Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, atheist-in-chief, coiner of the term “meme,” and maker of perplexing comments about church sex scandals, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

As an expert on evolution, what do you feel is the strangest creature on Earth, or the one that just doesn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint yet continues to survive? (Besides people)

Richard Dawkins:

Nautilus (because of its pinhole camera eye). But that’s just off the top of my head. I’d probably think of a better answer given more time (that is so often true!)

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Question:

Richard, what would you say to Muslims who point out (correctly) that during Islam’s Golden Age, science and education flourished in the Caliphate as Muslim scientists either started new fields, or built on past work by Greek and Indian scholars.

Richard Dawkins:

Great job in the Middle Ages, guys. What went wrong?

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Question:

How do you feel about South Park’s depiction of you and their take on the argument?

Richard Dawkins:

Satire is supposed to satirise. Depicting somebody as having a predilection for buggering a bald transvestite is not satire and not witty. The futuristic projection of wars between atheist factions is genuine satire and quite witty. I think it’s important understand the difference. I preferred the experience of going on The Simpsons.

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Question:

How do you feel now that memes, first discussed in your book The Selfish Gene, have become ubiquitous in internet culture?

Richard Dawkins:

I’m pleased that the concept of meme has become widely understood, but the true meaning is a bit broader than the common understanding. Anything transmitted with high fidelity from brain to brain by imitation is a meme.

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Question:

Would you like to take a moment to chat about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?

Richard Dawkins:

No thank you.•

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The wonderfully talented Françoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker and one of the forces behind the legendary Raw, tells Sarah Boxer of the Los Angeles Review of Books about introducing R. Crumb to the New Yorker during the 1990s:

Sarah Boxer:

It’s amazing that you ever got R. Crumb in The New Yorker. How did that go down?

 

Françoise Mouly:

When I started back in 1992, I asked him for an image for the cover. And it was of some interest to him, because as a kid growing up with his brother, what they’re looking at is Mad magazine, but also The New Yorker covers, because it was narrative storytelling. There’s a picture of his brother Charles in their room, and on the walls are New Yorker covers from the ’30s and ’40s.

That medium of the New Yorker cover is a challenge. It’s like writing a kind of sonnet, with only so many meters, or like a haiku, because you can’t use too many words.

Sarah Boxer:

You didn’t always love Crumb’s work. In the Masters of American Comics catalog, you wrote: “I came to R. Crumb’s work with the full force of all my prejudices. I found his work unabashed in its vulgarity and was put off by the glorification of his own nerdiness, his occasionally repulsive depictions of women, blacks, and Jews, and his endless graphic representations of kinky smelly, sweaty sex.”

Françoise Mouly:

I had to get over my prejudices against the offensive part to find the incredibly sensitive, humanistic side of the man. When you read the complete R. Crumb stories, you realize he’s such a good observer of the people around him. It makes sense that he became an emblem of the ’60s, not so much for Mr. Natural, but because he is such a sensitive and communicative observer.

He’s not a hippie in any way. He may have been smoking dope and taking acid, but Crumb was always somewhat mocking of the ‘peace-man’ hippie, the long-haired, bearded hippie. He himself was straitlaced, more of a beatnik, you know, wearing a hat, his beard trimmed. Of course, he’s misogynistic and misanthropic, but he’s also a real humanist. I don’t believe they are incompatible.”

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TV has never been so celebrated or so despised. People want the content but not the medium’s cumbersome anti-portability and passe economic model. Cable TV subscription prices will continue to rise and milk the dwindling customers until it all falls down. From Jim Edwards at Business Insider:

“The TV business is having its worst year ever.

Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, ‘The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.’ All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn’t.

In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.”

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Tiny robots drifting in the air is the ultimate goal of an experiment in jellyfish design at NYU. From Sandrine Ceurstemont at New Scientist: “Tiny flying robots usually mimic nature’s flyers, like birds and insects – but perhaps that’s due to a lack of imagination. A four-winged design created by Leif Ristroph and colleagues at New York University, which boasts a body plan reminiscent of a jellyfish, is more stable in the air than insect-like machines.”

