Andrea

America's infrastructure is close to hitting rock bottom. In fact, infrastructure as a whole in the US received an embarrassing D+ on the American Society of Civil Engineers latest Infrastructure Report Card. And when talking specifically about bridges, the grade was a C+. Way to go, Congress.

According to Business Insider, "Every state has at least one structurally deficient bridge, which the US Department of Transportation (DOT) defines as when one or more key bridge components (e.g. the deck, superstructure, or substructure) is in 'poor' condition."

And the Auto Insurance Center says that "tens of thousands of bridges across the country are currently falling apart." Great. So which of these over 10,000 crumbling US bridges are in the worst condition? The Auto Insurance Center put out a list, which includes the worst bridge in every state, including Washington D.C. Here is a sample from the list: • Arizona I-17 over 19th Avenue in Maricopa County • California I-110 over Dominguez Channel in Los Angeles • Colorado I-70 ML over Havana St Railroad in Denver • Florida Fuller Warren Bridge in Duval County • New York Route I-278 over Relief in Richmond County • Washington DC Anacostia Freeway over Suitland Parkway Southeast For an easy way to read the full list, check it out at Business Insider.

Image by Payton Chung from Chicago, USA - 105 freeway @ Harbor?, CC BY 2.0, Link

A Wellington, New-Zealand-based hunter named Matt Bircham captured the astonishing footage you see below. Upon encountering a sheep farm in Marlborough, Bircham sent his drone up to a distance of 180 meters to capture the sheep dogs doing their herding work, then sped the footage up:

"They were moving 3500 ewes into the yard," Bircham told NZ Farmer, "so we thought we would film it and see what it looked like, sped it up and it looks like schooling fish to me."

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, remembers asking an undergraduate seminar recently, “How many of you are waiting to find your passion?”

“Almost all of them raised their hand and got dreamy looks in their eyes,” she told me. They talked about it “like a tidal wave would sweep over them,” he said. Sploosh. Huzzah! It’s accounting!

Would they have unlimited motivation for their passion? They nodded solemnly.

“I hate to burst your balloon,” she said, “but it doesn’t usually happen that way.”

What Dweck asked her students is a common refrain in American society. The term “Follow your passion” has increased ninefold in English books since 1990. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is another college-counseling standby of unknown provenance.

But according to Dweck and others, that advice is steering people wrong.

“What are the consequences of that?” asked Paul O’Keefe, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. “That means that if you do something that feels like work, it means you don’t love it.” He gave me the example of a student who jumps from lab to lab, trying to find one whose research topic feels like her passion. “It’s this idea that if I’m not completely overwhelmed by emotion when I walk into a lab, then it won’t be my passion or my interest.”

That’s why he and two co-authors—Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.

In a paper that is forthcoming in Psychological Science, the authors delineate the difference between the two mind-sets. One is a “fixed theory of interests”—the idea that core interests are there from birth, just waiting to be discovered—and the other is a “growth theory,” the idea that interests are something anyone can cultivate over time.

To examine how these different mind-sets affect our pursuit of different topics, the authors performed a series of studies on college students—a group that’s frequently advised to find their passion in the form of a major or career path.

First, students answered a survey that would categorize them as either “techy”—slang for interested in math and science—or “fuzzy,” meaning interested in the arts or humanities. They also filled out a survey determining how much they agreed with the idea that peoples’ core interests don’t change over time. They then read an article that mismatched their interests—a piece on the future of algorithms for the fuzzies, and a piece on Derrida for the techies. The more the participants endorsed a “fixed” theory of interests, the less interested they were in the article that mismatched their aforementioned identity as a techy or fuzzy.

The authors then repeated a similar procedure, but they had students read first about either the fixed theory of interests or the growth theory. Again, those who learned that interests are fixed throughout a person’s life were less captivated by an article that mismatched their interests.

The authors believe this could mean that students who have fixed theories of interest might forgo interesting lectures or opportunities because they don’t align with their previously stated passions. Or that they might overlook ways that other disciplines can intersect with their own.

“If passions are things found fully formed, and your job is to look around the world for your passion—it’s a crazy thought,” Walton told me. “It doesn’t reflect the way I or my students experience school, where you go to a class and have a lecture or a conversation, and you think, That’s interesting. It’s through a process of investment and development that you develop an abiding passion in a field.”

Another reason not to endorse the fixed theory is that it can cause people to give up too easily. If something becomes difficult, it’s easy to assume that it simply must not have been your passion, after all. In one portion of this study, the students who thought interests were fixed were also less likely to think that pursuing a passion would be difficult at times. Instead, they thought it would provide “endless motivation.”

Dweck, one of the paper’s authors, has previously studied different types of mind-sets as they relate to intelligence. People who have a growth mind-set about their own intelligence tend to be less afraid of failure, according to her research, because they believe smarts are cultivated, not inherent. Interests are related to, but distinct from, abilities, the study authors told me: You can be interested in something but not very good at it. “I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years, but I can’t say that my abilities have gotten that much better in the past 10 years,” O’Keefe said.

Dweck told me that “Find your passion” has a laudable history. “Before that, people were saying, ‘Find your genius,’ and that was so intimidating. It implied that only people who were really brilliant at something could succeed,” she said. “‘Find your passion’ felt more democratic. Everybody can have an interest.” But this study suggests that even the idea of finding your “true” interest can intimidate people and keep them from digging further into a field.

The authors also had students learn about either fixed or growth theory and then exposed them to a new interest: Astronomy. First, they had them watch a video made by The Guardian for a general audience about Stephen Hawking’s ideas. It was easy to understand, and entertaining. Then the authors had the students read a highly technical, challenging article in the academic journal Science about black holes. Despite saying just moments ago, after viewing the video, that they were fascinated by black holes, the students who were exposed to the fixed theory of interests said they were no longer interested in black holes after reading the difficult Science article. In other words, when you’re told that your interests are somehow ingrained, you give up on new interests as soon as the going gets tough.

This study was a preregistered replication, meaning the authors stated at the outset what their hypothesis and methods would be. This process is meant to prevent p-hacking, a shady data practice that has cast a shadow over many psychology studies in recent years.

K. Ann Renninger, a professor at Swarthmore College who was not involved with the study, has researched the development of interests and said that “neuroscience has confirmed that interests can be supported to develop.” In other words, with the right help, most people can get interested in almost anything. Before the age of 8, she said, kids will try anything. Between the ages of 8 and 12, they start to compare themselves with others and become insecure if they’re not as good as their peers at something. That’s when educators have to start to find new ways to keep them interested in certain subjects.

Though the authors didn’t examine adults, they told me their findings could apply to an older population as well. For example, people’s interest in parenthood tends to escalate rapidly once they have a real, crying baby in their house. “You could not know the first thing about cancer, but if your mother gets cancer, you’re going to be an expert in it pretty darn quick,” O’Keefe said.

A different study done on adults’ views toward passions suggests that people who think passions are found tend to pick jobs that fit them well from the outset. They prioritize enjoyment over good pay. People who think passions are developed, meanwhile, prioritize other goals over immediate enjoyment at work, and they “grow to fit their vocations better over time,” the authors of that study write. “In conclusion,” they add, “people who have not found their perfect fit in a career can take heart—there is more than one way to attain passion for work.”

How to cultivate a “growth” mind-set in the young, future-psychology-experiment subjects of America? If you’re a parent, you can avoid dropping new hobbies as soon as they become difficult. (Your kids might take note if you do, O’Keefe said.)

Beyond that, there’s not a clear way to develop a growth mind-set about interests, other than knowing that it’s a valid way to think, and that your passion might still be around the corner.

“We’re just trying to pull the veil back on the hidden implications of things like, Find your passion,’” Walton said. “Is that really how things work? A little bit of knowledge is power.”

Disagreements between bike advocates and fire departments pop up all the time in American cities. But what’s happening in Baltimore right now is not normal.

Local bike advocates say they’ve been personally targeted for harassment and intimidation by fire department employees and even the Baltimore City Fire Department itself, which has been campaigning against the addition of bike lanes.

At issue are street redesigns that have narrowed the right-of-way for motor vehicles, which BCFD says violate the requirement for 20 feet of clearance in the city’s fire code. Residents of Potomac Street cited the fire code in a bid to remove a protected bike lane on their street.

A lawsuit by Bikemore, the local bike advocacy group, halted the city’s plans to remove the bike lane, arguing that the fire code should be interpreted more flexibly.

Two months ago, members of BCFD started lashing out. At a public meeting on bike lanes on May 14, several witnesses reported that a white off-duty firefighter, Charles Mudra, lifted Austin Davis, a black city planner (also attending in an unofficial capacity) up by his neck.

Bikemore Executive Director Liz Cornish told the local news site Baltimore Fishbowl that Mudra should be released by the fire department. He’s currently facing assault charges.

At a July 3 City Council hearing, Alyssa Domzal testified that a man driving a pickup truck with a Baltimore City Fire Department decal swerved at her as she was biking and shouted, “I still hate you.” Cornish says the Fire Department has not made any effort to investigate the incident.

BCFD recently filmed a bizarre nine-minute video to argue that bike lanes are incompatible with fire trucks. But it appears to have backfired. The trucks in the video clearly have enough room to travel on the streets with protected bike lanes.

Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young told the Baltimore Sun that “I’m glad I saw the video because it showed me those trucks can get to those fires.”

Strangely, part of the video was filmed right across from Cornish’s home and Davis’s home. The two happen to be neighbors. Cornish told the City Council that she doesn’t think the location was chosen by chance:

At 3:00 p.m., I was walking home from my office. As I approached my block, I noticed a BCFD tiller truck parked in the travel lane in front of my house, surrounded by around eight BCFD employees, including many senior ranking staff based on their uniforms. My initial assumption was there was some kind of emergency on my block, but as I got closer I recognized that the fire department was filming a video. Given the history of aggression and bullying over the past year, BCFD leadership showing up on my block to film a video implying they can’t fight a fire there didn’t just feel like a double down on fear mongering, it also felt like a personal message to me and to my neighbor Austin Davis — a threat.  

Fire Department officials denied singling out Cornish.

The City Council is considering a resolution to strike the “clear width rule” from the city’s code and replace it with more flexible guidance from the National Association of City Transportation Officials, but did not pass it yesterday. It will be taken up again on August 5.

This Stabilo Boss campaign highlighting the remarkable, as in history’s forgotten women, is fantastic.

Here’s something you may not have known about the 1800s wet plate collodion photography process: it can make certain tattoos disappear in photos. It’s a curious phenomenon that photographer Michael Bradley used for his portrait project Puaki.

“The idea was first sparked when I saw some wet plate collodion images from photographers around the world who had shot people with tattoos,” Bradley tells PetaPixel. “I had been shooting on the wet plate collodion method for a few months and was looking for a long-term project when I saw these images of people with tattoo’s and noticed that some faded away depending on the color of that tattoo.

“I noticed that the green/blue shades looked like they were most likely to disappear, especially on someone with slightly darker skin, and this sparked the idea.”

Bradley decided to focus his camera on the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand, whose traditional tā moko tattoos have been making a resurgence.

