Shared posts

25 Nov 03:46

C&L's Chiller Theater: The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

by driftglass

The first true horror movie. Countless doctoral theses have been written about it. Generations of directors have gone to school on it. And here's the thing -- this 1920's silent masterpiece by F. W. Murnau is still creepy and effective as hell.

Put it on full screen, turn up the volume and enjoy!


29 Sep 02:29

National Jesuit Publication Pulls Support For Kavanaugh

by Frances Langum
National Jesuit Publication Pulls Support For Kavanaugh

America Magazine, a publication of the Jesuits, tweeted: "While we previously endorsed the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh on the basis of his legal credentials and his reputation as a committed textualist, it is now clear that the nomination should be withdrawn."

The editorial is entitled "It is time for the Kavanaugh nomination to be withdrawn":

What is different this time is that this nomination battle is no longer purely about predicting the likely outcome of Judge Kavanaugh’s vote on the court. It now involves the symbolic meaning of his nomination and confirmation in the #MeToo era. The hearings and the committee’s deliberations are now also a bellwether of the way the country treats women when their reports of harassment, assault and abuse threaten to derail the careers of powerful men.

While nomination hearings are far from the best venue to deal with such issues, the question is sufficiently important that it is prudent to recognize it as determinative at this point. Dr. Blasey's accusations have neither been fully investigated nor been proven to a legal standard, but neither have they been conclusively disproved or shown to be less than credible. Judge Kavanaugh continues to enjoy a legal presumption of innocence, but the standard for a nominee to the Supreme Court is far higher; there is no presumption of confirmability. The best of the bad resolutions available in this dilemma is for Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to be withdrawn.

read more

20 Sep 01:25

The Best Booster Car Seats

by Rebecca Gale
The Best Booster Car Seats

We researched over 40 booster car seats, had five families try the top contenders to see how they performed in real life, crash-tested six finalists at a top lab—and determined that the Diono Monterey XT both performed the best and was a favorite with our kid testers. It was the only seat that prevented head contact with the car’s interior in side-impact testing, and with higher height and weight limits and more adjustability than the others it should last you and your growing kid longer.

11 Aug 21:00

Significant Digits For Friday, Aug. 10, 2018

by Oliver Roeder

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.


More than 760,000 competitors

More than 760,000 people entered the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship this year. The winner of the Excel division, claimant to the fantastic title World Excel Champion and surely now the most popular kid in his high school if there is any justice in the world, was 15-year-old Kevin Dimaculangan of Florida. [CNN]


30 percent increase in newsprint prices

The Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian newsprint have dealt another blow to already staggering local newspapers, forcing cuts in staff and (literally) narrower coverage. Also, by one estimate, U.S. newsprint prices will increase 30 percent over the next year or two. [The New York Times]


82 percent with “warm” feelings

In November 2016, 87 percent of Donald Trump voters had “warm” feelings toward the man, according to a Pew Research Center survey. By March 2018, these numbers had cooled only very little: 82 percent of Trump voters retained warm feelings toward him. For my part, I’ve long been incapable of any feeling. [Pew Research Center]


9-point scandals

In light of the arrest of Chris Collins, the Republican U.S. House member from New York, on charges of insider trading, my colleague Nate Silver looked into how much “scandals” hurt incumbents running for re-election. Quite a bit, it turns out. Since 1998, “scandal-plagued” incumbents won re-election by an average of 21.5 points, but this was compared to a projected margin of victory of 30.5 points. Scandals, therefore, cost about 9 points. [FiveThirtyEight]


15 percent of MoviePass users

Embattled MoviePass recently limited to three the number of movies its subscribers can see a month. Only 15 percent were seeing more than three movies a month using the service, according to the company, but some of those were really using the service. One bought tickets to “Avengers: Infinity War” six times but never went. Another saw “Lady Bird” six times. One said he went to a theater more than 570 days in a row. And one used it so he could have access to a public restroom in the public-restroom-sparse New York City. [BuzzFeed]


66 percent for government-paid tuition

Last month, a PR agency founded by the conservative and very rich Koch brothers commissioned an opinion poll on U.S. policy issues. Eighty-four percent of the respondents said that enforcing equal rights for all was a “very effective” or “somewhat effective” solution to overcoming social barriers. That number was 85 percent for encouraging scientific and technological innovation, 77 percent for ending harsh sentences for nonviolent crimes, 69 percent for more regulation of Wall Street, and 66 percent for government-paid college tuition. A Koch-backed group, probably needless to say, campaigned against government-paid tuition in 2016. [The Intercept]


If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.

16 Jan 21:50

Beaded Cable Tie

by mark

I came across beaded cable ties at my local hardware store, figuring maybe it was some common thing I just didn’t know about — and maybe it is — but I cannot find more than a single video about this stuff online. So I figure I can at least right that wrong here.

Think of this as a cross between a zip-tie and a velcro or hook & loop strap. It’s cheap and plastic like a ziptie, easy to reuse like velcro, but also kind of it’s own thing.

Let’s say you’ve got a cord to tie up. You wrap it around, thread it through the bottom hole, and then when you go back through the top hole you get a loop you can use to hang this up.

If you have multiple cords to bundle together, you can also use that second loop to wrap another cable.