The opening of Sarah Kessler’s Fast Company article about Marion Stokes who taped news stories from her television on 140,000 VHS tapes over a 35-year period:

“In a storage unit somewhere in Philadelphia, 140,000 VHS tapes sit packed into four shipping containers. Most are hand-labeled with a date between 1977 and 2012, and if you pop one into a VCR you might see scenes from the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Administration, or Hurricane Katrina.

It’s 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

It’s also the life work of Marion Stokes, who built an archive of network, local, and cable news, in her home, one tape at a time, recording every major (and trivial) news event until the day she died in 2012 at the age of 83 of lung disease.

Stokes was a former librarian who for two years co-produced a local television show with her then-future husband, John Stokes Jr. She also was engaged in civil rights issues, helping organize buses to the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, among other efforts. She began casually recording television in 1977. She taped lots of things, but she thought news was especially important, and when cable transformed it into a 24-hour affair, she began recording MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC, and CSPAN around the clock by running as many as eight television recorders at a time.”

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Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands–well, not exactly hands–of Deep Blue was supposed to have delivered a message to humans that we needed to dedicate ourselves to other things–but the coup de grace was ignored. In fact, computers have only enhanced our chess acumen, making it clear that thus far a hybrid is better than either carbon or silicon alone. In the wake of Computer Age child Magnus Carlsen becoming the greatest human player on Earth, Christopher Chabris and David Goodman of the Wall Street Journal look at the surprising resilience of chess in these digital times. The opening:

“In the world chess championship match that ended Friday in India, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, the cool, charismatic 22-year-old challenger and the highest-rated player in chess history, defeated local hero Viswanathan Anand, the 43-year-old champion. Mr. Carlsen’s winning score of three wins and seven draws will cement his place among the game’s all-time greats. But his success also illustrates a paradoxical development: Chess-playing computers, far from revealing the limits of human ability, have actually pushed it to new heights.

The last chess match to get as much publicity as Mr. Carlsen’s triumph was the 1997 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov and International Business Machines Corp.’s Deep Blue computer in New York City. Some observers saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an ‘early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come,’ wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled ‘The Brain’s Last Stand.’ 

But after Mr. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in dramatic fashion, a funny thing happened: nothing.”•

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“In Norway, you’ve got two big sports–chess and sadness”:

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A Guardian feature has a number of name authors choosing their favorite titles of 2013. Here’s Jonathan Franzen’s selection:

“My vote is for Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser’s book reads like a thriller, but it’s masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he’s a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn’t think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser’s hands it does.”

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FERTILITY WATER – $15 (MIDWEST)

half gallons of water. it’s just water to us, but many people have drank the water that comes from our well and become pregnant…

one of our friends used in vitro to have their first child and tried for a second with in vitro and it didnt work, after drinking our water she gave birth to another child, with no drugs.

a couple moved in down the road from us and had not conceived in 8 years, stopped in for a visit and had some iced tea with our water, and now have a happy healthy boy.

WE HAVE NO WAY TO PROVE THIS WORKS, but being one of nine children from a couple who could not have children till they moved to this farm, i think it works.

at $15 per half gallon plus shipping it is worth a try.

Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times isn’t very high on the new book about Apple designer Jony Ive, noting that seamlessness makes for beautiful products but ineffable biographical subjects. An excerpt from his new review:

“As Kubrick’s filmic anticipation of the iPad makes clear, Ive’s devices have been imagined before. Think of Ettore Sottsass, the Italian who made Olivetti the Apple of its time, designing typewriters and early computers with flair. Or Dieter Rams, the German designer whose products for Braun defined the company and are among the most beautiful products of the 20th century (and whose designs profoundly influenced Ive, even down to the rounded corners). Ive is far from unique as a designer who is synonymous with his company. What is new is the ubiquity of the products and the way they have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our lives.

Apple’s products are so beautifully and mysteriously constructed (where are the joints and bolts?) that they somehow mirror the obsessiveness of this secretive corporation. All of which makes them difficult to write about. Arguably what is most interesting is why they have become such a success, the social, political, aesthetic and cultural context which they have slotted into – or remade. And why have other companies not managed to emulate Apple’s design-led model?”

