An obsessive collector noticed something strange in his 11,000 postcards.
James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old-age homes, ugly restaurants, onlookers, and 1960s advertising are neatly organized in boxes in his Canadian home.
But James started to notice that some of his postcards — dozens, in fact — appeared to have the exact same sky. Looking even closer, he noticed that the same-sky postcards were all made by one publisher: Dexter Press out of West Nyack, New York.
Dexter Press was once one of the largest publishers of “chrome-era postcards” — postcards made from color photographs became popular in the 1940s. By the time James started collecting in the 1980s, “chrome cards” were mostly overlooked by collectors, and could be bought cheaply in flea markets. It wasn’t until he looked through a lot of these cards that he noticed the same sky repeating itself.
Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn’t show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes here.
Seattle Parks and Recreation staff set off a bit of a backlash last week when they shared a blog post praising its four golf courses for serving as valuable habitat for urban wildlife. The department proclaimed the 528 acres occupied by the publicly owned golf courses are home to a long list of species including coyotes, beavers, raccoons, tree frogs, herons, river otters, wood peckers, and more. Trout and salmon bearing streams are located within or downstream of golf courses as well, wrote Seattle Parks’ staff.
“These wild animals may not be playing a round of golf, but they rely on the habitat in these parks to live in our city,” quipped writer Chris Nicholson in the blog post.
Some Seattleites didn’t buy it.
“Mown grass is a wildlife desert. Pesticides are bad for wildlife. The land could be used for affordable housing, community services, and the actually wild spaces that wildlife needs to thrive. Also, the water expended to maintain the grass is an insane waste of resources,” tweeted @hikemonster in a response that encapsulated much of the criticism directed toward the post on Twitter.
Golf courses have become a hot topic in growing Seattle where publicly owned land and affordable housing are both in short supply. Data from a 2017 study completed by EMC Research for the City of Seattle shows that golf courses are the least utilized facilities owned by Seattle Parks and that the number of people accessing them is on the decline. According to EMC’s data, only 12% of Seattle residents visited golf courses two or more times per year, and only 3% visited golf courses 10 or more times annually.
Thus, when Nicholson kicked off his blog post with the line, “When most people think of parks, they don’t initially think of golf courses,” he struck on a vein of truth — a substantial majority of Seattleites do not think of golf courses as parks because they simply do not visit or use them.
It is also important to note that those numbers do not take into consideration whether those visitors actually played golf during their visit since Seattle Parks occasionally opens golf courses for limited community access, such as for sledding on snow days. However, if rounds of golf played and green fees collected from golfers are any indication, the amount of golf played is decreasing in tandem with sinking visitor numbers. According to Mike Eliason’s 2019 article in The Urbanist, “Unlike Seattle, Golf is Really Dying,” rounds of golf played on the City’s municipal courses declined by 43% between 2000 and 2017 when adjusted for population growth. This is in keeping with national trends showing younger generations have been less drawn to the sport, which has a well-documented elitist, racist, and sexist history. (Gentleman Only, Ladies Forbidden)
Fewer green fees collected from golfers has resulted in a downward trajectory in revenue for Seattle’s golf courses. EMC found that from 2013-2017 golf courses were unable to meet their financial targets. Additionally, golf courses have not been able to raise the capital funding necessary to make investments in aging infrastructure, leaving a Golf Master Plan created by Seattle Parks in 2009 unfunded.
Do golf courses really contribute to biodiversity in Seattle?
In an effort to strengthen their case for preserving golf courses in an era of declining use, some golf course boosters are turning to biodiversity to bolster their argument.
Roughly 8% of land owned by Seattle Parks is occupied by golf courses, which is not an insubstantial amount of park acreage in the city. According to the Trust for Public Land’s 2021 ParkScore index, Seattle scored 55 out of 100 for total park acreage, identifying acreage as one of the city’s weak spots when analyzing park performance. For golf supporters, keeping these lands as golf courses instead of converting them to other uses such as housing is imperative because of the city’s need to maintain or increase green space.
However, unlike golf courses, most Seattle park land is much more accessible and widely utilized by the public. That’s where golf course supporters turn to wildlife as beneficiaries of golf course land, arguing that the green space occupied by golf courses functions as wildlife habitat or corridors. Yet, the amount of golf course land that can be actually used by wildlife is far less than its total of 528 acres.
A view of a fairway at Jefferson Park Golf Course in Seattle. The majority of land occupied by golf courses is limited to frequently mowed grass, making it unsuitable as habitat for wildlife. (Credit: Bernzilla, Creative Commons)
Seattle Parks acknowledged in its own post that the bulk of the wildlife habitat within its golf courses is “contained in the edges and natural areas.” While the department did not cite exact acreage numbers, it did share that it is currently restoring 30 acres of golf course land with help from the Green Seattle Partnership, SPR’s urban forest restoration program. In total, Green Seattle Partnership has identified 85 acres within golf courses for restoration, representing only 16% of the total land area.
Pollution is also a major concern when it comes to golf courses. While Seattle Parks has made efforts to eliminate the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers used on its meadows in partnership with a certification program administered by the Audubon Society, grass fairways still demand of the application of these hazardous substances which harm wildlife and enter the city’s watershed. Additionally, the regular mowing and removal of weeds on grass fairways makes the land inhospitable as habitat for birds and other pollinators.
With this context, the argument for biodiversity on Seattle’s golf courses falls short, even when you consider the charismatic coyotes that venture out on the fairways from time to time. Those coyotes would probably be happier loping around the dense trails of Seward Park or another similarly verdant spot anyways.
Using golf course land for public benefit
A burgeoning movement calling for publicly owned golf course land to be put to greater use in cities is emerging nationwide as more cities put former golf course land to use as housing and park space. A 2018 report from the National Golf Foundation found that more than 200 golf courses closed in the U.S. in 2017 alone as golf facilities continue to exceed demand from golfers.
I definitely can't think of a better use for a collective amount of land that's this size. pic.twitter.com/LAIdl88xt3
Some of Seattle’s neighboring cities and suburbs have already embraced the trend of converting golf courses to new uses. In Kent, a 492-unit urban and garden style apartment development with 12,000 square feet of retail is in development near its town center on land formerly occupied by a nine-hole golf course, while in Mountlake Terrace a nine-hole golf course was converted into a 55 acre passive park, expanding the footprint of Lake Ballinger Park and increasing the amount of land dedicated to wildlife habitat.
Beyond actions taken by other cities, however, recent developments have put new urgency on examining the future of publicly owned golf courses in Seattle. On August 6th, 2021, the Sound Transit Board voted to approve plans to keep the expansion of Link light rail mostly on schedule and actually accelerating 130th Street Station. This means that two light rail stations will be opening within walking distance of Jackson Park golf course: NE 145th Street Station in 2024 and 130th Street Station in 2025. The City has been engaging in planning efforts around these station areas, including a community survey soliciting feedback on proposals to change the surrounding zoning from single-family to commercial/mixed use and multi-family residential zoning that closed in late July of this year.
The millions of dollars in public funding that have gone into the development of these light rail stations has spurred housing advocates to call for a reevaluation of the 160 acre, 27-hole Jackson Park golf course in particular. In an op-ed for the The Urbanist, titled “Let’s Tee Off for Housing,” Ryan DiRaimo makes the case for converting the course into a new eco-district that could house 35,000 people on the 60 acres of fairways and preserve the remaining 100 forested acres as public open space, all of which would be within a short walk of rapid transit.
Two future light rail stops will open by the year 2025. With 61% of the site uncovered by trees, a quality designed neighborhood could house a dense population and leave swaths of existing trees and parks open to the public (Image by Ryan DiRaimo)
DiRaimo also supports removing the name of genocidal U.S. president Andrew Jackson from the park, suggesting renaming it after Jim Ellis, a Seattle planner who dedicated his professional life to the expansion of the mass transit in the region and set the groundwork for today’s Link light rail system.
Ensuring that affordable housing makes its way into the mix would be an important way for the City to further distance itself from a legacy of exclusion, and enable a diverse array of humans — and wildlife — to benefit from this publicly owned land.
Regardless of the particular solution, the status quo of an unpopular, money-sucking public golf course next to a soon-to-open light rail station is untenable. The first planning concern within a short walk of a transit station should be increasing the count of human residents rather than raccoons and coyotes.
Have you ever come across a tweet and hoped to the higher powers that be that it was fake? That’s how I felt when I saw one particular image from Lollapalooza going around social media.
“Maybe it’s not from this year,” I said, hoping that this was a case where something gets shared, but when you check the date, it’s from a couple of years ago.
Lollapalooza kicked off at Chicago’s Grant Park on Thursday. Organizers are expecting 110,000 people a day for the four-day music festival – the biggest event since the city reopened. pic.twitter.com/dSF9Dnt7qa
I feel like I’ve been stuck in a state of “deep sigh” since last year and I don’t think I’m ever going to recover from it. It’s reached a point now where I feel like I’m being gaslit by, in this case, an entire jammed concert full of people. For an entire weekend, thousands of people gathered to the point of looking like an animated sponge meme as if COVID and its variants aren’t screwing up the timeline right now.
Part of me, when I see gatherings THIS large, starts to wonder if it’s me who’s in the wrong here. Surely 100K+ people can’t be this irresponsible, right? Is COVID just a figment of my imagination at this point? Is it not as serious as I, who still has a mask in my purse for grocery store trips, has made it out to be?
We’re never going to physically or mentally recover from the level of trauma we’ve been forced to endure since 2020. https://t.co/8aJliWA1DY
— Bri Skipping The TVA Company Picnic (@BrichibiTweets) August 1, 2021
Fortunately, plenty of people have responded to this anxiety-inducing crowd size with just as much horror as I have.
Unfortunately, well, plenty of people have responded to this anxiety-inducing crowd size with just as much horror as I have because there was, in fact, a gigantic in-person event during a time of increased COVID cases.
What’s extra frightening about Lollapalooza is its lack of safety protocols. I’ll never be happy about the world trying to return to the before times when we’re nowhere near ready yet, but if you’re going to carry this the show must go on attitude, at least TRY and do it safely.
YALL I WAS AT LOLLA. THEY ARE ASKING PEOPLE TO COME IN WITH VACCINE CARDS AND NEGATIVE TESTS… BUT THEYRE NOT CHECKING FOR ANY. THEY ARE ASKING “are you vaccinated” AND PEOPLE ARE LYING. Stay home please.
And while people are arguing back and forth in comment threads about the measures Lollapalooza did or didn’t take, we can see, from pictures, that no one is social distancing. At all. Did we forget that was part of the safety measures we had?
It all just feels like we’re fighting an uphill battle with no end in sight.
