineffectual as a form of protest … it actually replaces protest.’

Coe and Scocca are both interested in the same phenomenon: how modern cultural forms turn out to have unanticipated—and paradoxical—consequences. But they reach widely divergent conclusions. Scocca thinks that the conventions of civility and seriousness serve the interests of the privileged. Coe says the opposite. Privilege is supported by those who claim to subvert civility and seriousness. It’s not the respectful voice that props up the status quo; it is the mocking one.”

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We often measure the intelligence of animals based on how much they’re like humans or how closely they can follow tricks we try to teach them. But their talents are really Other and often amazing. They have superpowers we can only dream of. Via the ever-wonderful Browser, here’s an excerpt from “The Brains of Animals,” Amit Majmudar’s Kenyon Review post:

“There may come a time when we cease to regard animals as inferior, preliminary iterations of the human—with the human thought of as the pinnacle of evolution so far—and instead regard all forms of life as fugue-like elaborations of a single musical theme.

Animals are routinely superhuman in one way or another. They outstrip us in this or that perceptual or physical ability, and we think nothing of it. It is only our kind of superiority (in the use of tools, basically) that we select as the marker of ‘real’ superiority. A human being with an elephant’s hippocampus would end up like Funes the Memorious in the story by Borges; a human being with a dog’s olfactory bulb would become a Vermeer of scent, but his art would be lost on the rest of us, with our visually dominated brains. The poetry of the orcas is yet to be translated; I suspect that the whale sagas will have much more interesting things in them than the tablets and inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad.

If science should ever persuade people of this biological unity, it would be of far greater benefit to the species than penicillin or cardiopulmonary bypass; of far greater benefit to the planet than the piecemeal successes of environmental activism. We will have arrived, by study and reasoning, at the intuitive, mystical insights of poets.”

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As David Remnick prepares to offer analysis of Russia’s Winter Games, which hopefully will be a safe and joyous event, here’s the opening of E.J. Kahn’s 1972 New Yorker reportage in the direct aftermath of the tragedy in Munich, the so-called “Serene Olympics” which became anything but:

“Into the unreal Olympic world, where inches and ounces and seconds are what traditionally matter most, the real world cruelly intruded at five o’clock three mornings ago. The first inkling most of the four thousand journalists here had of the dreadful events that should have terminated these now cheerless Olympics came just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, at which hour we had been invited to attend a press conference with the American swimmer Mark Spitz, who, having won an unprecedented seventh gold medal the night before, has been crowned by the German press ‘der König von München.’ Like just about everything else around here, though, his gilt had been tarnished. He had carried a pair of brand-name athletic shoes to the presentation ceremony for the third medal, and had felt constrained—probably under pressure from the United States Olympic Committee and under at least indirect pressure from Avery Brundage, the crusty American octogenarian who is retiring this year after twenty years as president of the International Olympic Committee—to make a public apology to his teammates. On my way to the conference, I glanced at the first editions of the local morning papers. They featured a queen not just of Munich but of all West Germany—the sixteen-year-old high jumper Ulrike Meyfarth, who had never cleared six feet until the previous afternoon, when she went three and a half inches above that and won a hysterically applauded gold medal of her own. Her glory was brief, for we learned during our wait for Spitz to show up that the Olympic Village had been murderously invaded. While we were reeling from that shock, Spitz arrived and gave sober, clipped answers to a few meaningless questions. He remained seated throughout the session, and a factotum explained, ‘Mark Spitz does not want to come to the microphone, because of the Israeli incident.’ (He is Jewish, and nobody knew who, if anyone, might be the next target.) As a result, the swimmer’s responses were all but inaudible to us. It didn’t much matter, because must of the questions, dredged from the near-bottom of the sportswriters’ cliché barrel, were absurd and obviously irrelevant. Indeed, all the things that had been ceased to seem very consequential—even the prodigies of the regal Spitz himself.”•

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“Our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized”:

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If you put your uncle to death as Kim Jong-un just did, you’re going to make your nation seem like the most barbaric on Earth. And North Korea is among the dimmest corners of the planet no matter the criteria we’re using for measurement. But is that country, even with its penchant for murderous purges, the worst wielder of the death penalty? It’s not easy to measure its deployment since some countries don’t officially murder people but still make enemies disappear. Anyhow, here are the Amnesty International numbers via the Guardian of executions performed from 2007-2012 in the nations most given to such practices:

  1. China: Thousands
  2. Iran: 1,663
  3. Saudi Arabia: 423
  4. Iraq: 256
  5. United States: 220
  6. Pakistan: 171
  7. Yemen: 152
  8. Korea (North): 105
  9. Vietnam: 58
  10. Libya 39

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"How is your pet feeling?"

“How is your pet feeling?”

From the March 21, 1904 New York Times:

Paterson, N.J.--The little mining village of Sterling Junction, N.Y., is at present speculating as to what is going to happen to Antonio Colone, six years old, who is lying in a serious condition in his father’s hut near the iron mine there. Last Thursday Antonio ate a stick of dynamite.

According to the story told by the boy’s father, Guiseppe Colone, he and some other laborers were employed at the junction on Thursday afternoon unloading a car of dynamite consigned to the Sterling Iron and Mining Company. Little Antonio sat by watching the operations.

The boy got hold of a stick of the explosive, and it is supposed that he took it for some kind of candy, for he ate it. He was still chewing the stuff when his father noticed the stump of the cartridge in the boy’s hands. He took it away from him and carried the boy very gently to the hut. There Antonio became unconscious. 

The father only knew one thing about dynamite, and that was its explosive properties. He dared not move the child for fear of an immediate disaster, so he sent to Sloatsburg for Dr. J.M. Gillett.

The physician found the boy in a state of coma, his temperature very high, and his heart beating at top speed. The latter symptom he attributed to the effect of the nitroglycerine contained in the dynamite. The doctor said the boy would certainly die.”

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I remember from when I was a kid that there were few people as famous or revered as the actor Richard Burton was during his life, but does it feel like his star is falling piece by piece to the Earth as those who watched him act live die off? The fame and infamy mean little now, the marriages and the drinking and the off-stage drama, and his performances, as least those on stage, are known directly by fewer an fewer. His famous name is recalled but without full knowledge of his talent. Here he sits down for a long-form interview with Michael Parkinson in 1974, having just completed a stint in rehab for his titanic problem with alcohol.

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The opening of “Where Are They?” philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2008 essay explaining why the discovery of extraterrestrial life may spell doom for earthlings:

“When water was discovered on Mars, people got very excited. Where there is water, there may be life. Scientists are planning new missions to study the planet up close. NASA’s next Mars rover is scheduled to arrive in 2010. In the decade following, a Mars Sample Return mission might be launched, which would use robotic systems to collect samples of Martian rocks, soils, and atmosphere, and return them to Earth. We could then analyze the sample to see if it contains any traces of life, whether extinct or still active. Such a discovery would be of tremendous scientific significance. What could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this vast cold cosmos.

But I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.”

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A follow-up post to the earlier one about Time‘s Michael Scherer seemingly being contacted by a telemarketing robot that was programmed to deceive him and deny being A.I. It may have not been a robot but a human telemarketer trying to hide a foreign accent by choosing pre-recorded answers. Alexis C. Madrigal of the Atlantic did a nice job in (perhaps) unraveling the mystery. From his article:

“The theory I heard — and keep in mind it is just a hypothesis to explain a perplexing situation — goes like this:

Samantha West is a human being who understands English but who is responding with a soundboard of different pre-recorded messages. So a human parses the English being spoken and plays a message from Samantha West. It is IVR, but the semantic intelligence is being provided by a human. You could call it a cyborg system. Or perhaps an automaton in that 18th-century sense.

If you’re reading this, you must be wondering: WHY?!?!

Well, while Americans accept customer service and technical help from people with non-American accents, they do not take well to telemarketing calls from non-Americans. The response rates for outbound marketing via call center are apparently abysmal.

So, Samantha West, could be the rather strange solution to this set of circumstances and technical capabilities.”

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