Steve Dyer

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 or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Browse previous contests here.

19 Overweight Animals That Should Probably Go on a Diet

nateswinehart:

Being good to each other is so important, guys.

by Dish Staff

Carl Zimmer unpacks a fascinating new study on bichirs (a type fish that “mostly live in lakes and rivers” but “will sometimes crawl across dry land with their fins”):

McGill scientists wondered what would happen if they forced the fish to grow up out of the water. To find out, they reared eight bichirs in a terrarium with a pebble-strewn floor. To prevent the bichirs from drying out, the scientists installed a mister to keep their skin moist. The fish grew for eight months, clambering around their terrarium instead of swimming.

Then the scientists examined these fish out of water. They found that eight months on dry land (or at least moist land) had wreaked profound changes to the bichirs.

For one thing, they now walked differently. Overall, they were more efficient. In each step, they planted their fins on the ground for less time, and they took shorter strides. Instead of flapping their fins out to each side, they placed their fins under their bodies. Their fins slipped less when they pushed off of them. They made smaller movements with their tails to go the same distance as a bichir raised underwater. Aquatic bichirs walk on land with an irregular gait. The terrestrial bichirs, on the other hand, walked more gracefully, planting their fins in the same spot relative to their bodies time after time.

Noah Baker adds that, beyond the fishes’ new walking style. “their bone structure and musculature changed to be more suited to a walking lifestyle”:

The results provide evidence for developmental plasticity, in which organisms alter their anatomy and behaviour in response to environmental change. The team suggests that this process, as demonstrated by the bichir, could have given the earliest tetrapod ancestors the ability to venture onto land. In doing so, claims [lead author Emily] Standen, they would have become exposed to the selective pressures of a terrestrial environment, thereby speeding up the evolutionary transformation from fins for swimming into limbs for walking.

via

In a few days, grills will be ceremonially set ablaze for Labor Day (“it’s the end of summer,” we’ll say, even though the first three weeks of September are still summer, technically and temperamentally). Many of those grills will be piled high with vegetables. Good: Direct heat and smoke can do lovely things to plant matter. But the most common technique for grilling vegetables, the kebab, is performed incorrectly by the vast majority of American grillmasters of the universe—even though most other countries mastered the technique sometime around the time it was discovered that fire hurts when you touch it.

Stabbing things with a skewer and putting them over open flame is just about as primitive as it gets, and we still do it because it’s 1) a convenient way to grill bite-sized pieces of food 2) fun and 3) delicious. Pretty much every culture has independently invented some version of the kebab, whether it’s brochette or yakitori or pinchos or satay or döner. For some reason, we Americans have chosen to ignore all of these kebab styles in favor of just one: shish kebab, a mutant version of Turkish şiş kebab that is a fairly simple riff on skewered grilling. If one had to pick a single way to grill vegetables until the end of civilization, it’s not a bad choice at all, with dominant flavors of lemon, oregano, mint, and olive oil.

Except.

The typical American kebab consists of cubes of raw meat or fish or shrimp, marinated (or maybe not), shoved onto a skewer in an alternating pattern with raw vegetables like onion, bell pepper, zucchini, and mushroom. These kebabs are then grilled, badly. The problem is that each vegetable needs a different amount of cooking. A pepper benefits from a hard, quick char, but a mushroom takes awhile to cook; it needs low or indirect heat for a long time. Zucchini falls somewhere in the middle, best cooked at a medium amount of heat for a medium amount of time. Putting all of these items on the same skewer and expecting the same amount heat applied for the same amount of time to cook each of them properly is the equivalent of putting raw hamburger meat onto a bun and putting it in the toaster: By the time the burger is done, the bun will have crumbled into ash.

The solution, which many Americans refuse to acknowledge, is that each ingredient should get its own skewer. Literally everyone in the world who is not an American citizen does this when cooking skewers over an open flame: Your chicken-skin yakitori is not skewered with chicken thigh; your lamb shashlik is not skewered with mushrooms; your peanut-rubbed chicken satay is not skewered with mutton. So why is your dumb green bell pepper skewered with a cube of zucchini?

Grill each vegetable separately, then combine them on your plate. This will be sort of a bummer for those who love the one-skewer-per-guest model; an entire meal on a stick just rubs us the right way. I sympathize! An all-in-one kebab is like a corn dog delivered by an Amazon Prime drone. Just the thought of it arouses me. But it can be—and in this case, trust me, it is—worth it to make things a little bit less convenient in the interest of flavor and texture.
It can be fun to treat these like little mini-courses or tapas; “Hey guys, the mushrooms are ready! Next up, scallions!” “That sounds great, we love you, grill-master!” And they will love you, because cooking all these ingredients separately is more difficult from the grill-master’s perspective. You have more things to keep track of on your grill; you have to know how to cook each individual vegetable; and it may be very difficult to have all these vegetables finish at the same time. But a properly charred pepper, a delicately blistered tomato, a slow-roasted smoky mushroom—these are wonderful wonderful things that are worth the effort and lack of convenience. SEGREGATE YOUR SKEWERS, AMERICA.

But! This doesn’t mean that you can’t combine some ingredients; vegetables with similar cooking needs can be grouped together. Here are some of my favorite ways to grill skewered vegetables:

— Skewering beans or peas is weird but fun; charred sugar snap peas are incredibly good and will be very impressive to guests. Char them on high heat quickly, so they get just a little blistered, then top with a mixture of lime juice, fish sauce, chili paste, and brown sugar (this is good on pretty much any vegetable; just keep trying it to get the balance right. If it’s too sweet, add more lime and fish sauce; too sour, add more sugar) and crushed peanuts.

