This has nothing to do with Star Trek but if you are in the Boston area and would like to see me sing some songs with some friends as a fundraiser for a women’s health organization in Indiana…here is your chance.
why is everything that jason posts SO GOOOOOD ugh ASSHOLE
By subtly animating still photos of waves shot by Ray Collins (previously), Armand Dijcks created short looping videos of waves that never break. It’s the visual equivalent of the Shepard tone, a sound that has the illusion of a forever rising or falling pitch.
“It’s weird for me — everyone should just be who they want to be,” said Styles. “It’s tough to justify somebody having to answer to someone else about stuff like that.”
When asked if he gives his sexual orientation a label, Styles said: “No, I’ve never felt the need to really. No.”
But he praised artists like Miley Cyrus, who do discuss it: “Being in a creative field, it’s important to be progressive. People doing stuff like that is great.”
This man punching numbers into the device hanging from his belt with a calm ferocity is doing inventory. A commenter on Reddit explains:
He is doing an inventory audit on the store. First, he enters the price, then the number of items, then moves to the next item. The entering of items is done by doing them in groups. When I used to do this, I would count in 4s. It would be 4+4+4+4+4+3 to indicate 23 items. When he looks at the 10-key he is probably correcting an error he just made. It is pretty rare to double check the count unless you fat fingered something. The end report does not contain SKU numbers but a categorical pricing of all the items in the store.
In Japan, there are competitions and clubs for performing quickly on calculators. Asuka Kamimura, a young Japanese featured in the beginning of this video, can work her calculator at a rate of nine keystrokes per second.
Because JARED and IVANKA straddle the millennial and Generation X divide, they love to host parties whenever seasons of their favorite television shows end. IVANKA thought it would be cute to host a season finale party to commemorate her father’s first hundred days in office. She and JARED invited all of their New York friends, though quickly dwindling in number, to their D.C. home.
The doorbell rings. It’s seat fillers IVANKA has paid so the party appears crowded. One of the seat fillers is wearing a t-shirt that reads “I hate Mondays” and another is wearing one, in Stanford colors, that reads “Smartass University.”
IVANKA: Go over there. [Ivanka gestures to her fainting couch, enlivened with gold balloons with the words ‘100 days’ printed on them.] You can eat, but ensure your faces are clean before the guests arrive. [She hands the two seat fillers baby wipes, and then presses her temples so hard that she grimaces slightly.]
[JARED enters. He notices the marks in the flooring, the marks that STEVE BANNON made when he tried dragging the fainting couch to the Potomac River. He calls over one of the waiters, points to a rug on the other side of the room, and demonstrates pulling it over to this side of the room. The waiter shakes his head, points to IVANKA and then mock cuts his throat.]
IVANKA [happily]: I don’t want them making changes unless I’ve signed off on them. The marks on the floor will remind me to micromanage you, and they will remind you that you have failed.
JARED [unhappily]: What time do we get to go back to New York?
IVANKA [putting on surgical gloves]: Go to New York whenever you feel. You know the arrangement.
JARED [trying his damnedest to remember the arrangement, but every time he is able to conjure a bit of it, the memory dissolves]: I thought this was over, like when Don comes up with the Coke ad while he is losing his mind in California. And then he goes back home to New York. I thought this was that?
IVANKA [adjusting the shoulders of one of the seat fillers]: That’s a series finale. This is the season finale. We are killing off —
JARED [perfunctorily]: Bannon?
IVANKA [matter of factly]: No. We have to keep him on staff until right before the 2020 election. Firing him will persuade college educated white people that we are pivoting. And so they will return home to us.
[STEVE BANNON is upstairs, sleeping. He is snoring so loudly that the seat fillers have asked each other whether a wild animal, a bear, maybe a monster, is constrained somewhere. They discuss escape routes, if it comes to that.]
IVANKA [powerfully]: We are killing off taxes.
[The door bell rings again. This time it’s JARED’s brother JOSH, a venture capitalist, and his girlfriend KARLIE KLOSS, a famous model. They’re wearing cool clothes and sunglasses even though it’s raining. They’re talking about how they are Democrats and how anyone who voted for IVANKA’s dad is literally the devil. Like a devil person who stands for the National anthem and who believes that granola is a health food.]
IVANKA [to JOSH and KARLIE]: Hello girls. [IVANKA goes in to air kiss JOSH but instead walks past him.]
KARLIE: Just FYI I’m only here because Josh said you built a really nice yoga studio in your subterranean addition. I doubted him because how could there be natural light in a basement, but here we are. [KARLIE takes a selfie, adjusts the filter and tags #antifa.] It’s really dangerous how your administration produces everything like it’s a television show.