The death of beloved New York Jets assistant coach Greg Knapp following a collision with a driver has sparked an outpouring among football fans, and outrage among street safety advocates who are sick of seeing cycling fatalities unilaterally referred to as “accidents.”
A celebrated passing-game specialist and father of three, Knapp, 58, was cycling northbound in an unprotected bike lane near his off-season home in San Ramon, Calif., when a driver traveling in the same direction reportedly “swerved” into him, a representative told Fox Sports Radio. Local police confirmed to Streetsblog that the driver, an unnamed 22-year-old man, was behind the wheel of a Lexus RX330 SUV — the kind of vehicle that’s long been acknowledged by experts as a major factor in America’s escalating pedestrian death crisis — and that he struck Knapp from the rear.
Knapp died of his injuries five days later.
Described as an “avid” cyclist by NBC News — an adjective frequently applied to dead bike riders by journalists, but almost never to motorists, despite advocates’ objections that the term implies that cycling is a hobby rather than a transportation mode deserving of protection — Knapp was remembered by national media as a “quarterback whisperer “ to NFL greats such as Peyton Manning, as well as a beloved husband and friend.
But many reports also referred to the crash that claimed his life as a “bicyclingaccident,” or simply a collision with an (presumably sentient) car rather than a driver operating a motor vehicle, effectively absolving both the person who struck him and the designers of the 50-mile-per-hour road that failed to provide even the most basic separation between cyclists and high-speed vehicle traffic.
A "bicycle accident" is when you hit a patch of ice or a pothole and fall off your bike, at worst breaking a bone. When a driver hits you and leaves you critically injured that's not a "bicycle accident." https://t.co/pFAhVIJFue
The Associated Press has cautioned journalists not to refer to crashes as “accidents” when driver negligence is a possible factor since 2016 — and advocates urge journalists to avoid the term completely, especially when deadly road design played a role.
The street where Knapp was killed, Dougherty Road just north of Monarch Drive, is a six-lane arterial with a 50 mile-per-hour speed limit, no protected cycling infrastructure, and infrequent crosswalks for pedestrians. The nearest intersection is within a few meters of a bus stop and roughly 500 meters way from an elementary school and a public park, as well as several large residential areas. A pedestrian was killed along a similarly designed section of the same road in 2016.
The approximate site of Greg Knapp’s fatal crash. Shoulder to the right is signed as a bike lane further up the road.Image: Google Maps
Sam Ramon Police have confirmed to local journalists that the driver who killed Knapp had consumed neither drugs nor alcohol prior to the crash. Law enforcement has so far refused to release the police report detailing the speed at which he was traveling, or any other relevant details about the deadly collision — a move that local advocates say is typical in cases in which a driver is unlikely to be charged.
That handling of the crash was eerily reminiscent of an infamous January collision involving another sports celebrity, NBA center Shawn Bradley. Bradley was also cycling on a road with no protected bike lane in broad daylight near his home when the driver of a mini-van misjudged the passing distance necessary to protect the 7-foot-6 athlete, clipping his handlebars and sending Bradley airborne. As in Knapp’s case, local police have not announced any charges against the driver; the Space Jam star survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Advocates also noticed similarities between the way that national media reported on both collisions, which California-based advocate John Lloyd said “reflect[s] the normalization of car culture in sports media, despite its pretense of promoting physical activity.”
You would think sports media would have some affinity for active, healthy modes of mobility, but it’s important to understand the way sponsorship and ad dollars shape the sports media landscape.
Their reporting of Knapp’s death, and of Shawn Bradley’s injuries last year, reflect the normalization of car culture in sports media, despite its pretense of promoting physical activity. Sports media needs to reckon with the contradiction in its embrace of the auto/oil complex.
I first learned of the Swiss visual artist, Pipilotti Rist, from her video Ever is Overall. I am entranced by this piece every time I see it. Ever is Over All (1997) is a slow-motion video of a woman taking a stroll down the sidewalk and smashing parked cars with a large pole in the shape of a tropical flower. — Read the rest
It was well known that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is running a secretive administration, but a whistleblower complaint last week revealed a bombshell revelation that Durkan likely committed a felony while seeking to shield her personal text messages from the public eye in an apparent coverup. Stacy Irwin, a public records officer in the Mayor’s Office, filed the whistleblower complaint, and she told The Seattle Times that Durkan placed her on unpaid administration leave in apparent retaliation. Irwin’s coworker Kim Ferreiro supported her whistleblower complaint and resigned, partly out of fear in retaliation.
The Seattle Timesreported that 10 months of text messages from one of the Mayor’s work phones had been deleted in violation of public disclosure laws. The period covered the first four weeks of protests following George Floyd’s murder when Mayor Durkan oversaw the repeated tear gassing of Capitol Hill, brutal police tactics against protesters, and the abandonment of the East Precinct building.
“Durkan’s texts were not retained from late August 2019 to June 25, 2020, a whistleblower investigation report revealed last week,” Lewis Kamb and Daniel Beekman wrote. “In an email Tuesday responding to several days of questions about how that happened, the Mayor’s Office said a forensic analysis has determined that Durkan’s text retention was set to 30 days ‘on one of the three phones issued’ to her at some point between late August 2019 and July 24, 2020.”
“At all times, the Mayor believed and had assumed all her text messages (iMessages and SMS messages), calendar and emails were backed up and available to anyone and would be quickly and fully produced,” Durkan’s chief of staff, Stephanie Formas, said in a statement to The Seattle Times. That claim hardly holds up to scrutiny for a number of reasons.
Very likely that Mayor Durkan committed a felony by setting her work phone to delete text messages after 30 days. https://t.co/Q1pQoccQdF
First off, anyone who had submitted a public disclosure request to the Mayor’s Office can testify they are never completed quickly and fully. A request often takes six months and comes heavily redacted typically.
Erica C. Barnett of Publicola noted she had placed six requests specifically asking for text messages and reported she had never been informed that a huge chunk of text messages was missing and had received responses with only emails pretending like the missing text messages never existed — nor has she received an explanation now that the news is out. Apparently, only The Seattle Times and KUOW were deemed worthy of that information. That means they violated public disclosure laws again by not informing journalists who made public records requests for text messages that they had lost them and filling those requests as if nothing was amiss.
Secondly, Durkan had been reprimanded in a 2019 settlement stemming from Deputy Mayors deleting text messages during the head tax debacle. She and the legal counsel (Michelle Chen) she continues to employ were instructed to get “refresher training” on public disclosure rules and recordkeeping practices. To proceed to destroy 10 months of text messages within the next year does not seem an accident. It would appear either grossly negligent or a purposeful coverup.
A Mayor already reprimanded for deleting text messages setting her phone to delete text messages after 30 days better be very sure they were being backed up elsewhere. A responsible public servant would verify before choosing this setting, which isn’t a default. Safer options of deleting text messages after a year or never deleting them were sitting right there. The claim of ignorance here is hard to take.
Thirdly, the context suggests a coverup. These suspicions are bolstered by the fact that five members of senior command at the Seattle Police Department also deleted their text messages. That means the question of who ordered the abandonment of East Precinct hasn’t been definitively answered, with both Durkan and former Police Chief Carmen Best denying they gave the order. It’s possible a subordinate made the call independently as they claim, but without the text messages to confirm this story, it’s a very convenient explanation.
The memorials along the East Precinct police station–briefly christened the Capitol Hill Community Center during the protester occupation of the block. SPD has since reclaimed the building and put up barricades. (Photo by Doug Trumm)
City Attorney Pete Holmes is investigating the whistleblower complaint and found that both Police Chief Best and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins had deleted or lost their text messages from June. “The six other officials whose texts weren’t retained, per [City Attorney spokesperson Dan] Nolte, include four members of the Police Department’s command staff: Chris Fisher, Eric Greening, Valarie Anderson and Deanna Nollette,” Kamb and Beekman reported. While Scoggins’ text messages were apparently lost when he got locked out of his phone, Nolte said they are still investigating why Best’s text messages disappeared.
Mayoral candidates react, spar with each other
The scandalous news elicited a variety of responses from candidates running to replace Durkan as mayor. Andrew Grant Houston is the only candidate to specifically call for Mayor Durkan’s removal and reiterated his support for the campaign to recall Durkan, which wasn’t able to convince a judge to allow the recall measure to proceed last year — though that campaign hadn’t had the full public records to make their case.
“The answer is not more systems and Seattle Process. It’s not ‘elect me, I’m a good one’ and calls for less bureaucracy. It’s not punting the issue to someone else as someone who themselves deletes communications when it no longer serves them but certainly haven’t taken a different stance either,” Houston wrote in a statement. “The answer is removing our current Mayor who, time and time again, has shown us she is incapable of leading and following the law, even as a career prosecutor. We’ve called for Durkan’s resignation and/or recall for a year now. This is long overdue.”
As Council President, Lorena González is in the unique position to bring about out her proposed accountability measures — granted that power is limited in scope. Recent entry into the Mayoral race, Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller is in the opposite position of being a part of the administration in coverup and cleanup mode, and seems to have sidestepped the issue.
Meanwhile Colleen Echohawk, called on Washington State Attorney General (AG) Bob Ferguson to investigate the Mayor, which he is yet to take her up on. In her letter, she cast shade on the idea this was just a innocent series of accidents:
“Perhaps there genuinely was an ‘unknown technological issue’ that simultaneously affected the Mayor, the Police Chief and the Fire Chief, in which case the City should immediately undertake a significant security assessment of those communication systems,” Echohawk’s letter to the AG’s office reads. “Or, perhaps they conspired to destroy evidence and violate the law to cover up their actions and escape the unavoidable public scrutiny of incredibly divisive decisions.”
González has proposed putting together an independent office to manage recordkeeping and public disclosure requests in partnership with the City Attorney’s Office. Fellow candidate Jessyn Farrell, meanwhile, argued that amounts to government waste and a symbolic non-solution: “This is why our city’s leaders have failed to solve big problems like homelessness. Rather than exercising fiscal discipline tethered to our values, they are just adding process after process at the taxpayers’ expense,” she tweeted.
This is why our city's leaders have failed to solve big problems like homelessness. Rather than exercising fiscal discipline tethered to our values, they are just adding process after process at the taxpayers' expense.
We need more than the appearance of action. We need results.
Whether leaders who claim to be “tethered to our values” will stay that way in the heat of a scandal is a pretty big leap of faith. Mayor Durkan has made a mockery of public disclosure laws and basic transparency. To restore institutional trust after such a scandal-prone, bumbling administration will likely take more than pinky swears.
This article has been updated with Colleen Echohawk’s statement.