— A simpler one: take mushrooms (the traditional whole button or chopped portobello mushroom work fine, or even a mix); put them in a ziploc bag. Take a microplane and grate several cloves of garlic (more than you think you need) into the bag, along with some salt and olive oil. Seal, toss, and let sit for as long as possible, up to a day, before skewering and grilling.

— Marinate several kinds of cubed summer squash, which all require roughly the same amount of time on the grill (not exactly the same, but close enough if you avoid crook-neck squash), in a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, and fresh thyme. This is a fun one because they’re all slightly different, in color and shape and texture, but can be grilled on the same skewer.

— Onions are a tricky one; I’ve never managed to cut an onion so that it stays together and grills evenly. Fuck it! Switch to scallions instead. You can pierce them right through the white bit, near the root, with a thin and sharp skewer. If you can, place the white part on a slightly higher heat than the green part. But the great thing about grilled scallions is that the green parts, when charred, are ABSURDLY DELICIOUS. You just want to make sure the white part is cooked enough to lose that raw onion flavor. Top with salt and pepper, or soy sauce and just a drop or two of sesame oil right before serving.

— How about fruit? Yeah! Grill some fruit! This is an opportunity to mixx it up a little, too: most kinds of stone fruit can be grilled together: cherries, plums, pluots, and apricots are my favorite, because ripe peaches/nectarines (did you know they’re the same fruit? True story.) are a little delicate for grilling. Serve with Greek yogurt sweetened with honey and some chopped mint or basil.

Skewered and grilled vegetables can be just as smoky and flavorful and ceremonial as any grilled meat. Or more! The sugars in vegetables can caramelize and the skins can char and crisp in ways that meats can’t, or shouldn’t. Grilling vegetables respectfully and carefully is a great way to celebrate the near end of summer produce before we move into fall. You can always have a burger in February, but the days when you can grill a perfectly ripe pattypan squash? Waning. Waning hard.

Crop Chef is a new column about the correct ways to prepare and consume plant matter, by Dan Nosowitz, a freelance human who lives in Brooklyn.

Photo by Joshua Bousel

The post The Most Correct Way to Grill Vegetables on a Stick appeared first on The Awl.

crazyforshoey:

my-darling-loki:

thewakeupcall:

this post is everything omg 

I seriously tried to scroll past this. I failed.

Aww :(

by Chas Danner

A reader thinks they’ve got it:

Mombasa, Kenya with Fort Jesus in the background.

Another reader:

Being new to this contest, I’d like you to know how much I enjoy reading all the comments that folks include. So much is really helpful to new participants like myself, BUT I really love the wisecracking comments and entries of the frustrated. Thank you!!

The View From Your Window Contest, driving readers to throw things our their windows since 2010:

I’ve never been more frustrated with a VFYWC than this week. Why? Because I’ve found this city before while searching for another week’s window, but I can’t for the life of me remember where it is. I can’t remember which window I was looking for when I found it, my cell browser history doesn’t go back more than a month, and I evidently wasn’t signed into Google Earth when I found it. Arrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!! I await the inevitable frustration when you reveal the answer and I immediately remember every detail I’ve been grasping for for the last 72 hours.

That reader will happy to know that he did get the country, but for the sake of suspense, we’ll get to that a little further down. Another:

I hope that’s Dubrovnik! I’ve walked the wall before.

That was the location of our 200th contest actually. They do indeed look similar. Another is thinking South America:

This totally looks like a view of Cuzco, Peru that my cousin sent me last year. Surely the gods would not allow me to so immediately and confidently guess the right view. Still, I will persist with my answer: The flaky-looking barrel tile, the crowding, distant mountain vista and general proximity of the structures to one another smack of the hotel room scene that was sent to me. But, I’m certain that we’ll discover this to be some quaint and distant Italian village whose claim to fame is as a supplier of the purest most virginal olive oil. Before I digress into further sarcasm, I must point out it is indeed a beautiful view, the blueness of the sky is quite captivating. Who knows, I may be within the same latitude, at the very least…

Too far south. Inching up the globe, this player notes an important assortment of clues:

We have a densely built group of brick and adobe buildings, mostly with clay tile roofs, overlooking a mountain valley. It is impossible to know for sure, but I think the flag on the parapet in the center of the upper half of the picture is a green-white-red tricolor, either that of Italy or Mexico. Either country works with these buildings and landscape. I’ve managed to stare at the flag long enough to convince myself there is something on the white stripe, so I’m going to say Mexico.

There appears to yellow lichen (Xanthoria parietina) on some of the roofs which grows…basically all over the world, but seems to favor coastal areas. So, mountains, valley, near the coast, in Mexico. In other words, just about anywhere in Mexico. The yellow color of a couple of the buildings reminds me of Oaxaca, but I don’t think that is it. The older parts of that city are in a valley, not overlooking it. (The worst part about this challenge for me is that every time I type the name of a Mexican town into Google image search, I get pictures of food. You guys are killing me!) Once again, I am reasonably confident as to region, but I know when I’m beat. Plus I’m thinking it may be Italy after all. Blind guess in (vain) hope of proximity: Taxco, Mexico, because it is on a hillside and the tile roofs seem especially popular there.

Many readers correctly identified the lichen this week. Another gets us closer:

I dunno, but there’s something about that fortress in the background that reminds me of some of the towns you see near the Bosphorus, somewhere between Istanbul and the Black Sea. Is that specific enough for you? Yeah, thought not.

Continuing to circle in:

Definitely Mediterranean, but contests have recently featured Spain, southern France, Baleric Islands, Greece. There’s a nice view of water & mountains behind a castle turret. I’m just throwing a dart at the board and guessing Tunis, Tunisia.

