Steve Dyer

pregnant ferret [x]

It took an interview on the BBC. Seriously, watch it.

You need only 2,000 Facebook friends:

You’ve heard of internet celebrities getting paid to mention a product in a tweet or shoot out an Instagram with a brand in the shot. Now a hotel in Sweden is taking social media marketing to a new level by offering a free stay to anyone with a serious online following.

In the words of Stockholm’s Nordic Light Hotel, it “accepts personal social networks as currency.”

Anyone with more than 2,000 personal Facebook friends or 100,000 followers on Instagram gets a free seven-night stay at the luxury hotel, which usually costs $360/night. All you have to do is post when you make the reservations, when you check in, and when you check out, all with the requisite hotel tags. (“If the guest does not shares the posts that are necessary to take part of the discount/ free nights, the guest will be charged full price for the stay,” the hotel warns.)

The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Bryan Lassiter, a loyal MR reader.

A flummoxed reader:

Hell no. I … How … But … You know what? No. Just no.

Another took to heart last Wednesday’s MHB:

Based on the hinges of the window: Time Square Hilton. Room 420.

Or a remote island?

I’ve never been to Cape Verde, but this is definitely it.

A more qualified shot-in-the-dark:

You’re like a cat with prey – one week you give me a window that practically shouts its location from the rooftops, then today you give us this. No signs, no cars, no recognizable buildings. What are the clues? Desert-y mountains, a woman on a roof, a satellite dish (maybe?), the grate on the shutters. I was going to guess the Elqui Valley in Chile, only because I’ve been there and the mountains look a lot like the ones in the photo. But Chile is too prosperous, I think, to still have mud buildings. So I’m going with Huarpa, Peru, because the landscape is similar.

Bastards.

Or somewhere in Asia?

Unfortunately, I suspect it’s actually nearby to Jalalabad, but the relative paucity of photos means that’s about as close as I’m going to get. The mountainside combined with the lack of trees and the mud brick construction puts it somewhere around the Himalayas. The mud brick construction plus the funky window bars puts it square in Afghanistan somewhere. (Pakistan and Tajikistan tend to more modern construction.) For a largish city, Jalabad looks like the closet match to an area which has water (from a river), and enough moisture to grow trees on the hillsides and allow mud brick construction, but otherwise so dry that the high parts of the hills are just rock and sand.

Kabul is likely too flat and probably has better construction. And there’s an FOB in Jalalabad …

Another from that country:

Just a guess, but this feels like the Panjshir Valley to me. The topography screams Afghanistan (as I’m sure many of your military readers will agree). Given the condition of the road and the absence of any concertina wire or security barriers, I would assume the image comes from a relatively peaceful province. Moreover, the fertile valley in the background looks like somewhere in the eastern part of the country. It could also be Kunar, but my gut says Panjshir.

Or India?

OK, high mountains, south flank of the Himalayas, that is a pretty wide area. Not Muslim, judging by the colorful clothing, so scratch Srinagar and points West in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush. Probably taken by a Westerner in a small guest house or such, more likely to be found on Lonely Planet than TripAdvisor, so maybe an intrepid traveler or and MSFer on R&R. Plenty of such types in Ladakh, so should be close. Road looks paved and there are hints of large electricity pylons, so could be on the road to a hydro dam. So without checking every hydro plant from Srinagar to Thimphu I will settle on Alchi, Jammu and Kashmir, India.

Another is sure it’s Yemen:

I suppose it’s unfair that I immediately recognized this the moment I saw it, since I lived there for several years in the 1960s. This looks like Taizz used to look, before it exploded as a city. Since I see no terraced gardens in this picture, I assume it’s from the northern part of the country, not too far from the capital Sanaa, where the Houthis reign. This poor country has been devastated by the US’s drone strikes, along with so many other things reign.

Another nails the right country as well as the mountain range:

I’ll eat my shoe if this isn’t the Central High Atlas region of Morocco, near/in the Toubkal National Park (Jebel Toubkal is the highest mountain in north Africa). From the valley vantage point looking up into the snow-capped peaks, I’m going to guess the Berber village of Ouirgane, with many lovely old riads where one can stay while hiking in the mountains. This could be a view from the Dar Tassa, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it. I spent several wonderful years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, though my site was in the more heartbreakingly desolate Anti-Atlas mountains seen here.