ExxonMobil is known for pumping cars full of gas. But according to a new study, it may have also pumped our language full of BS.
Using machine learning, researchers at Harvard University scrutinized 50 years’ worth of the oil giant’s memos, studies, and advertisements to spot hidden patterns in how the company talked about the climate crisis — in public and in private. The evidence suggests that ExxonMobil used subtle rhetoric to shift the blame for climate change from fossil fuels to individuals and that this kind of “discursive grooming” might have shaped the way that scholars, policymakers, and the public discuss the problem today.
“What they’ve done is skew the conversation and make it much more about you and me than about them,” said the study’s co-author, Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher studying the history of fossil fuel companies and the climate (and a member of the Grist 50 last year). “And that’s very problematic and misleading.”
In the new study, Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history at Harvard, used computational linguistics to help reveal patterns in language that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. They used algorithms to process the rhetoric in 180 company documents, including publicly available internal memos, peer-reviewed academic studies written by ExxonMobil scientists, and paid advertorials published in the New York Times op-ed pages — what Supran called a “treasure troves of information.”
They found that in company communication and academic papers, ExxonMobil often used phrases like “fossil fuel” and recognized the major role their products play in heating up the globe. But its public communications focused on “consumers,” “demand,” and “energy efficiency,” implicitly pointing the finger elsewhere.
“They’re basically biased toward what we call individualistic framings of not only who is responsible for causing climate change, but who is responsible for solving it,” Supran said. It all adds up to what the study calls a “fossil fuel savior” frame, which depicts oil companies as innocent, trustworthy innovators simply giving the people what they demand. Other oil giants have tapped into this narrative. In November, Shell put out a poll on Twitter, asking “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?” Meanwhile, BP has been touting carbon footprint calculators for more than 15 years.
To be sure, individuals — especially rich jet-setters — do bear some responsibility for global warming, as Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability scientist, writes in the book Under the Sky We Make. But personal efforts can only go so far without systemic political and economic changes.
The new study builds on previous research by Supran and Oreskes. In 2017, the pair demonstrated that ExxonMobil had historically “misled the public” on climate change, acknowledging the dangers of fossil fuels in private while casting doubt on the science in public. In their new study, Supran and Oreskes turned to what they call “the subtle micro-politics of language” — the often hidden ways that fossil fuel companies have been trying to manipulate the climate conversation. One example they uncovered was an emphasis on “risk.”
ExxonMobil’s public communications shifted from blatant science denial to language about “risks” in the early 2000s. The word choice suggests a potential threat somewhere in the future, rather than a disaster already unfolding. If you visit Exxon’s climate change page today, you’ll find six references to the “risks” of climate change.
“Exxon and Chevron and ConocoPhillips, they all continue to call climate change a ‘risk’ rather than the reality,” Supran said. “And that’s rather rich when it’s literally harming and killing people today and yesterday.”
The study draws parallels between the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry, which used similar rhetoric about risk and consumer responsibility to deflect blame for selling products linked to cancer. Supran and Oreskes warn that the oil industry may use a similar strategy in court.
In recent years, cities and states have begun filing lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry for knowingly lying to the public about climate change, seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for deceptive marketing practices. Last month, New York City added to the pile of lawsuits, suing ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute for “false advertising” and greenwashing, a PR move in which a company parades minor sustainability efforts without changing its polluting ways. Supran and Oreskes anticipate that the findings in their new study may be of interest to lawyers involved in these kinds of cases.
In a statement, a spokesperson from ExxonMobil said that the oil giant “supports the Paris climate agreement, and is working to reduce company emissions and helping customers reduce their emissions while working on new lower-emission technologies and advocating for effective policies.”
The new research, he said, “is clearly part of a litigation strategy against ExxonMobil and other energy companies,” pointing to the study’s support from the Rockefeller Family Fund, which has donated more than $3 million to organizations that support climate liability lawsuits, and Oreskes’ support for these lawsuits.
Supran and Oreskes said that Exxon’s argument was just its latest attempt to attack their work with logical fallacies. “ExxonMobil is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public,” they wrote in a statement.
While the new study doesn’t prove that Exxon and other fossil fuel companies have shaped the way Americans talk about climate change, it suggests that they may be “one source” of the idea that it’s an issue of consumer choice. “I think there’s probably good reason to suspect that if there’s so many of these texts over decades, that it’s going to have some kind of influence,” said Richard Besel, a professor of communications at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who was not involved in the study.
Besel suggested that what Exxon didn’t say in these documents might also be just as important as what it did. “The way they’re selecting and framing things, it’s also simultaneously deflecting from things and taking our attention away from other sorts of ways of thinking about climate change,” Besel said. Future experiments could test the effects of these framings on public perception. Supran pointed to a study showing that framing the climate crisis as a personal responsibility can make people less likely to support climate-friendly political candidates or reduce their own emissions.
“The most pernicious effect of all this,” Supran said, is that the fossil fuel industry may have left its fingerprints on how people think and talk about climate change. “We’re groomed to see ourselves as consumers first and citizens second.”
We've written about Bill C-10, the Canadian government's attempt to bring online services under the auspices of the country's broadcast regulator, the CRTC, and the way the story about the bill keeps shifting and the promises about what it supposedly won't do keep being broken.
Now, work on the the bill has been paused after lawmakers from all four parties voted to ask the Department of Justice for a fresh analysis of its legality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They've also asked for the bill's champion, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, and others to come before the committee and discuss its implications. But Guilbeault has consistently demonstrated a total inability to give clear answers (or, sometimes, any answers at all) to questions people raise about their concerns with the bill. This has been made "crystal clear" (a term Guilbeault has wrongly applied to the muddy and vague bill itself) by some of his responses over the past couple of weeks.
First, at the end of April, Guilbeault was pressed for details in an interview on the CBC, with host David Common asking why the exclusion for social media content was removed from the bill and how the Minister can still claim it won't be impacted (you can watch the full interview here). As you can see, his answer — inasmuch as it constitutes an answer — is not very convincing:
Why won't Bill C-10 impact user content on social media? Because they're "not interested" in doing that and it's not the bill's "purpose". Oh and also the bill isn't finished. The fact that an exclusion to specifically prevent regulation of social media was removed is, apparently, irrelevant. The powers granted by the actual text of the bill are, apparently, irrelevant. The idea that regulators would use the regulatory powers given to them by the bill "has no basis in reality". Just trust him.
Not convinced? Well, a few days later in the legislature, Guilbeault was pressed by an opposition Member of Parliament on the free expression implications of the bill, and he gave even less of an answer:
You will not believe what just happened during Question Period in the House of Commons.@S_Guilbeault simply could not have been more crass and despicable trying to defend his indefensible censorship Bill C-10
Yes, you saw that — Guilbeault immediately pivoted to the completely unrelated topic of reproductive rights and lobbed accusations of hypocrisy at the questioner. Those accusations might not be entirely baseless, but they are entirely irrelevant to this subject that is of extreme importance to all Canadians, not just those on the opposite side of the political aisle from Guilbeault. The Minister also accused another MP of lying about the bill, and was reprimanded in the House of Commons and pressed to withdraw his statement. The Liberal party would very much like it if people viewed opposition to Bill C-10 as a purely partisan effort coming from disingenuous and dishonest opposition politicians, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Guilbeault manages to contradict himself in a matter of seconds. After the understandably frustrated interviewer presses him, yet again, on his promises that the bill won't regulate social media users, he emphatically insists "individuals are exempt from this la-" and can't quite make it to the end of the word "law" before cutting himself off to say "or will be, once it's adopted". Then, in the very next sentence, he says that the bill will apply to individuals who "act like broadcasters" then vaguely asserts that such people are somehow completely distinct from "everyday citizens". As we discussed in the previous post, he then goes on to be completely unable to clarify how this line would be drawn. And then, the next day, he backtracked these comments and made more insistent promises that users will not be regulated.
Even Canadians who know very little about the subject of online regulation are noticing how desperate and vague Guilbeault gets every time he's pressed for details, and are unimpressed by his obviously evasive deflections in parliament. Now even MPs from his own party are seeking answers. If the government is going to do what it should and toss out C-10 to start over with a brand new bill, it also needs to find a more capable and trustworthy champion for it.
Netflix released Bridgerton on Christmas Day, and while it’s not meant to be a strictly historical portrayal of Regency life, the big inaccuracy that caught my eye just from the trailer was the costumes. Not only did the show seem to be using costumes from different centuries, with typical Regency looks from around the late eighteen-teens mashed against much earlier looks from forty years prior, but they also did the thing I hate in period movies and made a joke about a woman not being able to breathe in a corset.
You see, pretty much everything you think you know about corsets, bodices, stays, and period undergarments, in general, is probably wrong.
First off, let’s get some terminology out of the way because it can get very messy, even for dress historians, thanks to the way language evolves. Just ask Abby Cox, who did a really comprehensive video on her YouTube channel about the distinction last month, and whose content on corsets and stays, in general, is amazing. “Corsets” as a term for a boned and laced support garment is a relatively new term, according to Cox. The word corset didn’t quite take off until maybe the Victorian era, and usually meant a support garment that wasn’t boned.
Before this most such garments were called “stays,” or “bodies” in an earlier era. (You can see how “bodies” possibly morphed into the word “bodice.”) What we think of as a “corset,” with tight lacing meant to constrict the waist specifically, reached peak popularity in the Victorian era. But before that, undergarments were actually far more comfortable than what movies would have us believe.
Let’s discuss the Rocco/Georgian period first. The typical undergarment of this era, usually stays, varied, like all clothes do, but the emphasis was on conical torso shape, a flat front, and not necessarily on a teeny-tiny waist. The illusion of a smaller waist was created by large skirts, padding, and hoop structure, and but the purpose of a pair of stays, or bodies, was as more bust support and posture than it was to make someone appear thinner. Here’s an example from the Fashion Museum in Bath:
Stays and corsets of the ers would often be embellished and visible under a dress. And they were also highly adjustable for those days when you were a bit more bloated, or for pregnancy. But these were what most women wore, day-to-day; what women worked and lived in. They supported busts and made clothes look better over them. They weren’t the torture devices we like to think of when it comes to ye olde days.
This was even more true of undergarments in the Empire and Regency eras. The fashions of this era were crafted in a direct counterpoint to the frilly, structured, over-the-top fashion of the pre-revolutionary era and a response to the supposed decadence of things like the French monarchy. Women’s clothes of the era were meant to emphasize a more natural silhouette and soft curves. This not only makes the mixing of style in Bridgerton even more confusing, but it also reminds us that restrictive, waist-cinching corsets just … were not a thing in the era of Austen. Waistlines were very high, right below the bust (we call that an empire waist for a reason!) and so there was no need for tummy flattening or waist reduction.