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From the June 7, 1914 New York Times:

Denver, Col.–An artificial leg containing $8,000, the property of Henry C. Wise, who died recently at a local hospital, is today in the possession of the Public Administration, awaiting an heir.

Wise, who was said to have been a Texas oil man, was found unconscious in his room in a hotel. An examination of his wooden leg after his death revealed certificates of deposits amounting to $8,000, concealed therein. The certificates were on banks at Sherman, Texas.”

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I don’t think there was a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and I can’t take anyone seriously who refers to Oliver Stone’s ridiculous JFK movie to argue the contrary. It’s not that a lot of people didn’t want him dead, but I don’t think Lee Harvey Oswald was the trigger man for any group. Oswald probably acted alone. He almost definitely wasn’t in cahoots with Cuba or Russia or any other foreign power. It’s somewhat possible he may have been acting in concert with American mob figures, but it’s doubtful, and there’s no good proof of any such cabal. Jack Ruby likewise probably acted alone in murdering Oswald, envisioning himself as a national hero for his deed. 

There is one interesting theory that can’t be completely dismissed: Perhaps the final bullet that struck and killed the President was an accidental discharge from a Secret Service agent. This idea has survived for three reasons: 1) The last bullet impacted differently than the first, causing an explosion of flesh 2) Some doubt Oswald’s ability for such pinpoint accuracy at such a distance with such a cheap weapon 3) Quite a few witnesses on the ground reported smelling gunpowder.

I don’t believe this theory, either. Ammo can react differently in different situations and a direct hit to the back from one angle will not necessarily create the same result as one to the head from another. Oswald was a highly trained marksman, and I think it’s very possible he could reach a target in a slow-moving vehicle. Bullets hitting more than one person and causing someone’s brain to explode might cause a smell that’s similar to gunpowder. There were also likely tires straining quickly in every direction which can cause a burning smell. And let’s remember that the witness closest to Oswald in the book depository distinctly heard three registers.

During the first 35 minutes of a recent Grantland podcast, Bill Simmons and Chris Connelly interview Bill James, who subscribes to the Secret Service theory. In addition to being one of baseball’s sabermetrics pioneers, James has written about the assassination in his book on true crime. I was disappointed by James’ stance in the wake of the Penn State pedophilia scandal, but he’s very sober-minded in this discussion. The only comment James makes in the podcast that I take issue with is his assertion that Oswald striking Kennedy more than once in a matter of seconds is tantamount to James himself being able to hit a home run off Roger Clemens. It’s a poor analogy. Oswald had a professional level of marksmanship and James does not have that level of athletic ability, especially in middle age. And James didn’t seem to be employing hyperbole. But it’s an interesting conversation overall.• Listen here.

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Another bit coming from the Frontline program “League of Denial,” which looked at the impact of brain injuries stemming from American football:

“The nation’s largest youth football program, Pop Warner, saw its participation rate drop 9.5 percent from 2010-2012, according to an Outside the Lines report by League of Denial authors Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. ‘Pop Warner lost 23,612 players, thought to be the largest two-year decline since the organization began keeping statistics decades ago,’ the report found. ‘Pop Warner officials said they believe several factors played a role in the decline, including the trend of youngsters focusing on one sport. But the organization’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julian Bailes, cited concerns about head injuries as ‘the No. 1 cause.’”

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10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. we live in public documentary about josh harris
  2. jug band musician who became a cult leader
  3. the jockey who married fred astaire
  4. 1800s scalping survivor
  5. eddie murphy interviewed by dick cavett
  6. instant newspapers printed by electromagnetic waves
  7. charlie smith former slave who attended the moon launch
  8. footage of the aga khan when he was young
  9. akio morita being interviewed by tom snyder
  10. divine healer francis schlatter
Afflictor: Believing that the crackerjack news desk at CNN learned exclusively this week that JFK has been shot.

Afflictor: Believing that CNN’s crackerjack news desk learned exclusively this week that JFK has been shot.

  • Robots will soon be making your greasy hamburgers.
  • Jerry Givens, Virginia’s executioner for 17 years, did an Ask Me Anything.

