Pure breeding has also introduced medical problems for some breeds.
The English bulldog has come to symbolize all that is wrong with the dog fancy and not without good reason; they suffer from almost every possible disease. A 2004 survey by the Kennel Club found that they die at the median age of 6.25 years (n=180). There really is no such thing as a healthy bulldog. The bulldog's monstrous proportions makes them virtually incapable of mating or birthing without medical intervention.
For a white dude in America with a hot wife and a huge house and kids who aren't in rehab and a job that presumably pays at least six figures, Clark Griswold sure has a lot of problems come Christmastime! His family is annoying! Putting up Christmas lights is hard! He might not be able to afford a pool with his bonus! In terms of economic landscape, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation has aged about as well as a pumpkin in a swamp.
The film is ostensibly about finding the true spirit of the season amid a hellish, slapstick descent into suburban holiday dysfunction, but the film's "fun, old-fashioned Christmas" is remarkably steeped in wealth's economic markers, which I'll discuss in 2013 dollars.
On a recent five-star November afternoon, I decided to visit Trinity Church Cemetery in northern Harlem. Starting at the plateau on Amsterdam Avenue and 154th Street, I followed the winding paths down through a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves and crumbling crypts, which, glowing in the western sun, appeared almost transitory. As one tends to do in cemeteries, I contemplated the end of all things. Lately, I had heard murmurs about “the death” of the internet, and though inclined to dismiss such speculation as a form of insipid nostalgia that often clings to any recollection of the past—and really, what is the internet if not an infinite collection of memories?—I wondered if there might be some truth to the idea. As I ran my fingers over the fading inscription of a tombstone, it occurred to me that, if the internet were really dying, we might inter it here, in this most beautiful cemetery in Manhattan, the last one on the island that still receives bodies of the dead.
Much as I sometimes would like to bury the internet, it only took a few seconds to conclude that any conjecture about its death was premature. We were not (yet) living in a television show about a future in which the electricity has been turned off, leaving a world full of surprisingly clean heterosexuals who wanted to kill each other. Most people still seem to read blogs—or web sites—similar to this one, and if you’re like me, you probably sent or received approximately 100,000 e-mails this morning alone. You may have even participated in a web-based meeting with employees of your company’s offshore vendor in China or India. For the past twenty years, the internet has been a vice of efficiency for the commercial trade of information and goods, and, as we all know, this part of it is not only alive, but also rapacious.
All logic aside, however, the internet still felt a little dead to me. I thought about G____ Reader and wished that a tombstone had been erected in the cemetery to mark its merciless execution. More than just a “feed reader,” G____ Reader had (to me, anyway) represented the blogosphere, the soul of the internet, that once borderless frontier now being relentlessly colonized by the insatiable corporate machines. So maybe blogging was dead, or close to it? It seemed possible. A few weeks earlier, as I was about to dispense my 86,794th heart on Tumblr, my soul hardened and cracked, leaving only a pile of ashes. It was not a bitter or tragic event. I would always consider Tumblr the best cocktail party I had ever attended on the internet, and didn’t regret the years I spent there, ranting, fighting, and LOLing with the wits and demagogues who made up its ranks. The site for me had fulfilled the premise of “social media,” and had done so in a reasonably “artistic” manner; I could fondly recall my dashboard, with its hypnotic photographs and gifs of flowers, ruins, breaking waves, and sun-drenched flocks of birds. (And, of course, as much porn as you could take.)
But I had gradually become incapacitated by the endless sales pitch of my online persona, the implicit dissonance as I compared it to my offline self, the constant cycle of posturing and affirmation. As I grew to know them, my fellow Tumblrs began to seem like family members—I needed a break! Or really, I needed a break from myself. If I sometimes felt like I was writing the novel of my life, it was one in which I had to send every sentence out to be work-shopped. I was beginning to hate myself; I needed to say goodbye.
There was something familiar about this departure—this tiniest and most subjective of deaths—which I realized had echoes in a decision I had made almost fifteen years earlier to leave Brooklyn, where I had lived for most of my twenties. In both cases, there was something unnerving about what I perceived to be bastions of oblivious youth and intensifying wealth. Together these elements seemed to create a stultifying atmosphere of conformity in which I—an aging, insecure, non-heterosexual pessimist—had felt increasingly estranged. But, thankfully, rather than languish in a self-constructed echo chamber of bitterness and self-loathing, I had left. It was better for me to quit, to escape, to start over in a place where I could realign my expectations about exactly what I could offer to my life, and what I could (and could not) expect in return. This process was now unfolding virtually instead of geographically; it made sense to me that the internet, given its ubiquity, is the only place of meaning you can truly leave anymore.