That means that the scene from the trailers and seen in the top image would never have happened!
Emma featured extremely accurate regency costuming.
That’s not to say there were no undergarments, but they were more concerned with providing structure and support for the bust, which was emphasized. It wasn’t until decades later that corsets cam back in style, and even then, the Victorian “wasp waist” was even later and not nearly as prevalent a fashion as you might think. Most fashionable silhouettes were achieved through a combination of corsetry, padding, and tailoring. And even so, that fashionable silhouette was always evolving.
In fact, what really defines our ideas about corsets and other such garments isn’t the body standards of the past, but those of the present. While it’s true that corsets were restrictive in many eras, that wasn’t always the case. We see it that way because that’s what beauty standards are doing to women right now.
The idea that stays, bodies, and corsets existed to squeeze women into an ideal thin shape is not really accurate, because the veneration of extreme thinness as the female ideal body is something that’s in many ways a modern idea. The “ideal” body has varied tremendously over the years, and when we assume corsets of ages past only existed to make people look skinny, we’re placing our modern ideal onto the garments.
In movies and shows like Bridgerton or Pirates of the Caribbean or Ever After filmmakers use corsetry inaccurately as shorthand for female oppression and unfair body standards. But corsets so tight you couldn’t breathe simply were not the standard in the eras in which these films were set. And it’s even more offensive because often the women getting forced into these evil, restrive garments are already super skinny. That’s just lazy and it should stop.
Screenwriters and costume designers often fall back on our ideas and stereotypes about the past, instead of doing their research. They’ve seen a dozen movies going back to Gone With The Wind where women were forcefully laced into corsets to meet some barbaric beauty standard so they just throw it in their show too. But real history is far more complex and the history of fashion is as complex as the history of humanity.
Hollywood can’t pat themselves for being so evolved that we don’t wear corsets anymore while it still promotes all but unattainable body images. Just like with so many other things, we can’t excuse the present by demonizing the past as a means of saying we’ve improved. We need to be honest about both and give ourselves so real breathing room.
When the Walt Disney Company spent $4 billion to acquire Lucasfilm in 2012, they were amassing a galaxy’s worth of characters, sagas, and intellectual property. In short order, Disney churned out a new trilogy, standalone films, a hit series, a theme park and more, all in service of the world of Star Wars. But as Disney rakes in billions in Star Wars revenue, they refuse to pay royalties on the franchise’s novelizations.
According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, Star Wars novelists have been shut off from royalties, as have fellow novelists for 20th Century Fox’s library, which include books set in the worlds of Alien and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among others.
One such novelist is Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the original novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope and has penned countless Star Wars novelizations since. In his original contract with George Lucas in the 1970s, Foster was paid $7,500 upfront, with a 0.5% royalty on sales that have since earned him that original fee several times over. Foster, a notable name among fans the world over, is now in his mid-70s, and doesn’t understand why a multi-billion dollar corporation like Disney is bilking him out of a few thousand dollars.
“I’m not Steve Spielberg. I’m not Steve King. I don’t even have a name that starts with Steve,” Foster said. He only discovered the lack of royalty checks after the Disney-Fox merger in 2019, when he abruptly stopped receiving royalties for the three Alien novels he penned. His lawyer contacted Disney, where he was told that while the company acquired the rights to the books, they were not beholden to any royalties.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, imagine how it must sound to Foster. “Disney has acquired a house with a mortgage on it. They want to keep living in the house. They don’t want to pay the mortgage,” he said succintly. And he’s not alone: Donald Glut, who novelized The Empire Strikes Back, and James Kahn, who wrote the book for Return of the Jedi, have both claimed they were missing royalty checks as well.
In an open letter to Disney, Foster wrote, “All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.”
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association is raising awareness on the issue with the hashtag #DisneyMustPay. SFWA’s President, Mary Robinette Kowal, released a statement saying,
“In my decade with the organization, the fact that we are forced to present this publicly is unprecedented. So too, are the problems. The simple problem is that we have a writer who is not being paid.
The larger problem has the potential to affect every writer. Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract. In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says. If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.”
Disney released their own statement, saying “We are carefully reviewing whether any royalty payments may have been missed as a result of acquisition integration and will take appropriate remedial steps if that is the case.” It’s still a puzzling decision considering that these royalties are a mere drop in the bucket for the multi-billion dollar corporation.
Many took to social media in support of Foster and his fellow authors, demanding that Disney pay these writers what they’re owed.
…he is not alone. At least half a dozen authors have come forward to report that #DisneyMustPay them royalties for their novelizations of Disney properties as well. If you are having a similar problem, please report it here: https://t.co/0f2KKEVncv To raise awareness, RT. pic.twitter.com/EAwBvo8ks4
— Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (@sfwa) December 19, 2020
I did not like that episode of that show as much as you liked that episode of that show. And that’s okay. Also, #DisneyMustPay Alan Dean Foster, Mike Stackpole, and other writers please and thank you.
— Owen K.C. Stephens has a Patreon! (@Owen_Stephens) December 13, 2020
The best part of the Mandalorian season finale is when Mando straightens up and looks to the horizon and everything is still and perfect and despite his helmet you can see him thinking about how Disney needs to pay its fucking writers otherwise there’s no content #disneymustpaypic.twitter.com/OZi1sWd5Ir
Here's a rather odd juxtaposition of a Nightline promo read over the end credits of A Muppet Family Christmas. Even stranger are those responding to the tweet who seemingly missed the entire point of it:
I think what @mikescollins is trying to say with this tweet is that the infants life is worth more but it'd be good if he clarified
Restaurants are getting creative with their winter setups. But some changes might make dining out riskier.
To the surprise of many restaurant patrons and public health experts, outdoor dining has begun to migrate indoors. Or, as one Twitter user put it, it’s become “indoor dining on the sidewalk.”
Pandemic restrictions on restaurants vary by jurisdiction or state, with some enacting bans or requiring reduced capacity on indoor dining. Many restaurants, therefore, heavily invested in outdoor dining setups when stay-at-home orders were lifted or lightened. That drew in customers — at least until temperatures began to drop.
In parts of the country with colder winters, restaurants have drummed up temporary solutions to persuade guests to dine out for as long as possible, before snow-induced winter hibernation sets in. Many establishments have been tasked with figuring out how to make outdoor dining appear invitingly cozy, with little to no federal or state regulations on how streetery setups should look.
Outdoor restaurants have exchanged their bright Campari umbrellas for space heaters and heat lamps, canopy tents with vinyl flaps, and plastic bubble igloos decked out with string lights. Some have even hired workers to construct semi-enclosed wooden huts, which serve as restaurant-adjacent sunrooms with more dining space. Most of these creative architectural creations are intended to keep customers warm in the winter. It might not, though, keep them safe — or as safe as outdoor dining could be with uninterrupted airflow and plenty of space between patrons.
People have become more attuned to how performative measures championed by restaurants and bars (temperature checks and frequent surface sanitizing) don’t do a good job at protecting customers in high-risk situations. But with the cold weather, it seems that patrons have been lulled into believing that “outdoor” dining — even when it isn’t really outdoors — is not as risky.
An environmental engineering professor told Vice News that it’s no longer accurate to categorize a setup as “outdoor dining” if there are multiple walls or sides to an enclosure. It might be tempting to think that a semi-enclosed vinyl tent or bubble has just the right amount of outdoor air mixed with indoor warmth. However, the air exchange rate might be lower than that of a completely outdoor space.
“You’re actually creating an environment where the virus is within the enclosure,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the New York Times. Epidemiologists have emphasized how ventilation is crucial when it comes to preventing airborne spread of the coronavirus, which is more likely to occur in communal indoor spaces. There are no perfectly safe indoor environments during the pandemic, even if the space is well-ventilated or equipped with air purifiers. Plus, patrons aren’t able to wear masks when they’re eating or drinking. More often than not, streetery tents and huts are flimsy and small, and diners are usually seated closer than the six feet apart recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
William Bahnfleth, a Pennsylvania State University professor of architectural engineering, told me in October that restaurants should focus on increasing their indoor air change rate, which is the frequency at which air in a space is recycled. This reduces the likelihood of customers inhaling viral particles. Plexiglass partitions or vinyl flaps, for example, could impede the natural airflow of an environment. It’s a trade-off some restaurants have to consider: Airflow is important, but how long will a guest stay seated if they’re bombarded by chilly winds?
“My feeling is that it’s very hard to tell if a space is well-ventilated,” Bahnfleth said. “You might be able to tell if it’s poorly ventilated, but even that could be misleading. I would recommend that you dine entirely outside where there’s good air movement.”
Bloomberg reported that New York City is one of the few jurisdictions that have policies to define outdoor dining as part of its Open Restaurants program. If a restaurant has two or more open side walls, the city allows the setup to operate under outdoor dining guidelines (patrons six feet apart, and no parties larger than 10); if there are three or more side walls, the 25 percent capacity rule for indoor dining must be applied. For plastic domes, igloos, and other enclosed structures, there must be “adequate ventilation to allow for air circulation.” That said, it’s uncertain whether city officials are actively enforcing these rules.
Restaurant operators are spending thousands of additional dollars to erect their winter setups, as cities and states implement policies in response to climbing Covid-19 case numbers. These expenses are arriving at the end of a financially disastrous year. Small businesses have received little to no support from the federal government; some don’t qualify for assistance from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) or have held back from spending the money, out of fear that they won’t be able to repay the loans, Eater reported.
On top of the devil’s bargain restaurants have been forced to make, there’s the added concern about how severe the winter will be, and whether their setups are weatherproof and worth the investment. In New York City’s East Village, at least one wooden dining structure was toppled onto the street by strong gusts of wind. The restaurant owner told Curbed this was the third time it has happened, and that he’s unable to spend more money to make it sturdier (its construction cost $2,000).
Most cash-strapped businesses don’t have the means to invest in an entirely new outdoor setup to stay open through the winter months — especially when the promise of customers is fickle. More people are being urged to stay home due to rising case numbers, or deterred by the cold weather. It’s also possible that cities can shut down outdoor dining temporarily, as Los Angeles did for three weeks. It’s a lot of risk to winterize a space with little reward.
At 5:20pm Monday, Bellevue Police received a call about a pedestrian-driver collision near Crossroads Park. A 92-year-old gentleman was walking along NE 8th St and only a block away from his home when a driver struck him in the roadway, killing him.
