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25 May 14:17

Video was never the answer


Disclaimer: Below I discuss the pivot to video, Facebook, and the controversy around its video view measurement miscalculations. During the period in question, my employer (and I, in my capacity as an employee) worked directly with Facebook on display and video advertising measurement.

Every year or so, someone in media obliquely references the infamous 'pivot to video' and sets off a wave of journalists and technologists misremembering everything about it.

This last week's edition of collective amnesia was no different. In a Nieman Lab

 story last Friday about The Atlantic's recent layoffs, Laura Hazard Owen glancingly noted:

If there was any doubt, it’s now gone: Video and events will not save us...A couple years ago, publishers raced to bulk up their video departments, guided in part by Facebook’s now-extremely-suspect-seeming guidance that it was really, actually what news consumers wanted. It turns out they do not.

That was all it took for a small pile-on. Digital Content Next's Jason Kint tweeted: "As the industry and publishers chased Facebook’s news, learning only later they may have been fraudently deceived, it was one of the long list of reasons not to trust Facebook."

Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall retweeted this, adding: "wow, golden oldie, the time @Facebook lied about its numbers and got half the journalism industry to run off a cliff and everyone lost their job."

If this sounds familiar, it's because the same Twitter phenomenon took hold last October, right after Hollywood Reporter published a piece about Facebook settling a lawsuit around their inflated video metrics:

  • Adam Conover, host of Adam Ruins Everything: "In order to beat YouTube, Facebook faked incredible viewership numbers, so [CollegeHumor] pivoted to FB. So did Funny or Die, many others. The result: A once-thriving online comedy industry was decimated. A $40m fine is laughable; shut Facebook down."
  • NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway: "Whole companies shifted their strategy to video.  Companies going bankrupt, people losing jobs, FB gets away with 0.18% of annual income ($40M / $22B), a slap on the wrist."
  • Gavin Purcell, Vox Media's former Head of Video: "Six months or so after I left, the above all continued and they did a round of layoffs primarily around social video hires."
And these takes, in turn, echoed those from one year earlier, in October 2018, when a lawsuit was unsealed alleging that Facebook had known about their incorrectly calculated metrics before they disclosed it to advertisers:
  • Chris Conroy, senior editor at DC Comics: "If you missed it: today it was confirmed that Facebook massively & knowingly inflated its video-view statistics, which had the DIRECT consequence of 90% of media orgs firing writers in favor of expensive video producers, who also got fired when it turned out video was worthless. Careers were devastated. A large chunk of Facebook’s staff should go to prison for this."
  • Movie writer Bob Chipman: "*Everyone* in media overnight basically tore down a century of text journalism infrastructure, destroying millions of careers, to "pivot to video" because Facebook told them (essentially) Millennials only clicked on vids."
  • Writer Benjamin Bailey: "A lot of friends lost their jobs over this bullshit. Facebook outright lied and pushed this whole 'pivot to video' narrative. It's all a big house of cards."
These takes are wrong. Facebook didn't cause the layoffs from the pivot to video: publisher leadership teams did.

Let's revisit the facts. First, what was the pivot to video? In short, it was the ill-fated decision many publications made, mostly in 2016 and 2017, as memorably summarized by journalist Heidi Moore:

  1. lay off most of your writers, who produce stories fast and cheaply for your own website
  2. produce more video, which is vastly more expensive and time-consuming and which only finds an audience on other platforms, like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube
  3. ????
  4. PROFIT
Step 4, needless to say, never happened. And media types have been blaming Facebook ever since.

Specifically, they've been blaming Facebook for repeatedly insisting video was the future, relentlessly pushing their video-centric products like Facebook Live, and touting this strategy based on two years' worth of video ad metrics that, it turns out, were massively inflated.

Facebook did indeed screw up its metrics (not just video ad views, but many others as well). But there are glaring logical flaws with its critics' accusations that these errors were directly responsible for the pivot to video and resulting layoffs. And these problems starkly illustrate the news industry's chronic inability to turn the spotlight inward and examine its own strategic failings.

There's a line connecting this collective denialism with, say, The New York Times' preternatural skill for pretending its 2016 election coverage never happened, or Buzzfeed insisting they were right to report that Trump directed Cohen to lie. For an industry devoted to holding others accountable, the pivot to video represents a gigantic void of publisher accountability. All of which means this will happen again, the next time a platform dangles a carrot in front of publishers' faces.

So then: the logical problems.

First, and most damagingly to the commentary quoted above, the pivot to video continued long after Facebook admitted, in September 2016, that they had miscalculated video view data. MTV and FOX Sports and Vocativ all pivoted to video in June 2017 alone. Vice Media pivoted in July. Mic.com pivoted in August. Ad industry mainstay Digiday was still writing articles in August and September covering publishers "going all-in on video." (In December, a full fifteen months after Facebook's miscalculations came to light, Digiday reported: "The video bubble hasn’t burst quite yet, but it sure has deflated for video makers looking to sell short-form content to streaming platforms.") Indeed, pivoting to video was so common in 2017 that New York Magazine's Brian Feldman called it "a kind of cliché — a slick way to describe something else: layoffs."

Second, overstating its video ads' effectiveness did harm some Facebook clients. But the clients it directly screwed were advertisers, not publishers. To the extent that the world was incorrectly led to believe that Facebook videos performed better than they actually did, this would have had the temporary effect of increasing news publishers' ability to monetize videos, not decreasing it.

Third, the notion that a strategy as short-lived and specific as the pivot to video is the cause of journalism's recent problems is akin to Trump taking credit for the U.S.'s long economic expansion that significantly pre-dated his presidency:

That is, if there was anything close to an ironclad rule of the prior decade-plus of news history, it's that advertising revenue was in near-unrelenting decline:

Can you spot the pivot to video anywhere in there? Me neither.

Fourth, and by far most importantly, the sheer folly of publishers piggybacking off Facebook to produce a business model for news out of thin air, instead of investing in the long, hard slog to build something sustainable and user-friendly in-house was not -- contrary to all those angry tweets -- unforeseeable.

I know this because many people foresaw it.

In June 2016, three months before anyone outside of Facebook had an inkling their video ad metrics were wildly off, the very same Josh Marshall tweeted: "The reality is that news consumers don't want video...The entire industry push is because advertisers want to duplicate the familiarity and perhaps the effectiveness of television advertising on the web."

Aram Zucker-Scharff tweeted similarly in January 2017: "Just watch literally any user of your site to determine that video is less effective than its endless boosters keep saying." Brian Feldman wrote about the broader strategic implications in June of that same year: "Profit-seeking start-ups and enormous publicly traded conglomerates...are poor patrons of ambitious, sophisticated, politically driven journalism." Heidi Moore concluded in September 2017 that "the biggest problem with the pivot to video is that it’s not well-considered strategy."

TIME's Zach Schonfeld took note of the endless procession of carrots proffered by platforms to eager publishers, explaining in June 2017:

"Pivoting to video" won't solve long-term media business woes in 2017, just as Facebook Live didn't solve them in 2016 and quizzes didn't solve them in 2014 and curiosity-gap headlines didn't solve them in 2013 and listicles didn't solve them in 2012 and blogs or whatever didn't solve them in 2007. Eventually, algorithms change and ad models collapse and executives panic and money flows apace into Facebook and YouTube and other distribution channels. Flashy, short-sighted solutions don't really solve existential crises.

Hell, even saw it coming. Way back in June 2016, I wrote a post called "Video is not your savior:"*

TL;DR: Video, like text before it, is about to explode in supply, and prices are eventually going to drop because much of that video inventory is going to be terrible. We will exaggerate that supply with metrics that aren’t real, which will obscure the fact that the ones that are real aren’t rising as quickly as we’d expected or declining as quickly as we’d hoped. Best of all, we’ll make room for our mediocre new video supply – as we already are – by reducing the supply of text content: you know, that thing that was the Future of News a few months ago. One can only hope that, by the time the video market has plateaued, the news media will have found the next future of news monetization. They’re going to need it. That’s not the fault of Facebook: it’s only a problem for journalists. Here’s the unfortunate truth about good journalism: it’s inherently non-scalable. The principles that work so well in tech companies – especially ones like Facebook that operate in two-sided markets and that benefit enormously from network effects – are worth very little to journalism, at least in immediate terms. Producing 2,000 AI-assisted videos will contribute virtually nothing to the corpus of quality content, while doing much to dilute the market for everyone who’s actually creating some. One of my favorite writers on tech and media, Ben Thompson, appeared on Ezra Klein’s podcast in April. During the episode, Klein asked him how he was able to successfully find and keep a (paying) audience online. Although he raised other factors too, Thompson summarized his approach thusly: “You just have to produce stuff that’s really good.”

That’s the whole secret. It may not be the answer journalists want, but it’s the only one they’ve got.

A year and a half later, Susie Banikarim penned a eulogy -- titled, literally, "R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017 - 2017)" -- which concludes with a near-identical analysis:

That’s why publishers who made the pivot are now pivoting away again, looking for the next thing that may “save” them. But that’s an endless cycle of restrategizing and layoffs. There is no easy answer, no one thing that’s going to magically make audiences find and connect to your work. The secret to success in journalism isn’t a secret at all: Make very good things that people actually want to read and watch. That’s it. That’s all. That’s everything.

You get the picture.

Now, none of this is to say that the Internet-enabled superstar economy -- in which a couple large tech platforms prey, vulture-like, on infinite user-generated content and starve all other forms of media of meaningful revenue streams -- is not a problem. It is! Indeed, for journalism, it may well be an existential one. And solving it will likely require antitrust actions, or forceful regulation, or both.

But much like video, antitrust or regulation won't save news organizations from themselves. (In this newsletter, I'm focusing primarily on the leadership teams at national news and/or politics publications, not local news sites, who face similar challenges but have scarce resources or scale to do anything about them.)

I have no idea how journalism will be saved. But I do know that publishers who blame Facebook for their own short-termist thinking undermine their case for continued existence. Cries of "but we're the fourth estate!" won't cut it. Candidly, no one else cares. If you think journalism is special, you need to prove it to your constituents -- that is, your readers, not the advertisers -- over and over, just like any other business does with its customers.

Among other things, this requires innovation. I'll give just one small example. Every day, the desktop home page layouts of our national newspapers share striking similarities with the designs of their print editions.

Here's The Wall Street Journal (L - the web site home page, R - Saturday's print edition):

Now why, well over twenty years after newspapers first began migrating online, has so little changed in the way they present their most prominent content? (And some of these sites' mobile apps represent yet another publishing medium with a striking lack of native feature sets or differentiators. They seem to exist just for the sake of having an app.) It's a bit like all those anecdotes about early TV ads, which were essentially radio ads read by someone on-camera. The message hadn't yet caught up to the medium. But newspapers don't have the excuse of newbie-ism anymore: it's been too long. Again, this is a minor example, but it's illustrative of a larger mindset in which, somehow, journalism can just carry on as before because it stands on its own.

The thing is, it doesn't. I am certainly not as caustic or dogmatic as, say, Stratechery writer Ben Thompson, who recently declared: "It is just assumed [by NYT columnist Ben Smith] that Google and Facebook ought to be paying publishers for their content, but any sort of rational evaluation would suggest that money should flow in the opposite direction." But journalists should nevertheless confront the reality that their continued employment is not a concern for most people. (Take it from a guy who works in advertising for a company not named Google or Facebook. Literally no one cares about our continued employment either, and they shouldn't.)

To be clear, everyone and everything is fair game for criticism. My point is most certainly not to tell the media to pull punches against Facebook and Google, or ad tech generally. But like any other industry in seemingly endless decline, the news can either lament the status quo or try to change it. As Thompson writes, "Media organizations have to be honest with themselves about why they are struggling." It's not a fix. But it's a start. -----

* In that same piece, I mentioned Facebook's Instant Articles program, which had just opened up to all content creators, as yet another red herring publishers needlessly fell for: "In short, for the cost of building out storage and a few servers to host all that new content, Facebook gained access to news organizations’ output as well as a cut of their ad revenue. (They’re smart, those guys.) It is unclear what news organizations received in return."

Ten months later, The Verge's Casey Newton would write: "And after two years of experimenting with Instant Articles, many outlets appear to have had enough. The New York Times, which had been a launch partner for Instant Articles, abandoned the platform last fall. Vice News, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Hearst publications are among the large publishers who have joined it in leaving."

24 May 18:41

The Uncounted Dead

The first time Bob Duffy entered the world of epidemiology, he was an amateur scientist. It was 2003. He had retired from the New York City Fire Department and taken a sabbatical from his normal life in suburban Long Island to help his daughter Meghan earn her Ph.D. in Michigan. She was studying the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, using tiny lake crustaceans as a model organism.