Because I lived just a few blocks away from the cemetery, I had often fantasized about spending eternity here, preferably on one of the hills with river views. One day, perhaps. I watched the sun sink into New Jersey and was consoled by the spectral wings of so many angels emerging from their crypts; they spoke in whispers barely audible above the rustling leaves. The internet, they reassured me, was not dying: I was, and, like everyone else, could soon enough expect to join this parade of the night.
Well, Sarge, we’ve been poring over this case day and night trying to make some sense of it. After the evidence we fished out of the reservoir and the latest reports from the boys in the lab, we finally have a profile coming together: our killer appears to be a millennial.
We estimate that he’s between the ages of 18-35, always connected to his mobile device, and often builds his sense of social identity through the brands he consumes. He’s progress-focused, optimistic, and expects opportunities to just open up for him based on merit. He wants to get more done in less time, whether it’s buying tickets for an Arcade Fire concert or disposing of three quickly putrefying bodies.
I know what you’re thinking: we can’t just go around the city arresting any high school graduate with an iPhone and FOMO. But Vasquez here came up with a plan that’s so bat-shit crazy, it might just work. See, originally, we thought we were after a guy who was a passive participant in conversations with brands, but, boy, were we wrong. This sick bastard loves to engage actively with brands if they approach him in an authentic fashion. He’s hungry for content and what’s new. He doesn’t have time for print, television, or the desperate pleas of his hapless victims.
So we start creating content that feels authentically shareable—vines, photos, longreads, whatever. It’s all gotta speak to his interests as an always-on, social-focused doer/maker who might work as a barista during the day but spends his evenings following his true passion of DIY electronics.
Sure, I know, then we have a bunch of content, but how the hell is that gonna nab us the most vicious serial killer seen in our metro area since the 1970s? Simple: we aggregate all of this content in an immersive, media-rich microsite. HTML5, music, real-time tweets, the whole nine yards. Then we go and send one of our guys out to buy some sponsored posts on Facebook promoting the microsite. Get a few of the perp’s friends to like it, then all of a sudden, he’s seeing it all over his feed, until one day the homicidal sonofabitch clicks one and there he is, right on our doorstep.
Of course we can drop a cookie on the bastard right then and there, but what do we have then other than his rough geolocation and a few key metrics about his browsing habits? Nah, we don’t stop there. Here’s the beautiful part: on our microsite we offer “exclusive content” for visitors who log in with Facebook. What’s the content? Fuck if I know. Vasquez was thinking it’s just some minor celebrity’s new music video or a desktop wallpaper for a Netflix original series. Point is, our perp goes for the exclusive content, logs in with Facebook, and BAM! We’ve got permission to see his full name, his birthday, and his recent likes.
We’re confident we can get this millennial jagoff behind bars within a week. Vasquez already has a little boutique agency working on the shareable content. We’ll have mocks on your desk by noon tomorrow.
Solar power is expensive, right? Actually, the high cost of alternative energy is a good example of a mesofact. As this graph shows, the cost of producing photovoltaic cells has dropped two orders of magnitude over the past 35 years, bringing costs within range of fossil fuel energy production.
The underlying cause of this disruption is a phenomenon that solar's supporters call Swanson's law, in imitation of Moore's law of transistor cost. Moore's law suggests that the size of transistors (and also their cost) halves every 18 months or so. Swanson's law, named after Richard Swanson, the founder of SunPower, a big American solar-cell manufacturer, suggests that the cost of the photovoltaic cells needed to generate solar power falls by 20% with each doubling of global manufacturing capacity. The upshot (see chart) is that the modules used to make solar-power plants now cost less than a dollar per watt of capacity. Power-station construction costs can add $4 to that, but these, too, are falling as builders work out how to do the job better. And running a solar power station is cheap because the fuel is free.
Coal-fired plants, for comparison, cost about $3 a watt to build in the United States, and natural-gas plants cost $1. But that is before the fuel to run them is bought. In sunny regions such as California, then, photovoltaic power could already compete without subsidy with the more expensive parts of the traditional power market, such as the natural-gas-fired "peaker" plants kept on stand-by to meet surges in demand. Moreover, technological developments that have been proved in the laboratory but have not yet moved into the factory mean Swanson's law still has many years to run.
