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Why do guys “like” the sexy pictures random strangers put up on Instagram even though nothing but shame will come of it? Probably because having a dick gives you brain damage. I mean, I’m not a scientist or anything, but I feel like this is true.
Steve DyerGuys this blog is still posting.
I am your sister
Steve DyerJust a lot of different flavors of "wait, what" going on here.
Apple has more than $205 billion in cash. What should they do with the money? Apple should buy a university and rebuild it from the ground up.
In recent years, some private equity firms have bought universities and turned them into for-profits. The for-profit model, however, has yet to produce a world-class university. But consider Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, it was only established in 1984 and yet today with its online students it’s the largest private, non-profit university in the United States. Liberty University doesn’t get accolades but it is a technology leader and it shows what is possible starting from a small budget.
Apple is a for-profit corporation not a charity but there are plenty of ways to make money from a non-profit university. Aside from the tax breaks and other deductions, Apple University would be a proving ground for educational technologies that would be sold to every other university in the world. New textbooks built for the iPad and its successors would greatly increase the demand for iPads. Apple-designed courses built using online technologies, a.i. tutors, and virtual reality experimental worlds could become the leading form of education worldwide. Big data analytics from Apple University textbooks and courses would lead to new and better ways of teaching. As a new university, Apple could experiment with new ways of organizing degrees and departments and certifying knowledge. Campuses in Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Berlin, and Sao Paulo could provide opportunities for studying abroad. Apple’s reputation would attract top students, especially, for example, if it started with a design and business school. Top students would lead Apple University to be highly ranked. The more prestigious Apple University became the greater would be the demand for Apple University educational products.
Apple already has the beginning of this model with iTunes U and its own internal Apple University for training in business and design. By buying a university, Apple would commit to a learning process to develop these technologies in entirely new ways.
More than a century ago Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller used their industrial-age fortunes to build some of our best universities. Isn’t it time for another great university built for the information age?
Originally posted on September 18, 2013.
Straight male here. I took a writing course, and some of us students created a writing group. We meet and workshop the things we've been working on. One of the guys in the group is gay, and a while ago, he confessed that he had very strong feelings for me. I didn't have a problem with this, but I told him that I wasn't into guys. The other day, he sent me an e-mail telling me there was something he wanted to discuss. We met for dinner, and he told me that despite the fact that I claimed to be straight, he felt like I had been sending him messages to indicate my interest in him. He said that this was cruel and that he felt like I was teasing him. When I asked him for examples, he told me that when we had originally been in class together, he noticed that I had started to dress like him, and that this was sometimes a way closeted men showed interest in other men. He mentioned that one week he had worn a red sweater, and the following week I had worn a red T-shirt. He also said that he felt like the stories I had been workshopping in our group were secretly about him. I admit I'm not the stereotypical straight guy—I have good taste in shoes and I like art—but I know what I'm into and who I want to get naked with. I never showed any interest in this guy, I never led him on, this entire thing has taken place purely in his head. I told him all this, and now he says he is hurt and doesn't want to see me at the group. He suggested that we share the group, alternating meetings, but I refused. We're both adults who should have the emotional maturity to handle this. Am I being too harsh?
Pulled Into Drama
My response after the jump...
Closeted gay men don't use colored T-shirts to send messages to out gay men. They use Craigslist.
Look, PID, Jeffrey Dahmer—aka the Milwaukee Cannibal—ate a friend of mine. By which I mean to say: Some gay people are insane. I'm not saying you're in danger of being drugged, raped, butchered, and eaten by this guy from your writing group. But the guy is—if your account is accurate—more than a little unpleasant and a whole lot batshit. Confide in some friends in your writing group about what's going on and be prepared to leave the group and/or form a breakaway group if Mr. Red Sweater continues to detect clues in your wardrobe. Also: Do not spend any more time alone with this guy. Someone who would accuse you of making super-secret passes at him via red T-shirts is capable of making baseless accusations about much worse.
And finally, PID, a bonus pro tip: Writers don't need a writers' group to write. They just need to write.