Another was thinking Spain (again), but gave up when she instead “chose to spend [her] indoor time this weekend binging on the good-years episodes of the Simpsons marathon on FXX. D’oh!” Speaking of mysteries, a few years ago Matt Groening finally revealed the actual location that inspired Springfield. Meanwhile, this homer gets the country:

A village somewhere in Tuscany. I know the turrets one sees is a clue but I’m not sure what the ancient influence is. I’m guessing it’s a village somewhere in Tuscany, Italy.

Nice job, a Tuscan hill town indeed. Which one? This week’s very first entrant guessed right:

The lichen-stained clay roof tiles, the brick-and-stone architecture, and the gentle hills in the distance (love that deep blue color the mountain has) remind me of the touristy town of Siena, south of Florence. Plus, although the flags, hanging from poles on the two crenellated towers to the left and the center of the photo, are both limp (no wind…grr) I can make out faint red, white, and green stripes, with the red band hanging furthest to the ground—as it should as the red band goes on the right (away from the pole) if you fly it correctly.

This previous winner nails the exact location and window:

This week, we are in Siena, Italy, just a couple of blocks from the View From Your Window that you ran last summer. Unlike that unmistakable view, the submitter carefully framed the contest picture to avoid including the famous Mangia Tower to the left, leaving only some of the Palazzo Pubblico‘s merlons visible. While the view screams Tuscany, those merlons were the clue I used to find this week’s window. This photo from the hotel’s website and another from a travel website confirmed the location. The contest window is in one of the apartment rooms at the I Terizi di Siena at Via dei Termini 13. Although I could not find a room number, it is a south facing room on the fifth floor.

No heatmap this week as the vast majority of contestants got the town and window. And this one used a unique clue:

My initial reaction was that it wouldn’t be easy unless I got lucky. I got lucky. After searching for mossy terracotta and getting several Tuscany hits, I found the air conditioner shown on the next building appeared to be an Italian product. A search for “Tuscany fort village” led to the attached image of the Il Campo medieval piazza that can be seen from the opposite direction in the “view.”

This reader nailed the flags on the tower in the background as well:

The flag of Tuscany and the city flag of Siena.

A first-time reader and player chimes in:

I was using Google Image Search for keywords different keywords like “Italy”, “striped“, “wall”, “armament”, “merlon”, “tower”, “rooftops”, until I finally found the right sillhouette of the Palazzo Pubblico at Piazza del Campo. From there I used Google Earth and panned around until I found the right combination of roofs, chimneys, towers and the glass skylight, that is in the window. Hope my guess is right. First time I am taking part here, found VFYW Contest linked in this Der Spiegel report.

Glad to have you! Around 25K new visitors have checked out the contest thanks to that link. And we’ll have a post up on the amazing Bellingcat effort soon. (Update: here it is.) Moving on, many Dish readers have apparently been to Siena:

This image brings back that magnificent smell of wood-burning fires filling the air. Walking the streets of Montepulciano looked like an ancient city, but smelled like camping. It was the most delightful and unexpected surprise during my trip to Italy.

And love the dining:

I had one of my most memorable meals ever in Siena, right on the Piazza del Campo at sunset. Cinghiale in umido con polenta, a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino and cantuccini with Vin Santo for dessert. Fu meraviglioso!

And the influence on New England architecture:

I hope the photographer had a lovely time in Siena and climbed the Torre del Mangia, the tall bell tower at the Palazzo Pubblico. In a neat coincidence, Wikipedia says the bell tower was used as a model for Waterbury Union Station in Waterbury, Connecticut, site of one of last month’s VFYW contests.

Another:

Ah, Siena! Hard to miss, with the famous Torre del Mangia just out of view but the false parapets giving away the Palazzo Pubblico. The Palazzo looks down on the stunning Campo, home of the crazy Palio horse race, last held only 10 days ago (was a VFYW reader in town for the Palio?) Just to right of center, prominent on the horizen is the tower of the Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, now home to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, an international centre for advanced musical studies. Nice gig if you can get it. Just out of view to the right lies the famous Cathedral of Siena.

That’s exactly when and why our submitter was there. More on the race:

Siena is a great town, incredibly overcrowded during the horse races which are held in the town square. IIRC they are done bare-back so are quite challenging for the jockeys. The bragging rights if your contrada (city section?) wins the race are hard to imagine for an outsider but very real for those involved. In the Spring and Fall when the mobs have left it is a lovely town to tour, amazing old architecture, wonderful restaurants. Thanks again for these wonderful chances to renew old memories (and more often to explore new worlds).

Another advises that one of their “best travel experiences so far is going to the winning contrada house after the Palio for the most amazingly hospitable and electrified party of the year; and don’t bring any money, it will just upset the hosts.” One more reader’s process:

After a failed search of nearby hill towns such as Pienza and Montalcino, I cast my net further to the northwest (the only direction from which Monte Amiata has this profile) and happened upon Siena. Voila, I instantly saw a match with the corner feature of Siena’s famous Palazzo Pubblico. From there, I drew a line from Monte Amiata to the corner of the Palazzo Pubblico and looked for Hotels or B&B’s. Pretty quickly I converged on I Terzi di Siena.

Chini approves:

An easy view, for sure, but one that brings back nice memories. My junior year in college I studied in Florence and our program had us take day trips to just about every town in Tuscany. Lucca, San Gimignano, Pisa, Arezzo, pretty much all of them, and each more amazing than the last. So despite being 4,000 miles from the NYC, this week’s location is one of the few that I’ve been to, having sprawled out below your viewer’s window in the piazza as we ate lunch. Unfortunately, we were there in the fall so we didn’t get to see the Palio, but I’m betting your viewer just did…

This week’s view comes from Siena, Italy and looks almost due south along a heading of 170.1 degrees. The iconic torre del mangia is just out of frame on the left and the piazza itself is hidden by a steep drop and the buildings in the foreground. The picture was taken from the Camera Romana (Roman room) on the fifth floor of a bed and breakfast called i Terzi di Siena.