The use of abandoned boats as sheds is an East Coast of England tradition. These upturned boatsheds are found at the harbour on Lindisfarne, Northumberland, are still used by local fishermen.
The boat sheds at the castle first appeared when Edwin Lutyens restored Lindisfarne castle for Edward Hudson at the turn of the last century. The Spanish architect Enric Miralles used Lutyens’ upturned herring busses as an inspiration for his design of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh.
"Obviously Google had to have a good reason to shut Reader down. The company has reams of data on how we use its products, and would not shutter a product that was providing sufficient food to its info-hungry maw. While some users remained devoted, the usage numbers just didn’t add up. The announcement shouldn’t have been too unexpected. Google hadn’t iterated on the service for years. It even went down for a few days in February. But there’s another reason Google decided to put its RSS reader to death. According to Mountain View, most of us simply consume news differently now than when Reader was launched."
You've heard of Weird Twitter but now there's Weird Ocean. This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet.
Cronuts are donuts made from croissant dough and they are all the rage here in NYC. They were invented by chef Dominique Ansel and they are only available in limited quantities at his bakery in Soho. Apparently people start lining up for them at 6am and all 200 of the world's daily supply of cronuts are gone within minutes of opening. Naturally, a black market has sprung up, with cronuts selling on Craigslist for upwards of $25/item:
Since I wont be in New York any time soon I thought I would see if I could replicate them at home, and you know what? They are pretty damn good! Now the dough I'm using isnt a proper croissant dough, its my quick dough made with just 20 minutes active work which, compared to traditional croissant dough is a snap to make.
Now, there's another important implication of genomic ancestry studies: Most of the people you are descended from are no more genetically related to you than strangers are. Or to put it another way, your genealogical family tree, which includes all the history of your family going back thousands of years, is much larger than your genetic family tree-the people whom genome sequencing would pinpoint as related to you. 99.9 percent of your genome is the same as that of every other human being (apart from the x and y chromosomes), and that .1 percent of variation in each person gets thinned out pretty quickly across the generations, as each child gets half of each of her parents' genomes, passes on half to each of her children, and so on. Geneticist Luke Jostins did a nice mathematical analysis and estimated that you have only about a 12 percent chance of being genetically related to an ancestor 10 generations ago; by the time you get to a 14-generation ancestor, the probability is nearly zero.
4. Arkansas. Official state bird: northern mockingbird
Christ. What makes this even less funny is that there are like eight other states with mockingbird as their official bird. I'm convinced that the guy whose job it was to report to the state's legislature on what the official bird should be forgot until the day it was due and he was in line for a breakfast sandwich at Burger King. In a panic he walked outside and selected the first bird he could find, a dirty mockingbird singing its stupid head off on top of a dumpster.
What it should be: painted bunting
More hilarious science journalism, please. Yes, in addition to the excellent What If? (via @jessamyn)
Major League Combat is a sport that combines juggling, rugby, Capture the Flag, and maybe Quidditch? I can't make out how you score, but keeping your juggle from end-to-end seems important.
Weird sport or the weirdest sport? It's definitely up there with chessboxing. (thx, benjamin)
Great article by Burkhard Bilger about NASA's Curiosity mission to Mars.
The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds. By the time Earth took its first breath three billion years ago, geologists now believe, Mars had been suffocating for a billion years. The air had thinned and rivers evaporated; dust storms swept up and ice caps seized what was left of the water. The Great Desiccation Event, as it's sometimes called, is even more of a mystery than the Great Oxygenation on Earth. We know only this: one planet lived and the other died. One turned green, the other red.
Perfect read if you've been curious about what Curiosity is up to on Mars but needed something a bit more narrative than the mission home page or Wikipedia page to guide you. Also features the phrase "a self-eating watermelon of despair", so there's that. Oh, and here's the Seven Minutes of Terror video referred to in the story.
We must remember that physics is science, not philosophy, and in our attempts to explain the universe that we observe, we have to make claims that can in principle be tested — and then test them.
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Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, "the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade."
Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models' range within a few years.
The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
“Maps are the places where memories go not to die but to live forever.”
“New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation … so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul,”E. B. White memorably wrote in his 1949 masterpiece Here Is New York. And indeed what a canvas of glorious shared eclecticism Gotham is — city of cats and city of dogs, city of beloved public spaces and beloved secret places, of meticulous order and sparkling chaos, but above all a city of private memories woven together into one shared tapestry of belonging.