Guesses were all over the map this week:

And a surprising number of readers knew the right country right away:

When I saw the photo I instantly knew it was Morocco. I visited Marrakech almost 15 years ago and I still have fond memories of that lovely country. I was traveling solo and spent a few days traveling in the Atlas mountains in a Land Rover full of Belgian women. We had an amazing time, seeing several casbahs, Ait Ben Haddou and bouncing down the high Atlas road to Ouarzazate (still my favorite place name ever). I need a good couscous and tagine now!

Another:

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, and this looks like the High Atlas region of that country. I’d say the photo was taken near Mount Toubqal, the highest peak in Morocco. It looks like there is a small village between the window and the peak, and after poking around Google Maps for a little while, I’d say the photo was taken in Imlil, Morocco. I’m going to go one further and say that the patch of green in the foreground is Aroumd, Morocco. I’m not sure about this “Aroumd” place… In Google Maps, you will note that although the English says, “Aroumd,” the Arabic still says “Imlil.” Anyway, I’d say the best chance at capturing the view in the photo is on the West side of town, looking in the same direction as this Google Maps image:

I’ve been following your contest for a long time – too long to have any confidence of winning. Maybe I will at least make into your blog post as an “also-ran.” My parents would be so proud!

Another narrowed it down using a key clue:

The landscape screams one of four places – the Moroccan Atlas, the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, northern Yemen, or the Af-Pak borderlands. The seemingly unveiled woman is typical of the Berber people of the Atlas, so I’m going with Tafraoute, Morocco, a wonderful collection of villages south of Marrakesh. Where exactly amongst those villages this picture was taken, I have no idea – no doubt others will be more precise.

Bad luck found this guesser of Tacheddirt:

Sadists. You wait until I move house, to a diabolical cable modem that doesn’t work so I’m hopping around the attic trying to get 3G. That’s when you transport me to a place I think I know: hiking the wondrous trail to Tacheddirt, whose Wikitravel entry baldly states “The only way is by foot, no roads exist. The village isn’t very big anyway.” Whoever wrote that has no soul. Like me, moaning about modems instead of the disastrous floods that occasionally hit the High Atlas.

Well, I did find similar windows in the Gîte Iabassene further east of Tacheddirt (h/t salimr at summitpost.org) But instead of hurling my now-wheezing phone against the wall, I will leave it to your army of fenestrophiles to DNA the laundry on the nearby rooftop. Still, thanks for the memories of a magical place and the last time I had no internet for a week, though then it was willingly.

Incorrect guesses don’t get more specific than this one:

Aaack! One of those photos that you can probably only solve by having been there, but I’m taking a stab at it anyway.The window grill screams Morocco. The wide white window trim on the visible buildings plus the mud brick construction of the nearest building backs this up. The mountains, most likely the High Atlas chain. Currently very popular with the trekking set.

After a couple hours looking through the different hotel guest photos of the guesthouses and hotels in the valleys leading to the High Atlas from Marrakesh, I finally decided that this was taken from the Yan Room of the Douar Samra guesthouse. Why? Based entirely on the photo to the right, whose window grill matches the grill in the photo you posted. According to their website, this room is in the main house and has a balcony.

But it doesn’t seem to be taken from either of these, since the terraces below don’t show up, so it is probably taken from a side window. I’m guessing it is this window right here:

Looking forward to seeing how close (or far off) I was.

Not far at all. A former winner nails the village and lodge:

It looks rather tough, doesn’t it? But if you get a rough idea of where to look (a mountain region near the Sahara desert), and search for some distinctive feature (for me it was the peculiar power-line), it isn’t that hard to find, after all. This week’s picture was taken from the south side of the Azzaden Trekking Lodge, in the village of Aït Aïssa, Azzaden Valley, some 50 kilometers south of Marrakesh, Morocco. Here it is:

And here is the view from one of the rooms (maybe the same as this week’s picture?):

These more difficult contests really demonstrate how truly gifted some of our veterans have become. This one has been playing at Grand Champion level for a long time:

The contest view is from the southern façade of Azzaden Trekking Lodge (aka Toubkal Lodge) in the valley of Azzaden, Toubkal National Park, Morocco, and faces the Toubkal Massif of the Atlas Mountains. The lodge is affiliated with the Kasbah du Toubkal Hotel in Imili which is located in a neighboring valley and is more widely known. The scenery, villages, and wheat terraces of the area are ridiculously stunning.