This week’s winner, a 12-contest veteran, comes from our vaunted list of previously correct guessers of difficult views:

Tougher this week. Learned a bit about mediterranean roof tiles to get me started and settled on Italy. After browsing photos of old towers in Italy, I came across the Palazzo Pubblico, which had the distinctive crenels in the upper left of the photo. Couldn’t get the view though until I came home from work and fired up Google Earth, which pegged the spot pretty quickly. The tower in the center right is the Fondazione Accademia Musicale Chigiana – Onlus, and just out of view is the Siena Cathedral, which otherwise dominates the skyline. The view is looking south from what appears to be Via Dei Termini, 17. See above for the window.

Congrats on the win! From the view’s original submitter:

The image was taken in Siena, Italy the day after “Il Palio di Siena,” aka “the most dangerous horse race in the world.” It is a view looking southward from this address: Vie Dei Termini, 13 Siena, Italy. I was staying on the the fifth floor and had a view westward, which had an obstructed view of a busy street, and a view southward (towards Piazza del Campo), which was straight from my bed. I much preferred the southward view! The best giveaway is the flag in the distance to the left. It is hard to see but is white and black, which denotes Siena itself.

Update: Had some technical (Time Warner Cable) difficulties today, but still wanted to guess-collage many of the wonderful visuals we got from contestants this week:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Lena Dunham was an anxious child:

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him. …

In our first session, Lisa sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Lisa is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a suit, sheer tights, and black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

Lisa lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Robin, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she can fix me.

The difference between Dunham’s childhood fears and everyone else’s is, in part, that hers were met with old-time New York therapy sessions out of a New Yorker cartoon and are… now featured in the New Yorker.

Which brings us to another issue, namely the anxieties Dunham herself inspires in a certain segment of the population. That segment being, I suppose, those who feel that all of life’s unfairnesses can be summed up in the fact of Dunham’s success. It’s a bit like how, for committed anti-Semites, every last one of the world’s problems can be blamed on Jews, with the crucial difference being that Dunham has – as far as I can tell – shrewdly incorporated these perceptions into her act. Many before her have passively resigned themselves to being the face of ‘privilege'; Dunham’s innovation is to not merely own it (as someone like Gwyneth Paltrow does) but go with it.

One can never just appreciate a cultural product Lena Dunham has created. One must always defend doing so, in anticipation of the ‘but-all-that-privilege’ detractors. The latest – and possibly strongest – apology comes from Jacob Clifton, who hones in on the key issue in his response to the essay:

We have a propensity for taking women, young women especially, at face value. Young women are not alone here: Dave Chapelle quit comedy when he realized the racists weren’t laughing with him, but at him; Kurt Cobain killed himself in part because his rapist fans were winning. I get infinitely more laughs with jokes about theater than I do about football. Taylor Swift continues writing singles about the haters because we’ve convinced ourselves that she isn’t making conscious choices to write about love, an abiding subject in poetry for a while now, but in fact just writing her diary for our consumption.

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash: Those are artists, because their experience—of white heterosexual masculinity—is after all universal. Everybody can identify with the love of a good woman, the vicissitudes that attain thereof, but nobody wants to hear about some dumb white girl getting dumped. …

Reading this first excerpt of Lena Dunham’s forthcoming book, preceded as it has been by a year’s worth of death knells and straight-up unadorned hating, I was irritated. Of course I was; it’s irritating as hell. But the funniest and loveliest thing about Dunham has always been, to me, the deadpan irony of exactly those choices. Tiny Furniture is every bit as self-excoriating as the first season of Girls was, and just as confusing for those of us (most of us) who find it hard to switch gears, to hear that register at all: The one where a woman telling you the worst things about herself is an attempt to bridge the gap, to create art that transcends selves, rather than to simply confess.

To learn about the wily bisexual, you may read this instead.

Much has been made in recent years of Lesbian Taxonomy—personality quizzes abound, and the lexicon swells with Sapphic terminology. But despite strides in genetic sequencing, no study has yet attempted to sort the Lesbian into her proper genetic tree. This is not surprising as, like the platypus, Lesbians were long thought to be a hoax, a fever dreamt up by ladies who spent too much time in the gymnasium, or playing brass instruments. The time has finally come for us to ask ourselves the hard questions: Yes there are Stone Butches and Bull Dykes, but where do they fit on the tree of life? Who were the first Lesbians, and where did they come from?

There is, of course, the oft-believed misconception that Lesbians are of the planet Earth at all. Such woeful error was exacerbated by the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which confused Lesbians everywhere with the line, “And similar in shape and girth/Was the children of the Earth/They looked like two girls rolled up in one.” I hope to address this and many more misconceptions in this study, which embarks upon both morphological and genetic analysis to construct, for the first time, the Lesbian cladogram—a tree-like diagram grouping Lesbian species based on their shared characteristics. 

To perform my analysis, I examined the physical form and mitochondrial DNA of 115 Lesbians. It is true that, because mitochondrial DNA is passed down matrilineally, it is the same as nuclear DNA in Lesbians. But I chose it because of symbolism. 

Here’s how to read this tree: descendent species or groups lie at the tips of the tree, and their most recent common ancestor is represented by a node (the point where the line splits into the descendent groups). Sister groups are descendents that came from the same branching point, and are each other’s closest relatives. Can you rotate two groups without breaking any of the other branches? If so, those rotated groups are sister groups. Traits are marked on the tree; all species above one of these marks possesses this trait. For example, Bull Dykes and mermaids both share Lesbianism, but tides do not; Gold Stars and Lone Stars are the only Lesbians Who Can Withstand the Vacuum of Space.