The convergence of these two — New York’s extraordinary multiplicity and the emotive storytelling power of maps — is precisely what Becky Cooper set out to explore in an ongoing collaborative art project that began in an appropriately personal manner: The summer after her freshman year of college in 2008, Cooper became an accidental cartographer when she was hired to help map all of Manhattan’s public art. As she learned about mapping and obsessively color-coded the locations, she considered what it took to make “a map that told an honest story of a place” and was faced with the inevitable subjectivity of the endeavor, realizing that an assemblage of many little subjective portraits revealed more about a place than any attempt at a “complete” map.
And so the idea was born — to assemble a collaborative portrait of the city based on numerous individual experiences, memories, and subjective impressions. She painstakingly hand-printed a few hundred schematic maps of Manhattan on the letterpress in the basement of her college dorm, then walked all over the island, handing them to strangers and asking them to draw “their Manhattan,” then mail the maps back to her — which, in a heartening antidote to Gotham’s rumored curmudgeonly cynicism, they readily did. Dozens of intimate narratives soon filled her inbox — first loves, last goodbyes, childhood favorites, unexpected delights. In short, lives lived.
The maps were like passports into strangers’ worlds. … I talked to gas station workers, MTA employees, artists, tourists, and veterans; to Columbia med students, Mister Softee drivers, city planners, San Francisco quilters, bakery owners, street cart vendors, Central park portraitists, jazz musicians, Watchtower distributors, undergrads, can collectors, and mail carriers. … These are their maps. Their ghosts. Their past loves. Their secret spots. Their favorite restaurants. These are their accidental autobiographies: when people don’t realize they’re revealing themselves, they’re apt to lay themselves much more bare.
[…]
I hope to show Manhattan as a cabinet of curiosities, a container of portals to hundreds of worlds; if I’ve succeeded, this portrait of the city will be as true as any of the seventy-five others.
The inimitable Adam Gopnik — a New Yorker’s New Yorker — writes in the foreword:
Maps and memories are bound together, a little as songs and love affairs are. The artifact envelops the emotion, and then the emotion stores away in the artifact: We hear ‘All the Things You Are’ or ‘Hey There Delilah’ just by chance while we’re in love, and then the love is forever after stored in the song. … This attachment requires no particular creative energy. It just happens. … Maps, especially schematic ones, are the places where memories go not to die, or be pinned, but to live forever.
Gopnik pads the metaphorical with the scientific, echoing Richard Dawkins, who famously speculated that drawing maps may have “boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross,” and turns to the brain:
Cognitive science now insists that our minds make maps before they take snapshots, storing in schematic form the information we need to navigate and make sense of the world. Maps are our first mental language, not our latest. The photographic sketch, with its optical hesitations, is a thing we force from history; the map, with its neat certainties and foggy edges, looks like the way we think.
“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning,”E. B. White wrote. “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.” It is this poetry of the internal engine — the emotional excess necessary for creativity, the compressed feeling bursting out of the poet’s soul like a rocket — that Gopnik, too, observes in reverence:
A remembered relation of spaces, a hole, a circle, a shaded area — and a whole life comes alive. The real appeal of the map, perhaps, is not so much that it stores our past as that it forces our emotions to be pressed into their most parsimonious essence — and, as every poet knows, it is emotion under the force of limits, emotion pressed down and held down to strict formal constraints, that makes for the purest expression. These maps are street haiku, whose emotions, whether made by the well known or the anonymous, are more moving for being so stylized.
[…]
Each map in this book diagrams the one thing we most want a map to show us, and that is a way home.
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I always knew my son would follow in my footsteps, so all you haters can shove it. DIY is a lifestyle and Henry’s lived it, from the moment the condom (which I’d crafted out of the intestines of a whole lamb we’d acquired through a now defunct farm-share program) that his father had been wearing broke. I wish I could say I’d made Henry all by myself, but some projects require assistance, even if you didn’t ask for it.
That said, you can’t just join a pottery club or knit a birdcage cover and then tell people you’re really into DIY. When I hear someone do that, I will call it out. I will say to them, “Are you really? Because I see there in your purse a package of store bought tissues. You didn’t happen to grind up your own tree bark, strain it using a very thin sieve, and turn it into super soft facial paper, did you? Oh, and I notice that the car seats in your Honda look eerily like the car seats in the commercial for that Honda. The car seats in my Honda are yellow paisley. Do you know ANYONE with yellow paisley car seats? Also, no offense, but it’s very obvious you get your hair colored professionally. What, can’t be bothered spending a few afternoons a week in your kitchen with a whole bunch of beets and a pair of thick rubber gloves?"