Tā moko is different from ordinary tattooing because chisels (called uhi are used to carve the skin and opposed to using needles and puncturing. As a result, the skin is grooved rather than smooth in the tattoo areas.

Bradley realized that when photographs of traditional tā moko were captured back in the 1800s, the tattoos themselves barely showed up at all and where therefore lost to history.

“The wet-plate photographic method used by European settlers served to erase this cultural marker – and as the years went by, this proved true in real life, too,” the project’s statement reads. “The ancient art of tā moko was increasingly suppressed as Māori were assimilated into the colonial world.”

To capture the rebirth of tā moko, Bradley captured two portraits of Māori individuals who have facial tattoos: one with a digital camera to show the tattoos as it looks in real life, and one with the wet plate collodion process to show the same subject without the tattoos.

Bradley’s 48 resulting photos (and the videos that accompany them) are currently being exhibited at the Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, through September 2nd, 2018. You can also find more of Bradley’s work on his website.

(via Puaki via Fstoppers)

Image credits: Photographs by Michael Bradley and used with permission

I've been talking a lot lately about the unfortunate shift of the web from being more decentralized to being about a few giant silos and I expect to have plenty more to say on the topic in the near future. But I'm thinking about this again after Andy Baio reminded me that this past weekend was five years since Google turned off Google Reader. Though, as he notes, Google's own awful decision making created the diminished use that allowed Google to justify shutting it down. Here's Andy's tweeted thread, and then I'll tie it back to my thinking on the silo'd state of the web today:

Many people have pointed to the death of Google Reader as a point at which news reading online shifted from things like RSS feeds to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It might seem odd (or ironic) to bemoan a move by one of the companies now considered one of the major silos for killing off a product, but it does seem to indicate a fundamental shift in the way that Google viewed the open web. A quick Google search (yeah, yeah, I know...) is not helping me find the quote, but I pretty clearly remember, in the early days of Google, one of Larry Page or Sergey Brin saying something to the effect of how the most important thing for Google was to get you off its site as quickly as possible. The whole point of Google was to take you somewhere else on the amazing web. Update It has been pointed out to me that the quote in question most likely is part of Larry Page's interview with Playboy in which he responded to the fact that in the early days all of their competitors were "portals" that tried to keep you in with the following:

We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. It seems that much of the change was really an overreaction by Google leadership to the "threat" of Facebook. So many of Google's efforts from the late 2000s until now seemed to have been designed to ward off Facebook. This includes not just Google's multiple (often weird) attempts at building a social network, but also Google's infatuation with getting users to sign in just to use its core search engine. Over the past decade or so, Google went very strongly from a company trying to get you off its site quickly to one that tried to keep you in. And it feels like the death of Reader was a clear indication of that shift. Reader started in the good old days, when the whole point of an RSS reader was to help you keep track of new stuff all over the web on individual sites.

But, as Andy noted above, part of what killed Reader was Google attempting desperately to use it as a tool to boost Google+, the exact opposite of what Google Reader stood for in helping people go elsewhere. I don't think Google Reader alone would have kept RSS or the open web more thriving than it is today, but it certainly does feel like a landmark shift in the way Google itself viewed its mission: away from helping you get somewhere else, and much more towards keeping you connected to Google's big data machine.

There’s a very real chance that when Amazon.com, Inc. starts hiring employees for its second headquarters, or HQ2, those employees’ state personal income taxes won’t all go to the state treasury. Billions of dollars in taxes may instead be diverted to the company, of which CEO Jeff Bezos owns 17 percent.

There are 18 states that offer this tax-diversion shell game to companies: If Amazon chooses to locate HQ2 in one of the nine finalist cities in these states, the employees will never be notified of their participation. Their pay stubs won’t show where their tax deductions have actually gone. They’ll never be asked if they consent or wish to opt out. Nor will the state’s school boards, universities or transportation agencies have any say: Their resources will be greatly eroded, yet they’ll still be expected to deliver a highly skilled workforce on time.

It’s a glaring example of how extreme and hypocritical corporate welfare has become in reinforcing inequality. Amazon is headed by the world’s richest man, but pays a median wage of just $28,446. Yet it may get such huge amounts of these personal income tax diversions that it will enjoy a negative income tax rate for many years in the state that “wins” the deal.

Of course, because of the traditional “economic development incentives” state and cities give out, Amazon will likely pay few if any of its corporate property taxes or sales taxes, either. Many states automatically exempt a project this size from sales taxes on building materials, machinery, and equipment. If they don’t grant that automatically, Amazon will no doubt demand it. At the local level, politicians will be under terrific pressure to abate property taxes to mirror the state’s generosity with corporate income tax credits that will reduce or eliminate its income tax bill for many years. The personal income tax diversions described here are on top of those.

We at Good Jobs First revealed this insidious giveaway in 2012 when we named 2,700 companies in 16 states that had been awarded big chunks of their employees’ state payroll taxes. In “Paying Taxes to the Boss,” we explained three different ways the money can flow, with the net effect always the same.

Amazon did not impose non-disclosure agreements on the first-round proposals for HQ2, yet we still know far too little about all but two of the tax-break offers made by Amazon’s 20 finalist locations. But even with such poor disclosure about the specifics of each package, it’s already evident that HQ2 employees could effectively pay lots of their income taxes to Bezos and other Amazon shareholders.

For example, Maryland has offered the biggest known HQ2 subsidy package, totaling $8.5 billion, for locating in Montgomery County. Most of it—$4.9 billion—would be payments to Amazon of 5.75 percent of every dollar paid in salaries. That’s the state’s top personal income tax rate.

If Amazon chooses Chicago, a reported $1.32 billion of Chicago’s offer would derive from state personal income taxes. Never mind that the revenue is desperately needed by the most financially distressed state in the nation. It's surprising that the Prairie State would gamble on a retail headquarters deal: It has given Sears two HQ packages totaling $517 million, and those haven’t stopped that chain’s death spiral.

If Columbus is the choice, Amazon could get two kinds of personal income tax diversions: An Ohio program could entitle Amazon to three-fourths of its HQ2 employees’ payroll taxes for 15 years, at an undisclosed price tag; and a local income tax diversion could total $400 million.

North Carolina may soon open its floodgates even wider as Amazon considers Raleigh: The state is now considering legislation that would divert some personal income taxes to employers for 40 years. For Atlanta, Georgia, another finalist, the state has two tax credits derived from payroll withholdings; one accountant estimated between $1 and $2 billion could be lost to the state treasury.

In Colorado where Denver—also a contender—is, workers pay a share of their personal income taxes to employers. The same would be true if HQ2 goes to Indianapolis, Indiana. But both of those bids are hidden from taxpayers.

Pennsylvania’s state bid, which would apply to either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia—both are still in the hunt—has been estimated at $1 billion in incentives. But it’s not yet known whether that sum includes the offer of a personal income tax diversion. Could this be why both cities refuse to disclose their first-round bids, despite rulings by the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records that they be released to the news media?

Taxpayers in all 238 localities that bid on HQ2 deserve to see every single penny. We have more important things to do with the money, especially because many states have enacted unwise tax cuts. Critical investments that benefit all employers, such as education and infrastructure, have not recovered to pre-recession levels.

We can’t afford to mortgage our futures for one corporate headquarters; it’s far too many eggs in one basket. As a Maryland taxpayer, I want all of that $4.9 billion going for schools, healthcare, safety, transit and infrastructure—not lining Jeff Bezos’ pockets.

One of FCC Chair Ajit Pai's claims about how he's changed the FCC is that he's making it more transparent. And, to be fair, he did make one key change that his predecessors failed to do: which is releasing the details of rulemakings before they're voted on. That was good. But in so many other ways, Pai has been significantly less than transparent. And this goes all the way down to incredibly stupid things, like his silly stupid giant Reese's coffee mug. That mug is so famous, that even John Oliver mocked it in his story on net neutrality:

Taylor Amarel had some questions about the mug, and made a FOIA request using Muckrock, that might shed some details on the mug (and, perhaps, a few other things):

I would like to obtain all emails sent to, from, or copied to Deanne Erwin, Executive Assistant, containing any of the following non-case-sensitive key-strings: “reeses”, “ethics”, “mug”, “liberals”, or “Reese’s” from January 1, 2017 to present day.

But the wonderfully "transparent" Ajit Pai... apparently didn't want that. The FCC's General Counsel sent back an oddly accusatory email to Amarel, demanding a ridiculous amount of completely unnecessary information -- claiming it needed that info to assess fees to respond to the FOIA request:

In our attempts to discern your fee categorization, we became aware that the name you provided, Taylor Amarel, is likely a pseudonym. In order to proceed with your request, please provide us with your name, your personal mailing address, and a phone number where you can be reached.... We ask that you provide this information by May 29, 2018. If we do not hear from you by then, we will assume you are unwilling to provide this information and will close your requests accordingly.

As Muckrock noted, there is no reason why anyone should need to prove that they are using their real name or to provide all this personal info to the FCC, and it feels like an intimidation technique. Muckrock does note that such info might be useful in determining if Amarel should be granted media status, which might help waive fees, but Amarel did not request to be covered under such status.

Amarel handed over the info... and was then told that it would cost $233 to get the emails related to Pai's Reese's mug. Using Muckrock's own crowdfunding platform, users chipped in to fund the money, so hopefully at some point the FCC will live up to its legally required transparency and tell us about that stupid mug.

In conversations about transit, does the word inefficiency sound boring to you? If so, whenever you hear it, just replace it with inequality or exclusion. With one exception, noted below, that’s what inefficiency is.

For example, consider this shocking piece by Peter Wayner in The Atlantic. In it, the author proposes destroying the New York City subway system: “Instead of fixing the old trains,” he writes, “let’s rip out the tracks and fill the tunnels with fleets of autonomous vehicles running on pavement.” People who understand transit are reacting with horror to this idea, which contradicts the basic math of how transit succeeds.

Because cars take a lot more space per passenger than trains do, no matter how automated they are, this is a proposal to reduce how many people the subway can serve. How will we apportion access to these tunnels? Wayner is explicit: “People would pay to reserve a slice of the pavement at a particular time; and the tunnels would be maintained by these fees. The prices would move up and down, adapting to demand.” As always, cutting capacity means increasing the fare, which means poor people will have to walk (or more likely, will lose their jobs for lack of transportation).

Elon Musk’s Boring Company raises a similar issue. They propose to build subways cheaper by making them smaller, so that (compared to real transit subways) very few people can use them. They, too, began with the idea of private cars rushing through this subway, an even more inefficient solution than narrow subways in general.

There is no way around this math: When transit plans reduce the number of people that transit can serve, they are planning for more people to be excluded from transit.

Transit agencies always have a fixed budget, so efficiency describes our ability to serve lots of people for that budget. To serve many people, and thus be available to everyone who wants it, transit must serve people at a low cost per rider.

We can also talk about energy efficiency—but energy is cheap compared to space in a big city. There’s also labor efficiency, but automation of high-capacity transit is always possible if we decide we care about that.