Depending on the cord you’re wrapping, you could also wrap one notch just on the cord, and use the other notch for wrapping the entire bundle. This helps keep the wrap with the cord when you undo it.

If you have something big to wrap and need a longer cord, you can chain these together until you get the size you need. They also just sell bigger and smaller versions of these if you already know what kind of job you want them to handle.

Best of all, these come undone with just a little gentle encouragement. I feel they’re easier to undo than reusable zip ties, but not so easy you have worry about them falling apart.

Compared to a hook & loop strap, the hook and loop looks nicer and is more intuitive to manage — but they’re not cheap, you don’t really get the secure chaining feature, and you don’t get the built-in loop for hanging.

I’m not saying they’re perfect, but I’m glad to have them around, and they’re cheap.

-- Donald Bell

Gardner Bender Beaded Cable Tie, 40-pack ($7)

Available from Amazon

25 Nov 15:50

Dementia Patient Shares Delusion About Being TIME's Man Of The Year

by Susie Madrak
Dementia Patient Shares Delusion About Being TIME's Man Of The Year

Many of us have dealt with elderly parents in some stage of dementia. It's a stew of delusion, belligerance, fantasy, and just plain lies.

So it looks like that's what the Trump family is dealing with. Look at this tweet:

TIME responded:

And so did the Twitter world:

06 Nov 03:26

Trump Wonders Why 'Samurai' Japan Didn't Shoot Down North Korean Missiles

by John Amato
Trump Wonders Why 'Samurai' Japan Didn't Shoot Down North Korean Missiles

It didn't take long for Trump to insult Japan.

I think we can confidently say that everything Trump knows about Japan came from movies like Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

The Japan Times:

U.S. President Donald Trump has said Japan should have shot down the North Korean missiles that flew over the country before landing in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year, diplomatic sources have said, despite the difficulties and potential ramifications of doing so.

"The U.S. president said he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles, the sources said."

Only in the Trump administration do ancient racial stereotypes rule!


19 Sep 19:06

Gutenberg Magic Catalog

by mark

I’ve been evangelizing the Gutenberg Magic Catalog to all my reading friends for years and I was floored that it hasn’t been on CoolTools. The Gutenberg Project has been digitizing books in the common (public domain) since 1971 (!?). Most of the great books are actually in this set. You can download the catalog to your Kindle or other ereader and then search for a book and download it.

It may be the single most intellectual democratizing event in history. If you are anywhere in the world and decide to read Charles Dickens or The Art of War, go at it. While probably terrible for Penguin Classics, it’s a step forward for the reading person around the globe. I hope I hear a story about a young person reading from here in India, China, you name it, and having it be the spark that creates the next Naipaul or Melville.

-- J. Sciarra

The Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-Books (free)

16 Jul 22:44

Film Noir Movie Night - The Killers (1946)

by driftglass

One of the genre-defining classics of film noir, The Killers -- based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway -- stars Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster in his film debut. Thanks to its top-notch performances, tight script by John Huston, Richard Brooks and Anthony Veillerand and excellent direction by Robert Siodmak, in 2008, The Killers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

It's also a blast to watch.

Enjoy!


03 Jul 21:28

Donald Trump has spent more than 21 percent of his days as president at golf clubs

by German Lopez

Trump said he’d “work my ass off” as president. He’s spent about 1 in 5 days at a golf club.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump remarked that once in the White House, he’d never see his golf courses again — because “I want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”

In reality, Trump has spent 35 days at a golf property since taking office, according to NBC News. That amounts to more than 21 percent of his 164 days as president so far.

The New York Times also previously found that as of April, Trump had spent much more time at the golf course than his predecessors. By April 28, Trump had spent 19 days at the golf course. In comparison, Barack Obama had spent one day at the same point in his presidency, George W. Bush had spent zero, and Bill Clinton had spent five.

It’s good for everyone, even the president, to take some time off every once in a while. You don’t want anyone at an important job to be exhausted or drained, and multiple studies suggest that vacations and breaks from work are good for productivity.

What makes Trump’s outings remarkable is that they’re just another example of how he’s lied and bullshitted to the American people. Consider this video from NBC News editor Bradd Jaffy, in which Trump repeatedly insisted that he would not take time off during his presidency — taking shots at Obama for golfing, in his view, so much:

“There won’t be time to go on vacations,” Trump said on MSNBC. “There won’t be time to go golfing all the time.” At another point, he said, “You need leadership. You can’t fly to Hawaii to play golf.”

Trump has so far broken that promise to the American people.

Meanwhile, his legislative promises have fallen apart too. Trump spent much of the campaign contrasting himself with traditional Republicans by saying he’d take a much more compassionate view on health care, promising he would “take care of everybody,” and vowing not to cut Medicaid. Instead, the health care bill that Senate Republicans proposed and that Trump supports would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cut 22 million people from the insurance rolls and slash Medicaid by $772 billion over 10 years.

This is the kind of stuff Trump could spend his time as president “working [his] ass off” to fix. Instead, it looks like he’s taking a lot of time off.

07 Jun 23:28

What To Expect From James Comey’s Congressional Testimony

by Clare Malone and Tony Chow

Former FBI Director James Comey is scheduled to testify Thursday about his interactions with President Trump. In the video above, Clare Malone tells us what to expect.