Together, Meghan and Bob would go out in a truck, towing a little, flat-bottomed rowboat. They were studying how epidemics begin and spread under a variety of conditions. They’d unhitch at one lake, and then another, working their way across the countryside as they collected and counted diseased crustaceans and the fish that preyed on them. “Over the course of a few months, you can go through a whole epidemic,” Meghan Duffy told me. Her father was her paid research assistant, and one of his jobs was to catch the fish. After 30 years of running into burning buildings, he couldn’t believe his luck, she said.

The last time Bob Duffy entered the world of epidemiology, he was a statistic.

Bob Duffy was a father, grandfather, retired firefighter, and longtime volunteer in his Long Island community. He died on March 29.

COURTESY OF MEGHAN DUFFY

He died, at home, on March 29, 2020. Officially, the cause of death was chronic lung disease. But there was more going on than just that. A sudden illness had left him too fatigued to leave the house, and he had had contact with multiple people who later tested positive for COVID-19. Yet Bob’s death certificate doesn’t list that disease as a cause or even a probable cause of his death. He never got tested — he didn’t want to enter a hospital and be separated from Fran, his wife of 48 years.

Instead, because he didn’t die at a hospital and because this was at the beginning of the pandemic, when guidelines were rapidly changing and testing was hard to come by, Bob Duffy became one of the people who fell through the statistical cracks. As of this writing,1 22,843 New Yorkers have officially died from COVID-19. Bob Duffy is not counted among them.

More than a month later, the question of who counts as a COVID-19 fatality has become political. In Florida, the Medical Examiners Commission accused state officials of suppressing their state death count. Pennsylvania’s death tally bounced up and down, enough to prompt the state senate to discuss giving coroners a bigger role in investigating COVID-19 deaths. And President Trump has questioned the official national death count of 90,340 as of May 19,2 reportedly wondering whether it was exaggerated.

The experts who are involved in counting novel coronavirus deaths at all levels — from local hospitals to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — disagree with the president. If anything, they say, these deaths are undercounted. And with a death like Bob Duffy’s, you can begin to see why.

Bob was a person, beloved by his family and his community. Ever since he died, Bob has also become a number — data entered into a spreadsheet, just like the tiny shellfish he and his daughter once pulled from cold Michigan lakes. His death might never end up being attributed to SARS-CoV-2, but his death matters to the way we understand it.

There was never a cough. Instead, the first sign of illness Fran Duffy remembers was when she and Bob tried to go for a walk and he couldn’t make it to the end of the block. “We got three houses down, and he said, ‘I can’t walk today. I’m too tired.’ I thought maybe he’s getting a bug. Maybe he’s just tired. So we came back. That was Wednesday,” she said.

He died four days later.

It was a very fast decline. But in other ways, Bob’s final illness was just part of a long string of sicknesses. Over the two decades since his retirement, he had had a stroke. He also had had cancer in his mouth, colon and liver. There was scarring — fibrosis — that had damaged his lungs and forced him onto supplemental oxygen. The radiation treatments that had cured his cancers years ago had also left him with nerve damage in his legs and a slowly eroding jawbone. Bob was not the picture of health. We are, after all, talking about a guy who worked for the NYFD during a time when firefighters did not routinely wear the ventilators and masks they had been issued. It was a macho thing, Fran said. You couldn’t be the one guy who put on the mask if nobody else did.

So when Bob got sick in late March this year, whatever it was was not the only thing he was sick with. He was also so sick of being sick that he wasn’t interested in going to the hospital. Even as his temperature soared to 103 degrees, Bob chose to do a video chat with his family doctor, Ihor Magun, rather than leave the house. Fran remembers the doctor suggesting they treat Bob as if he was positive for COVID-19, in terms of isolation from friends and family. He could have gotten a test — but the nearest testing center at Jones Beach was 30 minutes away, and then there were the long lines besides. Fran thought about driving him out there, but he was already sick enough that that option seemed worse for him than not knowing what it was that he had contracted.

All those small decisions, made in the moment because of what was best for Bob, ended up determining how his death was recorded.

The way deaths are counted, like so much else in the U.S., differs among (and even within) states. There’s a lot of variation in this process, even on a good day — a fact that stretches all the way back to the beginning of mortality records in this country. While the census began counting living people nationwide in 1790, recording deaths was left up to state and local governments. The first state to fully document its deaths was Massachusetts, in 1842. It wasn’t until 1933 that all states were turning in death counts to federal authorities.

Even today, now that the death certificate itself is fairly standardized, who first records your death and decides what you died of varies by where you live and where you die. And that variation is only likely to increase when people begin dying of a new disease that we still don’t understand. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, for example, medical examiners — medical doctors who investigate deaths and perform autopsies — must provide official certification for every COVID-19 or COVID-19-related death in the county, said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. But that’s not true everywhere. In New York State, medical examiners get involved only in cases that seem strange or suspicious, like when an otherwise healthy young person dies with no prior warning, said Richard Sullivan, president of the New York State Funeral Directors Association. Otherwise, the decision is left up to health care workers.

Bob’s death certificate was filled out by his family doctor and did not mention COVID-19. The county medical examiner called Fran but asked only about Bob’s preexisting conditions. He had had enough of them that there was no reason to suspect foul play, and that was all the medical examiner needed to know.

If Bob had died in a nearby hospital, such as one of the ones in Nassau County owned by Northwell Health, he would have been tested for COVID-19, either before or after his death. Whether he’d been there for five minutes or a month, hospital staff would have been in charge of filling out the part of his electronic death record that pertains to cause of death, a representative from Northwell told me. This process can look deceptively simple — just write a cause of death on the line — but there’s more to it than you’d think.

A standard certificate of death provided by the National Center for Health Statistics leaves room for the chain of events that led to someone’s death.

The New York electronic death records form provides three lines for cause of death, which are supposed to be filled out in a way that tells a story. The idea is that nobody ever really dies of just one thing, Aiken told me. Even if you die in a traffic accident, the death record might read something like “Blunt force trauma … as a consequence of a car crash.” This is the information that helps people further up the data chain classify a death accurately. Leaving any part of the story out means a gap in the data later.

Not everyone fills out these records completely, though. And early on during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion happening, said Shawna Webster, executive director of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, which represents vital registrars nationwide. “It might just say ‘coronavirus,’ which I’m sure you know is not as descriptive as it needs to be,” she said. There are, after all, multiple ways COVID-19 might kill a person. On the other end of the spectrum are people who fill out the forms completely wrong. “Please do not put ‘COVID-19 test negative,'” Webster said. “Do not do that. There were several.”

In the days after his first symptoms, Bob’s condition worsened. He’d become so tired he couldn’t leave the house — then so tired that walking anywhere by himself was impossible. He had a massively high fever. But even Saturday, the night before he died, he was still talking, Fran said, and so she asked him what he wanted for dinner. She expected something light. Bob said, “Corned beef hash.”

“I said, ‘Bob, corned beef hash?'” But he was sure. So Fran put it together for him, the man she loved. She had to move him to a wheelchair and bring him to the kitchen to eat. He could no longer walk without falling. “I bring him to the kitchen and I’m just turning to the sink to wash my hands and I hear plop,” she said. He had fallen asleep at the table. “His head went right down in the plate. And I just said, ‘Bob. What about the corned beef hash!’ So it just … he thought about it and he wanted it, but he just couldn’t get it, you know?”

Doctors say this kind of oxygen depletion and exhaustion — coupled with an ability to still communicate — is a common feature of COVID-19. Even after he collapsed at the table, Bob was lucid enough to talk to the priest who gave him his last rites later that night. He died the next day.

Over the next few weeks, it would become clear that Bob had been in contact with a number of potential sources of COVID-19 — or maybe he’d been a source that passed it to them. It’s impossible to know. His son-in-law was later diagnosed with the disease, and his wife — one of Bob’s three daughters — tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies. One day Fran would open the newspaper to find that the woman who had cut her and Bob’s hair for three decades — and who had come to their house just before Bob got sick — had died of COVID-19.

But Bob’s death certificate makes no mention of the novel coronavirus. Bob’s doctor did not return requests for an interview, so we don’t know why he made the choices he did when completing the certificate. But Bob’s immediate cause of death is listed as “cardiopulmonary arrest” — his heart stopped — as a consequence of “chronic obstructive lung disease,” as a consequence of “fibrosis.”

Bob is a prime example of why doctors and other experts think that COVID-19 deaths are probably being undercounted — not overcounted, as some COVID-19 skeptics have alleged. In fact, if Bob had died today, there’s a decent chance that he’d have been labeled a “probable” COVID death, based on current CDC guidelines, which, among other things, advise doctors to include “probable COVID-19” on death certificates when a patient has had symptoms of the disease and been in contact with people who tested positive. Originally, only people who themselves had tested positive for the virus were being counted. Like Bob, a lot of people were probably left out. But even as the guidelines were revised and the national death count — which includes probable as well as confirmed cases — shot upward, experts said that undercounting was still more likely than overcounting.

COVID-19’s death toll has been so overwhelming that officials have had to resort to makeshift morgues in trailers.

TAYFUN COSKUN / ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

Some of this reasoning is based on logic. We know that we had a widespread shortage of tests when people were already dying of COVID-19, so it makes sense that these two problems would overlap at times.

Other reasoning is based on data. In a lot of states the number of pneumonia deaths in March was higher than what you’d expect for that time of year, or for the level of influenza active during that time — an important detail, given that pneumonia can often be a complication of that disease as well. These increases were particularly noticeable in New Jersey, Georgia, Illinois, Washington and New York, according to research led by Dan Weinberger, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine. But pneumonia isn’t the only way COVID-19 kills. All deaths in the state of New York went up in March, and these excess deaths — deaths above the usual rate for that place and time of year — outstrip diagnosed COVID-19 cases statewide by nearly three times. Data collected by The New York Times suggests that the high number of “excess” deaths in New York continued through April.

Yet another reason why experts say we’re not overcounting COVID-19 deaths is that we’re now counting them in much the same way as we have always counted deaths from infectious disease. The methodology is longstanding and is used for all sorts of diseases — and there’s never been cause to think that the methodology made us overcount the deaths from those other diseases.

In the bureaucracy of death everything happens fast, fast, fast, and then, after a while, things just grind on.

If you look at the CDC’s annual report of flu deaths, for example, you’ll see that it’s “estimated,” modeled on official flu deaths reported, deaths from flu-like causes reported, and what we know about flu epidemiology. The calculation is done this way precisely because public health officials know that a straight count of formally diagnosed flu deaths would be an undercount of actual flu deaths.

While flu tests aren’t in short supply and essentially anyone who wants to be tested for the flu can be, not everyone who catches it gets tested. Plenty of people get sick with the flu and never go to a doctor, said Alberto Marino, a research officer at the London School of Economics who has studied disease case and death counts for both LSE and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. If they die — especially if they are also old or have some underlying condition — the role the flu played in their deaths can easily go unnoticed and unrecorded. We don’t record “probable” flu deaths (again, the tests aren’t rationed), but we do record deaths due to “flu-like illnesses” — and plenty of people who die from the flu don’t have that listed as the cause on their death certificates.

Likewise, when a doctor lists COVID-19 as a condition that led to someone’s death — even if it was just the last in a series of illnesses — they’re not doing anything different from what’s been done with the flu for years, Aiken told me.

Basically, if you think COVID-19 deaths are being inflated, then you shouldn’t trust annual flu death counts, either. Or a whole host of other death counts. The only reason to really think that COVID-19 death counts are less trustworthy at this point is that the flu is politically neutral while the new coronavirus is not.

If there’s any major difference between the way we count flu deaths and the way we count COVID-19 deaths, it’s that nobody is trying to publish flu deaths daily, in real time. And that’s where death counting for COVID-19 gets complicated.

When Bob Duffy died, his community responded immediately. Fran found her mailbox filled with cards; flowers and baked goods piled up on the porch. At one point, there were so many tulips, hydrangeas and pansies that the Amazon delivery guy started to make comments, so Fran decided to plant the flowers around the yard. “There’s not one card that doesn’t have a separate letter in it,” she said. And many were from people she didn’t even know.

Besides being a firefighter and Ph.D. assistant, Bob spent many years working with the local Catholic parish’s social ministry. Essentially, he was a volunteer social worker. He made sure people who were hungry found meals. He helped strangers pay their utility bills, and he coordinated a Long Island-wide food bank. “Most people volunteer one day a week. Bob officially volunteered five days a week,” Fran told me. “He ended up with the keys to the parish. He was up there seven days a week, and he couldn’t be stopped.”