In cities, the only truly finite resource is space. The whole point of public transit in dense cities is to liberate many people to have rich and prosperous lives while taking no more than their fair share of the limited space.

Today, certain sectors of the tech industry are spending vast sums promoting the idea that transit should take more space to serve fewer people. Perhaps you have also heard tech pitches implying that what’s wrong with transit is that you have to walk to it, and that the future is “service to your door.” A vehicle that comes to your door will carry fewer people per driver hour than a fixed route that people walk to, because it will spend more time each hour meandering to get to individual people’s doors. (More on this here. And on the version of this notion that’s branded as microtransit, see here.)

These visions imply that transit should carry fewer people than it otherwise could, so that those people will have a nicer experience, all at the taxpayer’s expense. The people with the nicer experience are usually more fortunate people, especially if the low efficiency translates into a higher fare, as the free market would dictate.

You can demand that these cool new things be distributed in ways that include poor neighborhoods, and call that equality, but a low-capacity service will have room for fewer people, and when it runs out of capacity, those who can’t afford it will be left behind. (Or, when this happens, more low-capacity service will be added, which means less high-capacity service will be affordable, further reducing total ridership.)

These ideas, which are nearly universal in the world of tech “disruptors” of transportation, imply the upward redistribution of the benefits of public subsidy.

To be clear, in my work as a transit planning consultant, I won’t tell you not to do this. Communities get to decide their own values through their own political process. Some business leaders, for example, demand that transit subsidies focus on the needs of people they see as customers or senior employees, even when this implies less attention to other people’s needs. If the goal is indeed a transit system focused on the relatively fortunate—in the full knowledge that this means serving fewer people at a higher cost—leaders are free to make that decision.

But if you claim that specializing service around the tastes of the more fortunate will attract more riders, that’s a basic fallacy called elite projection. Very fortunate people are a minority, and you don’t attract lots of riders by appealing to any one minority’s tastes.

There is one exception to the claim that inefficiency is the opposite of equality: Sometimes, inefficiency compensates for some existing inequality. Transit agencies do tolerate low ridership in order to meet the needs of some disadvantaged populations for this reason. One example is paratransit for disabled persons: It costs vastly more per rider to operate than fixed routes, but in the U.S. it is justified as a civil right. A similar “leave nobody behind” principle helps justify low-ridership coverage service, where availability rather than ridership is the goal. If you define equality as equality of subjective experience (everyone gets some service) rather equality than investment (the taxpayer spends the same amount on everyone’s service), then that idea of equality is consistent with low-capacity, low-ridership service.

But that’s the only exception. If you reduce the capacity or quantity of transit, you are making it a nicer experience for fewer people. If these fewer people are not disadvantaged in some way, then you are deepening inequality. That’s what the math says. Know the consequences when you decide.

We all know that the TSA maintains a secret watchlist of suspected terrorists who are somehow suspicious enough that they can be denied the right to fly or be subjected to humiliating screenings (but not suspicious enough to charge with any crime), but it turns out that that TSA has another watchlist of problem fliers -- people who've complained about TSA screeners, as well as people who are accused of having "assaulted" screeners (the definition of "assault" includes women who've removed screeners' hands from their breasts). (more…)

As we careen wildly into a post-GDPR world at the end of this week, you've probably already been inundated with tons upon tons of emails from various companies where you either have an account or have been signed up for their mailing list. Some of these emails likely note that they want you to confirm that you want to remain on their list because of the GDPR. Others pretend they're just checking in with you for the hell of it. According to an expert in EU regulation, many of these emails probably violate another EU regulation, one designed to make spamming illegal. As for the others? They're almost certainly not necessary under the GDPR and appear to be people misunderstanding the GDPR "out of an abundance of caution."

In short, if a service already has proper permission from you, then it doesn't need to get it again. If it doesn't, it's violating EU spam regulations by asking you to give your consent to receive such messages.

Vitale said, if the business really does lack the necessary consent to communicate with you, it probably lacks the consent even to email to ask you to give it that consent.

“In many cases the sender will be breaching another set of regulations, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, which makes it an offence to email someone to ask them for consent to send them marketing by email.”

And, yes, EU regulators are aware of all of this:

“We’ve heard stories of email inboxes bursting with long emails from organisations asking people if they’re still happy to hear from them,” Steve Wood, the deputy information commissioner, wrote in guidance for businesses. “So think about whether you actually need to refresh consent before you send that email, and don’t forget to put in place mechanisms for people to withdraw their consent easily.”

Like Vitale, Wood emphasised that asking for marketing consent from people who had not given it initially could be illegal. “It’s also important to remember that in some cases it may not be appropriate to seek fresh consent if you are unsure how you collected the contact information in the first place, and the consent would not have met the standard under our existing Data Protection Act,” he said.

Depending on how you look at this, it's either the most European of European regulation situations -- in which efforts to comply with a new set of convoluted regulations means violating existing convoluted EU regulations -- or just another example of how ridiculous companies act. Still, it does seem fairly clear that the whole GDPR situation is an utter mess, with tons of companies having no idea what they actually need to do, or how to actually comply with the law.

Whether you think the GDPR is a wonderful innovation in protecting our privacy, or you think it's a giant clusterfuck of bureaucratic virtue signaling, it does seem like it could be something of a general problem if basically every internet company everywhere has no idea how to actually be in compliance.

As Memorial Day weekend approaches, national Democrats are testing out a new line of attack against Donald Trump. Nope, it’s not about the new evidence accumulating every day that the president bases major policy decisions on how they affect his personal wealth. The Democrats’ strategy is all about pinning a moderate rise in gas prices on Trump.

Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic National Committee put out a “sprinkling of statements” blaming Trump for higher gas prices, the Daily Beast reports, the opening salvos in a sustained, coordinated messaging campaign by the party.

Across the country, gas prices are rising.
It’s clear who to blame: @realdonaldtrump pic.twitter.com/eKxq4yDjD0

— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) May 21, 2018

Gas price populism is nothing new. Despite the absence of any firm connection between White House policy and the price of fuel, blaming the sitting president for more expensive gas is a timeworn political tactic. Though only Republicans routinely work themselves into full-on drill-baby-drill mania, we’re now seeing that Democrats are fully capable of turning an uptick in gas prices into electioneering fodder.

It’s a maneuver that sits uncomfortably next to Democrats’ position as the major political party that views global warming as serious threat.

Few things are more damaging to the climate than cheap gas, which incentivizes more driving, the purchase of less fuel efficient cars, and sprawling development patterns. As economist Joe Cortright has written, Americans get “locked in” to larger cars with worse fuel economy for the lifecycle of the vehicle — which can be more than a decade.

Even with the increase in fuel prices in the past year, gas remains relatively cheap by recent standards:

And by the standards of international peer nations, America does not pay much at the pump:

The longer America’s addiction to low fuel prices continues, the harder it will be to make a transition to carbon-efficient transportation and development patterns. Democrats are going to tie themselves in knots if they try to be the party fighting for cheap gas and against global warming at the same time.

Editor’s note: A series of racially charged incidents of “loitering” have triggered national outrage recently. This month, CityLab's visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger dives into the long history of laws against being somewhere you’re not wanted.

Further Reading:

• “Vagrancy Laws and the 1960s,” C-SPAN
• “The Forgotten Law That Gave Police Nearly Unlimited Power,” Time
• “Racial Profiling via Nextdoor.com,” East Bay Express
• “The Yes Loitering Project Ask Kids of Color to Rethink Public Space,” Fast Company
• “#WhyLoiter Reclaims Public—and Inner—Space for Indian Women,” PRI
• “Black Women vs. White Men in Public Spaces: Crosswalk Experiment and Relevance,” Girl with Pen
• “How Punitive and Racist Policing Enforces Gentrification in San Francisco,” Truthout
• “The Criminalization of Gentrifying Neighborhoods,” The Atlantic

For some American families, one kitchen is apparently not enough. What is wrong with having just one kitchen? Well, people cook in kitchens, and when they cook in kitchens, they make messes, and then, to make matters worse, if their kitchen is in full view from the rest of the house—as many today are—their mess is out in the open visible as they eat their meals, hang out with their families, entertain their guests, and go about their lives.

That is why one company, Schumacher Homes of Akron, Ohio, has a fresh new design on offer: a house with an open floor plan, with its kitchen, dining area, and living room all flowing into one another. But then, behind the first kitchen, lies another. A “messy” kitchen. There, the preparation for or remainders from a meal or party can be deposited for later cleanup, out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

That this is “necessary” at all is a consequence of the rise of the open floor plan in the first place. On the next block or on HGTV, remodels blow out walls, enlarge kitchens, and couple them to the surrounding space. In new construction, enormous great rooms combine hundreds of square feet of living space into singular, cavernous voids, punctuated only by the granite or marble outcropping of a kitchen island. This amorphous, multipurpose space has become the center of domestic life.

It hasn’t always been this way. These layouts first became popular in pre-war modernist architecture, but their origins stretch back earlier, to the turn of the 20th century at least. Then, as now, they promised to tear down obstruction and facilitate connection. But that promise was aspirational from the start: It assumed an equality in the home that has never come to pass. In practice, open-plan design has always been a stage to a quiet struggle between freedom and servitude. That struggle continues today, and messy kitchens won’t put an end to it. It’s just hard to notice when the experience has been sold, universally, as “great for entertaining.”

In the February 1901 issue of Ladies Home Journal, on a single page between a portrayal on the “Life of an English Girl” and a feature asking, “Is the Newspaper Office the Place for a Girl?,” the then-obscure American architect Frank Lloyd Wright published plans for a home “in a prairie town.” It might seem like a strange host for architectural plans, but Ladies Home Journal frequently featured them, amid Rubifoam toothpaste ads, tips on what to do with cheese, serialized romance novels, and journalistic muckraking. It makes sense: Architecture is the foundation of home life, a matter largely relegated to women then—and still today, like it or not.

Many of the characteristic features of Wright’s “Prairie” style, as others would come to call it, are already visible in the 1901 design: a low-pitched roof, wide eaves, horizontal orientation, and a strong connection to the surrounding landscape. Inside, another feature is present, in nascent form: an early open floor plan, combining multiple rooms together into a continuous space.

Wright’s design joined a series of “model suburban homes which can be built at moderate cost.” Moderate cost was relative; despite calling it “economical” and “cheap,” Wright estimated the design at $6,970, or about $210,000 in today’s dollars, not including the land on which it would be built. That figure is well above the median home cost even in 2000, let alone in the 1940s and ’50s, when the suburban housing boom spread small, affordable, ranch and minimal-traditional homes in and around American cities.

Wright’s first prairie-house design—and the early, open floor plan it hosted—assumed not only wealth sufficient to buy the land and build the home, but sufficient to operate it too. Live-in help was assumed. The design opened a vaulted “gallery” living room, library, and dining room in a manner that presaged more extreme open plans. But it still tucked the kitchen into the corner of the main floor, connected by its own stairs to the servants’ quarters above.