Steve Dyerholy shit
They say you hate in other people what you see in yourself, and in my case, that has always been true. I get annoyed when people can’t keep a conversation going even though I constantly find myself struggling to think of what to say. I’m agitated when people merge into my lane without using a signal even though that’s been my modus operandi ever since I started my long commute to Los Angeles. And I especially loathe when people take the last of something even though I was talking about how much I wanted to have it behind them in line.
I’m sorry, guy who also wanted a honey bran muffin! I know your pain.
I think the adage is also true of other people’s spending. I’m prone to buying the most ridiculous stuff: expensive food from food trucks, saltwater spray in a bid to get wavier hair (sidenote: there is literally no saltwater spray that will actually give you wavy hair if yours is straight), lipstick colors in varying shades of reddish pink that already look exactly like my natural lip color.
Unfortunately, my boyfriend is also prone to ridiculous purchases.
He tells me he has $20 in his checking account and receives exactly 10 minutes of pity from me before he reveals that it’s because he bought a new, ultra-slim wallet he saw in GQ or a new watch even though he already has a bunch or, my least favorite, gun parts that he doesn’t actually need. At which point, all of my sympathy recedes to reveal pure irritation. He then refuses to eat food for two weeks to preserve that $20, only to spend his next paycheck on something I consider equally ridiculous.
Of course, in that same timeframe, I’ll probably get a new pair of shoes or a bag or a genuine leather passport holder for no apparent reason. It doesn’t stop me from getting annoyed, though.
“Let me pay for your food,” I say. “OK, let’s split the check,” I say after he refuses that initial offer. (That’s another thing: we’re both stubborn, so he refuses to let me pay even when he hasn’t eaten the entire day.)
“I’ll just pay for yours so you can eat and then I’ll watch you,” he replies, which is absolutely ridiculous and slightly creepy. Sometimes I even sneak food in his backpack just so he’ll eat something that isn’t his customary ultra-cheap lunch of Mountain Dew and peanuts or—even worse—nothing.
This came to a head recently in, of all places, a Wingstop which, sidenote, is absurdly expensive for wings.
“I’m thinking of selling off some of my stocks to pay off my credit card debt,” he told me. (Another sidenote: he has quite a bit invested, while having nothing in his savings account. I don’t judge, as I just opened my own savings account approximately two weeks ago.)
“That sounds like a great idea!” I said.
“Yeah, but actually I might just sell of a quarter of it and then use half of that to pay off some of the debt.”
I paused. “What will you do with the other half then?”
“Oh,” he said, and smiled. “Probably buy night vision goggles!”
And that’s how we began fighting in a Wingstop. I pleaded with him to just pay off his debt. He had enough to do so with plenty left over and it was accruing interest.
“But,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice, “I really want night vision goggles.”
In the end he did sell off his stocks and intends to pay off his debt – although, in truth, he hasn’t yet. “I’m waiting for the transaction to go through,” he tells me every time I ask. Time will tell.
If I see night vision goggles in his room, I will know. And I will pick another fight in a Wingstop if I have to.
The one bonus is that his spending has made me take a look at mine. I’m no longer receiving a weekly package containing something I don’t really need: goodbye, fancy day planner! I bring my lunch instead of buying overly expensive food. I heavily research things I’m thinking of getting to make sure they’re worthwhile products: no more spontaneous mascara buying or trying out weird and random snacks at Trader Joes.
I’ve also learned to understand other people’s seemingly whimsical purchases more. To him it’s worth it to eat peanuts to get something he wants. I don’t have to like it, but I do have to let it go. And, in the meantime, slip him some healthier snacks to offset all that Mountain Dew.
Ashley Burnett is a writer living in California. You can see both her short stories as well as other articles she’s written on her website ashleyburnett.net.
Steve DyerI HAVE A GREAT TRACK RECORD
A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on
New York City’s last great local gossip item, the “Page Six Team”-bylined story “Marc Jacobs hosts a wild, 10-person orgy,” really delivers the goods right in the headline. Ten men! An orgy, it seems safe to say, is definitely an orgy if it contains double digits. But those are not the facts: The digits in this orgy were at minimum eleven, as the text clearly indicates that “the single designer hosted an orgy over the weekend with up to 10 people, whom he invited via Grindr.” Bless! That’s so much work on a little iPhone keyboard.