Let’s walk through the tree, starting at the bottom. The first thing you will notice is that, contrary to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Lesbians are in fact from the moon. This should come as no surprise – witchery, long a favored Lesbian profession, is well known for coordinating her spells with the moon’s phases. While it was commonly thought that lunar craters are caused by meteoric impacts, it is now known that craters are in fact the launching points for Lunar Spores. In the harsh early stages of Earth’s life, many of these spores landed on the planet’s surface, where some of them became the tides—the others, the first Lesbians. 

And what of those spores that did not reach Earth? Floating around in space, they eventually coalesced into stars. Among these Lesbians Who Withstand the Vacuum of Space are the Lone Stars, Lesbians who initially form binary star systems with other Lesbians, but whose gravitational hold loosens over time, leaving them stranded. Lone Stars do occasionally stay friends with their former companions, but the expansion of the universe makes this feat difficult. 

Back on Earth, Lesbians quickly colonized the terrestrial surface, and soon branched out to every available niche on the planet. An especially interesting Earth-bound Lesbian variety is the mermaid—much as the earliest whales were terrestrial animals that reentered the sea, so too have mermaids given up their terrestrial lifestyle and become fully marine Lesbians. (The difference being that Lesbians were not reentering the sea, but entering it for the first time.) Though it has long been thought that the sailors of yore mistook manatees for mermaids (and drowned trying to pursue them), the truth is that the sailors of yore did not know how to swim, and that the mermaids, being Lesbians, did not want to sleep with them, letting them drown out of amusement. With recent increases in sea levels, which are not a product of anthropogenic pollution but of the evolutionary might of the tides, it is likely that mermaids will outlast us all. 

Unrestricted to the sea and the planet’s surface, Lesbians have also made themselves at home deep in the foundations of the planet—see the Earthen Lesbians. Diesel Dykes burrow for millions of years, emerging, like so many Sapphic cicadas, for rigorous mating, then death. Diesel Dykes have long been unfairly exploited in the automobile industry, and while some species of Lesbian choose to reclaim the use of the motorcycle, others opt for bipedal walking and hybrid vehicles.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing taxon are the Lesbians with Adorned Lips. Of particular interest are the Chapstick Lesbians, who appear to absorb oxygen through their lips. They are often seen rubbing their lips with moisturizing substances in order to maximize their oxygen-capturing ability.

Up until now, all Lesbians reviewed in this study have been six-legged, possessing an “extra” pair or two of legs. Though they are difficult to see to the untrained eye, these tiny legs are used by the Lesbian to steady her partner while mating. But now we venture into the Quadruped Lesbians. Representing Lesbians Who Molt (Ecdysis Dykes) are the Pillow Queens and Powersuits. Named for their pillow-shaped mound nests, Pillow Queens are ground-nesting Lesbians who arrange their molts around them in Lesbian-shaped patterns to give the appearance of being a much larger Lesbian—a very effective predator deterrent. Being ground-nesting species, they are often seen associating with Stone Butches. Powersuit Lesbians take a quite a different tack to predator avoidance—when threatened, they quickly shed their skins, revealing intensely shiny flesh underneath. While her attacker is confused by her shed skin and brilliant flesh, the Powersuit uses her dermis to strangle her predator. She must then wait eight to ten hours to regrow her skin, during which she drinks a lot of coffee.

Last of all, the Hoofed/Ruminant Lesbians, so named because they spend their hours thinking intently, and chewing and regurgitating grasses. Okapi Dykes, in dazzling feats of sexual selection, attract mates by somehow managing to pair patterned clothing that would not work on any other Lesbian. Bull Dykes and Deer Dykes, both sporting bony protrusions from their heads, are often mistaken for each other, though only Deer Dykes drop their antlers in the winter (Bull Dykes have horns, and keep them year-round). It is rumored that with every Pride she attends, a Deer Dyke gains a new prong, but this observation has yet to be tested.

It is my sincere hope that, as molecular techniques improve, science will be able to further to elucidate the Lesbian family tree. There are so many more Lesbian species that are absent from this chart, all of which will surely help understand their unique evolution. Until then, I will have to keep sampling.

Read more The Natural History and Cladistics of the Lesbian at The Toast.

by Chas Danner

One can’t help but think of our View From Your Window Contest when reading this news:

Last week, Eliot Higgins (who was the subject of a glowing profile in the New Yorker) raised £50,891 on Kickstarter to fund a new open source news project, Bellingcat, which would equip citizen journalists with the training and tools to carry out online investigations responsibly. Over the weekend, Bellingcat (which is the spiritual successor to Brown Moses, Higgins’s Blogspot that found that Syria had chemical weapons in its arsenal) has already had its first major scoop: It looks like it located an ISIS training camp.

Bellingcat used many of the same techniques as VFYWC contestants:

Higgins and his coworkers examined photos posted on July 21 by a Twitter account associated with Islamic State militants which show the ‘class of 2014 martial arts lesson.’ “It was possible to establish the time and direction the camera was facing using the shadows that are visible which narrowed down the location,” says Higgins. Other landmarks were widely visible constructions such as the bridge on this photo:

Higgins and his colleagues were able to find a bridge which looked similar in Google Earth.

To be more precise, Higgins used the tool Panoramio which relies on Google Maps to Geo-tag photos. That way, the pictures of tourists can become extremely valuable. By analyzing street lamps and Arabic letters Higgins verified the location of the bridge.

Kabir Chibber chimes in:

The whole process to pinpoint the training camp is impressive—and what is more impressive is that you can do it too. Bellingcat has a series of guides on how to geolocate photos and images. As Higgins explains his mission on Kickstarter:

The practice of journalism is continuing to expand and broaden. We don’t need to exclusively rely on traditional news media to do the digging and reporting for us. We—you—can do it on our own.