Update: the 92-year-old victim was out for a walk & attempted to cross NE 8th St to go home. The male driver, in his 50s, says he never saw the victim enter the roadway. The driver is cooperating with investigators—no sign of impairment. pic.twitter.com/Z27pJqvnbg
This tragedy marks the fourth death on city streets in 2020 and the ninth in the last 15 months. Eight victims have been pedestrians or cyclists who were struck by drivers, and seven of those have been people over 60 years of age. 2019 saw the most deaths plus serious injuries on Bellevue streets in more than a decade, and 2020 isn’t faring much better.
2020 has seen four people die on Bellevue streets – three while walking and one while cycling (City of Bellevue).
Much is left to be investigated about how this collision occurred, but that hasn’t stopped the internet comment wars about who is ultimately at fault for this incident. That police were quick to note the cooperative and unimpaired nature of the driver as they listened to his side of the story will invariably lead people to blame the pedestrian for his own death–I believe it’s unfortunate that we will not be able to grant the same privilege of attentive listening to the victim. However, I would argue that this isolated search for fault (which is frustratingly so fundamental to our legal system and our perception of guilt) pits residents against one another and misses a larger picture. The statistics I just cited show that this collision is not an isolated incident. In fact, this is the third fatality on NE 8th St in the last 15 months alone.
The framework of Vision Zero (a pledge adopted in many cities, including Bellevue, to reduce collision fatalities and serious injuries to zero by 2030) rightly emphasizes a systemic approach to road safety. Proposals that focus on individual responsibility, such as public awareness campaigns and enforcement, can only go so far, because people will make mistakes. The key to achieving our Vision Zero goals will lie in adaptations to our transportation infrastructure that make it impossible for such injuries and fatalities to occur–even when people make mistakes. Although this may sound like a monumental task, the application of quick, tactical road modifications to improve transit, bicycle, and pedestrian mobility while introducing road conditions that encourage lower vehicle speeds has been accomplished worldwide with significant success.
And even though our history of suburban land use patterns currently makes mobility outside of a car in many areas difficult, that does not make us unique, special, or immune from applying these known solutions — especially in our mixed-use areas with frequent pedestrian and cyclist traffic. Bellevue, ever the data-orientedcity, already knows which streets are in the most urgent need of safety modifications. Through study and analysis, city staff know that 56% of Bellevue’s fatality and serious injury crashes occur on just 7% of the city’s street network.
The Vision Zero High Injury Network is indicated in red. (City of Bellevue)
And guess which road comes out on top as having the most collisions?
Both this table and the previous map can be found in this 2019 report. (City of Bellevue)
With this context in mind (and until we have more information regarding the exact circumstances of Monday’s collision), let’s examine what we can: the dangerous conditions on NE 8th that can so often lead to tragedy.
NE 8th St on Google Maps. Note the connections to Crossroads Mall, parks, trails, and businesses to the south (Google Maps)
16000 Block NE 8th St eastbound (Google Streetview)
16000 Block NE 8th St westbound (Google Streetview)
And let’s start at the scene of Monday’s collision, pictured above. The first thing I notice while traversing the sidewalks on this section of NE 8th St is how narrow they are. At only 6 feet wide and immediately adjacent to the road, there is no protection offered from the traffic that often greatly exceeds the posted 30 mph speed limit, especially as cars head downhill going westbound. The five-foot painted bike lanes are suitable for only the most confident of riders, certainly not for families or for people who are just learning to cycle. Perhaps worst of all for people walking and rolling on this key commercial and residential corridor is the sheer lack of marked crosswalks connecting establishments on either side of the street. The gentleman in Monday’s collision, for example, was several hundred feet from the nearest crosswalk to the east. Alternatively, he would have needed to head over 1000 feet to the west to access a signalized intersection, one that likely would have prioritized the mobility of cars over his own and left him waiting.
For mobility-impaired individuals, this need to double back and wait for signals that do not prioritize pedestrian movement can add several minutes to a journey and represent a prohibitive barrier from undertaking a trip in the first place. At a bare minimum, the addition of crosswalks in front of key destinations, such as the retirement center and the restaurants on 160th Ave NE, would provide more frequent opportunities for residents to access the places they need to get to. When combined with lower speeds, this portion of the corridor could be made markedly safer for everybody who’s just trying to get where they need to go.
If you live, work, or study in Bellevue, sign Complete Streets Bellevue’s letter to City Council.
Just a few hundred feet to the west, however, NE 8th St becomes the five-lane behemoth that Bellevue loves to use to move cars.
With all the residences and businesses nearby, walking in the Crossroads area is not what it should be. (Google Streetview).
This road configuration, actively hostile to pedestrian and cyclist mobility while expressly designed to move as many cars as quickly as possible, is the core danger behind NE 8th St. Any attempt to make this street safer must acknowledge that the design of this street and the driving conditions it enables are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of Vision Zero. They leave no room for cyclists to safely avoid collisions with vehicles, killing them. They enable drivers to strike pedestrians who are legally in crosswalks at high speeds, killing them. As a city, we cannot merely choose to paint a bike lane, add a planted buffer next to a sidewalk, and call it a day. We must address the fundamental issues with our city’s land use, street widths, vehicle speeds, and urban design choices that have made swathes of Bellevue inhospitable and actively dangerous for those walking, rolling, and biking.
Although certainly not a panacea for these multiple deep-rooted problems, there is room for hope in the city’s current budget deliberations. A Vision Zero Capital Investment Program (CIP) Project has been introduced that would fund rapid-build, tactical fixes to improve safety on several of Bellevue’s most dangerous roads, including NE 8th St.
Although several key roads are absent (e.g. 156th Ave NE, 148th Ave NE, etc.), this funding represents a good first step to achieving Vision Zero (City of Bellevue).
The city’s original draft budget would see this funding begin in 2023, but thanks to an amendment proposed by Councilmember Janice Zahn, Bellevue residents could see this money make a difference as soon as next year. Monday’s collision, and the series of deaths we’ve had over the last 10 years, remind us that these road design changes are long overdue and too late for too many. But if Bellevue City Council shows leadership and approves Councilmember Zahn’s amendment, they can meaningfully support Vision Zero action at the second best time: now.
Vanity Fair reports that Barack and Michelle Obama are producing a comedy series for Netflix based on Michael Lewis's book The Fifth Risk that documented "the historic chaos and mismanagement that occurred in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy during the handoff between the administrations." — Read the rest
A law enforcement agency looking to dodge oversight has a few options. First, there's the 1033 program, which allows agencies to pick up useful things like guns, bullets, armored vehicles, grenade launchers… and… um… filing cabinets, I guess. Going this route means spending federal money rather than local money. So, if you're not spending local tax dollars, you really don't need to ask permission.
Another accountability dodge is the discretionary spending allowed by civil asset forfeiture. Law enforcement agencies directly profit from property seized and are given a lot of latitude on spending those dollars. City/county oversight is rarely involved. Very few localities have implemented strict reporting on seizures so the money flows from victims through cop shops and into the hands of cop tech purveyors.
There's a third option: use private money. Donors with deep pockets and minimal concerns about the people they're bypassing pay for surveillance tech and other law enforcement goodies. Again, because no public money is involved, the public is left out of the equation. This happened in Baltimore, where a Texas philanthropist purchased an aerial surveillance system capable of covering the entire city. No one was told about it until after it went up in the air.
The same thing is happening elsewhere. Lots of private companies and individuals are buying stuff for police departments, allowing them to circumvent accountability measures. Some of these "private" concerns should be considered public, considering their narrow focus. As ProPublica reported in 2014, the Los Angeles Police Foundation -- a "private" charity -- asked for $200,000 from Target Corp. to buy the Los Angeles Police Department data analytics software from Palantir. It also purchased several automatic license plate readers for the department. No public oversight was involved since it was "private" money.
"The GrayKey was purchased by the Police Foundation and donated to the lab," an official from the San Diego Police Department's Crime Laboratory wrote in a 2018 email to a contracting officer, referring to the iPhone unlocking technology GrayKey.
Grayshift's flagship product generates a pretty strong revenue stream. The following year the Police Foundation helped the SDPD reup its license… which costs exactly as much as the original buy-in.
"This is the phone unlocking technique that the Police Foundation purchased for us (for 15k). Apparently the software 'upgrade' costs the same as the initial purchase each year. :/ They are the only ones that offer a tool that can crack iPhones, so they charge A LOT!," the email reads.
No one's arguing police departments shouldn't have access to tools like these. But if they're using these to perform their public duties, they owe it to the public to inform them about their acquisitions and allow their oversight to do its job. Forming a bunch of "private charities" specifically to provide police departments with off-the-books tech is a spectacularly lousy way to engage in public service.
The first federal National Pedestrian Safety Month starts tomorrow, but activists are demanding that the Trump Administration save the platitudes and pedestrian-blaming and actually pass policy reforms that will save lives.
A diverse coalition of powerful transportation safety, public health and consumer advocacy groups co-authored an open letter yesterday urging Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to push for laws aimed at decreasing the pedestrian death toll on America’s roadways, which reached a 30-year high of 6,590 last year.
The letter is pragmatic rather than visionary by design. All five of the coalition’s recommendations concern vehicle design, rather than more politically challenging reforms to infrastructure and traffic laws, and all of them have already approved by Congress in July as a part of the Democratic transportation mega-bill the Moving Forward Act. The larger bill languished in the Senate because of its aggressive stance on ending transportation-related climate change emissions, but nothing is stopping the DOT from implementing the aspects of the proposed legislation related to saving walkers’ lives — and advocates think Chao has a moral obligation to do so.
“There is a groundswell of support for these measures in Congress,” said Catherine Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the lead signatory on the letter. “These types of technologies have already been proven to work, but the problem is, they’re not standard equipment. They’re typically only features in luxury cars that get bundled together with other bells and whistles like heated seats and heated steering wheels. We don’t think that safety should just be a luxury for people who have a lot of money.”
The coalition wants the US DOT to:
Require the installation of pedestrian detection systems, automatic emergency braking, and other automated driver assistance technology on all new cars;
Require the installation of systems that onboard alcohol sensors or other technologies that detect erratic driving behavior from drunk motorists on all new cars;
Require automakers to redesign hoods and bumpers to make cars more forgiving in crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists, using better crumple zone technology;
Enhance headlight visibility standards for new cars to help prevent the 76 percent of pedestrians crashes that happen at night;
And last but not least, finally join the rest of the planet in requiring automakers to test how safe their vehicles are for vulnerable road users in the event of a crash, rather than just the people inside vehicles.
Those kinds of common-sense reforms, though, are decidedly not the focus of National Pedestrian Safety Month, which is little more than a public awareness campaign dedicated to amplifying the myth that pedestrians can always prevent their own deaths by simply being alert to their surroundings. (Our coverage is here.)