Where does an orgy stop and start? Two is a mating and three is a threeway. Because four is a fourgy, you would think that five is logically an orgy, but no, five is two couples who keep forgetting about the creepy guy cranking it in the corner. Six is an accident, you didn’t get enough for a gangbang but you got too many for something more innocent and lovely. Six is gross. Seven is probably a really mild semi-orgy, an afternoon tea time of group sex. Seven is your grandmother’s orgy, polite and manageable, with people ducking out for treats when winded. Eight is certainly enough to hide from someone with bad pheromones or gross genitalia. Nine, though: nine is when we create the bare underpinnings of an orgy. The gross orgy about to break out in Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress has ten at the table. Couture’s Romains de la décadenc has a whole passel, more than a dozen; a Tom of Finland orgy never has fewer than eleven. In the Dutch engravings for de Sade’s Juliette from 1789, each panel seems to get more and more participants, and sprinkled throughout are highly unlikely and McMartin preschool-style sky-high pileups, but it ends, as far as we can tell, with an even dozen. If you have twelve people of any gender, you always have an orgy. And if you can’t quite remember how many there were, you’re definitely on your way.
Coupled with an very lengthy premature obituary for the career of Marc Jacobs published over the weekend, the Post seems to be trying to tell the world that Jacobs is off the wagon and back on the sauce. (“Jacobs is reportedly sober,” goes the orgy item; he’s plagued by a “mystery” goes the obit.) Like a trial lawyer, whenever the Post refers to a mystery, they always have an answer at hand.
Jacobs doesn’t address that text, and also doesn’t do himself any favors by aggressively clapping back to both items on Instagram. But would you have the willpower to resist? I certainly wouldn’t. Defensiveness never plays, but it does get you a million comments, most of which involve some variation of “yaassss” and “slayyyy” and various nail-painting + praise-hands emoji stringlets. Do those folks buy handbags? I’d say they do not. Still, lots of people think if you live like a diva you somehow won’t also die alone and afraid and regretful in a cold bathroom with a needle in your arm.
Steve Dyerew
Steve DyerI watched the first 5 episodes of this on the plane, it's pretty good! Does anyone else watch it? Should I prioritize? I feel like Nate either loves or loathes.
Steve DyerWho watched? Larry David obviously murdered everything and everyone. Demi Lovato surprised me with how great her performance was. But this episode made me feel kind of sad, because all of the good parts were either happening in spite of Tracy or when he was offscreen.
Also armbutts
Also Tracy said Jane Krakowski's name wrong in the goodbyes.
Steve DyerThe charts of (something) as independent variable and (animal size) or (log of animal size) as dependent variable are endless and amazing.
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/23/new-law-of-urination-mammals-take-21-seconds-to-pee/
A recent paper found that the time it takes for an animal to move the length of its own body is largely independent of mass. This appears to hold from tiny bacteria on up to whales -- that's more than 20 orders of magnitude of mass. The paper's argument as to why this happens relies on scaling laws. Alex Klotz explains.
A well-known example is the Square-Cube Law, dating back to Galileo and described quite well in the Haldane essay, On Being the Right Size. The Square-Cube Law essentially states that if something, be it a chair or a person or whatever, were made twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as deep, its volume and mass would increase by a factor of eight, but its ability to support that mass, its cross sectional area, would only increase by a factor of four. This means as things get bigger, their own weight becomes more significant compared to their strength (ants can carry 50 times their own weight, squirrels can run up trees, and humans can do pullups).
Another example is terminal velocity: the drag force depends on the cross-sectional area, which (assuming a spherical cow) goes as the square of radius (or the two-thirds power of mass), while the weight depends on the volume, proportional to the cube of radius or the first power of mass. As Haldane graphically puts it
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes."
Scaling laws also come into play in determining the limits of the size of animals: The Biology of B-Movie Monsters.
Tags: biology physics scienceWhen the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.
Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).
A Saudi prince is up to no good, the New York Post reports:
A Saudi Arabian prince is accused by three female staffers of acting like a bizarre party boy — engaging in a gay-sex act in front of them, threatening a woman’s life, demanding that an assistant fart in his face while others watched and declaring, “I am a prince and I do what I want,” according to a report.