Aside from conceiving my son, only once did one of my projects prove too difficult to do alone. I’d been working on the stroller for a month, in the meantime putting Henry in a repurposed shopping cart swathed in a wool blanket (thanks to the mother of the aforementioned lamb). On the day of the stroller’s trial run, the old shoehorn I’d been using as a brake proved less compliant than I’d hoped. Henry and I were testing it on a hill at the park and, for his trouble, he got to fly headfirst down the frozen grass and I got to watch my life flash before my eyes. It was a powerful reminder of both the necessity of testing homemade brake pedals and of the hassle of strollers.
“This is a sign,” I told my son, as I lifted him up onto his perfectly usable feet. Sure, I could’ve given it another shot, if I’d decided to go down that road, but I didn’t want to go down any roads, particularly sloped ones, after that. And I quickly found alternate uses for all of my stroller material, even the shoehorn (take a closer look at our toilet next time you’re at the house)! Henry started walking soon after, most likely in a fear-based response to what had happened on the hill.
Little did I know, he was just getting started.
I remember it was Halloween a few autumns ago, and Henry was going as a top hat, the whole hat from head to toe. I was finishing up some felt detailing to go along the rim when there was a knock at my sewing room door. It was Henry, all 40” of him, wearing a swim cap covered in packing peanuts. He’d strung them together with dental floss and they went all the way to his shoulders. He had on my oversized black silk blouse.
“You’re out of order,” he said to me. Then he lifted up his right hand and in it, he held our meat cleaver, which he had rubbed in dirt so that it looked like a gavel. He put it right through the wall! I don’t think he knew his own strength (or lack thereof).
I couldn’t have cared less about the wall or about the pounded chicken I was supposed to make later that night. In fact, I told him, I said, “I’ll just use your baseball bat, honey, I don’t care, I am so proud of you right now. Fuck this stupid hat.” My friend Stacy saw us from her stoop later that evening and called out, “You let your five year-old walk out of the house with a meat cleaver?” I yelled back, “I think I recognize that pumpkin costume Olivia’s wearing. Oh yeah, it’s from Rite Aid!”
When Henry snapped at me earlier today at the lumberyard, “I can do it myself, Mom,” yanking the reclaimed wood right out of my hands and nearly concussing a bearded gentleman in three-quarter length pants a few feet away, I knew we’d come full circle. For weeks, Henry’s been complaining about feeling constrained in his playroom.
I said to him, “Well, Henry, if you want more room, make more room.” So he’s building a room. It’ll be an addition adjacent to the garage. He’s out there now with the barn boards from this morning. I tell my friends, when they say things like, “A seven year-old boy can only grasp a fraction of the civil engineering principles necessary to do that!” and “Those planks are twice his height!” and “I’m pretty sure Henry just sliced a finger with that child-sized saw” that the only way to learn how to DIY is to DIY.
Also, Henry’s been giving himself stitches since he was five. Give me a break.
Why so few?
War, lack of a government for many years, violent muslim extremists, sharia law. The reputation of Somalia is extremelly close to rock bottom.
Why you may still want to visit
The government has started to function again. Mogadishu is now relatively safe and businesses are thriving. Turkish Airlines has even opened a direct twice weekly route from Istanbul.
What else
Go to the beach just outside Mogadishu or visit the Bakaara market where you can even buy your own semi-genuine Somalian passport. You may not want to use it anywhere, though. Your travel experience doesn't extend beyond the Bahamas, Paris or Gran Canaria, you say? First of all; Why are you reading this blog post? Secondly, do not go to Somalia!
The author of the list, Gunnar Garfors, has visited 196 of the 198 countries in the world; he's hitting the last two in the next few months: Kiribati and Cape Verde. (via @DavidGrann)
Well, this is interesting. Graphene is a substance discovered relatively recently that has a number of unusual properties. In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Russia used ordinary scotch tape to isolate single-layer sheets of graphene. Once isolated, the sheets could be tested for the unusual properties I mentioned. The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this work.
In 2012, a group of researchers at UCLA discovered they could make single-layer sheets of graphene by coating a DVD with graphite oxide and then "playing" the disc in a plain old DVD drive. And then in a happy accident, they found that graphene has unusually high supercapacitance properties, which could mean that graphene could be used, for example, as a mobile phone battery that lasts all day, charges in a few seconds, and can be thrown into a compost bin after use.