The National Transportation Safety Administration kicked off the festivities yesterday with a webinar that emphasized dubious catchphrases like “safety is a shared responsibility” — ignoring the fact that the “responsibilities” of walkers, who have little more than a bit of protected infrastructure to keep them safe, are drastically different than the responsibilities of drivers, who are operating multi-ton vehicles capable of taking a human life with the press of a toe.
Within 10 seconds, @NHTSAgov's "National Pedestrian Safety Month" kickoff webinar leads with "safety is a shared responsibility," and police officers talking about "engagement and enforcement."
The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which authored the letter before the Administration revealed the details of its effort, were disappointed but not surprised to learn they had a fight ahead of them.
“They’re taking the easy way out,” said Chase. “It’s always easier to put the onus on a pedestrian, when what [NHTSA] should be doing, as the agency charged with protecting all road users, is rulemaking on making vehicles and road users safer.”
The signatories of the letter — including members of organizations such as Consumers for America, Families for Safe Streets, the League of American Bicyclists, and even a former administrator of NHTSA itself, Joan Claybrook — say continuing pressure on the Administration will be key in getting them to take action.
“I would encourage everyone to reach out to their members of Congress and members of the Administration and express support for these policies, and remind them that they are charged with protecting the safety of all road users, says Chase. “We could make every month Pedestrian Safety Month, but until pass these measures, the bottom line is that people are going to continue to die.”
The first-ever federally funded “National Pedestrian Safety Month” kicks off tomorrow, and — surprise! — it’s centered around a press campaign aimed at convincing Americans of the debunked myth that the key to ending traffic violence is personal responsibility, mostly for walkers themselves.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its plans for the month-long public awareness effort yesterday, which includes a cache of social media graphics rife with some of the most toxic lies and misperceptions about how to keep walkers safe — and zero mention of real policy and infrastructure reforms that could actually saves lives.
Here are just a few of the low-lights.
Myth #1: Pedestrians have to keep themselves safe
This Instagram graphic trots out one of the most stubborn myths in the book: that walkers can save their own lives if they just turn themselves into human disco balls after dark.
Rather than a graphic announcing that the agency is funding streetlight improvements to make pedestrians visible without hi-viz vests, mandating better headlights on cars (as top safety advocates want them to do), or even simply acknowledging that people wearing light-colored clothing get killed by drivers, too, NHTSA chooses to focus on the personal responsibility of walkers — and ignore the responsibilities of every other contributor to fatal crashes.
Myth #2: The distracted pedestrian
Here’s another oldie-but-goodie: the myth of the distracted pedestrian, rampaging through American streets, somehow endangering everyone around her with her…cell phone.
But here’s the problem: only about 2 percent of pedestrian crashes involve the use of a mobile phone by the walker, and it’s a safe bet that none of them injured anyone but the walker herself, since a human body doesn’t tend to do much damage to a motor vehicle, much less the driver inside it.
Distracted driving, meanwhile, was considered a factor in the deaths of at least 2,841 people in 2018 according to the Administration’s own data, or about 7.7 percent of all fatalities. And that may even be an undercount, since many states don’t even include a field for law enforcement officers to report driver distraction on crash reports.
There is no graphic about the dangers of distracted driving in the Administration’s toolkit.
Myth #3: Drunk walking kills
This graphic needs a little demystifying: yes, alcohol is a factor in many pedestrian deaths, and a lot of the time — roughly a third — walkers themselves are drunk when they’re struck by car drivers. But here’s the thing: walking while drunk, in and of itself, is not a crime, nor is it inherently dangerous to other road users. And in some cases — say, when you can’t afford a taxi, and your city has insufficient public transit — it’s a responsible way to get home from the bar, at least compared to climbing behind the wheel after you’ve had a few beers.
Driving while drunk, of course, is illegal, and for good reason — and despite decades of public awareness campaigns and millions of dollars in advocacy efforts, 16 percent of drivers who killed walkers last year were drunk, according to NHTSA’s press materials.
Operating an easily weaponizable motor vehicle is indisputably an activity that demands a maximum amount of mental and physical acuity, and staying sober is the absolute least a driver can do. Using a sidewalk, on the other hand, shouldn’t require that level of acumen, because differently abled people, children, the elderly, and — yes — addicts all have a fundamental human right to public space that they don’t have to the space behind a wheel. A roadway that does require that walkers maintain total self awareness and lightning-fast response times should be redesigned — period.
Conflating the non-crime of drunk walking and the massive public health threat of drunk driving is a dangerous and manipulative way to blame pedestrians for their own deaths — not to mention adding dangerous stigma to addiction in a society that already fails to support recovery from the disease of alcoholism.
Myth #4: Old people die in traffic a lot for…reasons we don’t know?
Okay, this one’s just confusing.
Yes, friends, it’s true: older people are more likely to be killed by cars! But is NHTSA’s graphic announcing that cities must lengthen crosswalk signal timing to give elderly people with physical disabilities more time?
Or enhance zoning codes so older Americans, 14 percent of whom live in poverty, can afford to live in comprehensively walkable areas?
Or give the elderly better transit options when walking is no longer a great option for them?
Nope! None of that. The Administration’s just letting you know that a lot of dead walkers are seniors…and maybe implying, offensively, they shouldn’t walk outside their homes at all if they have the misfortune to live in an area whose streets weren’t designed with their needs in mind.
Myth #5: A safe walk to school starts with…ultra-responsible kids?
Here’s another baffling insinuation: that surviving the walk to your local elementary school starts with…uh, presumably those little cartoon children.
Let’s be clear: a safe route to school starts — and ends — with drivers not running over children. (And, in the case of non-white children, especially, police officers not murdering children.) Engineers can make that a whole lot easier by designing roads that compel drivers to slow down and reduce their chances of committing vehicular manslaughter, even when a little kid gets excited and jogs into the intersection a moment too soon.
But if the difference between life and death of a preschooler is the judgment of the preschooler, rather than the choices of the adults behind the wheel, the road design, or the badge, we’ve got a problem on our hands that a public awareness alone campaign can’t solve.
The Administration also assembled a handy packet of press releases that you can customize to put all manner of bogus traffic violence facts into the mouths of your local officials or non-profit leaders of choice. Those are already getting pretty well dragged on Twitter, but here’s a quick fix on this one to inspire you to join the fray:
Thanks to Studio Ghibli, you can hide piles of laundry and errant messes while videoconferencing from home with one of 400 stills from classic animations. The renowned Japanese animation studio recently released an online archive of images— which boasts iconic frames from films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo and Spirited Away and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya available—for free download. Each month, Studio Ghibli will add an additional eight images, mostly derived from new works.
IKEA’s transition from photography to all-CGI advertising is almost complete. After moving most of their catalog “photography” over to CGI many years ago, IKEA Japan’s latest ad campaign takes this approach to the next level by using a CGI model. Specifically, the campaign features CGI Instagram ‘Influencer’ Imma.
It might all sound a bit Black Mirror, but it’s true: IKEA Japan’s latest ad campaign, titled IKEA with Imma, features a fake CGI model who “lived” inside a small IKEA-decorated apartment for three days and posted images of her “life” inside that apartment on Instagram.
Her “living room” was on display on an LED screen in the window of the new Harajuku district store in Tokyo, where passers by could watch Imma live her IKEA-strewn life. Other than the occasional outing, she spend three full days inside that apartment: cooking, cleaning, exercising, playing with her dog Einstein, and taking & posting Instagram photo the entire time.
You can see how it turned out below, or watch 10 hours worth of livestream here.
And here’s a peek inside Imma’s “room” at IKEA in Tokyo:
Credit: IKEA Japan
Unlike some of the agencies and projects that generate portraits of fake people for ad campaigns and other uses, Imma is sort of… half real. According to My Modern Met, her photos are created by transposing her 3D animated head onto a live-action body and background.
The IKEA campaign was probably created in a similar way: a real person with Imma’s 3D head transposed on top of it actually had to live in a room for three days and take all those pictures; their life was then played out on an LCD screen and the pictures were posted as they were being “taken” in the virtual world.
Knowing that this is a half-real person might take a bit of the “magic” out of it, but it still represents a curious “next step” further away from genuine photography and videography for IKEA. In 2014, they were already using CGI “photos” of furniture; in 2020, they don’t even need real people anymore.
There have been so many atrocities been reported out of the ICE detention centers holding immigrants and refugees. Now a nurse from the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia has come forward with a complaint against the facility, accusing them of, among other medical abuses, forcing mass hysterectomies on detainees.
The whistleblower is Dawn Wooten, who says she was retaliated against for speaking up about the center’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. In July, the CEO of LaSalle Corrections, which runs Irwin and 17 other detention centers, claimed in a letter to Congress that no one at any LaSalle facility had “succumbed” to COVID-19, when in reality, as The Intercept writes, “at least two LaSalle guards and one member of medical staff have died of the disease.” 31 detainees at Irwin alone have tested positive for the virus, while Wooten suspects that by the time of that letter, at least 50 people had been infected.
A complaint submitted by the legal advocacy group Project South on Wooten’s behalf details many more grievances beyond the response to COVID-19, although on its own that is incredibly troubling. But the accusations of “high rates of hysterectomies” being performed on immigrant women and the circumstances around those procedures are an entirely different level of horror.
According to Wooten and numerous other sources included in the complaint, women were not told why they were receiving the procedure, which removes all or part of the uterus, or they were given reasons that didn’t make any sense. One woman was reportedly told the surgery would help with her heavy period, though she says that had never been an issue in the first place.
Another woman was told she was getting an ovarian cyst drained. But according to the complaint, “The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off.”
Yet another woman was told she had to have her left ovary removed because of a cyst. According to Wooten, the doctor accidentally removed her right ovary instead. “She was upset,” Wooten says in the complaint. “She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children—so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard [the doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.”
Wooten says that many of the nurses tried to communicate with the women by “Googling Spanish” or by asking another detainee to translate, rather than the official language services they’re supposed to use.
Wooten also says that all of these (often presumably unnecessary) surgeries were done by the same doctor.
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.
According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”
There is a long, shameful history of performing sterilizations and medical experiments on women of color and other marginalized groups, from J. Marion Sims–the “father of modern gynecology” who experimented on slaves without anesthesia–to the experiments done on prisoners during the Holocaust. In the U.S., Black women, Indigenous women, Latina women, as well as disabled people, have all had mass non-consensual sterilization forced on their communities. And while many people would like to write that off as ancient history, Wooten’s complaint makes it clear this kind of atrocity is very much still happening today.