Wright published another, similar plan in the July 1901 Ladies Home Journal. This time the dining room is central, and the kitchen—Wright calls it a “working department”—has been exposed to the main stairwell. The pantry, a common means to isolate the “dirty,” private kitchen from the “clean,” public dining room, is substantially smaller. The servants’ spaces connect to the primary living spaces more directly. Already, in 1901, form—that great fixation of modernism—is driving design and beginning to upset the servant-run family home in the process. By 1907, Wright did away with the butler’s pantry and its associated buffer in another design for Ladies Home Journal, deeming them “unnecessarily cumbersome.”

Wright saw architecture as a “powerful instrument of social progress,” as he told LIFE magazine later, in 1946. He was serious about this intervention, and not just for the well-off. By the mid-1930s, Wright had developed a series of small, functional “usonian” designs, a name he used as an aspiration for a uniquely American architectural form. These small, single-story structures were usually L-shaped, one branch containing the bedrooms and the other the living spaces, often in a mostly open configuration.

Following a custom begun in the 1920s, the dining room and kitchen were combined, partly for economic reasons, but also for functional ones. Anthony Alofsin, an architect and historian at the University of Texas, Austin, told me that the usonian arrangement facilitated a newly popular assumption: The mother, relegated to the kitchen, needed to have a view of where the children were playing in the yard. This key principle would evolve to justify open plans more generally, but with a mother’s view of the safe confines of the indoors more in mind.

The new-age tenor of this modernism was particularly compatible with California, where it incubated before spreading. There, starting in the 1930s, modernist design brought indoor and outdoor spaces to flow together with greater ease. To seek out even more air and light, interior spaces became less distinguished from one another. A new moralism underwrote the opening of the house plan, too: that a house’s design should facilitate a lofty attitude in its occupants. Wright’s 1936 design for the Palo Alto childhood-education specialists Paul and Jean Hanna, for example, symbolically fused the harmony of space with the harmony of the mind. The hope was that light and openness in the physical environment might elevate the social and creative virtues of the individuals who lived there.

Wright’s ideas spread across the country via his disciples. Architects like Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler, who had once worked with Wright, took up single-floor, open-plan designs with continuous spaces. Harwell Hamilton Harris absorbed Wright’s usonian lessons and reinterpreted them in California, Texas, and North Carolina. In Palm Springs Albert Frey, Donald Wexler, and others established desert modernism, perhaps the most recognizable version of mid-century modernism. In Florida, a comparable climate inspired architects like Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell to pursue similar effort under the name Sarasota modernism. Schools, office buildings, and skyscrapers also saw open-plan design flourish, but from the 1930s to the 1960s, the high-profile American modernist architectural project was largely a domestic one, focused on the middle-class home.

The reduced size and more affordable prices of interwar and post-war homes helped justify the fusion of cooking, dining, and living spaces, but the openness of kitchens was further rationalized by an idealized notion of efficiency, thanks to the ability to move seamlessly among different household tasks. But that efficiency created new duties in turn, including those facilitated by then-novel electric appliances. Americans’ ongoing rejection of domestic help made smaller, middle-class homes feasible, even as that very rejection also conscripted Americans, women in particular, to endless labor.

Already, by the 1950s, the open-plan kitchen offered a connection to living and dining spaces for the purposes of home monitoring and management. Gender roles being what they were, that tended to mean that women were “allowed” to oversee their children’s and husbands’ needs in the living spaces while also preparing or cleaning up from family meals. In one telling snapshot of the era, a 1950s box cover for the board game Battleship, a father and son play a game on the dining table while a mother and daughter look on in the background from the kitchen, where they wash dishes. Open plans, it would seem, worked best when enabling a request from the living space to be heard and carried out in the kitchen. So much for the harmony of mind.

Still, the change was framed as social progress. Open-plan designs were presented as more “casual” alternatives to the formal rooms they replaced. Describing one late-1950s home by the California-modernist architect Pierre Koenig, the design historian Pat Kirkham characterizes a kitchen opened up to the dining/living area as a “material expression of the informality of social intercourse.” The ability to chat with family and guests was a clear benefit, but it also created double-duty for the kitchen “worker,” who was assumed to be a housewife. And as Kirkham also notes, open-plan design created more work beyond the kitchen too, by providing ever easier ways for dirt to get in from outside and quickly spread throughout the house.

Prosperity rose during the 1960s. The housing industry became more powerful, and many families had enough money to trade up from their wartime houses—especially white, middle-class families who had been able to build wealth through home equity. They developed greater ambition and wanted more space. As the small, modernist middle-class home of the 1930s through 1950s gave way to larger designs of the late 1960s and onward, the great room emerged, often with a vaulted ceiling exposed to high windows or a second-floor gallery. And so, the total space and activity the open-plan homeowner had to manage from behind the kitchen increased ever further. The kitchen became like a ship’s bridge, but absent the personnel to run the vessel.

Openness and continuity might have been modernist aspirations for the spirit as much as the body, but just as the open-plan office created the oppression of constant oversight in the name of collaboration, so the open-plan home merged the duties of hostess, butler, cook, and childcare provider. And despite its promise of relaxation and conversation, open-plan living has actually combined leisure with labor. When the two fuse, work wins in the end, converting recreation back into obligation. The dinner party entails its preparation and cleanup; meal-prep also involves child oversight or homework help; television-viewing takes place during dishwasher-unloading. Overall, domestic life becomes an exercise in multitasking. And so, even when it expands freedom, the open kitchen constantly reminds its users of that freedom’s limits.

Today, the “prairie town” is just the suburbs. Mid-century modernism is alive as a style trend, but not necessarily an affordable one like it was in its salad days. American homes have gotten much bigger in the last century, and the open-plan design has consistently increased in popularity and ubiquity during that period, too. Along the way, the two-faced nature of the design, especially for those at work in the kitchen, has become so widely accepted that it has essentially devolved into domestic ideology.

On HGTV shows like Fixer-Upper and Property Brothers, almost every renovation involves removing walls to facilitate open-concept living. Families celebrate their future ability to oversee the kids in the living room from the kitchen, or to watch television from the sink, believing such split duties will constitute comfort and liberation. Like every dream to “have it all,” this one too is a fantasy. (In fact, the rise of the phrase “open-concept” offers its own testimony to the role that televised fancy has played in the drive to combine spaces together. It started as a distinctly Canadian name for “open-plan,” but since some of the most popular HGTV shows were filmed in Canada, the term spread in the United States. Architecture’s ideas are always best when imagined rather than built.)

For Wright, Neutra, Harris, and others, open design represented the promise of a new social ideal, one where fluid spaces would allow egalitarian integration. That aspiration continues, in a way, but the ideal is less communal and more individual: Open plan is where everyone does their own thing, but all together.

In retrospect, there was never a clear path from those early modernist visions of the 1930s—or even from the generic, 1970s great room—to a society of equity and mobility. At best, egalitarianism was confined to those who led comfortable middle- to upper-middle class lives already. Wright’s unrealized vision for an urban plan, which he called Broadacre City, amounted to a master-planned suburb, connected by the automobile, where television and other personal entertainment obviated most social needs anyway. Status and economic comfort, it seems, were prerequisites for living in the homes of the utopian future.

That assumption persists in today’s open-plan homes, even as the design has evolved. Most have shed both the ornamentation of Prairie style and the minimalism of modernism. Inside remodeled vernacular homes and ranches, and built into the designs of new subdivisions and urban infill, the open-plan strives for the largest void possible, with the kitchen and living space coming along for the ride.

But despite modernism’s aspirations, these homes still struggle with the relationship between formal and casual living. Consider a common design for infill construction in Atlanta, where I live: a swelled version of the foursquare home, large enough to contain 4,000 square feet or more. This design often features a formal dining room to the left or right of the entryway, sometimes with an office opposite. The formal living room has been abandoned, relegated to the informal great room in the rear, which flows together with a large kitchen and eat-in space.

Everything becomes confused. A butler’s pantry might connect the kitchen to a formal dining room, but without the Victorian servants to stock it—or the silver and china to store in it. Meanwhile, the kitchen remains exposed to the living space behind, its smells and sounds uncontained. The yard might be visible from the kitchen, as in the usonian ideal, but there’s not much yard left to play in or oversee once a giant house has been built on a small, urban plot. The spaces in these supposed dream homes are in constant conflict, not fluid harmony.

And yet, people still want open-plan living. According to Alofsin, who has written a book for consumers about suburban homes, homebuyers prefer to eliminate formal parlors or dining rooms in favor of even more open space. And all the designers, builders, and real-estate agents I asked said that their clients are still looking for open plans, whether for renovations, purchases, or new construction. Anja Weninger-Ramirez, a partner at Studio d+c, a home design/build firm in Decatur, Georgia, told me that people regularly report that new open spaces that make the social core of the house “change their lives.” Integrating meal prep, parties, and so forth with the living area appeals to people because “that’s where family life happens,” she says.

It makes sense, until you think about it for a moment. Wouldn’t family life keep happening, even if a few walls were erected? What open-plan aficionados might really mean is that so much time and effort is spent chasing the residual labor of school, work, and home life into the evenings and weekends, that it would be lovely if some of it might overlook other family activities in the process. There is so much to do, but at least a family can all be nearby one another while trying to get it done.

Driven by buyer preferences in a still-rising real-estate market, designers are beginning to treat the symptoms of open-plan excess. Modernists once designed for multipurpose use or simplicity, but now they design for stowage. Once the kitchen becomes the family room everyone looks for a place to charge their personal electronics. Weninger-Ramirez likes to hide them in a small cabinet with sufficient outlets for a family’s devices. Other bespoke storage spaces have also become common for hiding specialized equipment—mixers, juicers, blenders, instant pots, and the like. The goal, Weninger-Ramirez says, is to allow the family space to be quickly tidied up in case guests come over.

These are fine answers to perceived “problems,” but they are problems that might not exist under different circumstances. The open-plan doctrine blinds homeowners to the prior benefits of traditional, defined spaces. In the past, public-private spaces like formal living rooms and parlors would have received guests, sparing the home the embarrassment of view onto its private spaces. Even the early American modernist designs still offered some of these formalities, along with more purpose-built spaces like playrooms, libraries, or offices.

Today’s homes are far larger than their predecessors, and yet they often boast fewer types of spaces. That tendency is only increasing. The media room or theater, once a luxurious addition to a large, suburban home, is now being made moot by individual entertainment deliverable by smartphone or tablet and consumed on the couch in the den next to the kitchen. Given that the contemporary family often requires two incomes to afford the mortgage on such a home anyway, it’s no wonder that home design would devolve into three spaces— kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms—each of which serves the basic human functions of eating, sleeping, and expelling waste.

While Weninger-Ramirez tries to hide plugs and appliances, a modest remedy, Schumacher Homes’ “messy kitchen” opts for a more extreme approach: to hide one kitchen behind another.

The design looks familiar at first. An open kitchen island faces a large, vaulted great room with second-floor gallery and flanks an open-plan dining area. But this part of the kitchen is markedly smaller than the average in a home of this size (3,718 square feet by stock plans). The public kitchen boasts a range top, oven, microwave, and sink, but the rest of the kitchen, at first, appears to be missing.