24 May 17:10

Significant Digits For Wednesday, May 24, 2017

by Walt Hickey

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.


$5

A U.S. court of appeals ruled you don’t have to register your drones with the Federal Aviation Administration because small drones are just model airplanes. Save the $5 on that registration. In other news, drones are about to get way more annoying. [Quartz]


60 days

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte declared a 60-day period of martial law for the entirety of Mindanao island because of clashes between armed groups and the government. [ABS CBN]


80

More than 80 U.S. Olympians are reporting that their medals won at the Rio Olympics are flaking or otherwise degrading. Officials have observed problems on 6 to 7 percent of medals. [The Associated Press]


$900

Uber underpaid tens of thousands of New York City drivers by improperly basing their payments on net rather than gross fares. The controversial ride-sharing company has agreed to repay those lost earnings, an average of about $900 per driver. That’s tens of millions of dollars out of the pockets of drivers, finally reclaimed. [Quartz]


$5 million

Reported annual value of a contract between Nike and New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., the most lucrative shoe deal for an NFL player. [ESPN]


662 million vacation days

Number of available vacation days that Americans collectively did not take in 2016. Hit the beaches, people. [Fortune]


If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.

18 May 02:38

Historian Warns About The Signs Of A Failing Republic

by Susie Madrak

There was an actual lengthy, substantive discussion on Morning Joe this morning with Tim Snyder, a history professor and the author of the best-seller "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century," Willie Geist, and Joe Scarborough.

Snyder reminded them that "most republics and most democracies fail," and that history provides tools to help. "Because a lot of the things that are happening to us are just the early stages of processes that happened elsewhere."

Geist asked what parallels he saw with current events.

Snyder noted the recent "loyalty" conflict with Trump and Comey.

"First of all, the idea of loyalty. Loyalty is a way you take a rule-of-law state like ours off the rails and transform it into something else," he said.

"When the president asked the FBI director for loyalty, he's actually trying to change the character of the American government. Hitler in 1934 began to demand precisely loyalty, and it was from that moment forward that he was the leader and no longer just the chancellor of Germany," he said.

"Or, for example, firing Mr. Comey by sending over a head of a private security detail. That's what happens in Germany as well. The private security detail eventually becomes the SS and they become more important than the police. It's a baby step forward to use the head of your private bodyguard to fire the FBI director, but it's a troubling indication of the way this man's mind works."

read more

30 Mar 23:21

Sean Spicer Tries Gaslighting The White House Press Again

by Frances Langum

By now you know that 'gaslighting' is a technique used to abuse and manipulate another person, usually a woman in an intimate relationship. The abuser uses threats, bullying, and the blatant re-writing of history to make the other person doubt their own hearing, understanding, memory, and in some cases, sanity.

Sean Spicer at the March 23 presser said that the White House leaking information to Nunes "didn't pass the smell test." Well guess what, it stinks to high heaven. The intel Nunes brought to the White House, came from the White House.

Major Garrett read a direct quote from Spicer during the March 23 presser. That's seven days ago. A direct quote. As in This. IS. What. YOU. Said.

Spicer turned it around and blamed the media. He was quoting you, dude.

read more

20 Mar 20:22

The best electric toothbrush

by The Sweethome

By Casey Johnston

This post was done in partnership with The Sweethome, a buyer's guide to the best homewares. When readers choose to buy The Sweethome's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here.

To find the best electric toothbrush, we put in almost 100 total hours of research, interviewing experts, evaluating every model on the market, and testing 10 toothbrushes ourselves in hundreds of trials at the bathroom sink. We found that the best toothbrush for most people is a simple $50 model called the Oral-B Pro 1000. It has the fewest fancy features of the models we tested, but it does have the most important things experts recommend—a built-in two-minute timer and access to one of the most extensive and affordable lines of replaceable toothbrush heads available—for the lowest price.

Should you upgrade?

Per the ADA's recommendations, the only necessary thing in toothbrushing is a basic toothbrush that you use properly. No electric toothbrush has the ADA seal right now, but powered electric toothbrushes have been shown to provide superior dental care to manual toothbrushing—they remove more plaque and reduce gingivitis at statistically significant rates. If you find yourself struggling to meet two minutes, you tend to brush unevenly, or you find manual brushing to be too much labor, upgrading from a manual toothbrush to an electric one that automates these elements would make sense.

One thing worth pointing out about electric toothbrushes is that they are not cheaper in the long run. Electric toothbrushes cost about 10 times as much as manual toothbrushes, and you have to replace the brush heads at the same frequency (every three months), each for about the same cost as a manual brush. What you get for the higher cost is less friction in achieving good brushing habits, and, according to research, a significant reduction in plaque and gingivitis, even if that reduction may come only from having a brush that encourages good habits, like a full two minutes of brushing for each session.

How we picked and tested

The full complement of brushes we tested. Photo: Casey Johnston

After sorting through dental care research, which is littered with (unusable) clinical studies sponsored by the companies that make the toothbrushes being tested, we've learned that all you really need out of an electric toothbrush is a two-minute timer to make sure you brush your teeth for the right amount of time. Manufacturers have blown up the high end with scientific-sounding "features" like cleaning modes and UV lights, but there's nothing to prove these work, let alone that they are necessary. All an electric toothbrush can really offer is automation of the brushing process by adding a timer and easing some of the physical labor, according to the professors and dentist we spoke to.