That’s absolutely correct, and the more people that realize it, the better. Having myself spent several years trying to make sense of the world’s amateur war and protest images, it’s simply amazing to see efforts like Higgins’ take flight. It used to be a lonely endeavor, cross-referencing cell-phone photos and YouTube videos with timestamps and foreign-language tweets to triangulate facts as best and fast as you could. But that being said, as all our window contest players know, sometimes there’s nothing more fun than a good puzzle, especially when the result of solving that puzzle is a clearer picture of an important world event – or maybe just the truth, for the sake of knowing what that is. I can hardly imagine the satisfaction of using those skills to catch war criminals and locate murdering jihadists, like Higgins and Bellingcat have done. This is the welcome next generation of citizen journalism, and I’m grateful it’s getting the attention and respect it deserves. Hopefully the Chini’s of the world will lend a hand.

Bellingcat’s full explanation for how they found ISIS’s camp is here.

by Dish Staff

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 or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it!

Previous contests here.

pokemon-photography:

blazikingdom:

thedevintownsendfanproject:

offside-goal:

guaridadelmalvado:

"shoes in spanish"

MOMMY ISSUES

JAPANESE PORNSTAR

But you guys need to watch the video if you haven’t already

I wasn’t expecting these to be clever.  

Every winter, ladybugs coat trees and hillsides in the Sierra Nevada mountains with bright orange scales. Each aggregation can contain millions of the insects, hunkered down in a kind of seasonal dormancy called diapause, and every year, collectors head out with snow shovels, nets, and bags to scoop them up by the millions. The beetles are sold to wholesalers, who offload the haul to farmers and gardeners as a living insecticide. This year, though, Arbico and Natural Pest Controls, two major wholesale suppliers of ladybugs, ran into a problem: there weren’t enough ladybugs to collect.

Both companies blame California’s severe drought and ongoing wildfires. According to one of Arbico’s sustainable agriculture specialists, Arianna Weisbly, wildfires have ravaged the ladybugs’ spring feeding grounds, while hot weather and drought have prevented them from entering diapause. "Global warming and human input (I’d wager most of the wildfires are human caused) have basically halted our collection," she wrote in an email. But there’s another, less studied possibility: that unabated mass collection has thinned the Sierra Nevada population of convergent lady beetles. "No one ever looked to see if collecting hundreds of millions of lady beetles from the Sierras each year was sustainable," Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society, a non-profit dedicated to invertebrate conservation, told me. In fact, no one is studying the population at all, so it’s impossible to tell how many ladybugs are gone—or why.

The Lost Ladybug Project, a citizen science program that tracks ladybug populations around the country, has noted for years that populations of many lady beetle species have been shrinking or moving around—the result of an unknown number of variables. For instance, between ten and fifteen percent of wild ladybugs carry deadly parasites, which may spread when animals are relocated for agricultural use or otherwise change locations. Some species also face competition from the Asian lady beetle, which was originally imported to control soybean aphids; it not only outcompetes the locals for food, it carries a deadly fungus.

According to Leslie Allee of the Lost Ladybug Project, losses of ladybug populations have the potential to increase the use of chemical pesticides, since even non-organic farms rely on the spotted bugs to keep pest populations down. "Ladybugs are part of complex food webs," Allee wrote in an email. "A reduction in ladybug numbers could result in a surge of aphids and other soft bodied insects, and this, in turn, could affect other parts of the web and result in reductions in plant health or plant survival in certain areas."

Each ladybug species has a specific feeding preference, but generally they eat aphids, tiny green dots that decimate food crops and ornamental plants. "Aphids will go after just about anything they can get their little mouths on," Brian Morris, the head of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, which buys and releases ladybugs into the park every summer, told me. That includes roses, corn, peas, cotton, potatoes, and cabbage. On top of their versatile appetites, aphids breed fast, and in large numbers. "Aphid are born pregnant. They’re like Russian dolls," Morris said. Other animals eat aphids, including lacewings, wasps, and praying mantises, but lady beetles, as ladybugs are technically known, are a favorite among farmers and gardeners because they’re cheap, ravenous and charismatic. From the moment they hatch, they prey on aphids with a voraciousness hardly suggested by our screensavers and desktop backgrounds. "If you're an aphid, that's the scariest predator in town," John Trumble, an entomologist at UC Riverside, told me.

So, instead of using chemical pesticides, many farmers and gardeners have come to rely on convergent lady beetles as a "natural" solution. (The most common agriculture pesticides deployed against aphids are organophosphates, which are acutely toxic to humans and implicated in colony collapse disorder in bees. The chemicals are nerve agents, dispatching animals of all sizes in brutal, twitching deaths.) One farmer in Washington state, who asked not to be identified, released two gallons of ladybugs across a hundred acres of peas in July—around twelve hundred ladybugs per acre. "I like the thought of using them from the standpoint of less chemicals, less harm to pollinators and other beneficial insects," he said.

Unfortunately, there’s a century of evidence that moving ladybugs around the country isn’t as effective at conventional pesticides at suppressing aphid populations. On waking from their winter slumber, the ladybugs are naturally inclined to have a snack and then fly off to warmer digs within a few days. "There’s tons of information that these are collected when they’re in the mountains, and when they wake up from hibernation they’re predisposed to fly. Basically, you release them in your yard and they fly three, ten, forty miles, and they’re in somebody else’s yard doing pest control," Black said. He suggests growing plants that will naturally attract ladybugs, instead of importing them.