I watch Frontline the way most Americans watch slasher films and zombie TV dramas: to frighten the fuck out of myself. The recent episode, “Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,” pointed out a yawning hole in the free market: Big Pharma companies have very few antibiotics in R&D because they’re expensive to develop and they’re supposed to be used as little as possible. It’s much more feasible to produce a diabetes or heart drug–something for long-term care. 

Of course, we actually haven’t been careful about restricting antibiotics, overprescribing them to humans in the past and currently practically pouring them into livestock. And the more we use these drugs, the less efficacy they possess. So the ones we have are losing effectiveness, and there are no answers in the pipeline. From Maryn McKenna’s Medium essay, “Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future“:

“Predictions that we might sacrifice the antibiotic miracle have been around almost as long as the drugs themselves. Penicillin was first discovered in 1928 and battlefield casualties got the first non-experimental doses in 1943, quickly saving soldiers who had been close to death. But just two years later, the drug’s discoverer Sir Alexander Fleming warned that its benefit might not last. Accepting the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, he said:

‘It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them… There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.’

As a biologist, Fleming knew that evolution was inevitable: sooner or later, bacteria would develop defenses against the compounds the nascent pharmaceutical industry was aiming at them. But what worried him was the possibility that misuse would speed the process up. Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive. (As would the micro-dose ‘growth promoters’ given in agriculture, which were invented a few years after Fleming spoke.) Bacteria can produce another generation in as little as twenty minutes; with tens of thousands of generations a year working out survival strategies, the organisms would soon overwhelm the potent new drugs.”

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Jimmy Breslin, lying on trunk of car, interviewing, Robert F. Kennedy. (Image by Jim Hubbard.)

Fifty years to the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, here’s the opening of what’s arguably Jimmy Breslin’s most famous column, his 1963 profile of the quiet, sober work of the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery who attended to the President’s burial plot:

Washington — Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. “Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.” Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging (Editor Note: At the bottom of the hill in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion).

Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. “That’s nice soil,” Metzler said. “I’d like to save a little of it,” Pollard said. “The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.”•

Bruce Schneier, a security expert (online and offline), just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. The following is an exchange about post-9/11 airport security:

“Question:

I am of the opinion that our airport security is poorly designed and for the hassle passengers go through, we get minimal benefit. I feel like we react to specific circumstances to create an illusion of security and that perception is more important to the TSA than creating a constructive plan to deal with threats. I know you are a proponent of the fail well philosophy which accepts failure and tries to compartmentalize and minimize the damage. Based on this theory what should be the security steps that airports should be taking?

Bruce Schneier:

I think airport security should be rolled back to pre-9/11 levels, and all the money saved should be spent on things that work: intelligence, investigation, and emergency response.

Only two things have improved airplane security since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit doors, and teaching passengers that they have to fight back. Everything else has been security theater.”

 

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This movie is the one I want to see this weekend. Michel Gondry, who’s most comfortable in a dream state, walks into one with Noam Chomsky. The score in the trailer sounds too much like Philip Glass’ work for Errol Morris, but I’ll let that slide.

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From the July 18, 1886 New York Times:

Detroit, Mich.–Near Jamestown, in the western part of this State, a singular and terrible accident occurred Thursday. Gerritt Bouma, whose parents reside in the village, was at work on a load of wheat and fell off in such a manner that two tines of a fork which fell off the load at the same time entered the back of his head and passed completely through it, coming out near his nose. He pulled the fork out himself, and ran to the house, some distance away, climbing a fence on his way. He asked for water, but soon after went into convulsions and died in about two hours. He was 24 years of age.”

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What place and time to do you most idealize? I think for me it’s recent: Los Angeles, from 1968-75. Maybe I would have hated it in reality, but I love the version in my head. In this news clip from that city of (roughly) that era, Tom Brokaw, everybody’s favorite middlebrow uncle, interviews the great Joan Didion.

Jerry Givens, who served as Virginia’s executioner for nearly two decades, lives with regret. He now campaigns against capital punishment. Just one exchange from an Ask Me Anything he did at the Guardian:

Question:

Can you explain the difference between the types of executions you had to perform?