It is housed in a separate room behind the public kitchen. There, the refrigerator, pantry storage, cabinets, and another sink and dishwasher are situated, with a long countertop extending the length of the space. The idea is that the pre-meal food prep and post-meal food waste can be stowed out of sight in the “messy kitchen,” leaving the public kitchen for the cooking, eating, and visiting.

Mary Becker, Schumacher’s vice president of sales and marketing, wasn’t sure where the phrase “messy kitchen” came from, although she and her associates disclaimed having invented the term. She situates the design squarely in the targets of conventional, suburban living. “It’s great for those big Saturday Costco trips to store all your stuff,” Becker said of the expansive pantry in the prep kitchen. In truth, the idea is really just a new interpretation of the old distinction between kitchen, pantry, and dining room. A kitchen for the mess, and a public space for eating it. The difference is that the public space is another kitchen instead of a dining room.

High-end estate homes have boasted secondary or hidden catering kitchens for years. But these are much larger, more expensive properties even than the 4,000 square-foot, million-dollar foursquares. Their wealthy owners may very well have regular staffs to run the household or manage large dinner parties or receptions. By comparison, Schumacher’s design starts at $359,193, not including the cost of land, making it affordable, to some extent, for families who still need a mortgage but want to come in under the maximum $750,000 eligible for mortgage-interest deduction under the new tax law. Some buyers might even be able to locate theirs close enough to a city that they could enjoy it for a spell in the mornings or evenings before commuting to and from work in those automobiles Wright so admired.

On first blush, the messy kitchen suggests that design’s pendulum might yet swing back toward defined, divided spaces. It’s possible that the rest of the kitchen will follow suit, and perhaps the dining room later on. But more likely, messy kitchens represent yet another skirmish in the struggle between obligation and freedom in the American home. After all, the kitchen was sequestered from the living space for all the same reasons a century ago and more: To spare the family from the visual and olfactory unsightliness of food preparation and cleanup.

The messy kitchen revisits that promise, but without the staff that would relieve the homemaker of the duty, and with homemaker in decline as a full-time role, too. After the dinner is done or the party concludes, someone has to go back into the big, kitchen closet and clean up the dishes. More times than not, that will probably be a woman, who will once again be banished from the social action in the process. That’s a circumstance that inspired the open-plan kitchen in the first place. And even if the messy kitchen’s usage proves more equitable along gender lines thanks to intervening cultural changes, the design seems to require a negotiation of the loneliness of prep and cleanup that, despite its downsides, an open design might have helped avoid.

Domestic open-plans were first a luxury for the servant-run upper class home, then they became a social aspiration for the prosperous, individualist middle class. Today neither circumstance really applies. And that loss plays out in the open-plan kitchen, for better and for worse. Unsustainable personal labor churns together with tenuous home economics, forever mixing but never reconciling, even as the joys and comforts of everyday life continue amidst it.

In this respect, the open plan might represent the most distinctly American home design possible: to labor in vain against ever-rising demands, imposed mostly by our own choices, all the while insisting that, actually, we love it. It’s a prison, but at least it’s one without walls.

A few years ago, when the EU Commission was first considering some really bad copyright policies designed to attack fundamental principles of how the internet worked, we pointed out the many, many problems with the EU Commission's online survey (including the fact that their survey tool was literally broken, which eventually resulted in them expanding the time that the survey could be answered). It appears that one thing the EU Commission is good at doing is pushing silly one-sided online surveys that seem uniquely designed to get people to answer in a manner that blesses whatever awful policy the EU Commission has already decided to adopt.

The latest is, once again, an attempt to massively censor the internet. As we've discussed over the past few months, after burying the evidence that said piracy is a much smaller issue than people claim, and ignoring multiple people explaining the fundamental issues of mandatory content filters (i.e., automated censorship machines), the EU Commission appears to be hellbent on putting in place such filters. And it's now pushing a survey to get you to support their plan.

Everything about the survey is designed to get you to be worried about the scourge of "illegal content" online (without any evidence that it's a serious problem) and to demand that the EU force platforms to wave a magic wand and make it go away. Here's the survey's introduction:

The availability and proliferation of illegal content online remains an important public policy and security concern in the EU, notably with regards to the dissemination of terrorist content, as well as of illegal hate speech, child sexual abuse material, or illegal commercial practices and infringements of intellectual property rights, selling of illicit drugs, counterfeits or other illicit goods.

First off, see what they did there? They mixed in copyright infringement with... things that don't belong in the same camp: "child sex abuse," "illicit drugs" and "hate speech." And that's not even touching on how problematic the whole area of "banning hate speech" has become.

The Commission is collecting evidence on the effectiveness of measures and the scale of the problem, and will explore, by the end of 2018, further measures to improve the effectiveness of combating illegal content online.

In particular, through the present public consultation the Commission seeks to gather views from all relevant stakeholders. The questionnaire is targeted to the general public, hosting service providers such as online platforms, organisations reporting the presence of illegal content online, competent authorities and law enforcement bodies, and academia, civil societies and other organisations.

Collecting evidence? It appears what the Commission wants is a bunch of people to say "ooh, bad content," and the Commission will use that to demand internet platforms wave their magic wands and make it go away. However, as we've noted over and over again, this backfires every single time. When you put the liability on platforms, they will massively over censor, stifling both free speech and innovation -- while doing very, very little to stop "bad stuff" from happening online. Sex trafficking and drug dealing is already mostly underground, so demanding that platforms do more won't have much of an impact either way. Hate speech is an amorphous ball of trouble that frequently just leads to censorship of people critical of government. And, honestly, haven't we learned by now that merely censoring people doesn't make them stop thinking whatever it is they're thinking -- it just makes them feel more persecuted.

Anyway, the survey starts out by asking you to designate who you are (and you can only pick one, even if more might apply):

It's a... weird sort of list. It seems to imply that someone representing "victims" can't also be representing "civil rights interests." Really? It also seems to suggest that organizations who "identify and report allegedly illegal content online" are somehow automatically opposed to organizations that host content online.... which is odd.

Once you start filling out the survey, new questions pop up that seem designed to just hand the EU Commission a bunch of anecdotes about you running into "bad" stuff online, so that they can use those stories to insist that we need more censorship:

If you check off any of these a new box pops up, in which you can almost feel the Commission salivating, asking you to share "in what way this has affected you." Basically "please give us scary anecdotes to push through our horrible idea."

Next up: please tell us how scary the internet is so we can, again, justify censoring it:

See all that? It's just "give us scary stories so we can scare people into allowing us to censor the internet." Incredibly, even if you check off that you "never" came across any of these things, the survey still asks you to explain "how were you affected by the illegal activities."

Then it asks who "has an important role to play in tackling illegal content online."

Um. Notice something missing here? For each party, the choices are "Main role," "important role," "marginal role," "I don't know" and "No answer." What's missing? How about "no role"? Why do we expect most of these parties to have any role in trying to censor content? Again, shouldn't the focus be on finding the person who did something illegal and bringing them to justice? Instead, this entire survey is 100% focused on just getting people to say platforms must "do more." Indeed, this survey doesn't let you say anything else.

Also: what strange framing. What does "tackling illegal content online" even mean? Hell, it's still not even clear what "illegal content" really consists of or how serious any "problem" is, but already we need to know who needs to "tackle" it? But, really, this question is absurd for a different reason: it cleverly skips all the nuance behind this question. That is, in order to actually understand how one would "tackle illegal content" (whatever that means) you'd first need to understand quite a lot about what methods already work for dealing with content -- and how that changes depending on the type of content. Or the type of platform. Or the type of user. It also would seem to require some knowledge of all the many, many, many, many ways that attempts to "tackle illegal content" (whatever that means) has failed miserably and tragically in the past -- often in ways that expand the "bad" content or make it more difficult to track down the actual perpetrators.

And this is a larger point that the survey makers don't seem to have considered at all: perhaps instead of focusing on the bad or illegal content... we should be focusing on those who created the illegal content. The underlying theme here is that we need to stop illegal content after it exists, rather than finding and stopping those creating this "illegal" content. It's a strange approach that focuses on burying the "crime" by blaming the tools, rather than targeting the criminal. What a silly approach.

But if you're just asking people who don't follow this issue, of course they're going to point their fingers at whoever hosts the content, because that's always the easiest to point fingers at, without ever recognizing that doing so is asking for widespread censorship with little recourse. At this point it's simply unconscionable that the EU Commission working on this effort doesn't recognize the massive dangerous consequences of mandatory filters. Yet this question is clearly designed to get people to request filters, without ever giving anyone a chance to point out that filters don't tend to work and often have massive speech-suppressing consequences.

There are then a few more questions, which all seem entirely focused on giving the EU Commission the cover they need to say that "the public has spoken" and "the public wants us to force platforms to censor speech." The whole thing is a travesty -- but at the very least, here's a chance for you to explain (politely) why this effort is not just nonsense, but actively dangerous to free speech and innovation.

Oh, and just to make things even more ridiculous: in the process of writing this post, I took the time to fill out the whole survey. As I finished up I hit submit and this is what I got:

Apparently, if you don't fill out the survey quick enough (and I did it pretty quickly), they'll just dump all your results in the garbage. Nice work, guys. I'm so glad you're the ones deciding how the internet will be regulated. I'm sure that'll go over just great.

Ross Douthat, who is considered an opinion columnist, wrote a piece for the New York Times called “The Redistribution of Sex” which basically asks the age-old question “what’s wrong with feeling entitled to sex?” To which every assaulted sex worker and woman collectively flips you off.

Vivian has already written an excellent piece about the “Incel Rebellion” and their women-hating, because “Stacys” would rather date “Chads” than them. As a result, they decided to abstain from sex voluntarily (even though the name they’ve chosen is short for “involuntary celibate”) because how dare the women that meet their ridiculous standards not see how special they are? If only the hag feminists would stop telling women to have standards and self-love.

Douthat had decided to take up the baton in favor of understanding these men because, as he states in his opening paragraph (emphasis mine): “One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.”

(image: Paramount Pictures)

Douthat brings up the argument made by Robin Hanson, an economist and libertarian who commented on the terrorist violence in Toronto: “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?”

“Which brings me to the sex robots.”

i’m gonna design sex robots with such advanced AI that they still reject incels

— i bless the rains down in Castamere (@Chinchillazllla) May 2, 2018

“Whether sex workers and sex robots can actually deliver real fulfillment is another matter. But that they will eventually be asked to do it, in service to a redistributive goal that for now still seems creepy or misogynist or radical, feels pretty much inevitable,” Douthat argues.

Anytime the “let’s spend millions of dollars on building robots to fuck” issue comes up, I just think, “Haven’t enough sci-fi premises told you this is stupid and won’t end well?”

Never mind that it doesn’t get to the root of the issue, the fact that men want to have full control over women, their minds and their bodies, just because they want to. Their ideology is nebulous, but it centers around the misogynist idea that women are sub-human villains who will bestow sex on only the most attractive and/or rich of men, and that it’s unfair because men don’t treat women this way—despite their entire grievance being centered around not getting sex from women they find attractive. They have nothing to offer or to give, but they want so much from women because they have convinced themselves that they are worth that.