To begin the search, we trawled the manufacturer websites of the highest-rated brands and looked at the recommendations of Consumer Reports (subscription required to see product recommendations) and the Good Housekeeping Institute for toothbrush models as well as their replacement or substitution toothbrush heads, an important factor in choosing a best toothbrush.

We looked for, at minimum, brushes with a two-minute timer, but still wanted to test higher-end brushes to compare their usability with that of the simplest models. We eliminated brushes without rechargeable batteries because loose batteries are a hassle and a waste. We also eliminated models that were reviewed as loud or having either short battery life or a too-small range of compatible brush heads. If a brush was compatible with a wide range of brush heads, that was a small point in its favor.

Both Oral-B and Sonicare make extensive lines of brushes and don't exactly go to pains to make it clear what the difference is between all of them. See our full guide for a breakdown of differentiating features.

We then called in models for testing to see what it was like to hold the toothbrushes, charge them, use them, replace their heads, and have our brushing sessions timed and monitored. To stress-test them, we also dropped our picks onto a tile floor from chest height to test for durability and submerged them in water while they ran for a full two-minute brushing cycle to test for water resistance. We compared the brushes on all these usability points to arrive at our conclusion.

Our pick

Photo: Casey Johnston

The Pro 1000 is among Oral-B's least expensive models, but comes with all the features recommended by most of our experts for the lowest price—a two-minute timer (with a nice-to-have quadrant alert), and a wide selection of compatible and affordable brush heads. The Pro 1000 has comfortable-feeling oscillating bristles, a simple one-button interface, and a battery that lasted 11½ days with twice-daily use in our tests. The body survived drop tests on the floor and into water. Best of all, you're not getting overcharged for features like digital monitors, travel cases, or inductive chargers—none of which will actually get your teeth any cleaner than the Pro 1000 can.

The one-button simplicity is a great feature—there are no useless cleaning modes. The Pro 1000's timer goes off every 30 seconds, alerting the user of the time by briefly pausing. After two minutes, the brush pulses three times to signal that a full cycle is up, but will continue brushing after if the user wants to keep brushing; it must always be turned off manually. This is nice for touching up areas of your mouth you may not have given enough attention to. On many more-expensive brushes, like the Philips Sonicare Diamondclean, pushing the button more than once activates different cleaning modes, forcing you to cycle through every option to get back to the simple default cleaning mode.

Using the right brush head for your teeth and gums matters, and we like that the Pro 1000 can take advantage of Oral-B's brush head line. The range is the widest of all toothbrush lines, making it easier to customize the brush for one user's preferences and recommendations from their dentist. Oral-B's brushes are also, on average, less expensive than replacement heads for other brushes.

Runner-up

The Philips Sonicare 2 Series. Photo: Casey Johnston

The Philips Sonicare 2 Series is currently one of the least expensive Sonicare brushes at around $50. This brush is quieter than our recommended Oral-B model, with a more subtle motion (though the vibrations can feel slightly more uncomfortable when the back of the brush knocks against your other teeth). The 2 Series also has twice the battery life of the Oral-B, lasting two weeks of use on a single charge instead of one (in our tests it lasted for 16 days of use), so it might be a better choice for travelers. The replacement brush heads for the 2 Series are slightly more expensive at $27 for three ($9 each); the Oral-B's replacement heads can be as cheap as $5 to $6 each, making the Oral-B's expenses a little lower in the long run.

Best online subscription toothbrush

Photo: Kit Dillon

The Goby Electric Toothbrush is only a few dollars more than our other picks and comes with the same no-frills features: a two-minute timer that shuts the brush off at the end, plus a quadrant timer to prompt you to switch areas every 30 seconds. Goby offers an "optional" brush head subscription service–however, it's worth keeping in mind that you can't get new brush heads anywhere else and there is only one kind available. The replacement brush heads for the Goby cost $6 with $3 shipping, about the same as the 2 Series replacements and a little more expensive than the Oral-B's heads.

This guide may have been updated by The Sweethome. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

Note from The Sweethome: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

15 Mar 22:43

Reporter Confronts Spicer: 'Medicare Is Government-Run, People Like It!'

by Karoli Kuns

There was a moment in today's cavalcade of White House lies -- also known as Sean Spicer's press briefings -- when CNN reporter Jim Acosta prevented my head from exploding.

While Spicer was spewing his talking points about the ACA being "government-run health care" that "nobody wants," Acosta stopped him cold.

"Medicare is government-run healthcare," Acosta reminded him. "People seem to like it."

This sent Spicer on a minute-long rant about Medicaid, and how no one can get a doctor who takes Medicaid and so freedom dictates that they should have no doctor at all or some such.

Spicer glided right past Medicare, because Acosta is right. It works, and people like it. And yeah, it's "government-run."

You know, there's an easy answer to all of this nonsense they're trying to pull over us right now. They can tell doctors who take Medicare reimbursements that if they'd like to keep getting that guaranteed income paid by the Federal government every month, they have to accept Medicaid and ACA patients too. Seems like an easy fix.

Or, they could just add a Medicare buy-in to the ACA. Or a public option. Or just make it Medicare for All.