Answer:

When I first started, it was only death by electrocution. Electrocution consists of 2,400 to 3,000 volts. The condemned receives 45 seconds of a high volt shock and 45 seconds of the low cycle. It takes about 2.5 minutes. Then there is a five minute grace period to let the body cool down. Then a physician goes in the room with a stethoscope to see if there is a heartbeat. Back in the mid-1990s, Virginia decided to go with lethal injection instead. That consists of seven tubes that are injected into the left arm. Three tubes of chemicals and four that are flush. So you administer the first chemical (sodium pentothal), then a flush, then the second chemical (pancuronium), then a flush, then the third chemical (potassium chloride) and then a final flush at the end. You have to keep people who remove the body from being exposed to chemicals.

If I had a choice, I would choose death by electrocution. That’s more like cutting your lights off and on. It’s a button you push once and then the machine runs by itself. It relieves you from being attached to it in some ways. You can’t see the current go through the body. But with chemicals, it takes a while because you’re dealing with three separate chemicals. You are on the other end with a needle in your hand. You can see the reaction of the body. You can see it going down the clear tube. So you can actually see the chemical going down the line and into the arm and see the effects of it. You are more attached to it. I know because I have done it. Death by electrocution in some ways seems more humane.”

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One thing you can say assuredly about writer William T. Vollmann is that he’s enjoying a singular career. There’s no one else practicing his brand of gonzo ardor for the sad casualties of modern life, the geographically remote, the politically fraught and the historically arcane–no one else even trying, really. The opening of Alexander Nazaryan’s Newseek article about the writer, who’s just published The Book of Dolores, perhaps his most personal and idiosyncratic work to date:

“If William T. Vollmann ever wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as many speculate he will – he knows exactly what he will do with the $1.1 million pot the Swedes attach to the award. ‘It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,’ he says, sitting on his futon, chuckling, a half-empty bottle of pretty good bourbon between us.

He is neither flippant nor drunk, though more booze awaits us out there in the temperate Sacramento twilight. Vollmann became famous for fiction that treated the sex worker as muse – especially the street stalker of those days in the Tenderloin of San Francisco when AIDS was just coming to haunt the national psyche and the yuppie invasion was a nightmare not yet hatched. His so-called prostitution trilogy – Whores for GloriaButterfly Stories, and The Royal Family – is overflowing with life and empathy, nothing like the backcountry machismo of Raymond Carver or fruitless experimentation of Donald Barthelme, both oh-so-popular with young writers when Vollmann first came on the scene after graduating from Cornell in 1981. He approached the prostitute like an anthropologist, yet did so without condescension, writing in Whores for Gloria, ‘The unpleasantnesses of her profession are largely caused by the criminal ambiance in which the prostitute must conduct it.’

He was a gonzo humanitarian, too: Vollmann once rescued a young Thai girl, Sukanja, from a rural brothel, installing her in a school in Bangkok; he later paid her father for ownership of the girl, essentially making himself the owner of another human being. (‘She loves the school,’ he told The Paris Review in 2000.) So if sex workers reap some of that Nobel money, it will be only be because they have long served as Vollmann’s subjects and companions, objects of his curiosity, his compassion, and, sometimes, his carnal impulses. He insists the last of these is not an occasion for shame. Of paying for sex, he once said, ‘We’re a culture of prostitutes.'”

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You already know that I’m flummoxed that children can’t go into bars or buy cigarettes while they’re allowed to eat at fast-food restaurants. All three will equally set them up for unhealthy lives. Consenting adults should do what they want, but I don’t think McDonald’s and Wendy’s should be open to children.