Prince Majed bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who is the son of the late King Abdullah, allegedly engaged in the lurid behavior at his $37 million mansion in Beverly Hills, according to a lawsuit flied by a trio of women who worked for him there.
The lawsuit accuses Al Saud, 29, of being drunk and on drugs — and of making crude sexual advances on men and women alike.
CNN confirms…
The post Headline of the Day appeared first on Towleroad.
Steve Dyeroop
Steve DyerI've had a range of AirBnB experiences over the past 2 weeks!
Airbnb. Amazing. Airbnb “believes that people can and should feel like they belong anywhere in the world.” Strongly agree. Hundreds of thousands of hosts. Tens of millions of users. 500,000 stays a night. A re-imagination of the notion of property. Incredible.
However, Airbnb investor Sam Altman says:
Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage.
That’s bad. But:
75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses.
That’s good! So why not let Airbnb help them even more. That’s where ReHome comes in.
Startup idea: ReHome will let renters and homeowners spend as little time in their homes as is necessary to keep them. By providing affordable sleep-work-live arrangements in extremely space-optimized towers located at or near public transit termini, ReHomes allow sharing economy rentrepreneurs to lease a bed in a beautifully efficient open-plan space. (The spaces could be inside of used shipping containers or former public housing, or even former disrupted office and residential buildings—ReHousing isn’t about the specific space, right, it’s an IRL API for the opportunities inside of it.)
Right, so your stay will be all-inclusive: A mattress (Casper Lite Coil Spring), collaborative bathrooms, and Wi-Fi in cases where cellular service is not available in this part of town. Since these towers may be outside affordable delivery zones, so ReHome, in partnership with Soylent and Beyond Food (formerly Beyond Meat), will offer consumption plans.
This is just a pitch. First things first, right, so we’ll use existing home-havers to scale ReHome. But this idea has real potential. At scale, ReHome could offer financing to partners in order to lease or purchase properties. These deals would be revolutionary: priced not only in dollars but in time. Right so ReHome could finance your home on a set monthly payment plan. $4000 a month with zero days shared could be reduced to $3000 a month with five days shared. ReHome could take care of the rental—either through future partners Airbnb or a future rental service of our own. ReHome would not own these properties it rents or finances, right. So that would be handled by an unbundled partner company called ReBank.*
ReHome will provide an app to help you determine your best home/ReHome living balance. Whether you need to stay in a ReHome for one day a week to make rent, or six days a week to make your mortgage, ReHome’s on-demand real-time pricing model has an option for you. Not yet broken into the personal shelter market? A ReHome is a great way to incubate your dream of renting a home near a population center, where you can enjoy the fruits of the Logistics and Leisure Revolution, such as solid food, and then renting that home to inspiring influencers from other cities.**
ReHomes are ultimately about community. Right? So you can Network with fellow free-working rentrepreneurs to get an edge over fellow Taskrabbit, Uber and Amazon Flex partners via sharing learnings.***
ReHome would also offer to its partners a rewards program. Helping to clean the ReHome space, or shuttling ReHome parters from their homes to their ReHomes, can earn you extra free nights. Save up enough free nights and you can redeem them for an extra night in your own home, credited as a client night. Right. So.
Anyway. Let me know. I’m searching for investors and a co-founder. I’m more of an ideas guy so I need someone good with computers.
*Not an FDIC bank
**ReHome Partners are not “guests” and their co-sleeping are not spaces “rooms.” Each cubicle area gate is compatible with industry-leading padlocks.
***Formal labor organization is counter to the spirit of ReHome and is not allowed on ReHome-licensed premises
Steve DyerI really like this, in that West-Wing-episode-with-an-upside-down-map kind of way.
Drawing upon the work of colleagues, historian Michael Todd Landis proposes new language for talking about slavery and the Civil War. In addition to favoring "labor camps" over the more romantic "plantations", he suggests retiring the concept of the Union vs the Confederacy.
Tags: Civil War history language Michael Todd Landis slaverySpecifically, let us drop the word "Union" when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in "Union troops" versus "Confederate troops." Instead of "Union," we should say "United States." By employing "Union" instead of "United States," we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a "sandy foundation" (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.