[KARLIE goes downstairs to salute the sun bathed in artificial light. JARED tries impressing his brother by showing him their sophisticated projector, which is airing the NBA playoffs on the large blank wall.]
IVANKA [from her fainting couch]: Your brother doesn’t care about that. Pitch him.
JARED [obediently]: It’s Craigslist but for —
JOSH [genuinely but while entering his last meal on MyFitnessPal app]: How are you?
JARED [disarmed because someone asked him how he is]: No one is going to come to this party.
JOSH [in troubleshooting mode]: Who else did you invite?
JARED [counting on his fingers]: Mindy Kaling, Tom Hanks, Senator Gillibrand, the girl who sings Rehab.
JOSH: Jared, those are all Democrats. And Amy Winehouse has been dead for like five years. [JOSH points to the NBA playoffs.] You should be showing a NASCAR race or something. You’re a Republican now. You should’ve invited like Karlie’s friend Taylor or Eli Manning maybe. Who do we know who hunts?
JARED [whispering but exaggerating]: My life is a nightmare.
JOSH: Download MyFitnessPal.
JARED: We don’t have to lose weight though.
JOSH [mentoring]: Big bro, you have to get better at hacking reality. If I’ve learned anything working in venture capital, it’s that. [JOSH takes JARED’s phone.] Is your password still fuckchuck?
[JOSH types ‘fuckchuck’ into JARED’s app store, and tosses the phone back.JARED wants to hack reality — he really does — but he has never been an athlete and so he drops his phone, cracking its screen. IVANKA sighs audibly from the other side of the room, yells that her husband can’t catch, and procures a fresh phone from her enormous bag.]
JOSH [powering on JARED’s new phone, and then doing everything all over again]: Trust me. I’ve dated a lot of girls with eating disorders and it’s never about losing weight. It’s about control. Now you can watch my meals. Watch me be in control and that’ll remind you to be in control.
JARED [gesturing to Steph Curry, projected onto his wall]: Why do you think he does that with his mouth guard all the time?
JOSH: You’re looking at it all wrong. Who gives a fuck about the mouth guard? He’s a tiny basketball player. He hacked his own system. Like you are going to. More like Steph. Less like Jared. Say it back to me.
[IVANKA is still reclining on her fainting couch. She is bouncing ideas off the waiter, assessing how he reacts when she says that next season’s arcs include rumors that Justice Kennedy is retiring, and a trade war with Canada over kayaks and Tim Hortons.]
JARED: It’s just I thought we got to move home after today.
JOSH [wisely]: What’s home even? Like where we grew up? [JOSH holds up his phone to JARED’s face.] This is where we live, big bro. We are globalists. We carry our homes with us everywhere we go. In our pockets.
JARED [while texting his mother that JOSH arrived safely]: Thanks for coming down, brother. I really appreciate it.
JOSH [reasonably]: I’m here because we are both rich. Plutocrats stick together. Never forget that, brother. Now, where in the hell is Gary Cohn? I’m raising another round.
[Convinced that every single person has something to teach him, a lesson he gleaned from a business book he bought at the Acela news stand this morning, JOSH approaches the seat fillers to make small talk with them.]
JOSH [to JARED]: Where did you find these girls?
JARED: It’s what I was telling you before. Craigslist, but exclusively for human trafficking.
IVANKA [from her fainting couch]: Jared, please unspeak that, and then reframe.
JOSH [excitedly, like he orchestrated a discounted share sale in an early round of financing]: Tatiana got into all eight Ivies.
TATIANA, SEAT FILLER #1: And Stanford.
JOSH: And this awful t-shirt is made from the detritus that commercial fishing operations accumulate in their nets.
TATIANA, SEAT FILLER #1 [actually pitching]: We are nearly dolphin safe.
JOSH [lying]: Venture capital has taught me to wring out bias from all my decisions. That’s why I struck up a conversation with your seat filler. And hired her. [JOSH mentors TATIANA, SEAT FILLER #1.] You’ll start Harvard next year. Malia is doing that too.
KARLIE [reemerging from her practice, and feeling refreshed and calm until she hears STEVE BANNON snoring one floor up]: What the fuck is going on up there? It sounds like a wounded animal fighting a second, more wounded animal. Let’s go, Josh.
JOSH: Karlie’s right. I need to call Malia’s dad about speaking at my fund. [JOSH and KARLIE make out and then leave.] Remember, Jared. More like Steph, less like you.