“I’m singing, oh I’m singing in my soul, when the troubles roll, I sing from morn’ till night, it makes my burdens light…”
Sister Rosetta Tharpe — reconstructionist, gospel music’s first superstar, the godmother of rock and roll, “the original soul sister,” Literary Jukebox hero — was born on this day in 1915. No better way to celebrate her spirit and legacy than with her legendary, electrifying 1964 live performance of “Didn’t It Rain” at the Manchester train station, complete with her iconic white coat and electric guitar.
When you talked about Rosetta Tharpe you talked about a ball of energy. This woman would come out on the stage she’d have people laughing, she’d talk to them in a way that it was almost like she was related to them. And when she finished her act, they were standing. You know, they would love this woman. And she was a lovable person. I mean she was an approachable person. Even though she was a diva too, you know, because she did play the diva role.
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March 22nd, 2013: There's a new Adventure Time comic out! It is ISSUE 14 and if you go to a comic store and say "Yo homes, give me issue 14 of Adventure Time" they will be happy to oblige you. I wrote it myself!
Also out now is Adventure Time Volume 2, a trade paperback collecting an entire storyline involving... TIME TRAVEL?? I wrote that bad boy too! :o
“People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.”
“In proportion as [a person] simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude…,”Thoreau famously wrote. “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it,”Don DeLillo wryly observed. Indeed, in today’s world of constant stimulation and interconnectivity, despite the rise of single living, the art of solitude is in graver danger of squander than ever, more and more susceptible to festering into the toxic sister aberrations of loneliness and boredom.
In this wonderful vintage footage, legendary Russian filmmaker and writer Andrei Tarkovsky offers some timeless advice to the young:
Since the video subtitles convey only a selective portion of what Tarkovsky actually says — quite distractingly so — I asked my friend Julia to help with a proper transcription, which she kindly did:
What would you like to tell people?
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to be spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
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I told my friend Dan I was getting tired of having long hair, that I often fantasized about trimming all of it off and leaving just a quarter-inch, fantasized about 90-second showers, no messing with ponytails under helmets, knots, conditioner, paying for haircuts.
Dan, a curly-haired man himself who has more than once used the word “inspire” when describing Rob Machado’s bro-fro, said, “You should dread it.”
I said Nah, I’m already a long-haired, sandal-wearing vegetarian rock climber. With Colorado license plates. On my van. That I live in. Shouldn’t we all have a limit on the number of cultural stereotype check boxes?
You ever feel like you might not be so unique, that maybe you’re just wearing the uniform of a specific subculture? Ever walked up to a station wagon with a rack on top of it in the parking lot of a ski hill or trailhead, and then realized it was someone else’s station wagon with a rack on top? Whoops.
Sometime I catch myself (1) buying granola and organic yogurt in (2) Whole Foods, sporting a (3) ponytail and (4) Chacos and carrying my groceries out in a backpack instead of a plastic bag (5), and in that backpack is a (6) reusable water bottle and (7) coffee mug, and I get in my van with a (8) rocket box and (9) mountain bike on top of it, and the shuffle on my ipod picks a song from a (10) Bob Marley box set to play — well, I gotta scratch my chin and wonder: Am I myself, or am I exactly like Every Other Dude Who Wants To Be A Mountain Dude?
I used to help lead backpacking trips for inner-city kids, and on one of the trips, we all hopped out of the van at the trailhead in the Wallowa Mountains, and we discussed the food. One of the other adult volunteers said something about a vegetarian in the group, and one of the teenagers, Miguel, said, Who’s a vegetarian, and I said I am. He looked at my sandals and said,
Do you drive a Subaru?
I laughed and said yes, I do. Pegged.
I volunteered with another group in California, and the other trip leader, Darin, and I, both flew out from Denver to pick up the kids in the Bay Area and head out for a week in the backcountry. Darin and I had met for the first time only days before and got along well. On the third day of the trip, Darin and I realized we were wearing almost the exact same outfit, down to the same brand of headlamp. The two white guys from Colorado, unintentionally perpetuating Colorado (ahem, Colo-rad-bro) stereotypes. See above photo.
My friend Jarrett asked me one time what I thought about a guy who was walking past us sporting a foot-high mohawk and full punk regalia, and I said I think it’s great that he’s doing his own thing. Jarrett said, Is he really doing his own thing, or is he wearing a uniform of people who love punk? I think about that sometimes. Then I think about how much I love wearing my smelly, beat-up black soft shell everywhere including restaurants with cloth napkins, and how much more I love to talk to people about rock climbing and national park trails than who’s dating who or reality TV or whatever.