So when he did stop, people cared. And they cared for his widow.

Bob Duffy’s family will never know for sure whether he died of COVID-19.

COURTESY OF MEGHAN DUFFY

Death happens suddenly, abruptly. At first, family, friends and, sometimes, if we’re lucky, strangers burst into action like Roman candles, sending out showers of casseroles and condolences like sparks. For a short period of time, there is a lot to do, decisions to be made, love to be accepted. But then there is quiet. And then there is the rest of your life. The absence that death leaves behind lasts far longer than the initial flurry of condolences.

The bureaucracy of death has a similar dynamic — first, everything happens fast, fast, fast, and then, after a while, things just grind on.

In New York, in the heady first day or two after a person dies, the doctor or hospital enters the cause of death on an electronic death record, the funeral home fills out demographic data on the same form, and the state registrar of vital statistics logs the data. But from there things slow down considerably.

Usually, that’s fine — death statistics aren’t so volatile that we need them to be updated as quickly as, say, election returns or live sports scores. But the pandemic has changed our relationship with these stats. Now they’re how we know whether we’re stopping the spread of COVID-19, and just how big that spread is. The problem is that the system isn’t designed to do that work.

Normally, if a death is uncomplicated and requires no investigation or autopsy or debate, death records are transferred to the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC that organizes and analyzes the data of life and death in this country. It’s here that a death is categorized and tabulated. And this process is happening now, with COVID-19 deaths as well.

It takes time to investigate some of the deaths and get them to NCHS — the frequency of investigations varies widely, but state-level emergency operations teams work with medical personnel and state epidemiology surveillance to review COVID-19 deaths and possible COVID-19 deaths, Webster said. So the records can be in the state databases for a while before they’re solid enough that they go to NCHS. Then, someone at the NCHS is reading each of these death records to make sure that, say, a car crash victim who happened to have a COVID-19 diagnosis is logged in a database differently from a COVID-19-positive patient who died on a ventilator. The result of all this is that, even though public counts include confirmed COVID-19 deaths and probable ones, the deaths aren’t just being recorded willy-nilly. And it will be possible, in the future, to go back and look at the records and see which cases were confirmed by testing and which weren’t.

But these are slow stats. And they’re slowed down even further by the confusion caused by a novel virus pandemic. Currently, the count of COVID-19 deaths produced this way is at least two weeks behind, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the NCHS. The counts in some states, including New York, might be lagging even more. This system is the gold standard, Webster said, but it’s designed to produce accurate statistics — not monitor a pandemic in real time.

Death is hard — hard to count, hard to experience.

And so the CDC also has fast stats on COVID-19 deaths. Besides going to the NCHS, the data from the New York State vital records office is also gathered directly from that agency’s database and into one maintained by USAFacts, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization charged with collecting daily death reports from the state and county registrars that first record them. The CDC’s COVID Data Tracker comes directly from the USAFacts count.

That means there are two distinct death counts being published by the CDC — one slow, one fast. (That’s in addition to counts being kept by Johns Hopkins University, The New York Times, and other entities.) As of May 19, the CDC’s slow count was 67,008, and its fast count was 90,340. You’ll find both counts in various sections of the CDC’s website, and when you look at those pages, it’s not always clear what these separate counts do and don’t represent. It’s easy to get confused and assume that the death count you’ve just seen in the newspaper has suddenly been cut in half. On May 2, conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza falsely claimed exactly that, linking his followers to the CDC’s slow count.

The smaller, slow count is more accurate, but it doesn’t reflect how many people have died as of today. It’s weeks behind. The fast count does a better job of portraying the real-time situation, but the exact number will shift as state and local counts fluctuate. Some of that change is due to confusion between state and local entities. New York City, for example, has its own vital records office — almost as though it’s an independent state — and the fast-count numbers it produces for itself don’t usually match the fast-count numbers produced for it by the State of New York, said Tanveer Ali, a data visualization analyst for USAFacts.

And while Bob Duffy will not be counted in either the slow or the fast counts happening now, he will likely end up included in the data — if only by algorithmic proxy. Eventually, experts said, the CDC will come back and do an estimated burden of death counts for COVID-19, just as it does for the flu every year.

All of this is why we won’t know the exact number of people who died of COVID-19 for years, Aiken said. Again, that’s nothing new. Final estimates for the number of people who died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic weren’t published until 2011. Getting the slow count right, sorting through differences between disparate and nonstandardized state reporting systems, correcting errors and categorizing probable cases, finding ways to understand how many Bob Duffys we’re missing — it all takes time. This is, experts emphasized again and again, something nobody has ever done before. But the precedent that does exist suggests we shouldn’t expect to get a “right” answer soon. “If you look at opioid mortality, they’re two and a half years behind on compiling that,” Aiken said.

Death is hard — hard to count, hard to experience. The personal and the statistical both reside in a space where the question of “what happened” can be answered as an absolute — as certain as we can ever be about a thing — while simultaneously remaining painfully inexact and mysterious.

We will almost certainly never know exactly how many Americans died of COVID-19. But any count we get by leaving out deaths probably related to the virus — and, ultimately, leaving out Bob and a lot of people like him — will be less accurate than a count that includes them.

“We like to have answers. We like to have a yes, a no, a definite answer,” Fran said. Bob had been dead for about a month when Fran spoke to me from her kitchen. Just that day, someone she didn’t know had sympathetically left a loaf of banana bread in her mailbox. He was still so close. He was so far away. “But we certainly don’t always get what we like,” she said. “That’s really the truth, you know?”

Additional reporting by Kaleigh Rogers.

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22 May 11:15

A faded, 1960s concrete UFO playground

by Lee

Presumably built in 1965 like the government housing buildings in the background, this concrete structure in the aptly named UFO Park was designed to celebrate unreal, and utterly unknown alien visitors.

Now, more than half a century later, it’s taped up and out of bounds because of an all too real, but sadly still not fully known invader.

a Tokyo concrete UFO playground

22 May 11:15

The pandemic will put billionaires’ commitment to journalism to the test

by Theodore Schleifer
Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of the Atlantic, onstage at the New York Times DealBook Conference in 2017. | Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times

Is it a charity or a business?

Outrage may be flowing toward Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of the Atlantic, after news came on Thursday that the magazine laid off almost 20 percent of its staff. But she will not be the last billionaire owner of a major news outlet who will have to make hard decisions in the next few weeks.

Over the last decade, billionaires like Powell Jobs have picked up prestige media outlets and won respect from those who saw these deals as a form of civic leadership and public service. Not every publication could get bought by a billionaire, to be sure, but those that did were thought to have hit the jackpot.

This pandemic is going to put these billionaires’ commitment to journalism to the test.

The Atlantic’s announcement that it was laying off 68 staffers sparked significant ire on Thursday toward Powell Jobs in particular and billionaires generally. What’s the point of having a billionaire owner if they’re not going to spend their billions to keep their assets afloat?

And that’s why it will be so revealing to see whether the outlet-toting billionaires treat their employees any differently than the hedge funds, public shareholders, or media conglomerates that own everything else. Layoffs at the Atlantic — or those announced last month at Protocol, a just-launched tech publication owned by billionaire Roger Allbritton —show that a billionaire owner does not make a publication immune to a struggling economy.

As the coronavirus pandemic has shrunken the economy and advertising budgets, this has been hitting media outlets particularly hard, even those that have tried to grow their recurring-revenue models through subscriptions.

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, will have tough decisions to make about Time magazine, the landmark publication he bought last year. John Henry, the billionaire owner of the Red Sox, will have them at the Boston Globe that he bought in 2013. And Jeff Bezos, of course, will have them at the Washington Post that he bought that same year.

And what decisions these billionaires make will be telling about a larger trend: Have their purchases over the last few years been an expression of pure philanthropy — a charitable commitment that they expect to lose money on, or at least are prepared to — as they and their admirers have made them out to be, or are they a financial investment and therefore subject to the same cold, hard math that applies to businesses like Amazon or Salesforce?

Up until now, it hasn’t always been clear. Billionaires have often cloaked these media bets with the language of philanthropy, even if recent decisions may test that rhetoric. The dollars-and-cents priority has always lurked.

When the Atlantic deal was announced in 2017, Powell Jobs called the publication “one of the country’s most important and enduring journalistic institutions,” and waxed eloquent about the publication’s 160-year history and ties to Ralph Waldo Emerson, after whom her philanthropy, Emerson Collective, is named.

When Benioff spent $190 million to buy Time, editors there said they felt confident that Benioff would be putting journalism above making money. Benioff has promised to protect the magazine reporters’ jobs through the end of June, but any long-term consequences are to be determined.

“More than ever, the truth matters. Facts matter. Values matter. Whatever organization, business, or institution that we’re a part of, we need to realize that we are not separate from the larger social issues that surround us. We have a responsibility not simply to make a profit, but to make the world a better place,” Benioff wrote in Time last year, before calling for an investment in the free press. “That’s why my wife Lynne and I decided to become the owners of TIME one year ago.”

Always left unsaid in the press releases and interviews are the brand value and power that the rich have for generations reaped from owning publications. Critics press that billionaire ownership of media outlets entrenches their power and presents conflicts of interest, but that prestige has, too, been an incentive.

But what gets forgotten amid the rhetoric of billionaires “saving” publications from despair is that these are businesses, and even billionaires are not endless wells of money.

When biopharma billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the struggling Los Angeles Times, he said he envisioned it not as a philanthropic commitment but as an “institutional public trust in a private setting,” comparing it to Stanford or Harvard. But he was clear that it had to become profitable. His paper last month announced steep cuts, including a novel workshare program for its journalists.

One problem is that too many people saw these acquisitions as pure acts of billionaire benevolence — an idealistic notion that is already being given a reality check in the early days of the pandemic’s fallout. A billionaire who does not address a publication’s fundamental business problems might be doing a genuinely good deed for the world. But these are businesspeople, and even that generosity will be strained and can prove temporary. The most well-regarded, savviest billionaire owners, such as Bezos, have helped transform their publications for the digital age. Their money facilitates long-term change.

There were indeed signs of a renaissance at the Atlantic, which has produced definitive stories about the pandemic and added 90,000 subscribers since March, for a total of 450,000. And that’s why so many people on Thursday were left scratching their heads.

One thing is for sure: The crisis created by the coronavirus for the economy and the media business is starting, not ending. Over the next few months, the billionaires that have won our admiration for their civic virtue will tell us more with their actions than their words.


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22 May 11:04

‘What Time Is It in London?’

by John Gruber

Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch. After too long of a wait, he got the correct answer — for London Canada. I tried on my iPhone and got the same result. Stupid and slow is heck of a combination.

You can argue that giving the time in London Ontario isn’t wrong per se, but that’s nonsense. If you had a human assistant and asked them “What’s the time in London?” and they honestly thought the best way to answer that question was to give you the time for the nearest London, which happened to be in Ontario or Kentucky, you’d fire that assistant. You wouldn’t fire them for getting that one answer wrong, you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. You’d never have hired them in the first place, really, because there’s no way a person this stupid would get through a job interview. You don’t have to be particularly smart or knowledgeable to assume that “London” means “London England”, you just have to not be stupid.

Worse, I tried on my HomePod and Siri gave me the correct answer: the time in London England. I say this is worse because it exemplifies how inconsistent Siri is. Why in the world would you get a completely different answer to a very simple question based solely on which device answers your question? At least when most computer systems are wrong they’re consistently wrong.

I tried the same question on every other system I know where it should work: “What time is it in London?”

21 May 07:37

Inte Sapfo

by Hexmaster

Så som det mjuka och formbara vaxet följer lärda fingrar, och blir till de konstverk som det beordras; än en Mars, än en kysk Minerva, än en Venus, än Venus son [gissar på Aeneas] [...] på samma sätt är det passande att människors talanger leds av de lärda.
- Plinius d.ä. (epistel 7.9.11)

Här har vi ett fint porträtt: En kvinna i skrivartagen. Stylus och träskivor överdragna med vax var standardmetoden för att anteckna saker och ting i antikens Rom och Grekland. Ofantligt mycket mer skrevs på det sättet än med bläck på papyrus (för att inte tala om dyrbara pergament av kalvskinn). Stylusen hade en vass ända som man skrev med, och en trubbig som man suddade med. Av materialets egenskaper följer att ytterst lite har bevarats till våra dagar, även om en del fina fynd har gjorts.

Vem det är vi ser vet vi inte, och lär aldrig få veta; om det alls är ett porträtt av en faktisk person. Fresken finns i Pompeji (ödelagt/bevarat år 79 e.Kr., se även en utredning av datumet), i ett hus som kallas Insula Occidentalis, där den hittades 1760. Den har fått den korrekta men oinspirerade beteckningen "kvinna med vaxtavla och stylus". Smyckena visar att vi har med någon från överklassen att göra – det är allt vi vet.