[JARED texts Justice Neil Gorsuch and some Congressional Republicans and asks them if they’d like to commemorate the first one hundred days of Trump by watching a stock car race. IVANKA texts her dad that trade war with Canada is market testing well.]
Jared Kushner’s First Hundred Days was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Melissa McCarthy returns to host SNL this weekend with musical guest Haim, and as today’s new promo shows, she’s feeling very pretty about joining SNL’s Five-Timers Club — even when she’s all dressed up as Sean Spicer. Check out our review of McCarthy’s last SNL hosting gig here, and catch the rest when her episode […]
Just some perspective from the other side, stay sharp
In my view, the Republicans have had a very weak hand to play on health care (not enough good ideas!), but over the last week they have played it brilliantly (which is not the same thing as having good policies). Those House members who need to say “I voted to repeal Obamacare” can now do so. The Republicans also have an option on proceeding further with reform, with everyone knowing the Senate will write its own bill. The defects of what they voted for are not so significant for this reason, and the cavalier attitude of many House Republicans toward the contents of the bill makes perfect sense.
At the same time, the Republicans have the option of letting the bill die in the Senate, where it is far easier to blame the Democrats for inaction — how many American swing voters understand the fine points of the Byrd rule and filibuster anyway? If you are what I call a “fulminating Democrat,” you are actually playing into Republican hands on this one (it would have been better to have spent the week saying abortion should be legal but rare, and talking about white people).
The big victory celebration pleased Trump, but more importantly all Republicans involved learned there is a way forward on many other issues: let Congress lead the way and pull Trump out of the bully role. That lesson won’t soon be forgotten. And from Trump’s point of view, he hasn’t given up the option of later working with the Democrats to pass a more centrist version of health care reform.
I don’t see the broader American public as so impressed with the Democrats’ arguments against the bill, mostly because they are not paying attention. It doesn’t feel like it has the urgency of when Obamacare was passed, and in fact it doesn’t. No one succeeded in showing it did, because it didn’t.
I still see the Republican House majority as extremely fragile, but on this one I believe the Democrats got pwned.
Macro Room, which has previously brought you close-up shots of melting ice cream and pills dissolving in water, recently filled an aquarium with water, shot various colors of ink into it, and filmed the swirling beauty in close-up slow motion.
P.S. It’s worth sitting though the bro-y thanks portion of the video to get a glimpse of their lo-fi rooftop setup. Did they shoot all that on a phone?
From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Here is an important quiz about animals that have been confused for other animals. See how many you guess right.
Answers at the bottom of this email, upside down, in the fine tradition of teen magazines in the ’90s. GOOD LUCK.
DOG OR WOLF?
2. DOG OR RACCOON?
3. DOG OR BEAR?
4. DOG OR FOX?
5. DOG OR WOLF?
6. DOG OR BADGER?
7 . DOG OR VICIOUS, VICIOUS LION?
8. DOG OR FOX?
9. DOG OR WOLF?
10. DOG OR PANDA BEAR (LEFT)?
ANSWERS!!!!!
From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
> DOG OR BEAR? A quiz. was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
IVANKA is sitting up straight on her reclining couch scrolling through her father’s Twitter feed as she realizes the only president he knows is Andrew Jackson. JARED is practicing an elevator pitch to himself. Apple Pay but for other kinds of phones.
IVANKA [decisively]: I need you to go to the nearest bank. Withdraw some bills we can use as flashcards for Daddy. The only way he will learn Abraham Lincoln, I’m afraid, is by memorizing that he is the one on the front of the $5 bill. [IVANKA gets up from the fainting couch, autographs several of her books and boxes them for FedEx.] We’ll keep one set of the bills in the West Wing for Kellyanne to use with him and the second set we will send to Mar-a-Lago.
JARED [smiling as he remembers the day Lehman Brothers went under]: I didn’t think Washington had banks.
IVANKA [smiling as she remembers that it was Bill Clinton who gutted the Glass-Steagall Act]: A commercial bank, not an investment bank. Go to the teller and let her know we need two of every denomination.
JARED [to himself]: A tell-her?
[IVANKA asks her butler to wake STEVE BANNON, who is upstairs sleeping off his midday screwdrivers, and then reserve him a Zipcar so that he can drop of her signed books at FedEx. JARED follows the butler out and whispers to him that he doesn’t know where a commercial bank is. The butler rolls his eyes, opens the shades, and points to the Bank of America across the street.]
JARED [upon entering the bank]: Hi. Are you the tell-her? [The security guard shakes his head and points to the teller, KATHY, who is readying her register for business.]