Giving them robot women, rewarding them for their narcissism and violence is not the answer, because I can almost promise you that they will not accept that solution. They want to control, not to love.

(image: HBO)

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For ten years a band of locals hijacked a Tribeca public dog park and charged for access.

In 2008 the NYC Parks Department partnered with a local dog owners group to help manage the Warren Street Dog Park. Dog Owners of Tribeca (DOOT), decided to turn the public park into a private one and charge fees for its use. They also established a Fight Club-style list of rules to keep their utopia private.

Via the NY Post:

In the absence of public funds and services, our group will help make sure that this park does not become a stain on the neighborhood,” the group proclaimed in their incorporation papers filed with the state attorney general.

Members said it also allowed them to restore canine order in the neighborhood. “At public dog runs, people let their dogs run wild and act aggressively,” said member Lenore Sherman, 61, who has a golden retriever named Huck. “Here, owners are held accountable for the behavior of their dog.”

One member had no idea the park was public.

“That’s crazy,” said John Ellett, 33, a professional dog-walker. “They even require the dogs to wear special tags, so I thought it was totally private.”

When the dog run first opened, the Parks Department tasked the DOOT to help run the park.

“Dog runs are maintained through barknerships between NYC Parks and community groups,” said Sam Biederman, a Parks spokesman. “NYC Parks dog runs are meant to be open to the public — charging for entrance is prohibited.”

Parks officials snipped the lock Friday, after receiving a complaint. DOOT members were left seething.

“We were quite happy not having Parks involved all these years,” said DOOT board member and leader Shirley Jaffe in an email. Another member said, “No one wants this and we plan to push back.”

A man was kicked out of a bar in New York City last year for wearing a red "Make America Great Again" cap.

Philadelphia accountant Greg Piatek and his friends were at the Happiest Hour bar, where he says a bar employee told him, “Anyone who supports Trump—or believes in what you believe—is not welcome here! And you need to leave right now because we won’t serve you!”

He sued the bar, and yesterday a New York City judge ruled that it is legal for a private business to refuse service if you are a Trump supporter. They can also refuse to serve someone for being a Democrat.

According to the Miami Herald:

Barring state or local laws, private businesses generally have the right to refuse service to anyone as long as they aren't discriminating based on race, color, religion or national origin. Politics is not on the list.

When Piatek heard this, he tried to convince the judge that being a Trump supporter did fall into the religion category.

According to Fortune:

Following the incident, Piatek sued the bar for offending “his sense of being American.” When The Happiest Hour’s lawyer noted that only religious beliefs are protected under city and state discrimination laws, Piatek attempted to pivot, suggesting that his hat reflected a “spiritual belief” and argued that he had donned the hat in “spiritual tribute” while visiting the 9/11 memorial prior to going to the bar.

It's hard for me to understand how anyone can be a Trump supporter, but it's also hard for me to understand how a person minding their own business in a bar (if that's indeed what he was doing) can be ordered to leave because of a hat they are wearing. Maybe they could have just asked him to take it off? Discrimination against political views might be legal, but it's also unsettling.

Image: Gage Skidmore - https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/25858555481/, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Since its launch in 1999, Neopets has enjoyed a pretty colorful history. The game offers users the ability to create a virtual pet to take on adventures and, using virtual and real-world currency, feed and trick out their digital pets with swag, homes and other online sundries. It was originally aimed at kids, but grew a cult-following of oldsters, too.

Oh, and it used to be run by Scientologists.

According to The Outline, the company that originally owned the Neopets brand employed business practices deeply rooted in Scientology. Up until the point where NeoPets was sold to Viacom in 2005, Neopet's CEO and practicing Scientologist Doug Dohring rocked L. Ron Hubbard’s Org Board business model in order to keep things running smoothly – provided you considered turning your employees against one another smooth.

From The Outline:

The information currently made public about Org Board is vague — introductory workshops are required to learn more about it. The business model contains seven divisions: Communications, Dissemination (sales/marketing), Treasury, Production, Qualifications (quality control), Public (public relations), and, most important to the system, Executive. The symbiotic divisions are arranged to create a “cycle of production” that parallels the church’s “cycle of action,” which Scientology.org describes as “revealing what underlies the continuous cycle of creation, survival and destruction—a cycle that seems inevitable in life, but which is only an apparency.” It is also made up of seven stages.

As part of putting Org Board into play, employees are called upon to spy on the work practices of other employees. Any useful information gleaned from their workplace voyeurism was to be sent to the company's executive team immediately. If what was reported was something that was bad for the company, or even an employee was found to have different views from those of the company's executives, punitive actions would be taken against the employee, immediately. It's some serious "eye-for-an-eye" crap that would have made for a terrible workplace environment.

If you've got the time, you can read the full, fascinating story here.

Image: PictorialEvidence - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

One of the gifts of living in a large city is the presence of well-endowed cultural institutions. Sitting next to our theater companies, the opera house, and the symphony–perhaps a little higher–is the Seattle Art Museum. True to its elevated position among the city’s institutions, SAM has hosted a number of admirable exhibits in the last few years but its latest, Figuring History, is something special. Returning from the third floor, where you will find the exhibit, I stopped on the second to take a look at the permanent collections, particularly the Minimalist paintings. These paintings could not be more different in their philosophy–antithetical, even–than the works upstairs.

The Figuring History exhibit (showing until May 13th) follows the popular Kerry James Marshall retrospective exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles in 2016 and 2017. This exhibit places Kerry James Marshall next to two other Black American painters, Robert Colescott and Mickalene Thomas, whose work, to hastily sum it up, reimagines the canon of Western painting as if it were not dominated by White men portraying White subjects. Instead, by placing Black people or Black places in familiar poses or settings from western painting, rich but marginalized histories are elevated, exceed even the originals they reference and, in the process, give the old works new juice just by association. As Marshall puts it in a videotaped monologue that plays on loop at the museum,

“I never think of the paintings I make as self-expression. I think of them exclusively as platforms for an idea since the idea of representation is really interesting to me. I make a lot of work that’s about that idea. And then I’m also interested in how you reference culture and history in pictures.”

It’s a really rewarding experience and I’d recommend anyone buy a ticket (or sneak in if the ticket price is outside your means).

As the Marshall quote above makes clear, his paintings are about representation of history and culture. All art is about something. Even the earliest art is not just a thing, it is a thing about a thing¹: the cave paintings in Lascaux, France

…or the Venus of Willendorf

Down the escalator from the Figuring History exhibit is the modern and contemporary art mainly housed in the Wright Gallery. The 20th Century was a wild one and there’s a lot of evocative work in here from expressionism to a giant black rat poised over a bed like a night hag. In a room adjacent to the night rat, and dating to the period beginning in the 1960s, are examples from Minimalist art. An information plaque helps explain the style:

“…’The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value–political, aesthetic, moral.’ Subsequently, abstraction became a vast realm of possibility: some artists flooded the field of vision with large planes of color. Others limited their palette to white, gray and black to emphasize texture and line, and still others framed the relationship of painting to architecture.”

In the way the cave paintings are about animal hunts and venus carvings are about fertility, Minimalist painting is about painting. By looking inward and examining itself, Minimalist paintings can ask such questions as: canvas–what is it?, oil paint–what is it?, Cartesian shapes–what are they? My first contention is these are not very interesting questions and they certainly are not interesting enough to have placed Minimalist painting in the high position in art institutions and art markets where it sits today.

I could be accused of being a Philistine here. But I don’t think your kid can paint a Jackson Pollock and I think the subject of Duchamp’s urinal–art and authorship–is interesting even after the object that raised those questions has long lost its potency.

The 1960s was a period of tremendous cultural change and political agitation: Vietnam, Betty Friedan, MLK Jr., Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, the free speech movement, riots, sexual liberation, mutually assured destruction, Presidential assassination. It’s an a capella Billy Joel song to talk about the decade this way but the list of historic events and figures remain impressive no matter how many drug store magazines and Oliver Stone movies revisit it.

During this dramatic decade Barnett Newman painted The Three which hangs in the Seattle Art Museum today.

Minimalist painting is not just an artifact of art history. It doesn’t just hang in museums as an instructive counterpoint to abstract expressionism or a (superficial) example of the Modernist Project. It maintains its relevance by commanding financial rewards in the art market. In 2014 Barnett Newman’s Black Fire I sold at auction for $84 million, the third highest sale of a painting that year after a Gauguin and a Rothko. The 1960s is also the decade when Colescott, one of the featured artists in Figuring History, got his career started with a solo show in a Portland, Oregon gallery featuring regional artists.

In between the origins of Minimalist paintings and that $84 million sale, paintings in this style continued to take their place in art institutions. Here’s Robert Ryman’s Reagan-era Associate also to be found at the Seattle Art Museum:

The museum website describes his work: “Ryman’s singular format draws attention to the basal elements of painting: the physical aspects of the paint; the manner in which it is applied; the color and texture of the paint support; the attachment of the painted square to the wall.”

The 1980s is also the decade when Marshall, perhaps the star of the Figuring History exhibit, began putting on solo shows near his art school in Southern California. His first touring retrospective was in 2016. Ryman’s was in 1993, the year Marshall painted De Style (not included in the Figuring History exhibit)

The vibrant, relevant, rewarding works of Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas now occupy the same space as the minimalist paintings in the Wright Gallery.

After Figuring History, looking at the Minimalist paintings from the permanent collection–diligently investigating squares, lines, and oil paint texture–I see them in a new light. They look self-indulgent, feckless, suspiciously apolitical, and, maybe worst of all, boring.

Museum space is a precious resource and one we all pay for by covering the tax breaks received by corporations and very wealthy individuals for their donations to these public institutions. What other artists that had something important–or beautiful or terrifying–to say over the last half century not had a chance to say it because Minimalist painting, so sanctified by institutions and critics and markets, sucked all the oxygen out of the room?

The conflict between Figuring History and Minimalist painting isn’t just an unresolved problem of the past. Earlier this year the chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art was fired by the museum director, a “highly unusual” move according to the LA Times art critic. The chief curator, Helen Molesworth, hosted the Kerry James Marshall exhibit as it toured the country in 2017. The director, said to have a conflict of vision with Molesworth, chose to show a retrospective of Minimalist sculptor² Carl Andre that same year. It looked like this:

In an analysis of the the market value of solo exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art before and after Molesworth’s appointment, Artnet’s Felix Salmon highlights the symbiotic relationship between art museums and the art market,

“Trustees and big-name art collectors, after all, tend to collect (and, therefore, want to see exhibited) the kind of expensive art, mostly by white men, that Molesworth explicitly tried to move away from. More generally, they like to see the value of their market-friendly collections ratified with prestigious museum shows. Once you’ve spent millions of dollars on a certain artist’s work, you generally want museums to reinforce what your art advisor and your dealer have been telling you, which is that the artist in question is a great genius worthy of being preserved for posterity.”