On a completely different topic about fast-food places: There’s a wiseass article in Vice by Alison Stevenson about a test McDonald’s in California that’s supposed to be “futuristic,” allowing customers to order on iPads. The author has fun with the redundancy of the iPad and the employee currently doing the same tasks, but before long. the human element will likely be reduced. It’s another step in the automation of informal restaurants and cafes. An excerpt:

“This McDonald’s is the McDonald’s of the future. I’m not saying that just because it’s really clean and people are happy. I’m saying that because this McDonald’s has iPads! What do these iPads do? They are the tool with which you customize your burger order. With this magic iPad, you’re able to order such exotic menu items as an ‘artisan roll,’ and ‘guacamole.’ Yeah you heard me, a McDonald’s that serves guacamole. Welcome to the 21st century, fuckers. Obviously, little things like ‘clean dining areas,’ ‘friendly service,’ and ‘freedom of choice’ are not features that can be rolled out to every McDonald’s all at once. No, those things have to be ‘tested,’ and Laguna Niguel is the only place where you can enjoy the aforementioned amenities.”

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I mentioned Cliodynamics in a post yesterday, and the field’s founder, Peter Turchin, has a dark forecast about America’s future at Bloomberg. He sees economic inequality and other factors possibly renting us apart, even violently. As Jim McKay said when the horror of the 1972 Munich Olympics was complete, “Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.” But seldom doesn’t mean never. The opening:

“Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.

Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside. The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the ‘violent 1910s.’

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The ‘great divergence‘ between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period.”

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In 1912, a daredevil who delighted in heights ascended to the peak of the Statue of Liberty and parachuted from the raised hand of the American icon. The full story as told in the February 3 edition of the New York Times of that year:

Frederick R. Law, listed in the telephone directory as an aerial contractor, with offices at 50 Church Street, growing tired of monotonously swaying to and fro on lofty flagpoles and of being conventionally referred to in the newspapers as a daring steeplejack, decided yesterday to startle the world with an entirely original feat.

Law is about 35 years old. He was the first man to paint the flagpoles of the Pulitzer and Singer buildings, and it has been said of him that he had to be at least 300 feet in the air with a cigar in his mouth to feel absolutely comfortable. Business has been dull in the steeple rigging line, and Law saw the necessity of doing something which no one else had ever done before.

According to one of his foremen, the boss steeplejack sat in his office all yesterday morning looking over the city’s high towers. Suddenly, it was said, he announced his intention of jumping from the Singer Building with a parachute. That seemed unpractical, however, after an investigation, and the Metropolitan Tower, a few stories higher, offered the same objections. The steeplejack did not fear the jump, but impeding traffic and the risk of causing a runaway or two deterred him.

The happy alternative of the Statue of Liberty suggested itself, and at noon the aerial contractor set out for Bedlow’s Island. At 2 o’clock he was armed with a special permit, issued by Capt. Leonard D. Wildman in charge of the post on the island, and half an hour later half a dozen moving picture machines and operators and several thousand spectators were on hand to see the jump from the top of the statue.

Law dragged his 100-pound parachute into the elevator, and in company with one of his foreman went aloft to the head of the Goddess. There he dressed his ropes and started up the remaining 50 feet through the mighty biceps and forearm until he reached the hand with supports the torch. There is an observation platform at this point which, since the issue of a recent order, cannot be visited without a special permit. This platform is 151 feet from the base of the statue and about 225 feet above sea level. It is large enough to hold twelve persons, and Law and his assistant had no trouble in arranging the parachute so that on the jump it would slide easily over the edges of the railing.

Awaiting a lull in the wind Law chose the eastern side of the statue for his descent, and at exactly 2:45 P.M., with all the moving picture machines trained in his direction, he jumped from the top of the railing, clearing the edges by ten feet. 

Whistles shrieked in the harbor, and every one within seeking distance held his breath while the bulky parachute followed the man over the railing. There was fear of a tragedy for a moment, for the steeplejack fell fully seventy-five feet like a dead weight, the parachute showing no inclination whatever to open at first.

When it opened the wind blew it clear of the statue. Then Law began waving his hands frantically. It was not a sign of alarm, merely a steering method which the young aeronaut had adopted to keep his craft out of the bay. It proved practical, too, for the parachute descended gracefully.

When it neared the surface it seemed to fall fast for a moment, and Law, forgetting to jump, fell heavily on the stone coping, thirty feet from the water’s edge. He limped away from the pile of canvas and ropes, but declared that he was not injured. Later he packed up his parachute and personally carried it to his office in the Hudson Terminal Building. He did not want to be interviewed, he said.•

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