KATHY [bracing herself because JARED looks like he would have a lot of questions that would answer themselves if his first inclination wasn’t always to cry for help]: How is your day going, sir?
JARED [looking around, for a fainting couch, maybe]: How do we do this? I tell you stuff? In front of all these people? [JARED motions his head towards all the people who have begun lining up behind him.]
KATHY [graciously]: Well, that depends. What do you need?
JARED [starting over]: I ran out of face wash a few weeks ago and so, as a very temporary life hack, I guess, I started using my wife’s apricot one. That turned into every morning, though. Like, such a simple thing to remember and I never could. And it would frustrate me. Because, like, what if someone smelled apricot on me? What if Eric or Don Jr. thought I was wearing perfume? What would happen?
[KATHY tries to make eye contact with the security guard but he is helping an old lady pick up all the money she accidentally dropped everywhere because she was eavesdropping on JARED. The teller keeps looking, until she locks gazes with her co-worker, another teller, SANDY.]
JARED [obliviously]: Anyhow, I finally remembered to ask the staff to buy me my face wash. I opened a brand new one this morning. That made me feel good. [JARED inhales and smiles because he doesn’t smell like apricot today.] My last tell-her asked me to make a list of all the people who validate me.
KATHY [patiently]: What’s your goal today, sir?
JARED [defiantly]: That’s an easy one. To grow my businesses and to be a more successful real estate guy than my father-in-law.
KATHY [realizing JARED still is not on her page, yet with hope]: Okay, well small business loans are over there. And home financing is —
[SANDY meets KATHY at her register. She mouths, is everything OK, and then whispers that she thinks the man is one of Princess Diana’s boys. Meanwhile, the line behind JARED is getting very, very long. There’s a MILLENNIAL waiting to ask for a key to the bathroom, and a middle-aged man, KEN, who keeps saying things loud enough for the others in line to hear or react to.]
KATHY [whispering to SANDY]: I think he thinks we are his therapists?
SANDY [to JARED, saltily]: Jesus Christ. Make a list of people who validate you. Try to validate them back. And then resolve to spend more of your free time with them.
JARED: The generals validate me, surprisingly enough. Or they used to. When we were in the Mideast together, troubleshooting that crisis. I’m not sure who validates me anymore.
SANDY [angling for a promotion, even though KATHY has more seniority]: This is a bank. Do you need to withdraw money? Make a deposit?
JARED [finally remembering IVANKA’s directive]: Yes, yes. I need two copies of every different — [JARED thinks of the word ‘bill.’] Of every different bill you have.
KEN [from the line, loudly]: Would you three get a room? [KEN looks around for others to agree. Then he speaks directly to the disinterested millennial.] That’s Jared, the one married to Ivanka. I didn’t vote for those guys but if I did I’d be pretty pissed those two were the ones running everything.
MILLENNIAL [sardonically]: They’re not running anything. It’s just PR.
KEN [combatively]: Agree to disagree
[The MILLENNIAL Instagrams JARED, KATHY and SANDY, and tags the photo, Ivanka dumped. It goes viral immediately.
Meanwhile, IVANKA and her butler have successfully woken up STEVE BANNON. She’s related to him that he’s to use the Zipcar out front to transport her books to the nearest FedEx. STEVE BANNON agrees, but in fact, he is lying. He will drive the Zipcar to the very ravine he strongly believes Vince Foster’s body to have once been hidden in. Because he plans to push the Zipcar, books included, into the ravine, he makes a mental note to check that the reservation is for a Mini Cooper, or other lightweight car.]
IVANKA [to STEVE BANNON, truthfully]: To thank you for your time I have reserved you a floor of rooms at the Best Western that you can trash. All I ask is that if you exercise your option to eat the hotel’s free continental breakfast, you not return here for at least one bowel cycle.
[IVANKA opens Instagram and sees her husband chatting up the working class. She phones the bank branch and directs the manager, JOYCE, to fire the tellers flirting with her husband. STEVE BANNON exits, while slurring JARED.]
JOYCE: Your wife is on the phone. She said you’re to go to the White House, deliver the cash to Kellyanne, and then wait in the map room until further instruction. [JOYCE hands the phone to JARED, and tells her staff that she would never fire them because of a Trump. We all resist in different ways, she says to them and to her customers.]
JARED [nervously]: Hello.
IVANKA: No tens. Hamilton is theirs. Put Joyce back on. [JARED hands the phone to JOYCE, and IVANKA motions to her butler to call her a car.]
JARED [to both tellers and their manager]: Can I have my flashcards? No tens, please.