In “Selfish,” what opens with a benign scene at a sushi restaurant quickly turns into a dire assessment of plastic pollution. Created by Canada-based animator PoChien Chen, the appropriately named film begins by a chef plucking a detergent bottle from a pile of fresh fish, assembling various dishes made entirely of waste material, and subsequently serving them to a horrified trio of aquatic life. It then dives into a disturbing series of facts and figures about the current state of our oceans and the effects of pollution on wildlife.
Chen said in a statement that the critical animation was inspired by a visit to a small island in Taiwan two years ago:
It was the closest I’d lived to the sea, being only a 10 minute drive away. Everyone can enjoy the beach with its white sand and turquoise ocean. At the time, I went snorkeling almost every week. Seeing such alluring tropical fish and coral reefs sill lingers in my mind. However, I also cannot forget the scenes of tons of human waste lying around the shore as if it were a part of nature.
See how Chen animated the project—which has garnered an impressive list of awards from film festivals around the world—on Behance, and check out more his films on Vimeo.
After seeing countless viral clips of anti-maskers acting out in public, engineer Allen Pan of the Sufficiently Advanced YouTube channel indulged in a bit of wish fulfillment: He cobbled together a CO2-powered "gun" that fires face masks directly onto people's faces.
After an impressively straightforward design/build process, Pan then brought his device to California's conservative Huntington Beach in search of volunteer testers:
A couple of months ago, automotive photographer Jack Schroeder and model Britni Sumida filed a lawsuit against car maker Volvo, accusing them of “willful and wanton” copyright infringement. In a major update to the case, Volvo is trying to get the suit thrown out by claiming that all public Instagram photos are basically free to use and share.
The story begins in April of 2019 when Schroeder and Sumida teamed up for a personal portfolio photo shoot featuring the Volvo S60 sedan.
After posting the images to Instagram, Volvo’s account reached out multiple times asking for permission to use the images without compensation. Schroeder refused this offer and instead reached out to Volvo over email to see if they were interested in licensing his images. He never heard back, but then in November he saw his photos—including two that never appeared on Instagram but were allegedly posted to Behance—pop up on Volvo’s Instagram and Pinterest accounts,
You can see some of the infringing image use in the exhibits from the lawsuit below:
The infringement obviously upset Schroeder, but it was arguably a bigger deal for Sumida, who was now in violation of an active modeling contract she’d signed with another car maker. After multiple failed attempts to address the issue with Volvo directly, the duo ultimately filed a lawsuit, which brings us up to this week…
In an attempt to get the suit thrown out, Volvo has filed a pretty aggressive motion. Not only do they claim that Instagram grants them a sublicense to re-share any public photo—something that IG has officially denied in the past—the motion also claims that “because Schroeder set his account to ‘public,’ Schroeder granted Volvo a direct license to re-share the Instagram Photographs,” referencing Instagram’s TOS about how User Content may be “re-shared by others” once you’ve made it public.
Claiming that Instagram grants users a sublicense to embed public images or share them as part of a new IG story is an ongoing debate, but saying that making one’s account Public grants Volvo a “direct, express license” to re-share content and “allows Volvo to post copies of Instagram content on other sites” takes this argument much further. From the motion:
The terms of the direct and indirect usage rights licensed to users under the IG Terms are extremely broad. The terms of these licenses do not state, nor can they
reasonably be interpreted as stating, that Volvo may only re-share publicly posted
content on the Instagram platform. Volvo thus had the right to make copies of the
publicly posted Instagram Photographs and post those copies on third party sites or
platforms such as Pinterest.
Furthermore, Volvo says Behance’s TOS grants them authorization to post images on external sites like Pinterest, and claims that “tagging Volvo … granted Volvo an implied non-exclusive license to share the Instagram photographs.”
You can read the full motion below:
In addition to social media Terms of Service and Privacy Policy arguments that Volvo is trying to make, the motion takes direct aim at both Schroeder and Sumida personally, accusing them of “try[ing] to make a mountain out of a molehill as they continue to exploit the brand, image, reputation and substantial social media reach of a venerable automotive company to promote themselves professionally.”
The car maker’s argument is, more or less, that this was not some sort of international advertising campaign, as the plaintiffs allege. Instead, Volvo “simply used basic social media sharing/publishing platform features to re-post Schroeder’s artistic depictions of … the Volvo S60.”
Schroeder and Sumida’s lawyers (obviously) vehemently disagree.
“Volvo’s argument, that they can allegedly take and exploit ANY photo publicly posted on Instagram, is dangerous, chilling, and wrong. The entire global creative community should be on high alert, and Instagram should speak up immediately,” Jeff Gluck, one of the duo’s lawyers, told PetaPixel over email. “It goes without saying that Volvo’s argument has absolutely zero legal merit and we look forward to further educating their counsel during trial. We will make sure that this case proceeds to a final verdict in order to protect the creative rights of millions of people.”
Whatever your opinion of the legal arguments presented above, this case is quickly turning into one of the ugliest copyright disputes we’ve seen. But, more importantly, it has the potential to establish a very broad reading of Instagram’s Terms of Service that would be dangerous to any and every photographer and creative professional.
Now would be a good time for Instagram to update their Terms… and maybe add a feature that allows you to disable embedding and explicitly prevent re-sharing.
Image credits: Photos by Jack Schroeder used with permission.
The conversation around U.S. schools reopening has been maddening for so many reasons, not least of which is the insistence that starting schools back up is safe as long as there are “proper precautions” in place. That sounds fine until you realize that those precautions involve expecting everyone from kindergarteners up to teenagers to do things like socially distance, not touch each other, and keep masks on throughout the day.
The notion that that was a possibility was quickly dispelled by photos from a school in Georgia during the first day back this week:
— 🇯🇲Black🇭🇹Aziz🇳🇬aNANsi🇹🇹 (@Freeyourmindkid) August 4, 2020
How many masks do you see in that crowded hallway? Five? That looks like a coronavirus petri dish.
As if that sight weren’t bad enough, the explanation given by that school districts’s superintendent is even worse. After that photo went viral, Dr. Paul Ott sent a letter to parents in which he wrote, “Wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them. What we will do is continue to strongly encourage all students and staff to wear masks.”
Speaking as someone that spent many years of my life being told I couldn’t wear spaghetti strap tank tops to school, that statement is total bull.
This is trash. Schools enforce dress code ALL. THE. TIME. T-shirts w/ “vulgar” messages, shorts that are “too revealing”, faculty can certainly enforce masks. Why the far right wants to put thousands of kids & teachers at risk of #COVID19 is beyond me https://t.co/r3tEBlJYDHpic.twitter.com/8OYey5IPJi
As practically any FEMALE who attended a public school in America can attest… if school admins could send us home for our skirts/shorts being too short, our tank tops not thick enough & our blouses showing too much cleavage … you can enforce a freaking mask mandate. https://t.co/vIcyOcPdzH
Anyone else laughing at how ridiculous it is that some schools are claiming that they can’t enforce mask policies when they’re constantly policing what students wear from hair to tank tops to hats. https://t.co/4DcyzgpN0V
Schools have never had any trouble policing girls’ bodies. Our bodies are called a “distraction,” impeding on male students’ right to an education. How is requiring a nose and mouth to be covered any different, logistically speaking, than requiring thighs or cleavage or shoulders to be covered? Isn’t a major public health risk also a distraction and an impediment to young people’s education?
In yet another example of schools doling out extreme punishments to young women and girls, Hannah Watters, the 10th-grade student who took that photo, was suspended for doing so. The suspension has since been rescinded (with no explanation given) but it’s ridiculous that it was issued in the first place.
Watters told CNN her reasoning for taking the photo, explaining, “I was concerned for the safety of everyone in that building and everyone in the county because precautions that the CDC and guidelines that the CDC has been telling us for months now, weren’t being followed.”
*Checks calendar* … Nope, it’s not April 1st. There really is a “Potato Photographer of the Year 2020” contest, judged by the likes of Martin Parr, and they really did just reveal the winners of the contest earlier this week.
Potato Photographer of the Year 2020 is a silly photo contest created in partnership with the contest platform Photocrowd to benefit the Trussell Trust food banks. The competition was inspired by photographer Kevin Abosch’s famous photo Potato #345 (2010), which sold for a staggering $1 million at auction in 2016.
This year, the honorary of Potato Photographer of the Year goes to photographer Ray Spence for his photo of a spud getting a haircut, titled “End of Lockdown.”
“This picture manages to introduce a topical lockdown obsession to the brief of photographing a potato,” says Nigel Atherton, Editor of the magazine Amateur Photographer and contest judge. “It takes a great imagination to see a sprouting potato as a head covered with hair, and there is a lot of humour in the way the picture has been executed.”
In addition to bragging rights, Spence wins a Fujifilm X-A7, one year membership to the Royal Photographic Society, a one-day workshop with photographer Benedict Brain in Bath, and a 3-year ‘master-level’ Photocrowd subscription. Not a bad haul given that submitting a photo cost him only a £5 ($6.50) donation to the food bank.
Scroll down to see some of the runners up, and if you want to see the full shortlist or read the judge’s comments about each winning photo, head over to the contest page on Photocrowd.
We’ll be honest: we’re not sure the idea behind Potato Photographer of the Year has the legs to become an annual thing. But if it does, we’ll hope to see a lot more entries like Spence’s winning image in the coming years.
To learn more about this year’s contest, the judges, and the charities involved, click here.
If you’ve ever wondered how Nintendo’s classic games evolved before they reached store shelves, you might have a good chance to find out. According to VGC, (via Eurogamer) a “gigaleak” of Nintendo art assets and source code from the mid-1990s has sur...
Amber Kelley has a “super-cool way” to make fish tacos. “You’re going to start with the natural gas flame,” the teenage one-time Food Network Star Kids winner explained in a professionally produced video to her 6,700 Instagram followers, adding, “because the flames actually come up, you can heat and cook your tortilla.”
Kelley’s not the only Instagram influencer praising the flames of her stove. “Chef Jenna,” a 20-something with cool-girl rainbow hair and 15,800 followers, posted, “Who’s up for some breakfast-for-dinner? Chef Jenna is bringing you some stovetop Huevos Rancheros this evening! Did you know natural gas provides better cooking results? Pretty nifty, huh?!” The Instagram account @kokoshanne, an “adventurous mama” with 131,000 followers, wrote in a post about easy weeknight dinners that natural gas “helps cook food faster.”
“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an L.A.-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.
Mother Jones
The gas cooking Insta–trend is no accident. It’s the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign dreamed up by marketers for representatives with the American Gas Association and American Public Gas Association, two trade groups that draw their funding from a mix of investor- and publicly owned utilities. Since at least 2018, social media and wellness personalities have been hired to post more than 100 posts extolling the virtues of their stoves in sponsored posts. Documents from the fossil fuel watchdog Climate Investigations Center show that another trade group, the American Public Gas Association, intends to spend another $300,000 on its millennial-centric “Natural Gas Genius” campaign in 2020.