This lying all the time, though. It's exhausting and so unnecessary. The harder Spicer spins, the less believable he is. All the dishonesty shines through like the dark armor it is.

02 Dec 22:28

One Last Dispatch From The Land Of Chess Kings And Billionaires

by Oliver Roeder
Left: Magnus Carlsen, 26, at the World Chess Championship’s opening gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Right: Sergey Karjakin, 26, tests the overhead lights in the playing hall.

Left: Magnus Carlsen, 26, at the World Chess Championship’s opening gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.
Right: Sergey Karjakin, 26, tests the overhead lights in the playing hall.

All photographs by Misha Friedman

Watching an elite chess match in person is at once enjoyable and discomfiting. You follow the players’ actions — their moves, their mannerisms — for long stretches of time. You hang on each one and imbue it with meaning. You become so familiar with their moves that you can rattle them off later from memory: “queen to h6,” say, or “rook to e2.” You try to understand why the players did what they did. The moves can be beautiful or inscrutable or frustrating or disappointing. You try to imagine what you would do if you were in one of their chairs. You try to predict what they will do next. You try and make sense of their postgame explanations. But you aren’t them, and you can never really understand.

On Wednesday, the final day of the World Chess Championship, hundreds crowded into the Fulton Market Building in lower Manhattan to watch, trying to understand. Magnus Carlsen, the defending champion, No. 1-rated player in the world and the closest thing the sport has to a rock star, was facing his challenger, Sergey Karjakin of Russia, in a series of speedy tiebreaker games. The 12 lengthy games that had stretched over the previous 19 days — I attended 11 in person — ended tied and the two grandmasters were back in their chairs in a soundproof glass box to break the deadlock. It was the biggest day in chess in many years. Carlsen, the former wunderkind, was clinging to his title and his legacy, while Karjakin and the Russians were hoping for a return to the days of Soviet chess hegemony. On the fourth game of the tiebreaker, and the 16th of the match, Carlsen attacked the Russian’s king, Karjakin resigned and the two shook hands. It was over.

 

Tickets were expensive, but there were a lot of young fans at every game, especially on weekends.

Tickets were expensive, but there were a lot of young fans at every game, especially on weekends.

 

You had to elbow your way through knots of onlookers to get anywhere in the venue’s sprawling VIP wing. Men in suits and expensive shoes crowded around TVs, watching the games and sipping martinis. The room was at a low murmur — equal parts English and Russian with an occasional dash of Norwegian. The clinking of glasses and the ratatat of ice in cocktail shakers punctuated the chess talk.

Like a Russian nesting doll, a VVIP section had been set up for Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, and company within the VIP section. It was newly roped off and closely monitored by scary-looking bodyguards. Thiel, a Donald Trump supporter and a strong chess player himself, and Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire venture capitalist, sat at a board inside. With apologies to Beyoncé, it was $6 billion at a chess table. Accompanying them: Bennett Miller, who directed “Foxcatcher,” about the wrestling-obsessed murderer and multimillionaire heir to the du Pont fortune, and the Icelandic grandmaster Hedinn Steingrimsson, who was giving them a private analysis of the ongoing championship game taking place just a few yards away.

A buffet and wine bar had been installed for the guests from Silicon Valley who’d arrived that day, and bored-looking members of their entourages lolled on large couches, poking at iPhones. Word around the venue was that the billionaires had paid $50,000 for these privileges. (The match’s organizer wouldn’t comment on the figure.) Much later in the evening, some other journalists and I raided their buffet, eating what must have been thousands of dollars worth of cold mini tacos.

“Are you security?” the writer Brin-Jonathan Butler asked one of the well-dressed, well-built men keeping close watch over the well-heeled chess lesson.

“Something like that,” he responded ominously. “I wouldn’t bother them, if you don’t mind.”

This World Chess Championship scene was somewhere at the intersection of Bond film, Trump fundraiser and museum gala.

 

Spectators in the VIP lounge. A production team from Russia created an atmosphere for VIPs more often seen in Moscow than Manhattan.

Spectators in the VIP lounge. A production team from Russia created an atmosphere for VIPs more often seen in Moscow than Manhattan.

 

Despite the high-powered, moneyed interest, and its prime New York City location, the match was sparsely covered by the American press — as chess is generally — and given little attention outside the core chess world. It’s unlikely to increase the game’s reach or exposure as the organizers may have hoped. That did happen once in the States — in 1972 — but that was because of Bobby Fischer.

The troublesome shadow of Fischer stretches over every conversation of chess’s success and future in the U.S. He was the best American player of all time, and its only modern world champion. His legacy is stained by his vocal anti-Semitism, and comments that he was pleased with the terrorism on Sept. 11, among other things. But in his chess prime, he carried the U.S. on his back while sitting at the board, having taught himself the game, largely alone, in a shabby Brooklyn apartment. And he won.

While this year’s championship lacked the colorful characters and Cold War narrative of Fischer’s title run — although some journalists tried to revive them — it did have some of the controversy.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of the game’s international governing body, FIDE, was absent from the match, having been sanctioned by the U.S. for business connections with the Assad regime in Syria. Ilyumzhinov is no stranger to controversy. He insists he was abducted by aliens. They were wearing yellow spacesuits and nabbed him from his Moscow apartment in 1997, taking him away to a distant star. He considers chess “a gift from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

 

Left: A branded vodka bar assured VIPs were sufficiently entertained throughout the tournament. Right: Ekaterina, a Karjakin family friend, flew in from Moscow just for the tiebreaker round.