Långt senare hände något intressant. Säger intressant ur faktoid-synpunkt.

Den antikens skrivande kvinna som fått mest uppmärksamhet i våra dagar är Sapfo (ca 630–570 f.Kr.). Hon var mycket produktiv (det som finns kvar idag är en liten flisa av allt som funnits) och uppskattades även av sin samtid. Det finns inte så få någorlunda samtidiga, relativt sett, avbildningar av henne – men detta var i en tid som var mindre besatt av tanken på bildlika porträtt än vår. Kort sagt: Vi vet inte hur hon såg ut.

Den som ska illustrera en bok eller artikel om Sapfo har som sagt en del att välja på, åtminstone om det inte är så noga med porträttlikheten. Då är det märkligt att så många valt bort de många grekiska alternativen, och istället valt en bild från en annan kultur och ett helt annat sekel som inte ens påståtts föreställa henne, utan alldeles garanterat visar upp en helt annan person.


Det är därför den som bildgooglar "sapfo" får upp kvinnan från Pompeji, inte i enstaka träffar utan gång på gång. Det är ungefär som att skriva om en författare från 1300-talet och illustrera med en slumpvald selfie från Instagram.

Se även Wikipedia (sv.): Sapfo för mer om hennes liv, diktande och i viss mån utseende
19 May 09:17

Artiklar och partiklar

by Erik Stattin

Ibland stöter man på en udda formulering som bara genom avsaknaden av en artikel får en att haja till och liksom se på verkligheten annorlunda. Som i titeln på boken ovan som jag fick syn på idag. “Vad är landskap?”. Inte “Vad är ett landskap?”, eller “Vad betyder landskap?”. Det är som att man skulle vilja översätta den till “Vad landskapar?”, som ett verb, och genast blir det en ögonöppnande fråga.

På samma sätt kan man öppna upp ett tankerum genom att byta ut ett “är” mot ett “var”, som t.ex. i frågan “Vad var Covid-19?” mitt i brinnande pandemi.

19 May 07:27

An extremely apologetic post

by Neil Gaiman
So. I did something stupid. I'm really sorry. 

The last blog I wrote, about how I had been here for almost three weeks, turned into news - and not in a good way. Man Flies 12000 Miles to Defy Lockdown sort of news. And I've managed to mess things up in Skye, which is the place I love most in the world.

So, to answer the questions I'm being asked most often right now:

What were you thinking? Why come back to the UK?

Because like so many other people, my homelife and work had been turned upside-down by the COVID-19 lockdowns. I was panicked, more than a little overwhelmed and stuck in New Zealand. I went to the UK government website (https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice), trying to figure out what to do, and read:
I've been living in the UK since 2017, and all of my upcoming work is here - so 'you are strongly advised to return now' looked like the most important message. I waited until New Zealand was done with its strict lockdown, and took the first flight out. (And yes, the flights and airports were socially distanced, and, for the most part, deserted.)

Why go to Skye? Why not go somewhere else?

When I landed the whole of the UK was under lockdown rules.  I drove directly to my home in the UK, which is on Skye. I came straight here, and I've been in isolation here ever since.

What were you THINKING?

I wasn't, not clearly. I just wanted to go home.

Would you leave New Zealand again, knowing what you know now?

I got to chat to some local police officers yesterday, who said all things considered I should have stayed where I was safe in New Zealand, and I agreed that yes, all things considered, I should. Mostly they wanted to be sure I was all right, and had been isolating, and that I would keep isolating here until the lockdown ends, and to make sure I knew the rules. Like all the locals who have reached out to me, they've been astonishingly kind.

Since I got here Skye has had its own tragic COVID outbreak – ten deaths in a local care home. It's not set up to handle things like this, and all the local resources are needed to look after the local community. So, yes. I made a mistake. Don't do what I did. Don't come to the Highlands and Islands unless you have to.

I want to apologize to everyone on the island for creating such a fuss. I also want to thank and apologise to the local police, who had better things to do than check up on me. I'm sure I've done sillier things in my life, but this is the most foolish thing I've done in quite a while.





16 May 15:17

Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic

by Jason Kottke

I recently came across this quote from Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book Human Scale and it succinctly relates a fundamental truth about the purpose of cities.

Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That is why they are there. That is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops there, hoteliers erected inns there. That is why factories locate there, why warehouses, assembly plants and distribution centers are established there. That is why people settle and cultural institutions grow there. No one wants to operate in a place that people are just passing through; everyone wants to settle where people will stop, and rest, and look around, and talk, and buy, and share.

Cities, in short, should be an end, not a means. Rationally one wants to have traffic stop there, not go through, one wants movement within it to be slow, not fast.

Sale goes on to list four ways in which cities should think about slowing traffic down:

  1. Cities should not try to move people to facilities but provide facilities where the people are.
  2. Cities should be small enough so that inter-community trips, when necessary, could be managed either on foot, by bike, or with some simple subway or trolley system.
  3. Cities should attempt to slow down the flow of traffic, particularly with plenty of squares and plazas and parks, places where wheeled vehicles are forced to halt, endpoints that invite stopping and resting.
  4. Cities should try to bring home and workplace back together.

You can read the entire excerpt on Google Books. (via @grescoe)

Update: Some alert readers let me know that Kirkpatrick Sale is a left-wing secessionist, which has brought him and his various organizations into contact & cooperation with racist hate groups and white supremacist organizations. I’m not going to link to it, but he’s written some stuff recently about how the Confederacy and slavery weren’t so bad (with tired arguments like white slave owners treating their slaves well) for an organization dedicated to exploring the “Southern tradition”. The white Southern tradition, mind you — there are no black voices or faces represented on their site as far as I can tell. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether that changes how you feel about his views on how to fix cities.1 (thx, edward & @paulbeard)

  1. For me, it does. It’s fine to advocate for more bike transportation & workplaces close to home, but cities can accomplish that in a way that takes into account lower income communities (which in American cities are often made up of PoC and immigrants) or not. Everyone who lives in the West Village working close to their house and being able to walk to the store is fine — and perhaps if you’re Sale, you’d say “mission accomplished” — but if the restaurant busboys, teachers, shop clerks, dry cleaners, store owners, plumbers, firefighters, and all the other people that make that neighborhood actually function can’t afford to live anywhere close to the neighborhood and are still spending hours every day commuting on the subway to & from Queens, the Bronx, or Brooklyn, I would argue you really haven’t solved, or even begun to solve, the problem of moving home and workplace closer together.

Tags: books   cities   Human Scale   Kirkpatrick Sale   traffic
16 May 15:01

Voyage d’Hermès: A Moebius Masterwork

by Ben Feldman

If you have followed the Sci-Fi-O-Rama blog and Facebook page, you have likely noticed our abiding love for the great Moebius (Jean Giraud, 1938-2012). With a career that spanned six decades, Moebius was remarkably prolific. His fertile imagination encompassed everything from gritty Westerns to mind-bending psychedelia and he produced influential works in comics, film, illustration, and fine art. A look at any phase of his life will reveal something original, amazing in its creativity, admirable in its craft.

Above: Plate 2.

However, in 2010 and at the age of 72, the master of French sci-fi comics released a nine plate folio that might be viewed as a culmination of his entire career, Voyage d’Hermès, subtitled “Les Mondes Élémentaires: Un Voyage Imaginé et Dessiné par Moebius” or “The Elemental Worlds: An Imagined and Drawn Journey by Moebius“.

Above: Plates 3 and 4.

Commissioned by French fashion house Hermès, the project is a bit of enigma. While its name would align it with one of their signature perfumes, the work has no discernible relationship with the fragrance or the brand. The images were ostensibly produced for some sort of marketing campaign, but never used for that purpose. A limited edition folio was released, bound with a Hermès-branded ribbon, and the Moebius/Hermès collaboration quietly came to a close.

Above: Plate 5.

What Hermès (and the world) got out of their investment was Moebius at his purest; clean, precise lines and a vibrant, electric palette straight from the first moments of an acid trip.

Above: Plates 6 and 7..

The nine plates tell the loose story of a wondrous journey in which a glowing, rainbow-coloured bird leads an explorer across vast, uncanny landscapes. Many of Moebius’ lifelong visual preoccupations are here: austere deserts with limitless horizons, the melding of architecture and landform, flying machines and flying beasts, crystals and spheres. These nine images construct a world as beautiful and coherent as any Moebius ever created.

Above: Plate 8.

These images have achieved a sort of internet fame in the years since his passing, and are often used as prime examples of the masterful art style he used throughout his career. One thing that is rarely noted however is that these images were not typical of his work, but were instead a bold, late-career experiment. Moebius crafted the entire set digitally on a Wacom Cintiq, a technology he adopted only a couple of years prior, after a lifetime of pen and paper. Elderly and ailing, Moebius was still experimenting with his craft, and with Voyage d’Hermès reaching new heights.

Above: The 9th and concluding plate in the Voyage d’Hermès folio.

For a broader view of Moebius’ career, check out our farewell to the master written in 2012.

The post Voyage d’Hermès: A Moebius Masterwork appeared first on Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

15 May 13:26

Where I am, what I'm doing, how I'm doing and how I got here

by Neil Gaiman
Hullo from Scotland, where I am in rural lockdown on my own.  I'm half a world away from Amanda and Ash, and missing both of them a lot. We check in on screens and phones twice a day, when I get up and before I sleep (which is when they go to sleep and when they get up) but it's not the same.

I was in New Zealand with them until two weeks ago, when New Zealand went from the Level 4 lockdown it had been on for the previous 5 weeks down to Level 3. I flew, masked and gloved, from empty Auckland airport to LAX, an empty international terminal with only one check in counter open -- the one for the BA flight from LAX to London. Both flights were surreal, especially the flight to London. Empty airports, mostly empty planes. It reminded me of flying a week after 9/11: everything's changed.

I landed in London about ten in the morning, got a masked car service to a friend's house. He had a spare car (bought many years ago as a birthday present for his daughter, but she had never learned to drive), with some groceries for me in a box in the back, waiting in the drive, with the key in the lock. I drove north, on empty motorways and then on empty roads, and got in about midnight, and I've been here ever since.

The journey was, as I said,  surreal. It was also emotionally hard. Amanda and I had found ourselves in a rough place immediately before I left (my fault, I'm afraid, I'd hurt her feelings very badly, and... actually beyond that it's none of anyone else's business). We agreed that we needed to give each other some space, which had been in very short supply in lockdown in New Zealand. So it was a sad sort of flight, even without the world in lockdown, and a sad sort of drive.

(You can read all about how we got to New Zealand and why we were there at all at  http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2020/03/on-beach.html. And, for the curious, the song that's currently stuck in my head is mostly Al Stewart's “Warren Gamaliel Harding”.) 

I needed to be somewhere I could talk to people in the UK while they and I were awake, not just before breakfast and after dinner. And I needed to be somewhere I could continue to isolate easily, which definitely isn't our house in Woodstock, currently at capacity with five families who have fled Manhattan and Brooklyn and Boston. 

Once the world opens up and travel gets easier Amanda and Ash and I are looking forward to being together again in Woodstock. (Yes, I've seen the newsfeed headlines saying I've moved to the UK, and even that we're divorcing. No, I haven't moved the UK, and yes, Amanda and I are still very much together, even with half a world between us.) 

Thank you to everyone who's been kind and nice and helpful, while Amanda and my problems got rather more public than either of us is comfortable with. We love each other, and we love Ash, and we will sort ourselves out, in private, which is much the best place for things like this.

It's rough for almost everyone right now – some people are crammed together and wish they weren't, some are alone and crave companionship, pretty much all of us are hurting in one way or another. So be kind. Be kind to each other, be kind to Amanda (who is getting a huge amount of undeserved internet flack for this, some of it really cruel),  and if you ever meet him (he will tell you very seriously everything he thinks about zombies, or his latest zombie-supplanting discovery, Richard Scarry's detectives), be kind to Ash.

Neil




PS: Amanda and I wrote a letter together, for the curious and for the bits of the world that is wondering what's going on, and whether they should worry about it. Feel free to send anyone who wants to know how we are and what's happening to read it.


Dear Everybody.

This has been a hard few weeks for us.  We are not getting divorced. It’s not that exciting.

We love each other very deeply. As sometimes happens during the course of a long marriage, we have hurt each other. We have lived our lives individually, and then as a couple, very publicly (and right now, too publicly).  