Steve DyerI laughed at the first sentence.
British Olympic Race Walker Tom Bosworth has come out as gay in an interview with the BBC.
Bosworth, who plans to compete in Rio 2016 Olympics, is the first professional British track athlete to come out of the closet. He holds the British record over 5,000 and 10,000 meters.
He told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire:
“It’s a scary thing. I’m really lucky. I’ve got a loving partner, a great family behind me, a great setup in Leeds, and everyone is really supportive and really welcoming, but that’s not the same for everybody else in this world today, even in 2015. It’s difficult for people to speak with their friends and family about a lot of different issues, and in sport I don’t think being gay is still a normal thing.”
“Why?” Derbyshire asked.
“That’s a good question. I don’t think I have an answer for that. In most other things now it’s very normal to have a gay colleague who teaches anything, any sort of line of work it’s very common to be open, but in sport it’s not.”
Bosworth tells BBC that British distance runner Mo Farah was very supportive when he told him, but things haven’t always been that way with fellow athletes. He was verbally abused a few years ago, and worse before that:
A group of lads used to gang up on me and the worst episode came when they smashed my head through a window after a run-in. I decided not to tell anyone about it, so my parents or teachers didn’t know. I guess I was more worried about people blaming me than the students but I had the support of my friends to get me through that tough time.
It was a decade ago, so I’d like to think that things have moved on a lot since then, even in schools, and that kids are more tolerant these days.
That experience taught me to ignore lone voices. I know there will always be people who have a problem with my sexuality, but one person’s opinion doesn’t affect me now, as I have support from my parents and partner.
I’m not even sure I can change the opinions of those boys. All I want to do is give a positive message that you can succeed in sport whatever your background. Be it gay, straight, black, white, religious or non-religious – there are no barriers.
You can watch Bosworth’s full video interview HERE.
Bosworth posted this to Instagram today:
Here’s a video of Bosworth training:
The post Tom Bosworth: British Olympic Hopeful Comes Out as Gay, Makes History: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.
Steve Dyeruh oh
Steve DyerThis is a very very very funny show and I think it should have universal appeal.
Comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez has just released the first episode of his new comic web series, Boy Toys and it’s as absurd as you might hope.
A half-hour scripted sitcom, Boy Toys follows go-go dancer Ivan (Alvarez) as he deals with a breakup and welcomes an old friend from high school, Frankie (played by series co-creator Brad Wergley), back into his life as his new roommate. Frankie is an all around ‘newbie’–new to LA and new to dating, or rather, sleeping with men. As Frankie, Wergley is the cute and spunky ‘straight man’ to Alvarez’s dry-witted but razor-tongued Ivan. One liners fly by so frequently you’ll have to pause and replay.
The show paints LA and its gay scene in broad strokes (“You’re in LA now, you’ve gotta learn how to lie”) that will doubtless be familiar to its denizens.
Comedian Jimmy Fowlie also shows up as Ivan’s confidante, Jeremy–who has something of a drinking problem.
5 more episodes are slated to be released in the coming weeks. Check back HERE for all the latest episodes! And watch the first episode below:
The post New Gay Web Sitcom ‘Boy Toys’ Looks at the Absurd Side of Life and Love in LA: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.
Steve Dyerthis is so bizarre, who are these fucking monsters
Chris Pratt joins Billy Eichner in a new episode of Billy on the Street but it appears that most New Yorkers haven’t seen Guardians of the Galaxy, Parks and Rec, or Jurassic World.
And some of them are absolutely thrilled to have met Josh Duhamel.
Now you’d never make this mistake, would you?
The post Chris Pratt Joins Billy on the Street and Nobody Knows Who He Is: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.
Steve DyerThe punchline of this is so good.