Left: A branded vodka bar assured VIPs were sufficiently entertained throughout the tournament.
Right: Ekaterina, a Karjakin family friend, flew in from Moscow just for the tiebreaker round.

 

There are other internal chess-world squabbles. Agon Limited, the match’s organizer, filed an application for a restraining order and injunction against a number of popular third-party chess websites, just before the match began. The websites’ alleged transgression? Relaying chess moves live, which Agon saw as a violation. The application was denied by a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who wrote that “robust reporting of factual data concerning the contestants’ moves” best served the public interest. Agon’s CEO, Ilya Merenzon, told me that the company would continue to pursue the matter in court, and was also proposing legislation to cement their rights to the games they organize.

I discussed the case with Macauley Peterson, the content director for chess24, one of the defendants, on the floor of the venue during one of the early games. He kept glancing away from me at people walking by. He said he was worried about who might be eavesdropping.

The tournament’s organizers have declared their own victory, though, bragging that the 20-day biennial championship had drawn some 10,000 spectators to its location in the South Street Seaport. But that’s less than, say, half the average attendance of the worst team in baseball for any one of its 81 home games this year. And the event’s only two main sponsors were PhosAgro, a Russian producer of phosphate-based fertilizer, and EG Capital Advisors, a Russian investment management company. Not exactly Nike and Coca-Cola.

 

Left: Neil deGrasse Tyson, a celebrated astrophysicist, and Fabiano Caruana, the No. 2 ranked chess player in the world, chatted about baseball. Right: Peter Thiel showed up for the decisive tiebreaker round and had a grandmaster at his side to explain the games live.

Left: Neil deGrasse Tyson, a celebrated astrophysicist, and Fabiano Caruana, the No. 2 ranked chess player in the world, chatted about baseball.
Right: Peter Thiel showed up for the decisive tiebreaker round and had a grandmaster at his side to explain the games live.

 

But despite the controversy and the finances, what’s really missing from chess is a character.

The U.S. has three players in the world Top 10, any one of whom could have a shot at challenging Carlsen for the title in two years. They’re undeniably fantastic players. But they seem less like compelling national characters — and less like artists — than Fischer did. They’re technicians, raised in a computer-chess age. Carlsen ended the match and extended his world championship reign with a beautiful move on Wednesday evening — whether he’d admit its beauty or not — sacrificing his queen to entrap Karjakin’s king. But in one of the postgame press conferences, Carlsen said chess was a sport and a science. For art, he said, you’d “have to look elsewhere.”

 

Left: While waiting for the title ceremony, Magnus Carlsen is finally able to relax with his father by his side. Right: Following his defeat, Karjakin was clearly disappointed while speaking to the Russian media. He confirmed rumors about travelling to New York with a Virgin Mary icon.

Left: While waiting for the title ceremony, Magnus Carlsen is finally able to relax with his father by his side.
Right: Following his defeat, Karjakin was clearly disappointed while speaking to the Russian media. He confirmed rumors about travelling to New York with a Virgin Mary icon.

 

After the match — after the trophy presentation and the cake and the champagne — our photographer and I tracked down the Norwegian contingent at an after-after-party at a steakhouse a couple miles uptown. It was a festive scene. Holiday garland and lights festooned the bannisters and the restaurant was a cozy respite from the cold and rainy November day outside. Carlsen was sitting at a far table in the crowded dining room with about 50 others. He was eating. With a fork. Like a person. It was odd to see him with something other than a chess piece in his hand.

I wanted to talk to him. I’d been watching him for hours most days for the past three weeks. But honestly I had no idea what I’d say. Carlsen famously hates interviews. But I was saved. “No questions. Definitely no,” his manager, Espen Agdestein, told us. “He’s very tired. We’re just relaxing.”

I’m not Carlsen. But I understood.

01 Dec 00:50

China’s Lucky Knot bridge

by Jason Kottke

Lucky Knot

Lucky Knot

Lucky Knot

Built by NEXT architects in the Chinese city of Changsha,1 the Lucky Knot bridge is a wonderfully inventive piece of architecture and engineering. It does not, however, appear very accessible to cyclists or the handicapped in the way that their Melkwegbridge project is. (via @robinsloan)

  1. I’m guessing you’ve never heard of Changsha — I hadn’t. It’s the 36th most populous city in the world, with a greater population than any city in the US except NYC. The scale of China’s population is incredible…16 of the most populous 50 cities in the world are in China and many Americans would struggle to name more than 3 or 4 of them.

Tags: architecture   China
07 Nov 15:16

The people’s tyrant: what Plato can teach us about Donald Trump

by Sean Illing

Trump put fascism on the ballot this year, and millions of people said “yes.”

Plato thought political regimes followed a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Oligarchies give way to democracies when the elites fail, when they become spoiled, lazy, profligate, and when they develop interests apart from those they rule.

Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses. But the tyrant is not quite a tyrant at first. On the contrary, in a democracy the would-be tyrant offers himself as the people’s champion. He’s the ultimate simplifier, the one man who can make everything whole again.

Sound familiar?