We have been trying to figure out how best to love each other for twelve years.  It is fair to say that this relationship has been the hardest, but also the most rewarding, collaboration of our lives. 

Living in lockdown is hard. Working on a marriage, as everyone married knows, is also hard. And we are very aware there are thousands, probably millions of people who have been dealing with their own versions of problems like ours over the last few months – and many face situations that are far worse.

We will sort out our marriage in private, which is where things like this are best sorted. We're working together to try and do this better. We care about  each other so much, and we have a small boy we love and delight in, and those are reasons enough to work together to fix things. 

So that's what's going on. It's not as much fun or as interesting as the newsfeed headlines made it seem.

For anyone who felt the urge to choose sides on this, trust us, there really aren't any sides to be  taken: we are on our side, and we're on Ash's side, and we hope you are too.

None of us know what the future is going to look and feel like, right now, and that's scary. We need to be able to have each other’s backs.  So please, if you can, have our backs, and we will do our best to have yours. 

And to the vast majority of people out there who have been kind and sane and supportive to both of us, and to each other,  thank you, we love you and appreciate it, and you, so very much.

Peace, and definitely love,


Neil and Amanda







12 May 09:48

Strindberg? om Kapitalismens hemlighet

by Hexmaster
De citat jag studerar brukar vara korta. Men då och då dyker det upp längre texter med tveksam proviniens. Som den här; den har cirkulerat en hel del, åtminstone i vissa politiska läger.
- Vad sa du till mannen därborta?
- Jag sa att han skulle arbeta fortare.
- Vilken rätt har du att befalla över honom?
- Jag betalar honom för det.
- Hur mycket betalar du honom för det?
- Tio kronor om dagen.
- Varifrån får du pengarna att betala honom med?
- Jag säljer sten.
- Vem hugger stenen som du säljer?
- Det gör han.
- Hur mycket hugger han om dagen?
- Åh, han hugger en hel del sten på en dag.
- Hur mycket får du för det?
- Ungefär 50 kronor.
- Men då är det ju han som betalar dig 40 kronor för att du går omkring och befaller honom att arbeta fortare.
- Ja, men jag äger ju verktygen och maskinerna.
- Hur blev du ägare av dem, då?
- Jag sålde huggen sten och fick in så mycket pengar på den att jag kunde köpa in verktyg och maskiner.
- Vem hade huggit den stenen?
- Tig, dumbom.
- Tillskriven ... August Strindberg?

En källa som nämnns är en odaterad insändare i Flamman av Lars Berglund, som i sin tur ska ange att texten kommer från Strindbergs Kapitalismens hemlighet. På andra ställen där texten citeras anges denna KH i sin tur vara en del av hans katekes för underklassen.

Katekesen är en verklig text, finns t.ex. att läsa på runeberg.org: August Strindbergs Lilla katekes för Underklassen. Den är inte särskilt lång, och det är lätt att konstatera att där inte finns något avsnitt som det ovan citerade, eller någon del som kallas "Kapitalismens hemlighet". (Stycket hade heller inte passat in i katekes-formens frågor och svar.) Så långt är det enkelt att konstatera att citeringskedjan är falsk.

Varifrån kommer texten? Efter några slagningar har jag hittat texten från 2005 utan Strindberg ("Peter" i Dagens Arbete, 30 oktober 2005), från 2006 med Strindberg. Det jag sett hittills tyder på ett typiskt exempel på hur citat tillskrivs fel personer: En text som uppfattas som rolig/smart/minnesvärd cirkulerar utan avsändare; namnet på en kändis ditklistras; och enbart tack vare detta får det snabbt mycket större spridning. Här en utläggning om denna faktoida attraktionslag.

11 May 09:35

The life and death of a traditional little Tokyo bar

by Lee

Tokyo’s old and traditional little bars are genuinely wonderful places to visit and spend some quality time in. There’s the joy, the banter and perhaps more than anything, the invariably advanced age of the owner. All positives of course, but the latter in particular offers the addition of extra wisdom and life stories, plus a refreshingly carefree attitude when it comes to hygiene and even heating.

The downside, on the other hand, is that every visit could well be the very last visit. Admittedly this is arguably true of any establishment, but when the sole person in charge is in their 70s, 80s and sometimes even 90s, there’s sadly only so long they can physically sustain the workload. And so one day the shutters come down, the demolition crew arrive, or as in the case below, the bar is simply stripped bare.

the life and death of a small tokyo bar

the life and death of a small tokyo bar

the life and death of a small tokyo bar

07 May 07:39

Den barmhärtige samarit-samariern

by Hexmaster

I diket ligger en man, rånad och misshandlad. En präst kommer gående ... Och går förbi, utan att bry sig om stackaren. Så kommer en levit (från den prästerliga stammen) – även han struntar i den skadade. Men så kommer en samarier. Vad är det?

Folket i Samarien följde Jahve, enligt dem själva på det enda sanna, rätta och obesudlade sättet. (Än idag finns det kvar en liten spillra som följer sin nästan-judendom; läs t.ex. om deras moseböcker på WP: Samaritan Pentateuch.) Judarna höll inte med, utan ansåg att samarierna blandat in hedniska tillsatser. Förhållandet mellan folken var följdaktligen spänt. Båda sidor såg ner på varandra, och kunde rentav använda varann som skällsord.
Judarna sade: "Har vi inte rätt när vi säger att du är samarier och att du är besatt." Jesus svarade: "Jag är inte besatt, utan jag ärar min fader, men ni skymfar mig."
- Joh 8:48-49

Det var det som var poängen i Jesu liknelse om den barmhärtige samariern: De som anses finare och heligare än andra men glömmer bort sina fina läror när det gäller är sämre förbilder än den föraktade samariern som inte bara är snack utan även verkstad.
[Jesus:] "Vilken av dessa tre tycker du var den överfallne mannens nästa?" [Den laglärde] svarade: "Den som visade honom barmhärtighet." Då sade Jesus: "Gå du och gör som han!"
- Luk 10:36–37

Ordet samarit togs tidigt och självklart in i svenskan som beteckning på en osjälvisk, hjälpsam person. Så småningom började det även användas om frivilliga som på samaritkurs fått lära sig första hjälpen och dylikt. Och ännu lite senare blev det namn på kommunalt anställda vårdbiträden i öppen vård (NE), det som idag kallas hemtjänst – frivilligheten hade professionaliserats.

Men den moderna betydelsen krockade med den gamla. Det var väl inte konstigt att samariten tog hand om mannen, det var ju hans jobb? – kunde man ha resonerat. Det var åtminstone så de resonerade som tog fram det som skulle bli 1981 års översättning av Nya testamentet:
För det första är ordet samarier den språkligt rimligaste och gängse beteckningen för personer från Samarier. Men viktigare är nog att den svenska beteckningen samarit har fått en annan innebörd med tiden. En samarit är nästan en teknisk term för en person som tar hand om sjuka.
- Mikael Winninge, översättningsdirektor i Svenska Bibelsällskapet, citerad i Aftonbladet 13 oktober 2014

Sen kan man ju begrunda det språkliga faktum, att såväl fariséer som samariter fått sina valörer omvämnda tack vare NT – det som ansågs fint blev fult, och tvärtom.

06 May 11:46

The Coronavirus Outbreak

As businesses contemplate the return of workers to their desks, many are considering large and small changes to the modern workplace culture and trappings.

The offices of Infection Prevention at the University of California, Irvine, has translucent protective barriers between desks and now requires employees to wear masks.
The offices of Infection Prevention at the University of California, Irvine, has translucent protective barriers between desks and now requires employees to wear masks.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — The modern corporate office is renowned for open, collaborative work spaces, in-house coffee bars and standing desks with room for two giant computer monitors.

Soon, there may be a new must-have perk: the sneeze guard.

This plexiglass barrier that can be mounted on a desk is one of many ideas being mulled by employers as they contemplate a return to the workplace after coronavirus lockdowns. Their post-pandemic makeovers may include hand sanitizers built into desks that are positioned at 90-degree angles or that are enclosed by translucent plastic partitions; air filters that push air down and not up; outdoor gathering space to allow collaboration without viral transmission; and windows that actually open, for freer air flow.

The conversation about how to reconfigure the American workplace is taking place throughout the business world, from small start-ups to giant Wall Street firms. The design and furniture companies that have been hired for the makeovers say the virus may even be tilting workplaces back toward a concept they had been moving away from since the Mad Men era: privacy.

The question is whether any of the changes being contemplated will actually result in safer workplaces.

“We are not infectious disease experts, we are simply furniture people,” said Tracy D. Wymer, vice president for workplace at Knoll, a company that makes office furniture and has been engaged by anxious clients, including some of the country’s largest corporations, to come up with ways to make workplaces less of a health risk.

The actual disease experts say that a virus-free office environment is a pipe dream. Dr. Rajneesh Behal, an internal medicine physician and the chief quality officer of One Medical, a primary-care chain that recently held a webinar for businesses on how to reopen, said, “A core message is, do not expect your risk goes down to zero.”

Much of what is known on the subject of workplace and disease transmission comes from studies about workplace transmission of the flu, which shares some similarities with the novel coronavirus, said Dr. Lisa Winston, the hospital epidemiologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General at the University of California, San Francisco. “We know that flu spreads in workplaces among healthy working adults,” she said. A 2016 analysis of various research papers from around the world found that around 16 percent of flu transmission takes place in the office.

Other research shows that one of the best ways to reduce transmission in the workplace is to provide paid sick leave that encourages ill employees to stay home.

A common area at Mobify, a Vancouver company with 40 employees, which shares its space with other companies.Credit...Alana Paterson for The New York Times
Igor Faletski, chief executive of Mobify, used to circulate freely about the company and interact with employees.Credit...Alana Paterson for The New York Times

Another basic step to lower risk, Dr. Winston said, is simply having “fewer people in a space.”

That is a concept that runs counter to the workplace zeitgeist of the past two decades. The embrace of open floor plans stretches back to the first dot-com boom in the late 1990s. It was hailed as essential to collaboration and creativity, but is, of course, also about cramming more people into expensive office space, a situation that people now realize creates unnerving petri-dish conditions.

Mr. Wymer of Knoll, the furniture design company, said his goal had changed from making offices virus-free, which is impractical, to remaking them so that workers feel safer.

“We can’t ask employees to come back to the same office,” he said. “Companies feel we have to address the root fear.”

For now, that may mean no more shared desks (a concept in the business world known as “hoteling”), elbow-to-elbow seating or cafes where people congregate to chat about a project over a fruit water or hazelnut latte. It could mean more use of materials, like copper, that are less hospitable to germs, and reconfiguring ventilation systems that flow air from the ceiling down rather than the floor up, which is considered safer.

Mobify, a Vancouver company that builds online storefronts for major retailers like Under Armour and Lancôme, has 40 employees who share space with other start-ups. It’s the epitome of the 21st century workplace with side-by-side desks in a row, sans partitions, and open space for a total of 100 people at full capacity to congregate for meetings, or for playing Ping-Pong and pool.

Now, Igor Faletksi, the company’s chief executive, said, “It’s less about fun and more about safety.”

“Huge buffets?” he said, “forget about that for now.”

Mr. Faletksi is contemplating allowing more employees to work from home and even moving headquarters to a new building with better air circulation.

“People want to have safe collaboration,” he said.

Some companies have begun mentioning a return to one of history’s more derided office-design concepts: the cubicle. There is talk also of the cubicle’s see-through cousin, known as the sneeze guard.

“Cough and Sneeze Protection Screens,” is how they are being marketed by the California company Obex P.E. in emails to potential customers. “Plenty of options to fit your style and needs,” the email says, adding: “Decrease person-to-person contact. Practice Social Distancing.”

These guards already have a home in banks and grocery stores, but they are getting a new push into the corporate office space.

“Add tall laminate gallery panels to workstations or benching stations” is suggested in a 12-page Power Point report, “Covid 19 and The Future of Furniture,” produced by CBRE, one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms.

Taller plastic barriers that extend over desks have long been in use at an office run by one of the country’s top infectious disease experts, Dr. Susan Huang, medical director of epidemiology and infection prevention at the University of California, Irvine. The barriers “weren’t designed for coronavirus,” Dr. Huang said, but, rather, to maintain a sense of collaboration while cutting down noise. Now, the barriers may have an added benefit of creating some biological isolation.

New advisories posted at the Infection Prevention office at the University of California, Irvine.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times
When Dr. Huang reopened her lab, she held a meeting to explain new hygiene rules and handed each employee a bottle of hand sanitizer and a mask.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

But Dr. Huang said that safety in the workplace would require more than plastic shields. In fact, her lab reopened last week, and the first thing she did was hold a meeting to explain the new hygiene rules. At a meeting in the conference room, Dr. Huang gave each employee a bottle of hand sanitizer and a mask. “I had to tell them, ‘You’re going to wear a mask all day long,’” she said, “and tell them how to do it right and that they have to do it.”