Farmers who do release ladybugs will probably lose around ninety percent of their flying workforce within a week. A 1919 California State Commission of Horticulture bulletin noted: "After three days, fewer and fewer beetles could be recovered, and at the end of a week hardly a beetle was visible even if abundant food was present. Moreover, counts made in other parts of the field indicated that but a small percentage, rarely estimated as over 10 per cent, had remained in and dispersed themselves over the field." The Washington farmer reported similar results in 2014. "I do not believe a lot of them stayed," he said. "The aphid population we had was incredible. They should have had plenty to feed on," the farmer said. He said he’d be happy to try again next year, though, with even more ladybugs.

Some gardeners recommend spraying the ladybugs with a sugar solution, to glue their wings shut, to keep them around for longer. But rather than forcing adults to stay, Morris thinks it’s a better idea to rely on the ladybugs’ offspring. "It’s not so much the adults we release that control the aphids. It’s primarily their progeny, the larvae that hatch the following year, that really do the job," Morris said of the Central Park releases. "They look nothing like ladybugs—they’re a little scary looking." A female can lay up to five hundred eggs, and each baby eats around fifty aphids a day Morris believes that ladybugs lay eggs before decamping, though scientists have not confirmed this.

Assuming there are enough ladybugs left to capture, the practice will probably continue. "You can buy ladybugs that have been grown in a nursery, but it’s much more expensive" and not very common, Trumble said. It’s much easier to just scoop up wild beetles while they’re in diapause, regardless of the consequences. "If the population starts to bounce back, are collectors going to get right back out there to collect them?" Black asked. "I think we should curb this practice until we know what the overall impacts are."

Cat Ferguson is writer with a dog and an email address.

Photos by Oliveoligarchy, USDA, and scyrene, respectively

The post The Flight of the Ladybugs appeared first on The Awl.

avengah:

Get to know me meme → [4/5] current celebrity crushes → Chris Pratt

Just be yourself and forget all of the stuff you read in ‘GQ’ magazine.

unamusedsloth:

Office Safari. [source]

spankmehardsanta:

jinglemynargles:

nice try bing

scroogled

hextina:

flirting with your crush like

by Chas Danner

Only one reader correctly guessed this week’s view:

Way too easy. Come on, at least make us work for it. Its’s clearly New York City, NY, USA.

Another is packing his bags:

I don’t care where it is, but I could live there!

Another elaborates:

If every human being could spend two weeks annually at such a place, workplace violence and domestic abuse would disappear.

A confident guess:

Obviously, this is a rare, full daylight view of Lamplight Village, so often painted by Thomas Kinkade, The Painter of Light:

And available for just three installments of $16.66 (that includes a free, light-painting Thomas Kinkade action figure). Another has a less sentimental guess:

Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Because of reasons.

Or perhaps the UK?

This is a straight-up stumper. No (readable) signs, no cars, no people. no livestock. Six buildings partially visible, and a paved road running through, in some very lovely mountains. Let’s start with the mountains: those could be the Rockies (or other range in western North America), the Alps, the Andes, or somewhere odd like Japan or New Zealand. The sun looks to be more or less directly overhead, so let’s eliminate the southern hemisphere.

My first impulse was Switzerland, but the houses don’t look typically Swiss. My next impulse was Scotland. That feels closer.

If anyone is going to actually decode this (i.e., if anyone is going to get it without having been here on vacation and recognizing it) my guess is that they are going to figure out what is up with that yellow box on the side of the building in the foreground that looks like a hand soap dispenser. I am not going to be that person.

So for the sake of keeping my resolution and my sanity I’m going to throw a virtual dart at a map of the Scottish Highlands and say… Fort Augustus, Scotland. Hoping for proximity…

Another:

I’m really looking forward to finding out how the winner deduced this, because I haven’t a clue. We have that funny yellow box on the side of the foreground building, but after much googling I still have no idea what it is. Perhaps the style of the sign on the road evokes something for someone, but not for me. Perhaps the combination of the old stone construction, the slate roofs, the solid shutters, and the mountainous setting all add together in a unique way for someone out there, but not for me. Or perhaps the trees make it clear. The best I can get is somewhere in Europe.

Well you’re right about Europe. Another:

I think those who wanted a difficult contest got there wish. Just because I want to make a guess, I’m saying Rottenturm, Switzerland because it looks like it could be somewhere in Europe and that’s where my grandmother was born and lived until she was eighteen and fled Europe for the United States. The look of the buildings and the slopes behind them are how I imagine that town must look.

This reader better watch out for Uncle Sam:

That is almost certainly where I do my secret banking in Switzerland. I’m not allowed to be more specific.

Another Dish-informed contestant gets closer:

La Mare-aux-Geais, France. Looks like a hameau. Now where did I recently read the word hameau? Oh yes, in the Dish post about La Mort Aux Juifs. The description of the hameau in that post is two houses and one farm. So that is my guess.

This reader gets really close:

The landscape combined with the slate roof, stone buildings, and dormer windows is a good fit for the Pyrenees. But this is a really tough one to narrow down further. There are a million little towns and villages in the French and Spanish Pyrenees, and there’s not really a good way to explore them all. I’ve officially given up and will randomly pick the French town of Fos. I’m anxious to see how the winner(s) this week will identify the exact spot. Grit, determination, and many hours of browsing google earth? ESP? What will the secret be?

The Pyrenees it is, and the French side was the most popular incorrect guess this week. This reader gets in the right country, only the wrong part of that country:

I know this is probably somewhere in southern Germany/the Alps but those slate-shingled roofs, the mountains, and the green foliage remind me of the tiny sub-region of “O Bierzo,” the far western corner of the province of León in Spain, just east of the region of Galicia (in fact, they speak the Galician language there, too). Slate-shingled roofs are very common in O Bierzo as well as in neighboring Lugo province, but clay shingles are the norm nearly everywhere else in the country.