With Trump, we have a glimpse of what this sort of evolution looks like: A vulgar right-wing populism emerges out of a whirlwind of anti-establishment hysteria; a strongman fascist promises to stick it to the elites and says only he can make the country great again; he gives the people a familiar boogeyman, some alien other, on whom they can dump their resentment.

For a fractured and embittered citizenry, this is a rhetorical balm, and, according to Plato, just the sort of thing that sends the city over a cliff.

The American founders were skeptical of democratic rule for all the reasons Plato spelled out. They created a firewall against the tyranny of the majority, which is why we have a republic instead of a direct democracy.

Trump is the firebrand they feared.

You might see his political existence as our democracy's response to its own decay. People no longer believe in the authority of public institutions, which amounts to a loss of faith in constitutional democracy. That Trump made it this far proves that the country can be whipped into a frenzy and that fascism is only an election away.

If Trump fails, it won’t be because he was too illiberal or too anti-democratic but because he self-sabotaged, because he was too incompetent to execute his half-baked vision. But it’s easy to imagine a future Trump, a candidate who shares his tyrannical nature but is skilled enough to capture a plurality.

Perhaps we’ll survive this time, but we walked right up to the edge of the abyss. Next time we may tumble into it.

 Getty Images / antonis kioupliotis photography

What Plato said

“Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” — Plato

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses, he did the country at least one service: He revealed the rot at the core of our politics. His success shows just how vulnerable we are to demagogic shocks.

Earlier this year, Andrew Sullivan wrote an essay for New York magazine in which he argued that America is ripe for tyranny. With Plato as his lodestar, Sullivan lamented the excesses of democracies and warned how easily they devolve into dictatorships.

Trump, he argued, is an “extinction-level” threat.

There’s much to disagree with in Sullivan’s piece, but his diagnosis was largely right: The very possibility of a Trump presidency constitutes a crisis for our democracy.

What’s happening in this election cycle isn’t new or incomprehensible. The character of Trump and the reasons for his rise are explained in remarkably prescient terms by Plato over two centuries ago in his most famous book, The Republic.

The Republic is a series of dialogues about many things: justice, human nature, education, virtue. Among the most important is a conversation between Socrates and friends about the nature of regimes and why one is superior to another.

Socrates says: “Let us place the most just regime side by side the most unjust, and when we see them we shall be able to compare…” Though it’s not the aim, what we get at the end of the dialogue is a theory of regime decline, with Socrates explaining why governments sink from higher to lower forms.

Oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny, in that order, are said to be the worst forms of government, and they are defined more or less in modern terms.

An oligarchy is a regime in which the rich have power and the poor are deprived of it. A democracy is a system of maximal freedom in which the people hold sway. And tyranny is rule by one man, who is both unjust and unqualified.

Oligarchies become democracies for predictable reasons: “As the rich grow richer and richer, the more they think of making a fortune and the less they think of virtue.” The inequality and corruption spread like a disease. “Democracy comes into power,” Socrates says, “when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest.”

Democracy, for all its charms, is said to be a poor substitute for oligarchy. It’s an “agreeable form of anarchy,” Socrates tells us. Like every other regime, a democracy collapses of its own contradictions. It’s full of freedom and spangled with every kind of liberty imaginable.

Over time, though, this boundless freedom degenerates into herd hysteria. Belief in authority atrophies. A spirit of excess takes hold and, eventually, “the state falls sick, and is at war with herself.”

Tyranny springs from democracy in the same manner democracy springs from oligarchy. Just as the blind pursuit of wealth occasions a thirst for equality, so “the insatiable desire for freedom occasions a demand for tyranny.”

There’s a logic to this dynamic, a kind of political physics. Each regime succeeds the previous one as its opposite and as a reaction to it.

So the shift from democracy to tyranny is simple enough: A surplus of freedom produces an excess of factions and a multiplicity of perspectives, most of which are blinkered by narrow interests. To get elected, those factions have to be flattered, their passions indulged. This is fertile soil for the demagogue, who manipulates the masses to “overmaster democracy,” as Plato put it.

In this way, it’s the very freedom of democracy that opens the way to tyranny. The love of tolerance devolves into a kind of unraveling licentiousness. Communal bonds wither. When things get bad, as they always do, the people grow restless and yield to a swindling demagogue who cultivates their fears and positions himself as the protector.

This is how democracy passes into despotism.

Rally At 39th Anniversary Of The Death Of Former Dictator General Franco Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images
A man speaks to a small crowd of Franco supporters during the 39th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco at Plaza Oriente square on November 23, 2014, in Madrid, Spain.

Trump as the people’s tyrant

“States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.” — Plato

Plato insists that it takes a particular kind of person to win over a democratic mob.

The Republic is based on an assumption of a parallelism between the city and the soul. It’s difficult to summarize, but Plato held that for every kind of government there existed a corresponding kind of man. This is what he means when he writes that states “grow out of human characters,” and this is what Socrates means when he says that “the city is the soul writ large.”

In The Republic, systems of government are defined by the end they most pursue. Oligarchies, for instance, esteem wealth. In democracies, freedom is the highest good. In tyrannies, it’s the will of the tyrant.

There are five regime types for Plato and thus five kinds of human characters, each following the other in corresponding order. Describing them all is beyond the scope of this article, so instead let’s focus on the most relevant: the tyrant.