Figuring History doesn’t just make us re-examine the subjects and settings of European art, it makes us re-examine why some art is canonized in museums and auction houses while other art is lucky to wait for overdue exposure. The Seattle Art Museum and future institutions exhibiting these works can do something now to make that interrogation easier through museum labels or placing the works nearer each other. The layers of drywall that separates Figuring History from the Wright Gallery need to come down.

1.Yes, the ready-made (think: Duchamp’s signed urinal), mechanical reproduction, and time-based art have all complicated notions of object, subject, and their relationship but to the extent that a thing makes us ask the question “is this art?” and makes us enthusiastically respond, “Yes! This is art,” the object and subject relationship is maintained… otherwise it’s just a thing in the world that, at best, does something useful or looks nice.

2. I’ve chosen to focus on Minimalist painting in this article because you can see it while visiting the Figuring History exhibit and it uses the same medium. One could make the case that Minimalist sculpture deserves some re-examination too. I don’t disagree but at least the subjects Minimalist sculpture explores is space and material which, I feel confident saying, are a lot more interesting subjects than canvas and oil paints.

In two months, Maine voters will go to the polls to select their nominees to succeed the state’s pugnacious two-term Republican governor, Paul LePage. Whether all of the candidates accept the results of those party primaries, however, remains a surprisingly open question.

The June 12 balloting will be the first statewide elections in the nation to use ranked-choice voting, a system Maine voters approved in a 2016 referendum designed to ensure that winners secure a majority—and not merely a plurality—of the vote. But a series of legal challenges and disputes in the state legislature over its implementation have clouded the upcoming primaries in uncertainty, and debate over the format has cleaved along partisan lines. Even as they campaign for support under ranked-choice voting, Republicans are calling for the state’s highest court to toss the new system at the last minute and order the June primaries to be held under traditional rules.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” said Mary Mayhew, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and the state’s former health commissioner under LePage. “I think it is likely illegal, and it is incredibly confusing to those who administer the elections and to those who are getting ready to vote.”

Mayhew is seen as a leading contender among the four Republicans running, but when I asked her if she’d challenge the results if she lost because of ranked-choice voting, she wouldn’t rule it out. “I will certainly evaluate my options based on the results,” Mayhew told me. “I couldn’t possibly decide at this point what my decision will be.

“I have serious concerns about this is going to be implemented, and I believe it is fraught with the vulnerability for error,” she continued. “That in and of itself may call into question the results.”

Mayhew is facing businessman Shawn Moody and two top Republicans in the state legislature—House Minority Leader Ken Fredette and Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, who leads a caucus that voted to appeal a judge’s ruling last week ordering the state to implement ranked-choice voting. All four Republicans have criticized the format, as has the state party.

“The system itself is more expensive, it’s going to suppress votes, and we think it’s just a bad idea,” said Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine Republican Party. “We’re concerned about a constitutional crisis of months of court challenges to results that end up with us not knowing who our candidates are.”  

Ranked-choice voting, which cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine, use to elect their mayors, has been likened to an “instant runoff”: Instead of selecting just one candidate, voters rank their choices in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and whoever their voters chose as their second choice is added to the tally of the remaining contenders. That process continues until there are only two candidates left, and the one with the most votes wins.

The idea had been bandied about for years in Maine, a state where the frequent viability of independent candidates has led to gubernatorial campaigns in which the winner had received less than a majority mandate in eight of the last 10 elections. It gained momentum after LePage won his first election in 2010 with just 37.6 percent of the vote; advocates for ranked-choice voting argue that independent candidate Eliot Cutler would have prevailed had the system been in use then.

Proponents held up ranked-choice voting as a remedy for the increasing vitriol of elections in Maine, which for a long time had viewed itself as removed from the partisan rancor that dominated national politics. “The quality of our campaigns has deteriorated,” said John Brautigam, legal counsel and senior policy advisor for the League of Women Voters of Maine, “and maybe ranked-choice voting holds a way to restore some of that special quality to our democracy here in Maine, to preserve decent relationships among candidates and minimize the negativity, and encourage broader outreach by campaigns to all possible voters.”

“People have been focused on LePage, because he’s been the most visible example of it,” Brautigam said, referring to a governor whose impolitic pronouncements and battles with the state legislature have made national headlines for years. But, he said, the problem went beyond merely the Republican in power.

To supporters of ranked-choice voting, the benefits are manifold. The system diminishes the “spoiler effect,” so voters can go with a preferred lower-tier candidate as their first choice without feeling that doing so will help elect the contender they like the least. It also encourages candidates to pay attention to voters who might not make them their first choice. “They have to talk to everybody, and that's really good for democracy,” Brautigam said. And, advocates say, the system could reduce the incentive for negative campaigning on the assumption that a candidate won’t want to offend supporters of a rival who could make them their second choice.

With backing from the League of Women Voters of Maine and an advocacy group called the Committee for Ranked-Choice Voting, a ballot measure enacting ranked-choice voting for gubernatorial, congressional, and state legislative races passed with a narrow 52 percent of the vote in 2016. The referendum called for the system to be in place for the 2018 elections, but questions about its implementation and legality quickly emerged.

Last May, in response to an inquiry from the Republican-controlled state Senate, Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court issued a unanimous advisory opinion that ranked-choice voting violated the state constitution, which calls for state elections to be determined by “a plurality” of voters, not a majority. The ruling was non-binding, but it prompted calls either for the legislature to overturn the ballot measure or to pass a constitutional amendment that would clarify its legality. What the legislature did was pass a law in the fall delaying the implementation of ranked-choice voting until 2022.

But that move sparked an outcry from supporters of the initiative, who accused lawmakers of thwarting the will of Maine voters. Using a process known as the “People’s Veto,” they amassed enough petitions to nullify the law delaying ranked-choice voting and setting up another statewide referendum on the topic. That means that come June 12, Maine voters will simultaneously be using ranked-choice voting for the first time while also deciding whether to use the system again before 2022.

Because of all the confusion, advocates and political operatives say campaigns have been slower to incorporate ranked-choice voting into their election strategies—if they’ve done so at all. The League of Women Voters of Maine held a training session a few weeks ago, where they advised candidates on tactics to succeed in the new system. The simplest piece of advice is just to be humble enough to ask voters supporting another candidate to consider making you their second choice.

While campaigns from both parties sent representatives to the training session, so far the Democratic candidates that support ranked-choice voting seem to be making the most use of the advice.

“When we ask [people] for their vote, we also ask for their second-choice vote if we don't get their first choice,” said Michael Ambler, campaign manager for Janet Mills, a leading Democratic contender and the state’s attorney general. “But it’s not changing the positions or anything like that that we’re taking.”

Still, Ambler told me the system was too untested in Maine for there to be an established wisdom on how to use it most effectively. “I don't think people have built up a lot of expertise with this, so I think people are mostly running the way they would in a different election,” he said.

As attorney general, Mills had raised questions about the constitutionality of ranked-choice voting—a position that has drawn criticism from her rivals. But Ambler said she supports its use in the primaries and vowed not to contest the results if she lost under the new format. “We are absolutely committed to accepting the results,” he told me.

If Mills and the other Democrats are incorporating the new system into their campaigns, Mayhew is ignoring it entirely. When I inquired whether she was asking voters to make her their second choice if they were supporting someone else, she scoffed. “Just think about that statement? Can you imagine asking someone that?” Mayhew replied. “No, I’m campaigning to be their No. 1 choice.”

She argued that ranked-choice voting could disenfranchise voters who pick lower-tier candidates but choose not to select a second choice, and she said it was a poor alternative to the more common use of run-off elections to ensure winners secure majority support. “You want to have a run off? Then have a runoff,” Mayhew said. “But as a voter, you’re going in to pick the person you most want to win.”

The state’s Republican Party, which has expressed its opposition to ranked-choice voting in the primary, isn’t dissuading candidates from challenging the election results in court. “It’s their prerogative,” Savage told me.

In addition to the constitutional dispute, there are questions about how Maine will pay for the new system and how the ballots will be counted. The referendum calls for counting to be done at a centralized location, but state law requires ballots to be counted locally.

While the rules for other elections are unclear, the general election for governor this fall will not use ranked-choice voting. And Savage made clear that the GOP’s opposition was not due to any perceived electoral disadvantage. “We don't think there's a partisan advantage either way,” he said. “This is not a fight about political advantage. It's a fight about respecting Maine’s constitution.”

Advocates for expanding ranked-choice voting nationwide are watching the Maine process closely, hoping that a successful experience will generate momentum to institute it in other states, like Massachusetts, or major cities like New York or Los Angeles. “There will be aspects of Maine that will be uniquely challenging,” said Rob Ritchie, executive director of FairVote, which supports changes to elections like ranked-choice voting and a national popular vote for president. Whereas many cities that use ranked-choice voting can tabulate the results on election night, Maine’s rules mean the state will take at least a few days to count all the ballots.

The bigger challenge for advocates of ranked-choice voting, however, has been ensuring that candidates and voters alike understand the rules going in. When Oakland first used the system in 2010, it produced an upset victory by Jean Quan, over a deep-funded frontrunner, Don Perata, who would have won under traditional rules and whose campaign blamed the format for his defeat. “It’s not just passing the thing and having it work,” Ritchie said. “It has to pass and work well, which it generally does. But people have to understand it as it’s happening. You can’t take that for granted.”

That’s cause for concern in Maine, where the legal challenges to ranked-choice voting have created uncertainty about just what rules will govern the June primary. The Supreme Judicial Court could still strike down the system in the next few weeks, forcing state election officials to scramble to put together a new ballot. But for the moment, ranked-choice voting will go forward—whether its Republican critics like it or not. “It’s going to be fascinating to see, because now they have to live it,” Ritchie said. “Now they have to win with it.”

new twitter challenge: describe yourself like a male author would

— Whit Reynolds (@whitneyarner) April 1, 2018

The way that some male writers have a tendency to write female characters—with emphasis on their looks and their breasts—has long been a popular subject of Internet conversation and derision. Today a Twitter thread invited people to imagine themselves as a male writer would.

The “challenge,” promoted by podcaster Whit Reynolds and writer Kate Leth, was kicked off by another Tweet:

A male author is insisting that he is living proof that it’s possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist.

Here’s a quote from his first page. pic.twitter.com/f6d5bN2EHq

— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

That it’s so easy for Twitter users to chime in with their guy-writer descriptions demonstrates how widespread this sort of writing is. The focus of male writers when turning their gaze on women is something that most of have read so many times that we could produce these in our sleep.

Worse, several people in the thread say that as a woman over 50, or someone outside of patriarchal beauty standards, they don’t have a description at all—because they’re considered invisible by the type of author who likes to write about the way a t-shirt clings to the curve of a small but well-shaped breast.

Carolyn was old. Not sure how old, doesn’t matter, too old for the likes of me. And fat. Wore glasses. No makeup. It’s like she gave up trying to be attractive for men. Or women. Whichever. I’m not sexist.
She may have won a Nobel in her day, but she sure was nothing to look at.