“And don’t touch your mask without first using your hand sanitizer,” she recalled saying at that meeting.

For smaller companies, the changes may be more modest but the issue weighs just as heavily. Howard Cao, the chief executive of Form & Fiction, a start-up incubator in San Francisco, said he had been thinking about changing out the touch-pad at the front door to the office that his seven employees shared with workers from other start-ups. “We’ll probably have to reconfigure that into something with Bluetooth or a key fob,” Mr. Cao said.

Inside the office, he is looking to create physical space or barriers between employees who sit together at long tables. “It may be as simple as a mini-divider between people,” he said.

Like a cubicle?

Yes, he conceded, though it’s not a nice word for him. “I’ve always been very anti-cubicle,” he said.

The proposed changes to the offices have struck some as more cosmetic than substantive, especially the sneeze guard.

“I call it social distancing theater, like T.S.A. security theater after 9/11,” said Ron Wiener, chief executive of iMovR, a Seattle company that designs standing desks that are used at many large employers, from Google and Facebook to the Department of Defense.

In the end, the solution for many employers may not be to spend a lot of money on outfitting their new office spaces, but rather simply having many employees continue to work at home, as a way to accomplish two goals: keeping people safe and saving money.

This is the punchline of a story about the post-pandemic office makeover. In the name of safety, there is likely to be a long, hard look at money, too. In this case, the goals may go together like hand-in-protective-glove.

Moving to home offices “has worked really great,” said Susan Stick, general counsel at Evernote, a maker of digital note-taking programs with 282 employees. “You can’t put that genie back into the bottle.”

  • Updated April 11, 2020

    • If you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have, and have a fever or symptoms like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without potentially infecting or exposing others.

    • This is a difficult question, because a lot depends on how well the virus is contained. A better question might be: “How will we know when to reopen the country?” In an American Enterprise Institute report, Scott Gottlieb, Caitlin Rivers, Mark B. McClellan, Lauren Silvis and Crystal Watson staked out four goal posts for recovery: Hospitals in the state must be able to safely treat all patients requiring hospitalization, without resorting to crisis standards of care; the state needs to be able to at least test everyone who has symptoms; the state is able to conduct monitoring of confirmed cases and contacts; and there must be a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days.

    • The C.D.C. has recommended that all Americans wear cloth masks if they go out in public. This is a shift in federal guidance reflecting new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who have no symptoms. Until now, the C.D.C., like the W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don’t need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short supply. Masks don’t replace hand washing and social distancing.

    • It seems to spread very easily from person to person, especially in homes, hospitals and other confined spaces. The pathogen can be carried on tiny respiratory droplets that fall as they are coughed or sneezed out. It may also be transmitted when we touch a contaminated surface and then touch our face.

    • No. Clinical trials are underway in the United States, China and Europe. But American officials and pharmaceutical executives have said that a vaccine remains at least 12 to 18 months away.

    • Unlike the flu, there is no known treatment or vaccine, and little is known about this particular virus so far. It seems to be more lethal than the flu, but the numbers are still uncertain. And it hits the elderly and those with underlying conditions — not just those with respiratory diseases — particularly hard.

    • If the family member doesn’t need hospitalization and can be cared for at home, you should help him or her with basic needs and monitor the symptoms, while also keeping as much distance as possible, according to guidelines issued by the C.D.C. If there’s space, the sick family member should stay in a separate room and use a separate bathroom. If masks are available, both the sick person and the caregiver should wear them when the caregiver enters the room. Make sure not to share any dishes or other household items and to regularly clean surfaces like counters, doorknobs, toilets and tables. Don’t forget to wash your hands frequently.

    • Plan two weeks of meals if possible. But people should not hoard food or supplies. Despite the empty shelves, the supply chain remains strong. And remember to wipe the handle of the grocery cart with a disinfecting wipe and wash your hands as soon as you get home.

    • That’s not a good idea. Even if you’re retired, having a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds so that your money keeps up with inflation, or even grows, makes sense. But retirees may want to think about having enough cash set aside for a year’s worth of living expenses and big payments needed over the next five years.

06 May 06:53

Disappearing Tokyo places, and people

by Lee

Last month, I posted a series of photos documenting the demise and pre-demolition abandonment of an old Tokyo danchi, or social housing complex. A sight that signalled the ageing nature of the buildings, as well as the generation that first moved into them.

Photos that fortunately were taken at just the right time, as the fences are now up, meaning the end of a certain era really is nigh.

old and disappearing Tokyo

old Tokyo danchi demolition

01 May 07:44

Beasts from the Outside World: The Art of Hataya

by Ben Feldman

Somewhere in Saitama, Japan, an artist working the pseudonym Hataya (ハタ屋) has opened a window onto a unique and richly imagined world.

Working in a meticulous pen and ink style, Hataya reveals a wild menagerie of beasts and beings; many-eyed and many-legged cat-people, bird-faced dragons, preening moth-scholars, and floating creatures beyond description. Set against a detailed background full of antique architectural details, paper lanterns, tattered posters, and mysterious goods in jars, Hataya’s diverse creatures share a believable, lived-in setting. This is art with great narrative allure and each piece leaves the viewer wanting more.

We asked Hataya about her work and she answered simply: “There is no one story I am trying to tell, but there is one big world in my mind. I’m drawing that world, so the work ends up feeling coherent. I draw what I want to see.”

For a broader view into Hataya’s world, follow her on Twitter and on her excellent Tumblr Muzinabu“.

The post Beasts from the Outside World: The Art of Hataya appeared first on Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

01 May 07:41

More defunct Japanese vending machines

by Lee

Back in February, I wrote this to accompany a series of photographs depicting some long-defunct vending machines:

“Japan is well known for its vending machines. With good reason too, as despite the ever-increasing number of convenience stores, the vending machine is still ubiquitous. Yet seeing one that’s no longer operational, let alone left to rot, is surprisingly rare.”

The ubiquity of such machines, of course, is most definitely still true, but the rarity of busted and forlorn looking examples, it turns out, is very much open to debate, as on walks in the last month, I’ve had the genuine pleasure of seeing the sad beauties below.

out of order Japanese vending machine

out of order Japanese vending machine

out of order Japanese vending machine

out of order Japanese vending machine

out of order Japanese vending machine

out of order Japanese vending machine

01 May 07:34

Historielöst kvack

by Hexmaster

- Ur en storannons i DN, 14 mars 1948

Ska man ägna sig åt kvack måste man vara historielös. Annars skulle man veta, att prisandet av kolloidalt silver, LCHF, THX eller vad som nu är kuren för dagen, återkommit gång på gång; det enda som förändrats är föremålet för prisandet.

Are Waerlands "hälsoförkunnelse" gick ut på en laktovegetarisk kost med tyngdpunkt på råkost (i synnerhet hans gröt kruska: havregryn, vetekli och russin som kokats ihop), liksom att sova för öppet fönster året runt, idka hälsosamt leverne i naturen, med mera. Det som då skulle uppnås var inte bara bättre hälsa och ork i allmänhet, utan alla sjukdomars utplånande.
Vi har inte med sjukdomar att göra, utan med livsföringsfel! Avskaffa livsföringsfelen och sjukdomarna kommer att försvinna.
- Are Waerland

Det löftet fungerade så länge som det hölls till böcker och föreläsningar för frälsta. Efter kriget startade hans förening Allnordisk Folkhälsa (det finns än idag men heter Hälsofrämjandet) ett hälsohem i Kiholm utanför Södertälje. Det dröjde inte innan granskande myndigheter fann saker att anmärka på; uppgifterna om mirakulösa tillfrisknanden återspeglades på något sätt inte av medicinska journaler, och patienter var ofina nog att dö bort trots att de hållit sig till råkost, juicer och gröt. Det är nog lika bra att vår tids profeter, vare sig de predikar LCHF, kolloidalt silver eller vad det nu kan vara, inte öppnar några hälsohem, för i så fall skulle nog de granskande myndigheterna även där finna mycket att anmärka på.

Kiholms hälsohem efterträddes så småningom av Tallmogården, det fashionabla hälsohemmet nr 1 på 1970- och 80-talen. Det bedrevs också i Waerlands anda, dock med kraftigt nedbantade löften; det var säkrare att hålla sig till antydningar, anekdoter om mirakulösa tillfrisknanden etc.

29 Apr 11:09

My travel sketches: 'Some drawings remind me how the sun felt on my skin'

by Interview by Rachel Dixon

Illustrator Jonathan Edwards on how his travel sketchbooks are bringing back memories of places and experiences

On family holidays, my parents would give me a book of A4 paper to keep me quiet. I’m drawing in every holiday photo! Actually, I’ve drawn every day for as long as I can remember.

I’ve always taken a sketchbook on my travels … and a major part of my work as an illustrator is based on travel drawings. I see what catches my eye, then sit on a bench or at a cafe window and stay for about an hour. I take two sketchbooks: an A6 one that fits in my pocket and an A4 watercolour sketchbook that I use if I have more time. In Britain, no one pays me any notice. In, say, Japan, people are more likely to come and talk or to stand at a respectful distance and watch.

My tools are usually just a grey brush pen and a black brush pen. With pencil, you know you can rub it out if it goes wrong and in a similar way, grey ink seems to fool the mind into thinking it’s not permanent. I go over the sketch in black ink later.

Continue reading...
27 Apr 16:14

30 incredibly useful things you didn’t know Google Calendar could do

by JR Raphael

If there’s one digital tool I rely on as much as Gmail, it’s Google Calendar.

From work deadlines to family happenings and random reminders, Calendar is what keeps me on track, on time, and on top of the approximately 1.7 zillion things I tend to juggle on an hourly basis. And the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve learned just how flexible it is—and how many easily overlooked options it offers for enhancing its interface, getting stuff accomplished more efficiently, and making the service work in whatever way makes sense for my own personal workflow.

If you rely on Google Calendar as I do—or even if you just use it casually to keep track of occasional appointments—you’ll get more out of it once you’ve discovered all of its advanced tricks and time-saving possibilities. And if you’re too busy to tackle this right now, no worries: I happen to know a spectacular tool for setting reminders and making sure you never forget anything on your agenda.

(Unless otherwise noted, all the instructions mentioned below are specific to Calendar’s web version.)

Interface enhancements

1. Wish your calendar could show a little more info—with less wasted space? Google Calendar has a hidden option to increase its display density. Click the gear icon in the website’s upper-right corner, then select “Density and color” and change the “Information density” setting to “Compact” to try it.

2. If most of your appointments tend to be during the week, you can also tidy up your view by telling Calendar to stop showing weekends. You’ll find the toggle by clicking the view dropdown—the box directly to the right of the gear icon on the Calendar website—and looking at the bottom of the menu that appears.

3. Even if you want to see weekends, you might prefer to show your weeks starting with Mondays and ending with the weekend—the way most of us think of a traditional workweek. You can make that change with a couple of quick clicks by opening the “View options” section of the Calendar site’s settings.

4. Google Calendar can let you create your own custom view in addition to the standard day, week, month, and year arrangements—if, say, you want to view your calendar in a zoomed-in two-day perspective or maybe a zoomed-out two- or four-week layout. Open the site’s settings, click “View options” in the left-of-screen sidebar, and then adjust the “Set custom view” option to set it up however you like.

5. Having multiple calendars in your account can often be useful, whether you’re separating holidays, shared family events, or any number of shared work-related agendas. But some calendars aren’t important enough to be seen all the time—so let Calendar hide low-priority calendars by default and then show them only when you need them. In the left-of-screen sidebar on the Calendar website, uncheck the box next to any calendar you don’t want displayed. That’ll keep it out of sight and clean up your active view, and you can then just recheck the calendar in question when you want it to appear.

6. Conversely, Calendar can show you a single calendar at a time for a slimmed-down and easily digestible arrangement. Click the three-dot menu icon next to any calendar’s name in that same left-of-screen sidebar area, then select “Display this only” to give it a whirl.

7. Stop distracting yourself with events that already happened and let Calendar dim past appointments so you can focus on what’s next. Look for the “Reduce the brightness of past events” checkbox within the “View options” area of Calendar’s settings. You’ll notice the difference immediately in Calendar’s week and month views.

Google Calendar can dim past events so they’re less attention-grabbing.