Magazines, particularly the male-dominated magazines, which include basically all the magazines except the magazines devoted to women, serve their own purposes. They don’t particularly care about writers or their actually very segmented audiences, although at the same time they live in fear of a mythologized audience. Here Is Our Audience: He Lives In TriBeCa And Goes To Equinox And Isn’t Sure Where The Best Sushi In Soho Is Now. That he is actually only eight men and seven of those men don’t read magazines isn’t relevant. The male magazine audience member also lives in a perpetual state of divorce and horniness: he must be, all at once, 43 sex tips and best husband and hot dad and also on the prowl. Abs Man and Dad Bod alike! The Male Magazine itself, having passed on over through its emotional crisis, lives in a sad new bachelor apartment of the mind, in a conference room and on an email chain. The “general interest” (male) magazine editor is always waiting for his boss to come back from Milan and tear up all the work everyone has done in the last week. The magazine male has a reasonable fear of commitment to a way of writing a piece. The magazine male is often punished. In the world of the magazine by committee, no profile or essay can satisfy.
The magazine piece lives in a horrifying multiverse, where every possible version of the piece must be executed and then discarded, at least in part to score points in the office game of alphas versus betas. This is workplace hamstering, to borrow the gross and useful term of the mens’ rights universe. I think when men are involved they call that gerbiling but that sounds too anal for what we’re talking about. Office Hamstering is the demonstration of workiness. An editor must prove that he works many hours. It can be unconvincing that one is important if one is not constantly closing a piece. OH I AM SO BUSY! I am already having had worked, I will have worked, I have been and will be working! SO BUSY.
And then, so truly busy, when the committee stomps on in. Senior editors must hamster as well, and they will do it on your story.
The committee will always peg a writer’s essay to a movie that is about to come out and bomb, which was pretty obvious even a couple months ago.
The committee will always ask you to “run some things by the publicist.”
The committee will always “have some last-minute ideas.”
Sometimes, the committee will save you from making terrible mistakes.
You really can’t complain about editors too much without acknowledging that sometimes they literally save lives.
It’s sad that few printed magazines allow the convictions of their story editors.
But mostly, an assemblage of bonobos are pasting up a magazine together, each thinking about the position he will be in when the editor-in-chief finally retires or is auctioned off.
Magazines have become too petrified to give us what we want. They’re right to be afraid, because we want all of the things. We are terrible! But then, magazines are antisocial media. So every magazine choice becomes agonizing, every edit inching closer to an infinity.
Maybe we have driven magazines insane.
this photo is the only way tell if this profile is fiction or not tbh pic.twitter.com/Xpnfq1DZ1t
— LW (@lindseyweber) October 12, 2015
Sometimes, magazine stories become gates instead of windows. This even happens at magazines that employ women! The manufacture of the story creates a distance between us and the subject of the story. You can see why women pop stars prefer to produce and execute their own content, rather than playing with the media to let it be created from them. There, sometimes, a subject becomes obscured, instead of revealed. Maybe that’s on purpose sometimes? Maybe it’s a byproduct of the system, where this one iteration of the story was plucked from the windowsill of all time and space. In any event, this is why T magazine should release the transcript of their Rihanna interview that was used for the profile they have just published. It is her first extensive interview in years. No one needs the media less than Rihanna. And yet, they have two hours of Rihanna talking for a piece that in this universe includes almost as much quotation from the writer’s Uber driver as it does from Rihanna herself. Thank the heavens for all involved, this published iteration of the story remains illuminating, charming, funny, insightful. It is filled with lots of really good ideas. And yet. The public words of Rihanna, which are so few, and so impressive, should belong to us all. Those birds want to fly free. Who is a magazine to keep us from hearing from Rihanna?
Steve Dyerit's friday, justin bieber's dad complimented his dick publicly on twitter, and all the fish are dead
I noted the other day that since the early 1980s, the world has lost about half of its coral reefs. According to a recent study, there's more to worry about in the sea: the ocean contains half the fish it did 45 years ago.
Professor McIntyre and his contemporaries believed that overfishing was inherently self-correcting. People might catch too much, but then they would stop fishing, letting the stock recover. They did not reckon on improvements in technology such as a monofilament line, factory trawlers, or fish finders that make it possible to catch so many fish so quickly that it can take decades for a stock to recover (if it ever does). Nor did he or his contemporaries understand food webs and ecological connections; reducing stocks of some species has more of an impact than others.
Update: Here's a PDF copy of the actual report by the WWF. (via @RachelAronson)
Tags: fish science