A tyrant, for Plato, wasn’t just someone who ruled over others; a tyrant is someone who can’t rule over himself. He’s Eros incarnate — pure impulse. He’s always in the thrall of his own lusts and passions.

Plato likens the tyrant to a drunken man, in whom there is a constant “succession of passions, and the new gets the better of the old and takes away their rights.” Because he can’t get along without domineering or being served, moreover, he “never tastes of true freedom or friendship.”

Trump is the tyrannical soul par excellence. His instinct is always to stifle dissent. The examples here are endless. He has threatened to “open up” federal libel laws and partially repeal the First Amendment in order to sue newspapers for the crime of challenging him.

During one of the presidential debates, he vowed to jail his political opponent for imagined non-offenses. “I’ll tell you what,” Trump said, “I didn’t think I’d say this … and I hate to say it: If I win, I’m going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.” He then warned Clinton that, if he were president, “You’d be in jail.”

Almost everything we know about Trump testifies to this need to punish and humiliate. Consider this revealing Politico report about Richard Branson’s memorable encounter with Trump several years ago. Here’s how Branson recalls it:

“Some years ago, Mr. Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted … Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.”

Branson later said that Trump’s “vindictive streak” would “be so dangerous if he got into the White House.”

This emotional incontinence is what sets Trump apart as a uniquely tyrannical figure. To watch him on stage is to witness a frenzied parade of inner consciousness. He’s simply incapable of restraining himself, and all of his “handlers” have learned this the hard way.

He has very few actual friends because other people are ornaments for him. He treats women as playthings. He mocks the disabled. He encourages supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters. He even withdrew medical benefits for his nephew’s infant child as retaliation for a dispute over his father’s estate.

Pathology is the only term for this kind of behavior.

As Plato predicted, Trump’s tyrannical psyche manifests in his political views. He has proposed killing the family members of terrorists; waterboarding suspects because “they deserve it anyway”; refused to accept the results of a free and fair election; toyed with deploying nuclear weapons in regional conflicts; suggested banning all Muslims from the country; and said a federal judge’s Mexican heritage disqualifies him from office. This list hardly captures all of Trump fascistic musings, but the point is obvious enough.

This is a man with no respect for democratic norms, no understanding of compromise, no sense of inclusiveness, and, worst of all, no self-awareness. His burning ignorance is matched only by his baseless confidence. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he said during his convention speech, “which is why I alone can fix it.” [Emphasis mine.]

The tyrannical drive cannot be distilled any better than that.

Indeed, with Trump we see the transition from democracy to tyranny in real time. And his message resonates for reasons familiar to Plato: Trump is a reflection of the people to whom he appeals. What distinguishes him from his followers is wealth and celebrity, but it’s his ingratiating crudity that does the real work.

A democratic tyrant slips into power by dint of deception: He is usually rich, but he carries himself as a commoner. “In the early days of his power,” Plato writes, “he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets … making promises in public and also in private, liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to everyone.”

But the honeymoon is brief. The populist begins as the people’s champion; later, having tasted power, he becomes their tyrant.

Donald Trump

What next?

Plato wasn’t a prophet. His critique of democracy is wildly exaggerated, and there’s a streak of illiberalism in his thought that ought to offend the modern reader. But his analysis is valuable nevertheless.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Elbridge Gerry, who later served as the fifth vice president under James Madison, declared the chaos in state governments a result of an “excess of democracy.” “The people do not want virtue; but are dupes of pretended patriots,” Gerry said, “and are misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.”

Trump is a designing man, and his political existence is a warning. He let loose something dark in this country, and whatever happens on Tuesday, the fact remains: Trump put fascism on the ballot this year, and millions of people said “yes.”

05 Oct 00:30

The Science Behind Why Ketchup Is So Hard to Pour

by Claire Lower on Skillet, shared by Andy Orin to Lifehacker

If you are a lover of ketchup, you have no doubt had to deal with the very real struggle of trying to get it out of the bottle, particularly if that bottle is glass. If you’ve ever wondered why you must suffer at the hands of this stubborn condiment, there is an answer: ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid.

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06 Sep 22:05

The tractor of the future is here … and it’s pretty awesome

The tractor of the future is here … and it’s pretty awesomeEver wish your tractor looked like a hybrid of a monster truck and spaceship?


05 Jun 23:23

LEGO Figures Make Perfect Cable Holders

by Melanie Pinola

LEGO Figures Make Perfect Cable Holders

Who knew that LEGO designed their figures' hands perfectly to hold Apple lightning and other types of cables? Stick a LEGO brick on your desk, attach LEGO figure(s), and, voilà, an ingenious cord-catching solution.

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14 May 00:08

Why a cheap counterfeit iPad charger isn't worth the price

by Yoni Heisler
With no shortage of counterfeit iOS accessories on the market, Ken Shirriff recently decided to take a look at a counterfeit iPad charger and compare it to the real deal. While a counterfeit version of anything will undoubtedly save you a few bucks,...
04 Sep 23:17

John McCain played poker during Syria debate. Bad phone etiquette? | Open thread

Open thread: Senator John McCain was caught playing on his iPhone during a Syria debate. Share your thoughts on phone dos and don'ts