— LJ Breedlove (@LJBreedlove) April 1, 2018

She caught my eye in a peripheral sort of way; just enough that I noticed her form in the background. Upon inspection, her tight frown and standoffish demeanor invited me to skate my eyes away from her in discomfort. Moments later, she was completely erased from my memory.

— Alicia Mestre (@aliciamestre) April 1, 2018

Let’s be realistic, as a middle-aged woman in tech, no male author would describe me, ever.

— Kathleen (@PeaceLoveUnix) April 1, 2018

And in terms of descriptions of diverse characters, Asian women knew exactly what to expect.

basically, pic.twitter.com/io8s3Y14UF

— Amanda Wong (@amandawtwong) April 1, 2018

[insert something about being mixed race and how that makes me petite and inherently submissive but juxtapose it with the idea of me being adorably aggressive and will stand up for myself. But make it sound endearing. ]

— Lilly Beth Chung (@LillyBethChungx) April 1, 2018

something abt porcelain skin because Asian, something about petite and submissive because Asian, something about silky raven Asian hair, something about exotic and something about almond shaped eyes because Asian

— Marie Lum 林 (@PuccaNoodles) April 1, 2018

Some respondents had fun with the challenge, but the reason their satire works is that it’s playing off of characterizations we’ve seen time and time again.

She was beautiful, inside and out, even with her flaws, which were few and endearing. After all, if I cared to notice anything deeper about her and consider her a dimensional human being my obsessive fantasy of her might be shattered.

— Cami Ragaglia (@Cami_Rags) April 1, 2018

Now some of the men in the thread are chiming in that it’s making them scared to write female characters.

Every dude who has responded to this thread with “this makes me scared to write women” — stop it, cut it out, nobody cares, just treat us like people. https://t.co/zJyp8I7Lss

— Kate Leth 🦇✨🌈 (@kateleth) April 2, 2018

My dudes, no one is saying that you shouldn’t try. Just try to write your women as humans (or aliens, or what have you) instead of sexual objects. If you’re worried about your characterization, ask a lady friend for their opinion, or find a lady editor and listen to their feedback. We need men to write women with sensitivity and grace. And I promise we don’t think about our boobs half so much as you imagine.

(images: Twitter, Tumblr)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

RSS was a revelation for blogging and online media; we got our first RSS feed in 2001 and I have relied heavily on RSS feeds to write this site (and stay informed) for nearly two decades now; in 2005, Google bet heavily on RSS with its Google Reader product, which quickly eclipsed every other reader, so that by the time they killed it in 2013, there wasn't anything sophisticated, robust and well-maintained to switch to. (more…)

A trio of engineering researchers from UC Berkeley modeled the effect of heavy reliance on GPS routing on municipal road efficiencies and found that people who are GPS-routed are likely to move to surface streets and secondary highways when the main highways are congested; though this increases overall throughput in a city and reduces overall drive-time, it also creates heavy traffic on residential streets, effectively transferring traffic jams from highways to neighborhoods. (more…)

I love supermarkets. Wandering the canyons of bright labels, hearing the languages of aisle numbers and PLU codes, peeking voyeuristically into other people’s carts: to me, these are sensual pleasures that shopping for other things rarely provides. I love the way good grocery stores—whether it’s a neighborhood Food Basket, a sprawling Publix, or a vintage Ralph’s—blend familiar products with new stuff to chance upon.

I especially love visiting supermarkets in new cities, because they’re a glimpse into the communities that use them. Young couples in gym attire, moms juggling strollers, aging bachelors who never bring bags: The need to eat and feed families tends to draw a more diverse crowd than other consumer impulses. Like jury pool waiting rooms and motor vehicle administrations, supermarkets (though not all of them) can be among the few places in American society where different kinds of people mix.

But I hate lines, so the concept of Amazon Go, the checkout-free store in Seattle where you “just walk out” with your groceries, fascinates me on many levels. Last Thursday, I walked into the company’s lone pilot store, which first opened to the public in January. To enter, I scanned my phone at the sensor-laden turnstiles where an orange-shirted greeter (or was he a guard?) stood with a smile. I peeled a paper bag off a stack and started to wander, giddy with early-adopter energy. (Yeah, maybe I don’t get out enough.)

Amazon Go sells only prepackaged, often pre-prepared items seemingly targeted to the youthful and upscale tastes of the Amazon employees that colonize this corner of downtown. And I guess my tastes, too. Here there be tiny cups of smoked tofu, multiple types of almond butter (chunky was sold out when I visited), flat-iron steak salads, special edition chocolate bars from Theo, a popular local producer. I bought one of those, plus a kombucha and a goat cheese salad. Local IPAs and other craft brews dominated the sizeable beer and wine section, where the second of two human employees I saw checked IDs. As on Amazon-dot-com, prices are as low as you’ll find anywhere else; that steak salad was about $8.

The place smelled of convergence: Part of a wall was devoted to snacks from Whole Foods, the splashy recent acquisition of the e-commerce goliath. I watched a woman in a dark coat study the selection before picking off a box of 365-branded cookies and dropping them into her reusable Amazon sack. Other shoppers seemed to be a mix of tourists and puffy-coated tech professionals.

But this wasn’t like wandering through a new supermarket in an unfamiliar neighborhood. For one thing, wandering was hard to do. Supermarkets have their CCTVs, but this store is watching you more intensely than a high-security prison. Wall-to-wall cameras and sensors track shoppers, their phones, and each item we pick up and put down via special glyphs printed on the product packaging. And, at 1,800 square feet, it’s more of a convenience store than a grocer, with only a few “aisles” in the traditional sense. It takes only a couple turns to figure out where everything is. (The layout needs to be pretty orderly for the cameras, I’d imagine). A certain sense of discovery was missing in the shopping process.

Of course, like its dot-com parent, Amazon Go isn’t supposed to be about the traditional pleasures of shopping, and certainly not about the pleasures of what’s being sold. If either were the case, the store would look a lot nicer than it does, and they would have figured out how to sell fresh produce. (Let me tell you, no one is buying these sad bags of pre-sliced apples.) Instead, the format is designed instead for speed, convenience, and cost efficiency, with a technology that does all three. Eliminating the teams of workers that currently make in-person commerce possible could cut labor costs substantially. Amazon insists that the “just walk out” technology wouldn’t have to eliminate the nation’s 3.5 million cashiers if applied at scale. But with one greeter and one ID checker per store, it’s hard to see how most people working low-skill retail jobs would fit the descriptions for the some of the new types of work Amazon Go would entail, such as software development.

Like few other types of retail, grocery stores are neighborhood anchors. It’s one of the reasons that food “deserts”—that problematic term for communities with few fresh eating options—are so vexing to study. Supermarkets are associated with healthier communities, but that’s not simply because they offer access to produce. It may also relate to the social capital they provide. “Especially in urban neighborhoods that have higher-than-average crime or poverty rates, a grocery store can serve as a community center—one that stays open late, generates foot traffic for the surrounding area, and features familiar faces,” writes Civil Eats. People seem to feel better about their neighborhoods when there’s a supermarket there, and worse when suddenly there’s not. Charles Platkin, the executive director of the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College, recently told the New York Times, “When a supermarket in your area closes, it feels like you’re moving backward.”

Having culled the ranks of bookstores, electronics emporiums, and clothing retailers, Amazon is now coming for the grocery store. Whereas once the food sector seemed safe from the company’s appetite for disruption, consumers are getting more comfortable with perishable deliveries. Now, more Americans with the disposable income to pay for delivery are shopping Amazon in lieu of their usual aisles. The acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017 was about the best-shod entry point into the brick-and-mortar world of groceries Amazon could have made, as well as a potential expansion of its array of delivery nodes. “Amazon will never take the whole grocery market, but they’ll take the top 10 percent of the most profitable customers, and few retailers can afford to lose the top 10 percent,” Rich Tarrant, CEO of MyWebGrocer, told Bloomberg in 2016.

Large grocery chains that can are competing for those precious customers with their own online shopping and on-demand options. Walmart just announced that it, too, is ramping up food delivery in more than 100 U.S. metros. Some supermarkets are building up their in-store customer experiences—more cheese-tasting tutorials and coffee bars—to keep their doors gliding open. But other locations, in less profitable, lower-income communities, are simply closing.

It’s much too soon to say where Amazon Go, as a product, fits into that landscape. Even if consumers embrace the line-free life, the expense and complexity of the technology behind it could easily prevent it from transforming retail anew. “We don’t have any idea if the mysterious system behind Amazon Go can be distributed at competitive cost and at scale, like an iPhone, or if it is an expensive, one-off display of ingenuity, like the many gewgaws corporate America once paraded at the World’s Fair,” Henry Grabar wrote at Slate in January.

But to me, Amazon Go represents something more chilling than a direct threat to storefronts. It feels like a physical embodiment of the larger social transformations its online parent has helped create. A segment of upscale-good shoppers—people like me, spenders on kombucha and goat cheese—will get to shop hassle-free, whether it’s online, at a Whole Foods, or one of its newly decked-out competitors. That’s great for us. But that leaves a lot of other people out of the equation, because they can’t afford online delivery, or because they live in neighborhoods where groceries can no longer justify the cost of operating. (At least one online petition has been launched to encourage Amazon Go to accept SNAP benefits, the federal food assistance program.) That could fray cohesion in those communities and, maybe, push apart the social mix that grocery stores can do so well. And never mind all those retail workers, who more or less disappear from the privileged shopper’s view.  

As demographically targeted as its products must be, Amazon Go isn’t really about any local experience. It’s one more expression of the wide-reaching impulses of a multinational corporation that wants to sell me everything it possibly can. The appeal is undeniable. Those of us who can shop there—because we have credit cards, smartphones, and a taste for probiotic-infused beverages—will, for all the reasons I keep shopping on Amazon-dot-com: It’s easier and cheaper. And, at least for now, the new technology is a thrill.

Yes, a thrill. Walking out through the Amazon Go turnstiles—with no human cashiers or attendants, no lines to judge or wait in—gave me the same tingly, vertiginous feeling I recall from the first time I “just got out” of an Uber. It was the sense that I’d mastered some previously onerous urban chore. As I sat down with my salad in an eating area equipped with wifi and USB connections, I refreshed the Amazon Go app to see if my receipt had loaded. Within a few minutes my three items popped up—another little jolt of excitement.

As I took screenshots, a young man in a slim puffer jacket sat down next to me and began to silently pray over his bahn mi and seltzer. When he finished, we chatted. His name was Keith. He was a data scientist for Amazon. He’d moved to Seattle from Kansas City. I asked Keith how he got to work every day (I was in Seattle to report on its transit system), and he told me drove his car from Bellevue, the suburb he’d moved to after years of living in the city. But he actually missed taking the bus, he said, for the feeling of human connection—the chance to bump against people he never gets to otherwise.

It occurred to me later, after my giddiness wore off, that perhaps there’s a similar threat in this one-trick automat. Obviously, Amazon Go can engineer possibilities for human connection into its otherwise frictionless space; sharing a moment with Keith proved that. The question is who’s invited in, and who’s getting walked out.