8. Clear out clutter and give your calendar more space to spread out by hiding Google Calendar’s sidebars whenever you aren’t using them. On the left side of the screen, click the three-line menu icon at the top to collapse the sidebar (and then click that same icon to expand it as needed). On the right—the sidebar that lets you view your Google Keep notes and other connected services—click the small left-facing arrow at the bottom to make that area vanish (and then click the right-facing arrow that appears if and when you want to bring the panel back).

9. Manage appointments across multiple time zones by activating Calendar’s secondary time zone option, which gives you the ability to have events start or end in different locales without the need for any mental conversions. Look for the “Time zone” header in the website’s settings, then check the box next to “Display secondary time zone” and select what time zone you want. You can also give each time zone a label (“Boston” and “California,” for example) to make things even simpler.

10. Calendar can also show you a world time clock to give you an at-a-glance view of the current time in any number of places. Look for the “World clock” option in the website’s settings; once it’s activated, you can add however many time zones you want, and they’ll all be displayed in the left-hand sidebar.

Time-saving tools

11. Switch your calendar view in an instant by tapping into one of Google Calendar’s super-handy hidden shortcuts: Press “1” or “d” for the day view, “2” or “w” for the week view, “3” or “m” for the month view, “4” or “x” for your custom view, “5” or “a” for the agenda view, and “6” or “y” for the year view.

12. One of Calendar’s most helpful hotkeys is also one of the easiest to miss: Press “g” from any calendar view to jump directly to any specific date, in any year. Calendar will pop up a box in which you can simply type whatever date you want, using either a standard date format (“4/13/06”) or a text-based description (“April 13, 2006”).

13. Another shortcut worth remembering: From anywhere on the Calendar site, hit the Esc key to jump back to the main calendar screen in a jiff. And while looking at any calendar view, hit “t” to return to today’s date.

14. For years, I’ve been irritated when I try to save new Calendar events by hitting Ctrl-Enter—a standard shortcut for that sort of function and one that’s present in other Google services—only to remember that key combination does absolutely nothing in Calendar’s event creation tool. Well, I recently discovered Calendar does have a keyboard command that lets you save a new event without having to lift your fingers; it’s just Ctrl-S instead of Ctrl-Enter. Now you know too!

15. While in Calendar’s day, week, or month view, you can left-click on any event for a fast pop-up view of its details—or right-click to access quick event adjustment options, including a selector to switch the event’s color and a one-click button to delete the event entirely right then and there.

16. You probably know about Calendar’s “c” keyboard shortcut for creating a new event, but here’s a helpful variation to add into your virtual toolbox: You can press Shift and “c” together to pull up Calendar’s floating-window event interface from your keyboard. That’ll let you create an event without having to leave the main Calendar screen.

17. Google Calendar’s search function is a great way to find an event in a hurry, and it has more options than you’d think: After clicking the search icon at the top of the Calendar site (or tapping the slash key on your keyboard, if you’d rather), click the downward-facing arrow in the search box that appears. That’ll reveal an advanced search panel that lets you narrow a search down to specific calendars, dates, locations, or participants—and even search for an event by excluding certain keywords.

Calendar’s advanced search function has all sorts of options for narrowing down your search and finding the items you need.

18. Calendar has a little-known command that’ll let you undo errant actions—like moving an event by mistake or deleting the wrong appointment. As soon as such an instance arises, hit Ctrl-Z or even just “z” by itself on your keyboard. You have only about a 10-second window to do it, annoyingly, but if you catch your slipup soon enough, it’s a great way to fix your flub.

19. For times when you delete an event entirely and then need to get it back later, don’t forget about Google Calendar’s tucked-away Trash section. It gives you the opportunity to recover any deleted event for a month after its axing. You can find the Trash section by clicking the gear icon in the site’s upper-right corner and selecting the “Trash” option in the menu that appears.

Smarter sharing

20. Take the hassle out of planning by asking Calendar to show your agenda alongside someone else’s in a split-screen, side-by-side view. First, the other person will have to share his or her calendar with you (by clicking the calendar’s name within their Google Calendar settings and then adding you into the “Share with specific people” section). Once you’ve accepted their invitation, open the “View options” section of your Calendar’s settings and make sure the “View calendars side by side in day view” option is activated. Then, just open up your day view, and you’ll see your cohort’s calendar right next to yours for easy agenda coordination.

Google Calendar can display your agenda alongside anyone else’s for enhanced planning and coordination.

21. You can also peek in at someone else’s agenda while you’re in the midst of creating a new event (provided that person has shared his or her calendar with you, of course). First, start a new event and add that person in as a guest. Then look for the “Find a Time” tab directly above the location box in Calendar’s event creation interface. Click that, and you’ll see your agenda and your pal’s side by side, just like you did in the previous tip. You can then click on any mutually available time to select it.

22. When you need to send a message to everyone invited to a particular event, save yourself the trouble of opening up your inbox and instead just email all of your invitees directly from Calendar. While viewing any event that has at least one other person involved, you’ll see a small envelope icon under the “Guests” header on the right of the screen. Click that icon, and you can compose and send your message right within that window, using the Gmail address associated with your account.

23. If you create a group event but then end up needing to back out of attending, Calendar has a way to let you transfer event ownership so the event can continue in your absence. Open up the event from the Calendar website, click the “More actions” button in the upper-right corner of the screen, and select “Change owner” from the menu that appears. Then, you can type in the name or address of whomever you want to take over as the primary point of contact.

Event enrichments

24. Did you know you can add an attachment directly to an event within Calendar—something like a PDF, image file, or document that you want all the invitees to see? When creating a new event, look for the paper clip icon in the toolbar atop the description field. Clicking it will allow you to insert any file from your local device or your Google Drive storage.

25. By default, new events in Google Calendar last for an hour—but you can customize that setting and give events any default duration you like. Just look in the “Event settings” section of the Calendar site’s settings and find the aptly named “Default duration” option.

26. Got something that needs to be on your agenda on a regular, repeating interval? Calendar can handle recurring events and reminders with some impressively customizable parameters. While creating a new event or reminder, click the box labeled “Does not repeat” (beneath the date and time and to the right of the “All day” option). That’ll give you a list of preconfigured patterns—having the item repeat daily, weekly on the current day, monthly on the current day, and so on—along with an option called “Custom” that lets you get incredibly specific about exactly how, when, and for how long you want your item to recur.

You can ask Calendar to repeat events in pretty much any pattern imaginable.

Advanced alerts

27. In addition to the usual notifications on the desktop and on your phone, you can ask Calendar to send you an email notification for any event. That can be especially helpful if you spend a lot of time in your inbox and want to have a reminder that remains present until you archive it. To create an email reminder for an event, open the event and then click the “Add notification” command. Next, within the new line that appears, click the “Notification” box and change it to “Email”—then just tell Calendar how far ahead of the event you want the email to arrive. Be sure to hit the blue “Save” button at the top of the screen when you’re done.

28. If you want to get email alerts for all events by default, open up Calendar’s settings and select your calendar from the list on the left side of the screen. Scroll down to the “Event notifications” section and click the “Add notification” button. Click on the new “Notification” box that appears, change it to “Email,” and set it for whatever amount of time you’d like.

29. You can also change your default alert times for regular Calendar notifications in that same area of the site’s settings: Just adjust the number of minutes next to the existing notifications under the “Event notifications” and “All-day event notifications” headers. You can add additional notifications too, or remove any existing notifications by clicking the “x” alongside them. Any changes you make will automatically apply to notifications generated by the Calendar app on your phone.

30. Want to get a daily rundown of your Calendar agenda via email every morning? Look under the “Other notifications” header within that same section of the site’s settings. Find the line labeled “Daily agenda,” then click the box next to it that says “None” and change it to “Email.” Your new daily summary will now arrive at 5:00 every morning, courtesy of the virtual calendar genie who’s been waiting for your wish all this time.

For even more next-level Google knowledge, check out my Android Intelligence newsletter.

[Editor’s note: This story was updated and expanded in April 2020.]

24 Apr 11:19

Bloomberg Reports ARM Macs Coming Next Year

by John Gruber

Mark Gurman, Debby Wu, and Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg:*

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on three of its own Mac processors, known as systems-on-a-chip, based on the A14 processor in the next iPhone. The first of these will be much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad, the people said.

There’s not much new information in this report, but what is new is interesting, and I want to focus on that. Saying that the first ARM Mac processor will be based on the A14 is news. Saying that the first ARM Mac processor will be “much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad” would be spectacular news, because the A13 in the iPhones 11 and new SE already offers faster single-core performance than a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, and iPad Pros have better multi-core performance than MacBook Airs.

If what Bloomberg is reporting is true — see footnote below, of course — they’re burying the lede. An ARM chip in a Mac that’s “much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad” would be much faster than anything Intel offers for use in portables.

Apple is preparing to release at least one Mac with its own chip next year, according to the people. But the initiative to develop multiple chips, codenamed Kalamata, suggests the company will transition more of its Mac lineup away from current supplier Intel Corp.

Of course they’re going to transition more than one Mac.

The latest iPad Pro has four cores for performance-intensive workloads and another four to handle low-power tasks to preserve battery life. The first Mac processors will have eight high-performance cores, codenamed Firestorm, and at least four energy-efficient cores, known internally as Icestorm. Apple is exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future, the people said. In some Macs, Apple’s designs will double or quadruple the number of cores that Intel provides. The current entry-level MacBook Air has two cores, for example.

News!

Despite a unified chip design, Macs will still run the macOS operating system, rather than the iOS software of the iPhone and iPad.

Duh. Unsaid in the article but widely known to be true is that Apple has had MacOS compiling for ARM for years, just like how they had MacOS compiling for Intel years before they announced the switch from PowerPC — what Steve Jobs described as a “secret double life”.

Apple is exploring tools that will ensure apps developed for older Intel-based Macs still work on the new machines.

Yeah but what tools? They already have cross-compilation tools in Xcode. The $64,000 question is whether they’re going to have an emulator for running x86 code on ARM Macs. When Apple transitioned from Motorola’s 680x0 family of processors to PowerPC, and when they transitioned from PowerPC to Intel x86, they built emulators into the OS so that old binaries still executed. If they don’t offer an emulator, all existing Mac software will need to be recompiled.

The company also has technology called Catalyst that lets software developers build an iPad app and run it on Mac computers.

Catalyst isn’t really relevant to the x86-ARM transition. Catalyst is already here, today. Whatever problems developers (and users) have with Catalyst, they’re not related to ARM vs. x86 — iOS apps have always been able to be cross-compiled to x86 because that’s what the Xcode iOS Simulator is — a version of iOS that runs on Intel.

If Apple plans to start this transition with new hardware in 2021, I expect the initiative to be announced at WWDC in mid-or-late June this year.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.

24 Apr 09:17

‘The Real Reason to Wear a Mask’

by John Gruber

Zeynep Tufekci, Jeremy Howard, and Trisha Greenhalgh, writing for The Atlantic:

If you feel confused about whether people should wear masks and why and what kind, you’re not alone. COVID-19 is a novel disease and we’re learning new things about it every day. However, much of the confusion around masks stems from the conflation of two very different functions of masks.

Masks can be worn to protect the wearer from getting infected or masks can be worn to protect others from being infected by the wearer. Protecting the wearer is difficult: It requires medical-grade respirator masks, a proper fit, and careful putting on and taking off. But masks can also be worn to prevent transmission to others, and this is their most important use for society. If we lower the likelihood of one person’s infecting another, the impact is exponential, so even a small reduction in those odds results in a huge decrease in deaths. Luckily, blocking transmission outward at the source is much easier. It can be accomplished with something as simple as a cloth mask.

There’s a very high chance that you, dear reader, are now wearing a face mask whenever you leave home. I’ve linked to a few good pieces on the subject in recent weeks. If you need help convincing anyone else, however, this piece at The Atlantic is a good one. It reviews the previous confusion regarding the reasons for mask-wearing, clears it up, and does so cogently.

It’s also worth noting that Zeynep Tufekci, co-author of this piece, deserves tremendous credit for her March 17 column in The New York Times, “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired”. It seems crazy that she wrote that column only a little over one month ago, but at the time she wrote it, Tufekci was calling out the CDC and WHO for giving bad advice — her take was very controversial — and she was right. Her courage and clarity moved the needle and helped change public policy and our social norms. It sounds hyperbolic but I think it’s clearly true: Tufekci wrote an op-ed column so compelling it will wind up saving untold lives. We in the U.S. would have gotten to universal mask-wearing during this pandemic sooner or later, but thanks to Tufekci we got there sooner.