The construction and architecture of the earthen, stone, wooden, and grass house in the foreground of the contest view are fortunately quite distinct. Searches for earthen structures in Africa narrowed the possibilities to the higher altitude regions of Morocco and the northern Sahara and, from there, to the Toubkal National Park region. The prominent ridge outcrop in the contest window proved to be the clinching clue when I recognized it in an older photograph taken from the lodge’s terrace. Finding the lodge on Google Earth took longer given the scarcity of place names available for the area, but eventually the relative locations of the valleys, the mountain peaks, roads, and various structures fell into place.

I am guessing that the contest window is one of three windows on the first (lower) floor of the lodge because the view appears lower than those in photographs taken from the second-story terrace (which is most of them). I decided to go with the western-most of the three because it seemed the one most likely to capture the contest photograph’s view of the western side of sprawling house directly below the lodge.

This search was a treat. Thank you.

Another:

Great contest this week. The contest view comes comes from the Azzaden Trekking Lodge in the Azzaden Valley. The lodge is in the village of Aït Aïssa, Al Haouz Province, Morocco. No street address this week. Best guess on location is 31°08’02.3″N 7°58’28.7″W at 5950 ft in elevation. Jebel Toubkal, the highest peak in the Atlas Mountains, dominates the view out the window.

Online maps do not offer enough detail to determine the village’s name. The closest village they identify is Tizi Ouseem to the south of Aït Aïssa. A tour company offers this map that made it possible to discern the name by comparing the distances to, and following the valley paths from, Tizi Ouseem and Imlil.

With Aït Aïssa pinpointed, it was time to find the gite or lodge with the contest window. The distinctive metal work on the windows (example here), the angle of the view towards Jebel Toubkal and the road below each offered great clues leading to the Azzaden Trekking Lodge. Attached is a comparison of the overhead view with the contest picture.

Once at the lodge, however, the exact window was hard to find. First, the window is on the south wall but I could only find exterior photos showing the east and north walls and the west wall. Second, the interior shots are difficult to make out and three sets of windows did not match. This window is too narrow and has the metalwork’s pattern on left and right panes reversed. This photograph shows almost the same view of the mountain but the window lacks metalwork. And these windows in the lodge’s southwest corner are also slightly off.

But this window looks just right. It is in the southeast corner below the top level terrace. Attached is a picture highlighting the contest window. It shows the room’s interior and where in the lodge it is based on a photo of the east wall:

Wow. Meanwhile, Chini tries to play coy:

I give up. I can’t find it. I’m resigned. Defeated. Shattered. I’ve looked everywhere, from one end of the internet to the other. Just when I thought I’d tracked an answer down, poof, it turns out to be something else. Think this image shows the building? No dice, Chini. That look like a good angle? Figured wrong, Butch. Sigh.

So I have to leave things where they are; I simply can’t find a good, close up image of the southern face of the Kasbah de Toubkal Trekking Lodge in Morocco’s Azzaden Valley where this week’s view was shot. The exact coordinates of 31° 8’2.47″N, 7°58’29.03″W in the village of Ait Aissa and these overhead and exterior views will have to suffice:

This week’s winners are a relatively new husband-and-wife team:

So my wife and I have come up with the location the past two weeks, and we were looking forward to this week’s View. And from the first moment I knew it just had to be Morocco, near the Atlas Mountains. So then I spent the next 3 or 4 hours looking at countless hotel websites, especially in and around Imlil. And then, finally, my wife found the shutters! At the Azzaden Trekking Lodge in the village of Aït Aïssa in the Azzaden Valle, a five or six hour trek from Imlil. The lodge is owned by – or associated with – the famous Kasbah du Toubkal in Imlil. The Lodge has three rooms, all of which appear to have similar shutters. I’ve decided that this room picture is the room with the View’s shutters:

Anyway, after four hours of searching – and as much as I enjoy it – it’s now way too late to continue this. Also, Obama is about to appear on the Colbert Report and I’m not going to miss that! So no more pretty pictures or Google maps with circles and arrows, But I did love this tour video of the trekking lodge:

Fantastic job. It was a honeymoon view:

As a frequent enjoyer of VFYW in contest and non-contest form, I thought I’d take a minute to submit this recent, especially fortunate view that I had from the Azzaden Trekking Lodge in the village of Ait Aissa, Morocco, in the Atlas Mountains near Mount Toubkal, the tallest mountain in North Africa. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in October travelling around Morocco, and we hiked from the town of Imlil, where many of the backpacking routes start and end, to Ait Aissa to get even more away from it all. We were there during the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, where many people were back home for the holidays from Marrakesh and other cities and at night the sounds of singing and games echoed around the valley.