Fellow dirt-lover: Put on your (1) puffy jacket with the duct-tape patches and get in your (2) all-wheel-drive station wagon/pickup with a topper, and we can fist bump at the (3) non-corporate coffee shop/Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour stop/crag/trailhead sometime, and (4) use the word “gnar” as a noun. I will be pleased to meet your (5) dog named Kaya and perhaps later buy you a (6) microbrew so we can exchange more (7) beta. Please be advised that I (8) do not shower that often.
Read more stories about the outdoors exactly like this at Semi-Rad.
Feeling totally depressed and sad and useless about this: the NRA wins again.
After Sandy Hook, after twenty children were shot and killed at a place where they should have been safe from all harm, there was some optimism among supporters of gun control: perhaps now, finally, both Democrats and Republicans could see the light -- and the suffering-and revive the assault -- weapons ban. It was a futile hope.
Less than a week after Adam Lanza shot up an elementary school, it was already basically clear that an assault-weapons ban could not pass Congress-that it probably couldn't even get through the Democratic-controlled Senate, never mind the House. So it was hardly a surprise when, three months later, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the ban would be removed from a larger gun-control package that is making its way through the upper chamber and given a separate vote that it will not survive. The scale of the defeat suffered by the ban's supporters, though, is shocking. This wasn't a close call; it was a body blow.
I haven't forgotten Sandy Hook. We drive by there every time we go to Vermont. I think about those kids almost every day. Sometimes when I think about them, I close my eyes and see my 5-year-old son cowering in the corner of his classroom as a black-clad figure toting a machine gun bears down on him. And then the tears come. I can't stand that this is what America is; that we trade our children's lives for the opportunity to purchase items specifically invented for killing. I can't stand it. It's pathetic and embarrassing and barbaric.
At around eleven, Filin, feeling tired and eager to see his wife, steered the Mercedes into a parking lot outside his building and headed for his door. The snow was icy and thick. Filin was reaching for the security buzzer when he heard someone behind him call out his name. Then the voice said, "Tebye privet!" -- literally, "Hello to you!," but more abrupt and menacing, as though someone were relaying an ominous greeting from a third party.
Filin turned and saw a man in front of him. He was neither tall nor short. He wore a woolly hat and a scarf wrapped around his face. His right arm was crooked behind him, as if he were concealing something.
A gun, Filin thought, in that flash of confrontation: He's holding a gun and I am dead. Bolt! But, before he could move, his attacker swung his arm out in front of him. In his hand was a glass jar filled with liquid, and he hurled its contents at Filin's face. A security camera in the parking lot fixed the time at 23:07.
The liquid was sulfuric acid -- the "oil of vitriol," as medieval alchemists called it. Depending on the concentration, it can lay waste to human skin as quickly as in a horror movie. Scientists working with sulfuric acid wear protective goggles; even a small amount in the eyes can destroy the cornea and cause permanent blindness.
Filin was in agony. The burning was immediate and severe. His vision turned to black. He could feel the scalding of his face and scalp, the pain intensifying all the time.
Always good to read Remnick on Russia...he was The Washington Post's Moscow correspondent for a few years in the late 1980s.
“Friendship: The silent places where speech ends.”
As a longtime fan of artist Nina Katchadourian’s long-running Sorted Books project, which even inspired some playful book spine poetry experiments of my own, I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books (public library) — a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines, including some pieces never seen online.
A heart-warming bonus: Most of the books Katchadourian uses are library copies, presenting a subtle conceptual addition to other love letters to libraries.
Brian Dillon writes in the introduction:
‘Sorted Books’ is many things at the same time: a series of sculptures or photographs, or site-specific installations; a collection of short stories, or poems, or jokes; a work in which the ‘found object’ is subject alike to chance and the most painstaking choices; a delicate conceptual game with the horizontal and the vertical. But it is first of all an act of reading. We have to picture the artist at large between the bookshelves, scanning the spines for likely, or unlikely, meetings among their titles.
Katchadourian’s project began in 1993, somewhat serendipitously — as most great side-projects-turned-lifelong-passions tend to — while she was pursuing an MFA at University of California, San Diego. She recounts the origin story:
We studied — and were trying to put into practice — an engagement with the everyday, a stance toward art that located it in unlikely places, and ways of working collaboratively. In that spirit, an art major undergraduate, who was friendly with some of the graduate students, invited a group of us to move into her parents’ house for a week and make art with what we found. Her parents — who were not art collectors but simply welcoming and curious people — generously agreed to be invaded by the six of us.