20 Apr 06:49

How Future adapted commerce content to drive 1m transactions in March

by Lucinda Southern

Magazine publisher Future Publishing has adapted its content over the last six weeks to be more helpful for readers. The result is that its sites across tech, gaming and homeware have generated 1.1 million e-commerce transactions during March, up 59% from the month before. Although it wouldn’t share how much revenue this equates to. In 2019, Future delivered 9.8 million e-commerce transactions, per its financial report.

Beyond the standard fare publishers are churning out, like product recommendations on the best office chairs or desk monitors, Future’s brands are writing pieces about which retailers have hand sanitizer in stock during wide-scale shortages and which grocery stores have available delivery slots. These are areas the publisher hadn’t explored before. Because there’s less coronavirus-related news, more editorial resource is focussed on writing commerce content. The amount of content hasn’t changed, but the type of content is more relevant to meet shopper demand.

In March, transactions for delivery services — including groceries, meal-kit services and flower-deliveries — increased by 1,768% compared with the previous month. Although it’s likely this is from a small base as these aren’t areas the publisher had fully explored before.

“There’s so much traffic that we have seen ad impressions go up, and we’ve seen transactions go up significantly,” said Sam Robson, director of audience, commerce. In March, global ad impressions increased by more than 53% on the month before, he added.

Robson and a team of 15 people comb through audience data and deliver the relevant information to editorial teams at Future’s global brands. This process is happening daily rather than weekly or monthly. What people are buying is shifting at pace. Commerce publishers are under duress to keep up with what people want.

“Editors are busy, they need data, they need to learn about shoppers in real-time,” said Shirley Chen, CEO of product recommendation platform Narrativ. According to Chen, Narrativ’s dashboards are now being refreshed by editors between 40 and 50 times a day, typically 10 times would have been more usual.

Elsewhere, Future’s core topics — gaming, homeware and tech — have also spiked, said the company: gaming hardware increasing by 135%, home and garden purchases increasing by 100%. Those adapting to working from home pushed software purchases up by 172%, and other tech increased by 82%, according to the company. As with most issues, like news traffic peaks (since plateaued) and subscription hikes, how long the behavior will last is anyone’s guess.

“It’s the combination of tech products at the heart of our business alongside the shorter-term consumer need around Covid-19 that helped underpin the huge volume of transactions,” said Robson.

Over the years, the publisher has got more sophisticated in understanding user journeys. A coronavirus news story on heath and science title Live Science would be angled to drive ad revenue through display ad units. Commerce pages more clearly display commerce widgets pulled in from its tech platform, Hawk. The result is that the number of Hawk widgets it displays has stayed relatively flat but the click-through rate and conversion has gone up.

“Our ongoing struggle is to make sure that we are maximizing the revenue we can take without diminishing the user experience,” said Robson.

Indoor confinement has meant that publishers are seeing bright spots in commerce and affiliate revenue, although not enough to mitigate the drastic cuts to advertising revenue. But affiliate opportunities are compounded as merchants restrict publisher traffic because they can’t keep up with demand, while Amazon is slashing commission rates for most publishers. Future was unwilling to share any detail on its relationship with Amazon.     

Robson’s team uses public data, search data and information garnered from Hawk. The tech platform pulls in feeds from over 45,000 retailers, including Amazon and affiliate networks like Skimlinks, matching up the most relevant tags in the feeds to the page script to surface the most competitive deals for each article. It then displays up to 200 different commerce elements, like price comparison feeds within an article on the latest handset, or discounted deals on a product within a buyer’s guide.

The publisher takes a commission cut anywhere between 2 percent to double digits, but it’s a high margin. Hawk gives it the flexibility to work more directly with retailers, where Future can negotiate rates.

“Often retailers come to us and say, ‘we’ve noticed you’re selling a lot of our stuff, do you want to do a direct deal?’” said Robson. “Coming out the other side of this, we’ll probably have a lot more direct relationships. And the relationships that are driving the most sales at the moment are very different from those that would have been there a month or so ago.”

The post How Future adapted commerce content to drive 1m transactions in March appeared first on Digiday.

17 Apr 06:20

Juan Giménez (1943 – 2020)

by Ben Feldman

It is with great sadness that we say farewell to Argentinean comics legend Juan Giménez. On April 2nd, 2020, at the age of 76, he died from complications related to COVID-19.

Born in Mendoza, Argentina and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona, Spain, Giménez was a powerful influence on the sci-fi and fantasy art cultures of three continents. As a teenager in the early 1960s he published works in the magazines of his home country. As a young man in the 1970s he consistently published in the top sci-fi and fantasy magazines of Spain, Italy, and France, including the vaunted Metal Hurlant. By the start of the 1980s he had become a regular contributor to the genre-defining American magazine Heavy Metal and worked as a designer on the 1981 animated film of the same name.

Above: Selections from Giménez’s long career.

He is most famous, however, for his long-lasting collaboration with fellow Argentinean Alejandro Jodorowsky on the multi-arc “Metabarons” comic series, which began in 1992 and continued for more than a decade. When he began this work Giménez was nearing 50 years old, a veteran artist completely assured in his style and abilities. All the hallmarks of his earlier work were on full display here; remarkable attention to technical details, dramatic design sense for machines and costumes, a seamless blending of the ancient and the high-tech, and an appealing, tough authenticity. His master vision built the “Metabarons” into one of the all-time great space operas, a work admired equally by fans and peers.

Above: Some favorite images from the “Metabarons” saga.

Upon hearing of his friend’s death, Jodorowsky gave the following statement: “I closely collaborated with Juan Giménez for 10 years and together, we created The Metabarons saga. What facilitated my task… was that he already embodied the immortal No-Name, the last Metabaron. In my unconscious, Juan Giménez cannot die. He will continue on, drawing like the master warrior that he was.”

Above: More selections from the epic portfolio of Juan Giménez.

Read more about Juan Giménez and his work in Heavy Metal‘s farewell to their old friend.

The post Juan Giménez (1943 – 2020) appeared first on Sci-Fi-O-Rama.

17 Apr 06:18

A little Tokyo barber shop of horrors

by Lee

Barber shops are currently deemed essential, and so are still open in Tokyo, but even if this was the last one to close, it’d have to be a particularly bad hair day to actually consider venturing in.

A little Tokyo barber shop of horrors

15 Apr 06:44

Att somna i duschen men gå vidare

by fthunholm

Kan man förändras i grunden? Kan man bli en annan person? Hur lång tid tar det i så fall? Det är frågor som kunde varit hypotetiska – men som vi vet svaret på. Det tar knappt två veckor.

I slutet av februari slungade Peter Wolodarski fyrahundra bemedlade stockholmare ur den bildade medelklassen, rakt in i den Europeiska coronasmittans epicentrum. En sväng om Alperna, vidare mot norra Italien. Två veckor senare skrev samme Wolodarski att vi borde stänga ner Sverige, med Danmark (och för all del Kina, där man svetsade igen folks dörrar) som förebild

Från att ha varit Neros och Marie Antoinettes kärleksbarn, berusad av den woke-eufori som utgjorde det rättrådiga armeringsjärnet i 2010-talet. Till att bli en unge som Grumpy Cat och Rodrigo Duterte har delad vårdnad om. På två veckor.

Hans kollega Björn Wiman skrev, om DN-tåget att det är ”en glädjefylld motståndshandling mot den sortens nihilism som säger att vi kan gå vidare som vanligt, när allt i själva verket måste förändras”. I retrospektiv är det där tåget snarare ett perfekt exempel på ett slags nihilism, av den sort som finns i alla 80-åringar som obekymrat går runt i matbutikerna och frotterar sig med andra, idag

Det är lätt att skriva detta med facit i hand. Men det är heller inte det som är grejen, right? Det är ju Wolodarskis totala 180-graders sväng. Kan det vara så enkelt att det handlar om skuld? Jag tror det.

En gång i min ungdom – och detta är inget jag är stolt över – somnade jag i duschen. Sittandes, halvliggande, på golvet. Uppenbarligen över golvbrunnen. Vatten flöt ut i hela den anslutande tvättstugan och var på väg ut i resten av källaren. Det blev till en del i den mysiga folklore som en familj spinner kring sig själv. En berättelse om absolut dumhet.

Jag hanterade det genom att skämmas och gå vidare.

Om jag hade hanterat det som Wolodarski, hade jag istället lagt all min energi på att skriva långa brev till olika myndigheter, för att kräva vidare golvbrunnar som standard och att inga duschgolv i svenska 80-talshus fick vara släta nog att somna på. Det ska vara räfflor eller knoppar. Jag hade besökt lokala politiker och cyklat oanmäld till Borås Tidning med min cykel. På pakethållaren, en sån där gammal drickaback som folk har LP-skivor i, fast med pärmar i.

Peter, det är lugnt. Det var klantigt men det gick ju bra ändå. Vattnet nådde inte bodegan och vävrummet. Gå vidare nu.

 

15 Apr 06:41

Massive Wild Animals Wander Russian Streets in Surreal Composites by Vadim Solovyov

by Grace Ebert

All images © Vadim Solovyov, shared with permission

Seeing a raccoon washing its paws in the rivers of Saint Petersburg or an octopus tumbling out of a city bus would be a startling sight for most city dwellers. Artist Vadim Solovyov, though, takes those surreal scenes a step farther as he imagines massive rooks, penguins, and chameleons invading the Russian city. While many of the composites feature the animals in nature, some position them in spaces typically occupied by a human, like a sloth behind the candy-covered counter of a convenience store.

Solovyov tells Colossal that he began the uncanny series as a way to explore strange events in his real life. For example, he said the giant raccoon and its presumptive counterparts “quietly make their way through the deserted evening city to the embankments and shyly rinse something in the water there. Thoroughly. Not less than 20 seconds,” which is a reference to current handwashing suggestions to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.

The artist says he values his work’s visual and textual components equally.

Giant animals (are) only one of the features of this world. Their origin, the history of the world itself can be found in fragments from the texts under the posts. Many posts exist in the context of actual events in my city and country. Through my work, I often convey in a veiled (and sometimes weird) way important for me issues or problems of society (attitude to animals, politics, social flaws). But this, of course, does not exclude the fact that some works are an ironic “visual game” without additional deep meanings.

For the complete collection of the meandering wildlife and their respective stories, head to Solovyov’s Instagram. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

 

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15 Apr 06:35

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

by Lee

Just over 3 weeks ago, I made what turned out to be my last train journey and bar visit of the pre-coronavirus era, as shortly afterwards, it became apparent that Japan was not going to avoid the pandemic, and with photo work having already dried up, staying near home seemed both the safest and most sensible thing to do.

Now, of course, Tokyo is in a state of emergency, and after an initially slow, worryingly indifferent start, more non-essential shops and services have started to close. Bars, on the other hand, don’t have to, but they are expected to finish up at 8pm, with last orders for booze at 7. A move that really doesn’t make sense, but it will reduce the amount of people out socialising, meaning that in a roundabout way it may well prompt owners to shut up shop anyway.

By the time this is all over then, it’s inevitable that a fair few drinking places will have ceased to exist, particularly the city’s old, local bars, which are invariably run by the old, and sometimes even the unbelievably old. Similarly, it’s also possible that having gotten out of the habit, the number of people going for post-work drinks instead of heading straight home could be greatly reduced.

That said, such discipline won’t exist within every drinker, and regardless of how long the state of emergency lasts, or indeed how many places actually re-open, it’s hard to imagine the bloke below being content to quietly cradle a beer back home.

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

An incredibly expressive Japanese man

14 Apr 18:47

Dystopia with hot chocolate: Tales from the Loop's author on his low-key sci-fi

by Sian Cain

Artist-writer Simon Stålenhag, whose work has inspired a new Amazon Prime serial, explains why he keeps it understated

If you think you’ve never seen Simon Stålenhag’s art before, you could well be wrong. His paintings often turn up online under headlines such as This Art Is Cool: Imagining a Dystopian Sweden Full of Robots and Dinosaurs, where people marvel at his beautiful and haunting melding of sci-fi and suburbia: rural towns where children spend listless afternoons exploring rusting robot skeletons, and giant cooling towers haunt the horizon. On his Instagram account, where a painting of a petrol station at dusk can get thousands of likes, fans from all over the world write to tell him that his landscapes look just like their back yards, from Minnesota to Norway – just with a few more flying cars than they remember.

But if you think Stålenhag’s art is his prediction for humanity, you’d be wrong, too. None of his art is in future but the past; specifically his 80s childhood on Färingsö, a large island located in Sweden’s Lake Mälaren. Now 36, he lives just two kilometres from the house where he grew up. When we speak, he shows me the view and it’s grey, grey, grey: colossal skies, austere plains of murky grass. It’s desolate and beautiful, just like his art.

Tales from the Loop is published by Simon & Schuster UK. The adaptation is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

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