Here are a couple more shots, one from the terrace of the Azzaden lodge looking roughly in the same direction as the lodge, “up” the valley:

And another from the terrace looking across the valley to the village on the other side (sorry, don’t know the name of it):

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the friendliness and hospitality of all of the Berber people we came across during our stay in the Atlas mountains, in particular our trekking guide Ibrahim. His father and brother are also guides and so maybe someone reading the Dish will come across them one day! It was a real pleasure being there and I’d definitely recommend a visit.

For a Conde Nast Traveller write-up of the lodge, check out this PDF.

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

So the perennial habit of lefties playing protest police has struck again, this time in the form of arguments that white people are too prominent and present at protests inspired by Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I’m not sure how a mass protest movement can emerge in a country that is still 78% white without an outsized presence of white people, but such concerns are gauche. Of course, it’s a bad look for white people to get pushy in protests against our racist police state. You’d just hope the focus stayed on black bodies instead of the 13-dimensional chess of cultural studies, but I’m not the boss. Often, in practice, it all shakes out as “black people aren’t socialists!” which, aside from the fact that I’ve known hundreds of black communists and anarchists in my life, is about as parochial and condescending a sentiment as I can imagine. But it is socially convenient.

Of course, that article and similar sentiments are right now being breathlessly shared on Facebook and Twitter… mostly by white people. And those white people, in turn, exempt themselves from the critique by sharing it. They stack meta-critique on top of meta-critique, building an impossibly tall tower of theoretical structures, designed, ultimately, to exempt the ones who make the most arch, most complex criticism. “Aha! But have you considered this?,” asks the undergraduate. We have less a genre of essays assailing white racism, online, than a genre assailing other people’s white racism. White subjectivity has a voracious appetite; escaping it appears to be, for our progressive elites, like swimming away from the horizon. The next time I read an argument about white racism by a white person that isn’t fundamentally a declaration of personal blamelessness will be the first time. And I read all my own work.

In moments such as these, I always advocate an inversion of Gandhi’s famous maxim. Think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat. The cops neither know nor care what the word intersectionality means; those with the guns are above such concerns. Remember Occupy. Remember it was strangled in the crib.

CIA Torture Report

Shane Harris and Tim Mak report on the “most gruesome moments” from the torture report. Among them:

[T]he CIA also forced some detainees who had broken feet or legs to stand in stress-inducing positions, despite having earlier pledged that they wouldn’t subject those wounded individuals to treatment that might exacerbate their injuries.

The CIA’s utter incompetence is staggering:

While the CIA has said publicly that it held about 100 detainees, the committee found that at least 119 people were in the agency’s custody. “The fact is they lost track and they didn’t really know who they were holding,” the Senate aide said, noting that investigators found emails in which CIA personnel were “surprised” to find some people in their custody. The CIA also determined that at least 26 of its detainees were wrongfully held. But due to the agency’s poor record-keeping, it may never be known precisely how many detainees were held, and how they were treated in custody, the committee found.

Or whether they died. The NYT summary has this:

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

This is the professionalism we’ve been told so much about – the tightly controlled, thoroughly humane interrogation practices that the CIA could keep firmly within legal parameters. And what, exactly, did we get for this barbarism? Nothing:

The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed 20 cited examples of intelligence “successes” that the CIA identified from the interrogation program and found that there was no relationship between a cited counterterrorism success and the techniques used. Furthermore, the information gleaned during torture sessions merely corroborated information already available to the intelligence community from other sources, including reports, communications intercepts, and information from law enforcement agencies, the committee found.

Stay tuned as we mine the actual report for more info.

Previously in the series: Autumnal Shower

***

To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L.; Jen
From: Ali
Date: November 20, 2014
Subject: Friendsgiving

Hi Ladies!! 

Can you believe it’s November already? I feel like just yesterday we were picking apples and feeling like we had the world at our fingertips. This holiday season is crazy already, between all the travel, galas, and regattas. I just wanted to write to my ~girls~ and tell you how much your friendship and support has meant to be this year. I am thankful for each and every one of you! Even Katie, although she is the worst at liking my instagrams ;) As Alanis said, “thank you frailty, thank you consequence, thank you, thank you silence.” I am most thankful this year for how well Jake Gyllenhaal has aged and also for my friendships, which I plan to cultivate much more in the New Year.

I am focused on clean and holistic living for the rest of 2014, but if anyone wants to do some pre-Thanksgiving vacay mani/pedi/Brazilian (blowouts/waxes) before Wednesday let me know! I’m just really looking forward to some R&R. But also I might be hitting up some bar the night before Thanksgiving and might be running into someone from high school that I heard is recently divorced, so I am planning a revenge fantasy of making Jeff want me, then brutally rejecting him, then going back home for clean living and gluten-free Thanksgiving. Anywho, let me know if anyone’s down!