[JARED sulks to the White House. He does as he is told, and hands the cash flashcards to KELLYANNE who is expecting him, eagerly. He sits down in the map room, making notes. IVANKA walks in and reads the piece of paper JARED is working on. It’s the list of people who validate him.]
IVANKA: Remove me from your list and then erase Steve Bannon’s wipe board. Leave every fourth word so that the mainstream media can speculate about what message Bannon is transmitting to his neo-Nazis. [IVANKA claps her hands to indicate to JARED to hurry up.] I’m going on book tour. You have the children and Bannon until I’m back.
JARED: Joyce told me that the $100,000 bill isn’t in circulation anymore.
IVANKA [exiting]: A shame. Daddy would’ve liked some of Woodrow Wilson’s policies.
this video is incredible and very of interest to many
For the past 33 years, The Criterion Collection has been “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements” and includes films like The 400 Blows, Hoop Dreams, and Seven Samurai. One of the more unusual movies in the collection is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. You definitely won’t find many other films with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 39% in there.
On the commentary track included on the Armageddon DVD, Ben Affleck goes off for a couple of minutes about the scene where Bruce Willis’ character argues for sending oil drillers into space rather than training astronauts to drill. It’s hilarious.
I asked Michael why it’s easier to train oil drillers to be astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to “shut shut shut the fuck up.” So that was the end of that talk. … See here’s where we demonstrate that because Bruce is gonna tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. See, he’s a salt of the earth guy and the NASA nerdonauts don’t understand his salt of the earth ways, his rough and tumble ways. Like somehow they can build rocket ships but they don’t understand, like what makes a good tranny.
But Ben Affleck is far from finished with this movie. He recounts an argument wherein an incredulous Michael Bay asked him why he’d never learned how to pretend like he was floating in acting school. Affleck told him most acting training does not, in fact, include “weightless mime.”
You guys. I’m telling you. Coffee has entered its “new wave” (which we are NOT calling “fourth wave,” which is just SO fourth wave) so I think we can now proclaim that Food is over. (Except it can never be “over” or “dead” or “sucky” or “disrupted” so I guess this is purgatory.)
In Britain and Ireland, a large number of enterprising early birds made a living waking people for work.
A knocker-up would be paid a few pence a week to make the rounds and rouse workers, banging on their doors with a short stick or rapping on upper windows with a long pole. The knocker-up would not move on until he received confirmation that his drowsy client was up and moving.
The profession died out in the 1920s as alarm clocks became cheaper and more reliable, but a few specialized knockers-up — such as Doris Weigand, employed by a railway depot to summon workers for short-notice shifts — survived for a few decades more.
Just in case your newsfeed doesn't look like mine and you aren't fully satisfied with the amount of horror in the world, there are currently small concentration camps for gays in Chechnya!
by Dan Savage
Katie Couric asked a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman about the torture and killing of gay men in Chechnya.
Gay men have never had an easy life in Chechnya. But the targeted, collective punishment of gays that began last month under its pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, is a new turn in the region’s long history of rights abuses. Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, first reported the pogrom, saying that at least 100 gay men had been arrested and three killed in the roundup. Human Rights Watch corroborated those findings.... The men were held for as little as a day or as long as several weeks, according to Human Rights Watch and to interviews with gay men who later escaped the region. Some “returned to their families barely alive from beatings,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director for Human Rights Watch. Among the fatalities documented by the organization were one man who succumbed during torture and two others who died in “honor killings” by relatives after the police released them.
Chechnya's leader—an appointee and puppet of Vladimir Putin's—has pledged to cleanse Chechnya of gay men by Ramadan while spokespersons for his government deny that there are any gay men in Chechnya at all:
In a telephone interview, Mr. Kadyrov’s spokesman, Alvi Karimov, said the reports of an anti-gay pogrom had to be false because such men did not exist in Chechnya. “In Grozny, have you ever noticed people who, by their appearance or manners, resemble people who are oriented in the wrong way?” Mr. Karimov asked. “A policy is developed for a problem,” he said, referring to a report that said the arrests were official policy. “I can officially say there is no policy because there is no problem. If there were a problem, there would be a policy.”
Chechnya is a Russian federal Republic, it's a part of Russia proper, the leader of Chechnya was appointed by Putin, he serves at Putin's pleasure, and nothing happens in Chechnya without Putin's approval. Putin is responsible. Thank you, Katie Couric, for pressing Putin's mouthpiece to address this issue.
did anyone see that video of the guy who was like “im really good at finding moles” and hes saying that hes gonna pull a mole right out of the ground and for a few seconds youre like ok whats the joke and then he just squats down to the grass and and jams his fist into the ground and pulls a mole up