What the polished posts don’t mention is that those perfectly charred tacos and fast weeknight meals come at a steep price: Gas stoves expose tens of millions of people in the United States to levels of pollution so high that they would be considered illegal outdoors. Counting on the allure of Instagram stars to help fend off alternatives backed by environmentalists, the gas industry doesn’t want you to realize how much its paid marketing has influenced public thinking that gas stoves are stylish, innocuous, and necessary home appliances. To the contrary, lifestyle bloggers are building their healthy, clean-living brands on one of the most dangerous home appliances on the market.
Americans have a lot of feelings about their stovetops, and the prevailing opinion is that electric can’t hold a candle to gas ranges. Gas stoves, we’re told, fire up faster, work smoothly with cast iron cookware, and allows better control.
As it turns out, the industry has been working on convincing us of these supposed benefits of gas stoves for a long time — Instagram campaigns are just the latest twist in a 90-year-old advertising campaign. In the 1930s, groups like the American Gas Association needed to stave off competition from wood and electric stoves. An enterprising executive at AGA came up with the slogan to promote the superior experience of its product that has lasted over a century later: “Now you’re cooking with gas.”
And the industry has long used pop culture to spread its message. In the 1940s, comedian Bob Hope incorporated the slogan into his routines. In 1956, it was actresses playing housewives selling gas-fired appliances in a 13-minute infomercial. In 1988, the phrase took an unfortunate turn in a rap by the National Fuel Gas Distributors, which featured lyrics like:
I cook with gas cause broiling’s so clean
The flame consumes the smoke and grease
You know what I mean.
Mother Jones
Presentations from the PR firms Bellomy and Porter Novelli highlight the thinking behind the ongoing influencer campaign. The intention was never to have ultra-famous influencers on board, the slides show, because these mid-level accounts with a few thousand followers apiece are cheaper and can still reach the desired niche audiences. So with its $300,000 budget from the American Public Gas Association, the PR firm Porter Novelli promises “snackable” content geared towards desirable millennial target audiences, “hispanic millennials,” “design enthusiasts,” “promising families,” and “young city solos.”
Mother Jones
“You can’t help but cringe,” Rocky Mountain Institute’s report author Brady Seals says when she looks at the #cookingwithgas hashtag of gorgeous kitchens and massive gas stoves, because they clearly lack a ventilation system.
Mother Jones
Every time you ignite a gas stove, you’re filling your home with many of the same pollutants in exhaust from cars — carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and formaldehyde, which are all associated with a range of chronic health problems like respiratory problems and cardiovascular disease.
The problem is worse the smaller the space; cramped apartments fill up more quickly with pollutants. And lower-income African American and Hispanic adults and children face the biggest toll as populations already facing higher rates of asthma exacerbated by more polluted outdoor air.
Two studies out in May added to that research with a closer look at one gas in particular: nitrogen oxide, a building block for smog, that is harmful even in short spurts and at lower levels. And in homes with gas stoves, the concentration of nitrogen dioxide is anywhere between 50 to 400 percent higher than homes with electric stoves. One report, a literature review from the policy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, Mothers Out Front, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Sierra Club, found that children, with their growing lungs and smaller bodies, are especially vulnerable: A gas stove can put them at 42 percent greater risk of developing asthma symptoms, and 24 percent risk of lifelong asthma, in addition to impacting their brains and cardiovascular systems. A second study by UCLA and commissioned by Sierra Club found that if your gas stove and oven were both on for an hour, you’d have enough nitrogen dioxide build up inside your home that it would be considered illegal if you were outdoors.
Indoor air quality has long gotten short shrift because our homes are, of course, private property—there is no agency formally responsible for keeping our indoor environments clean. So while the United States has made progress on outdoor pollution, the indoors—where we spent about 90 percent of our days—can be up to 100 times more polluted than the outside due to emissions from gas stoves and ovens, according to the RMI study. Other gas-powered appliances like water heaters and gas furnaces face more federal regulation requiring ventilation, but stoves have mostly escaped oversight.
The influencer campaigns from the gas industry have ramped up as environmentalists succeeded in convincing 30 cities in California (Seattle and Bellingham in Washington state have considered it) to use electricity instead of gas in new building construction. Though the electrification fights are about bigger battles than cooking, the gas industry saw an opportunity to convince Americans that banning gas would make their food taste less delicious. It’s working: For example, when Berkeley ordered new construction to go all-electric, the California Restaurant Association sued, noting the “uniquely negative impacts” on the culinary community.
As for the health effects of gas cooking, the industry assures consumers that it’s easy to reduce pollution: To minimize the fumes, experts say, you should cook only on the back burners, use the fan, and open windows if you can. Yet the industry marketing campaigns do not mention these safety measures, nor do any of the sponsored Instagram posts.
What’s more, most stovetops aren’t outfitted with the kind of range hoods that reach overhead to suck up the fumes to vent outside. Instead, most stoves come with a flimsy fan that does little more than recirculate the dirty air already in your home. While there’s no national data on this, less than 35 percent of California residents use any kind of fan when they cook, and even less have the right kind of hood, according to the UCLA study. (APGA points out that the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Environmental Protection Agency have tested emissions from gas stoves and do not consider them hazardous enough to regulate. “Virtually all gas utilities have existing policies in place evaluating acceptable CO emissions levels from residential gas equipment,” a spokesperson emailed.)
Environmentalists are calling for federal gas stove ventilation standards, but until that happens, there is an alternative that the gas industry doesn’t want consumers to know about: As my colleague Tom Philpott has written, the electric induction range is a glass-top alternative that uses a magnetic field to heat up pans. Though relatively expensive, the method is more precise, faster, and slightly more energy-efficient than gas rivals. Best of all, it doesn’t fill your kitchen with fumes.
Despite the well-documented health risks, gas stoves are still the norm in American households, while just 1 percent have adopted induction—far below what Asian and European countries have adopted. Like the tobacco industry’s misleading marketing campaigns, the gas companies have given the public false faith in these stovetops’ safety in the face of a growing body of research that proves otherwise.
“There’s just a black hole when it comes to indoor air,” Seals says. “It’s a shift to think we have something unvented right in the space that we breathe.”
Pop quiz: a couple publishes a relatively small news website critical of your massive and hugely profitable corporation.
Do you:
A: Simply ignore the criticism.
B: Consider whether the grievances are legitimate then take steps to improve your company, or
C: unleash a brutal, summer long campaign of terror and surveillance that includes sending the website publishers threatening DMs, live spiders, pornography, and dead pigs.
Apparently if you're employed at eBay, the answer is an enthusiastic C. Six (now former) executives and employees of eBay are facing federal charges after they participated in massive, grotesque harassment campaign targeting the publishers of a small news outlet (Ecommercebytes.com, published by David and Ina Steiner) critical of eBay. Said harassment campaign included sending porn to the Steiners' neighbor under their name, and also sending them live spiders, bloody pig masks, cockroaches, and even a dead pig fetus. Why? They were upset by both the newsletter and anonymous commenters:
"Members of the executive leadership team at eBay followed the newsletter’s posts, often taking issue with its content and the anonymous comments underneath the editor’s stories. It is alleged that in August 2019, after the newsletter published an article about litigation involving eBay, two members of eBay’s executive leadership team sent or forwarded text messages suggesting that it was time to “take down” the newsletter’s editor.
In response, Baugh, Harville, Popp, Gilbert, Zea, Stockwell, and others allegedly executed a three-part harassment campaign. Among other things, several of the defendants ordered anonymous and disturbing deliveries to the victims’ home, including a preserved fetal pig, a bloody pig Halloween mask, a funeral wreath, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, and pornography – the last of these addressed to the newsletter’s publisher but sent to his neighbors’ homes."
These weren't all low level employees, either. They included eBay’s senior manager of global intelligence, a manager of eBay's global intelligence center (GIC), a contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst within the GIC, and a senior manager of special operations for eBay’s global security team --and a former cop. In short, all folks who should have known better. And if you spend some time reading the articles at the newsletter in question, it appears to be just a largely polite trade mag. That it set these executives off to such a degree is just bizarre.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling indicated at a press conference that this appeared to be a "one off," and not part of a broader campaign against those critical of eBay. But he also made it very clear he'd never seen anything quite this grotesque and idiotic:
According to the government complaint (pdf) and press release, the plan was apparently three-phased. First, the executives decided they'd harass the couple, then they'd step in and approach the victims pretending to fix the problem they created. All in a bizarre effort to try and glean some good press for eBay in a newsletter that (no offense to the Steiners) isn't even that big:
"As part of the second phase of the campaign, some of the defendants allegedly sent private Twitter messages and public tweets criticizing the newsletter’s content and threatening to visit the victims in Natick. The documents allege that Baugh, Gilbert, Popp and another eBay security employee planned these messages to become increasingly disturbing, culminating with “doxing” the victims (i.e., publishing their home address). It is alleged that the very same group intended then to have Gilbert, a former Santa Clara police captain, approach the victims with an offer to help stop the harassment that the defendants were secretly causing, in an effort to promote good will towards eBay, generate more favorable coverage in the newsletter, and identify the individuals behind the anonymous comments."
But wait, it gets crazier. After engaging in grotesque harassment, then pretending to help in the belief it would net eBay some good press, the folks involved in the effort decided to engage in surveillance of the couple, at times justified by falsely claiming they had threatened eBay executives. At least some of these efforts may have had the blessing of former eBay CEO Devin Wenig (who urged executives to "take her down," according to the complaint). Those involved even crafted fake documents to help them lie about the effort should they get questioned by the police:
"The third phase of the campaign allegedly involved covertly surveilling the victims in their home and community. According to the complaint, Harville and Zea registered for a software development conference to explain their trip to Boston on Aug. 15, 2019. Baugh, Harville, and Zea (and later Popp) allegedly drove to the victims’ home in Natick several times, with Harville and Baugh intending at one point to break into the victims’ garage and install a GPS tracking device on their car. As protection in the event they were stopped by local police, Baugh and Harville allegedly carried false documents purporting to show that they were investigating the victims as “Persons of Interest” who had threatened eBay executives."
Those involved then lied to law enforcement and eBay lawyers about what they'd been up to. While Lelling's office indicates this was a one off and an eBay statement downplays the scandal, it takes a very specific corporate culture to generate executives who thought this was in any way a good idea, and who were able to engage in this behavior without running into any company or institutional guard rails whatsoever (until after the fact). Meanwhile the Steiner's newsletter will ultimately wind up getting more attention than ever. Bang up job all around.