Xo! Ali

“I clench his hands to the point of pain. "Stay with me."
His pupils contract to pinpoints, dilate again rapidly, and then return to something resembling normalcy. "Always," he murmurs.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

Read more Hey Ladies: Friendsgiving at The Toast.

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book, a new Dish mug, or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Last week’s contest results are here. Browse a gallery of all our previous contests here.

anna

There may be a nascent movement towards reappropriating roadkill as ethical meat, but sustainable fur couture? Paquin was in uncharted territory. No matter: In short order she located a taxidermist in Vermont who schooled her in the nitty-gritty of skinning and — oof — scraping an animal pelt ahead of the tanning process. Her induction came in the form of a deceased raccoon: “We both had a shot of whiskey, I put some peppermint oil under my nose, and we found a branch in the woods to hang this thing from. It was super intense.”

There is more here, from Meaghan Agnew.  I found these estimates interesting though perhaps speculative:

So, how many animals do you think get killed on the streets of this country every year? Whatever your guesstimate, go higher: according to Culture Change, it’s  approximately 1 million a day, or 365 million a year. By comparison, Born Free USA reports that approximately 50 million animals are killed every year for their fur.

For the pointer I thank Hugo Lindgren.

I’m heart-broken today about what can only be called the corporate manslaughter of my alma mater, The New Republic. And yes, many of us regard that place – for all its and our flaws – as an alma mater, the equivalent of a college, and our time there as formative and life-changing. It was a cauldron of first-class minds and third-class temperaments, engaged in something roughly called journalism not for money or pageviews, but because they believed in something, and were prepared to engage every ounce of their brainpower to fight over it. Editorial meetings were tempestuous, ribald, hilarious, and unmissable – and the island of misfit toys that Marty assembled over the years taught me more than anyone at college or grad school ever could.

We experimented every week – and took risks others balked at. The editors I was immensely privileged to work with – Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, Leon Wieseltier, Charles Krauthammer, Dorothy Wickenden, Ann Hulbert, Mickey Kaus, Bob Wright, John Judis, Peter Beinart, Jon Chait, Frank Foer, Jake Weisberg, and many others – still today count as some of the finest journalists in the country. There is no dream team out there in opinion journalism today that comes close. Which was why, in its heyday, the magazine truly mattered – to its readers and beyond – in ways almost no journalistic institution does any more.

I know that era is over. I figured that out a very long time ago. But Frank seemed to me to be trying to revive it in ways that were often successful in both old media depth and new media buzziness. And that the magazine (now to be published only ten times annually, when I used to put out 48 issues a year) could be swiftly despatched in favor of a “vertically integrated” (sic) “digital media company” – that the very idea of a place where people would assemble, and fight over ideas, under the sternest strictures of reason and reporting and wit could be thrown out with the trash – was not inevitable. Hard to re-imagine, sure. Terribly hard to monetize. But still worth trying to grow into something that could change out of all recognition and yet also stay the same.

But the economic forces of new media are very powerful, and few multi-millionaires seem willing any more to lose their shirts in order to keep them at bay. That noblesse oblige in defense of the highbrow and traditional is now no more. And when I witness the death of these magazines and their culture – one of the great achievements of post-war American life – and I witness the new, fissiparous models emerging, it is hard not to feel a little despair. The new business models are anti-magazines, in a way. What matters online is not the fellowship of writers in a joint enterprise, but the shareability of links, the success of single posts in social media, and the merging of advertising with editorial that blends all forms of journalism into the same corporate, indistinguishable, marketing mush.

I wonder if we can still manage – as we navigate this new forbidding media economy – to recreate what we once had in some form. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that TNR could not be a vehicle in that experiment, even as many TNR alums are engaged in it; that it could instantly lose two figures, Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier, with uniquely strong institutional memory, and thereby make its digital future utterly unconnected with its storied past. Chait pens a eulogy today. It is not, I’m afraid, an inapposite word.

Five posts worth revisiting from this sad day in journalism: Pauline Kael’s TNR review-essay on Godard; a truly hathetic Stand With Hillary ad; the new masculinity of dieting; pushback against the pushback on the UVA rape story; and readers tackle me (once again) on the thorny question of affirmative action.