Alas, the only players to nail this week’s exact town in Spain were previous winners. For instance, a neuroscientist:

This one was fun. At first the general alpine-ness suggested the Alps, but poking around there didn’t turn up the right mix of architectural features. Cycling fans know that if it’s not the Alps then it’s the Pyrenees, so off to the Franco-Spanish border. The ridgeline matched one outside Vielha, Spain, just a stone’s throw from the French border and familiar to obsessive cycling fans who remember it as the teams’ home base before last Tour de France stage 16.

From there, it was a process of roof-matching in Street View to ID the right structure among so many pretty buildings. The rushing stream in the picture is a great hint. Based on sight-lines, I think the window must be the southern-most one on the top floor at 52 Carrèr Major:

Amazing. Contest #164 was from another part of the Spanish Pyrenees as well. And here’s the winner of Contest #166:

This was the most difficult contest in quite a while.

This week we are in the Spanish Pyrenees in the town of Vielha. For the building appears to be named Nere and the closest address on I could find is 54 Carrèr Major, 25530 Vielha, Lleida, Spain.

On the second floor of the building, there are two large windows that open onto small balconies. I believe the contest window is the one on the left when facing the building (i.e. the one further south). The window is in the box in the attached picture. I also attach one street view picture showing a snowy version of the same scene, but just from one floor down. And for good measure attached is a third picture taken from the parallel street across the Arriu Nere showing the building with the contest window and two of the buildings in the contest picture.

Rest assured, the more the difficult the contest, the happier Grand-Champ-Chini gets:

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. After a tough few days I needed a good view to hunt and this one made up beautifully for Dish Editor Chris Bodenner’s maddening eephus pitch from last week.

The lack of landmarks means that we’ve got a classic “hard” view on our hands, but its proximity to Spain’s biggest ski resort makes me think that there’ll still be a decent number of responses. Eight correct answers, perhaps?

This week’s view comes from Vielha, Spain in the Val D’Aran just a few miles south of the French border. The picture was taken from a sliding living room door on the second physical floor of the Casa Mijaran rental apartments (most likely Mijaran #1) located at 54-52 Carrer Major and looks east-north-east along a heading of 71.37 degrees over the banks of the River Nere, a tributary of the Garonne River. I’ve also attached a picture from the interior showing the likely spot where your viewer was standing.

Lest any regular players get too intimidated, this week’s winner was off by only 7.1km:

A really difficult one this week! I am pretty certain it is on the Pyrenees, given the terrain and the architecture, but finding the exact mountain village with the scant clues present in the picture is beyond me. Just for fun I am going to guess Arties, Spain, though I’d be flabbergasted if I turn out to be right.

Flabbergast away. Nice job.

This week’s view actually came from friend-of-the-Dish Jonathan Cohn:

It’s from an apartment in Vielha, Spain, where we spent a week in July. Vielha is in the Pyrenees in Catalonia and near the French border.

The photo will be tough, I think, but there are mountains and a bell tower in the center of town which are both visible in the shot. There’s also a creek/small river in one of them. That could help too.

We’ll do an easier view for next week. If you’d like to try and find out where, we’ll see you on Saturday.

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

How the media talked about a dead teenager, fifty years ago last month:

— NEGRO BOY KILLED; 300 HARASS POLICE; Teen-Agers Hurl Cans and Bottles After Shooting by Off-Duty Officer Lieutenant Kills Negro Youth, The New York Times, July 17th, 1964.

 
— TEEN-AGE PARADE PROTESTS KILLING; 200 March in Yorkville as Police Watch — Shooting of Boy Being Investigated, The New York Times, July 18th, 1964.

 
— THOUSANDS RIOT IN HARLEM AREA; SCORES ARE HURT; Negroes Loot Stores, Taunt Whites — Police Shoot in Air to Control Crowd, The New York Times, July 19th, 1964.

 
— Mother Hysterical at Boy's Bier, The New York Times, July 19th, 1964

 
— VIOLENCE FLARES AGAIN IN HARLEM, The New York Times, July 20th, 1964.

 
— Policemen Exhaust Their Ammunition In All‐Night Battle, The New York Times, July 20th, 1964.

 
— Editorial: Tragedy in Harlem, The New York Times, July 20, 1964.

 
— Malcolm X Lays Harlem Riot To ‘Scare Tactics’ of Police, The New York Times, July 20th, 1964.

 
— Few Present as Boy Shot by Policeman Is Buried, The New York Times, July 21, 1964.

 
— VIOLENCE ERUPTS FOR THIRD NIGHT; Attacks Draw Police Fire in Harlem Again — Outbreak Follows Brooklyn Rally Violence Erupts for Third Night After a Peaceful Day in Harlem, The New York Times, July 21st, 1964.

 
— Statement by President Johnson, July 21, 1964.

 
— Teen‐Agers Throw Eggs at CORE Unit Picketing the Police, The New York Times, July 22nd, 1964.

— Statement on Harlem Riot, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, July 21st, 1964.

 
— SCREVANE LINKS REDS TO RIOTING Says Other ‘Radical Groups’ Also Incited Violence—Mayor Returns to City, The New York Times, July 22nd, 1964.

 
— Powell Says Riots Can End if Mayor Meets 5 Demands, The New York Times, July 23rd, 1964.

 
— Relative Calm Is Restored To Riot‐Torn Areas Here, The New York Times, July 24th, 1964.

 
— POLICE BAN MARCH IN HARLEM TODAY; SPONSORS DEFIANT; Leftists Still Plan Protest on Department — Rights Chiefs to Discuss Riots, The New York Times, July 25, 1964.

 
— 'Hot Summer,' The New York Times, July 26th, 1954.

The post Fifty Years Before Ferguson appeared first on The Awl.