The house where we stayed was in a small town called Half Moon Bay, about an hour south of San Francisco on the foggy California coast, so we decided to call the project ‘The Half Moon Bay Experiment.’ We spent about a week there, poking around and thinking about what to make. Eventually each of us found different zones in the house that interested us, and in the end we had a small show, which essentially meant running an announcement in the local paper, opening the font door for the afternoon, and having some friends, family, and locals come by.
Quite early in the week, I latched onto the library. Our hosts had married late in life — a second marriage for both — and they had merged their separate book collections when they moved in together. It seemed like they had decided to keep everything, and so they had a lot of books, organized in casually thematic manner on wooden shelves. I spent a long time looking at the books and getting acquainted with the wide variety of subjects in the library: Shakespeare, self-help, gambling, addiction, health care, history, and investment strategy guides. I suddenly recalled a moment in the university library when, looking for a book, I had turned my head sideways as I walked down the stacks and thought how spectacular it would be if all the titles formed an accidental sentence when read one after the other in a long chain. Standing amidst the bookshelves in Half Moon Bay, my next move was simply to make this imaginary accident real. I spent days shifting and arranging books, composing them so that their titles formed short sentences. The exercise was intimate, like a form of portraiture, and it felt important that the books I selected should function as a cross section of the larger collection.
The rest, as they say, is history — but Katchadourian remained true to the same methodology and ethos of curiosity over the years. In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page. Katchadourian writes:
I am always paying attention to the physical qualities of the books, and I try to work with their particular attributes as much as possible. The size of a book carries temperament and tonality, as does the way the text sits on the spine. A heavy volume with large text on the spine, for example, might be exuberant, urgent, pushy; a small typeface might communicate a voice that’s exacting, shy, insecure, or furtive.
Above all, however, Sorted Books is a visceral reminder of that powerful interplay between context and subtext, which embodies — and emboldens — the wellspring of meaning.
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A stumbling block to increasing our reliance on electricity from cleaner energy sources such as solar panels and wind farms has always been figuring out how to efficiently store the energy for use when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Danielle Fong could make clean energy significantly more practical on a large scale by introducing a novel way to use tanks of compressed air for energy storage. "It could radically reorient the economics of renewable energy," she says.
The idea of using compressed air to store energy is not new. Electricity from solar panels or wind turbines can turn a motor that's used to compress the air in a large tank, and the air pressure can then be converted into power to drive a generator when the power is needed. The problem is that during compression the air reaches temperatures of almost 1,000 ^0C. That means energy is lost in the form of heat, and storage in conventional steel vessels becomes impractical.
Fong stumbled on a possible solution while skimming through a nearly century-old book: water spray is great at cooling air. She asked, why not spray water into the air while compressing it, so that the air stays cool? To make the process practical, she developed a technique for separating the heated water from the compressed air and diverting the water into a tank, so the heat can be recaptured to minimize energy loss. The process is about as efficient as the best batteries: for every 10 kilowatt-hours of electricity that goes into the system, seven kilowatt-hours can be used when needed.
Fong sounds like an impressive person; she dropped out of middle school at 12 to attend college, graduating five years later with degrees in physics and computer science.
The beloved Russian author, shortly before his death, on the object of life.
“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,”Susan Sontag famously confessed in her collected meditations on love. And yet, one some level, in ways both resolute and subtle, almost all of us are on a constant quest to get better at life.
Last week marked 129 years since Leo Tolstoly conceived of A Calendar of Wisdom — his Tumblr-like compendium of famous thoughts on the meaning of life, which took him twenty years to complete. In this rare audio from 1909, recorded four years after the book was finalized and a year before Tolstoy passed away, the beloved author reads a passage from the book that bespeaks that universal pursuit of self-improvement:
That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shoudst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?
Imbibe some of the wisdom Tolstoy collected in the book, including his own meditations on knowledge and life, here.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.
Some of the greatest minds in science and the humanities have 
“In proportion as [a person] simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude…,” 
I told my friend Dan I was getting tired of having long hair, that I often fantasized about trimming all of it off and leaving just a quarter-inch, fantasized about 90-second showers, no messing with ponytails under helmets, knots, conditioner, paying for haircuts.
“I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation,”