The most popular post of the day was The Right’s Response To Eric Garner; followed by A Question of Human Dignity.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here. A final email for the day:

I finally subscribed after reading for years, and now that I have, I thought I’d just take a second to say thanks for all that you do. I love the Dish. I love reading your opinions, which do not always match my own but are always reasoned and thoughtful. I love reading contributions by your readers, whether they’re countering your opinion with their own or sharing a personal story. You’ve really put together something wonderful here and what you do is so important. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Happy holidays to you all!

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Former President Bill Clinton speaks on stage at the New Republic Centennial Gala at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on November 19, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images.)

dirrtyflowerchild:

all-about-living-up:

adeventute time helped me get over my last breakup no fuckin joke i shit u not

literally adventure time knows their shit

The New Republic was never anything but a warmongering racist antileft trashpile and I hope the whole enterprise burns to the ground and if you are nostalgic about it you’re nostalgic for The Bell Curve, the war on Iraq, and Marty Peretz’s Muslim Hating Neo-Fascist Jamboree. The whole enterprise was corrupt right down to its colonialist bones and if some Facebook billionaire wants to turn it into Tinder For Politico Jagbags it could not possibly suffer in comparison. Shedding tears for Leon Wiseltier’s job is like worrying about what became of Stalin’s cat. I only pray for the day that your twisted obsession with Village bric-a-brac is performed by the unpaid interns that are the inevitable future of Big Media, which will be celebrated by you neoliberal clowns right up until some 17 year old earning nothing but 3 $9,000-a-credit-hour credits literally unplugs the keyboard from your workstation. Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.

THIS IS ALL I DO ALL DAY.

Read more The Best YouTube Videos I Can Find Of Eagles Snatching Things at The Toast.

cushion

Felix Salmon sees Uber’s international reach as its key advantage:

This might not be obvious to people in San Francisco, who are spoiled with dozens of hopeful and well-funded startups, many of which are doing much the same thing that Uber is aspiring to. But leave the Bay Area, and the fears and frustrations of trying to get a cab start getting magnified — especially when you’re in a foreign country. The value of Uber is only partially in the service it provides; increasingly, it’s also in the global ubiquity of that service.

I just got back from Rome; I took a standard white cab from the airport, and then took an Uber back to it. The Uber was much a much more pleasant ride, as well as being cheaper. But most importantly, it came without any of the anxieties that generally accompany getting into a stranger’s car in a foreign country. Such anxieties are generally small, in a country like Italy, but even the locals will warn you against hailing a cab in a place like Mexico City.

He remarks that Uber is “the first app which can deliver a three-ton glass-and-steel machine to wherever you happen to be, in any of 200 cities around the world, in minutes”

That’s why Uber’s bulls think of it as a logistics company rather than a taxi company: it’s fundamentally about being able to move things (initially passengers, but that’s already expanding), within city boundaries, with unprecedented levels of efficiency. Most impressively, Uber has managed to do this within a single app: it doesn’t have a different version for every country that it’s in. Anybody with an Uber account, no matter where they’re from, can automatically use Uber in any city in the world where Uber operates. This is non-trivial, and not at all easy to replicate.

Harry Siegel has a deeply moving piece about the second tape made of the killing of Eric Garner by the police. What he gets at seems to me extremely important. It’s about the way the cops treated Garner’s inert body on the sidewalk, ordering people to stay away, barely talking to the man whose head they just smashed into the sidewalk, still handcuffed. He gets no CPR and despite being quite obviously in serious distress, he is just left to lie there, occasionally prodded, his dignity stolen, for seven minutes:

A bit later, the cops and medics finally decide to get Garner into an ambulance.

COP: “We’re going to try to get him up on the stretcher. It’s going to take like six of us.”

They hoist him up and literally drop him onto a gurney. Or at least the left side of him. One cop catches his legs falling off. Another holds Garner’s shirt, apparently to keep the rest of him from rolling off the gurney. Garner’s belly is exposed. He appears to be unconscious.

VOICE: “Why nobody do no CPR?”

VOICE: “Nobody did nothing.”

COP (as he walks by): “Because he’s breathing.”

The camera turns to Pantaleo, about 20 feet away. He waves and steps out of the picture. The camera shifts back to Garner strapped to the gurney and being wheeled away …

As he lay dying, he was treated like a piece of meat. By Pantaleo. By the other cops on the scene. Even by the medical technicians. Had Garner been treated with basic human dignity after he was violently, and needlessly, taken down, he might not be dead.

I recall the way in which Michael Brown’s body was left on the street for four hours, as if he were beneath the dignity of an animal.