This is not a profile of Hillary Clinton. It is not a review of her career or an assessment of her campaign. You won’t find any shocking revelations on her emails, on Benghazi, on Whitewater, or even on her health care plan.
This is an effort to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since at least 2008: Why is the Hillary Clinton described to me by her staff, her colleagues, and even her foes so different from the one I see on the campaign trail?
Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age—the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were “anal,” “amateur,” “teen,” and—one that would surely have made Freud smile—“mom and son.” Viewing figures are on a scale that golden-age moguls never dreamed of: in 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views, and XVideos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world. Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN, and less only than platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and PayPal. The twenty-first-century porn kings aren’t flamboyant magazine owners like Larry Flynt, whose taboo-breaking Hustler first published labial “pink shots,” in the mid-seventies, but faceless tech executives. The majority of the world’s tube sites are effectively a monopoly—owned by a company called MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Amazon or Facebook. Its C.E.O. until recently was a German named Fabian Thylmann, who earned a reported annual income of a hundred million dollars; he sold the company while being investigated for tax evasion.
The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors. In “The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford), Shira Tarrant explains how that industry works in the new age of Internet porn, and sets out to provide neutral, “even-handed” information about its production and consumption.
It’s not an easy task. Since the “porn wars” of the seventies and eighties, when feminists campaigned against the expanding pornography industry (and other feminists sided with Hustler to defend it), talking about pornography in terms of mere facts has seemed impossible. The atmosphere of controversy makes it hard to avoid moral positions. Even to suspend judgment may be to take sides.
[Holy. Crap. This is some serious state-of-the-art work! -egg]
[New advances in rat control: considerably more interesting than you probably think 🙂 -egg]
First, the myths. There are no “super rats”. Apart from a specific subtropical breed, they do not get much bigger than 20 inches long, including the tail. They are not blind, nor are they afraid of cats. They do not carry rabies. They do not, as was reported in 1969 regarding an island in Indonesia, fall from the sky. Their communities are not led by elusive, giant “king rats”. Rat skeletons cannot liquefy and reconstitute at will. (For some otherwise rational people, this is a genuine concern.) They are not indestructible, and there are not as many of them as we think. The one-rat-per-human in New York City estimate is pure fiction. Consider this the good news.
There may be no “king rat”, but there are “rat kings”, groups of up to 30 rats whose tails have knotted together to form one giant, swirling mass. Rats may be unable to liquefy their bones to slide under doors, but they don’t need to: their skeletons are so flexible that they can squeeze their way through any hole or crack wider than half an inch. They are cannibals, and they sometimes laugh (sort of) – especially when tickled. They can appear en masse, as if from nowhere, moving as fast as seven feet per second. They do not carry rabies, but a 2014 study from Columbia University found that the average New York City subway rat carried 18 viruses previously unknown to science, along with dozens of familiar, dangerous pathogens, such as C difficile and hepatitis C. As recently as 1994 there was a major recurrence of bubonic plague in India, an unpleasant flashback to the 14th century, when that rat-borne illness killed 25 million people in five years. Collectively, rats are responsible for more human death than any other mammal on earth.
Source: Man v rat: could the long war soon be over? | Jordan Kisner | Science | The Guardian
Just finished Ted Chiang’s recent book of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others, which is really excellent, some of the best sci fi I’ve read this year. Quite a few of the stories express really fascinating philosophical thought experiments (but are still fully entertaining). Here’s one I liked a lot (readable in full at website): “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” Highly recommended.
Recent Colorado transplant Jacob van Loon creates geometric watercolors that seem to visually reference abstract architectural renderings. The colors in his works look as if they have bled beyond recognition of a specific site or landmark, yet still retain a strict set of dense and chaotic lines. The paintings trap specific colors in the boxes of their grid-like surface, yet also allow some to traverse throughout the work, alternating between clean and hazy sections of muted blues and bright oranges.
“By the time I have a final sketch, the layers of primer are caked up and full of valleys and ridges created by broad brush strokes,” van Loon told The Creator’s Project. “When I’m ready for color, it’s not just about pragmatically filling in the spaces, it’s about putting paint down, letting it travel in the valleys and ridges, and seeing where and how it all comes to rest.”
Source: Geometric Watercolors by Artist Jacob Van Loon | Colossal
[Veeeeeerrrrry interesting. I’ve still been eager for a good AR product all along (and have been for decades). -egg]
If you read the tech blogs, you’d be forgiven for believing that Google Glass is a failed product, dead and gone. But in fact, the opposite is true.
The Google Glass Explorer program succeeded wildly. Google is feverishly working on new kinds of Google Glass products, and the innovation around Google Glass never stopped.
Wait, what was Google Glass again?
[Click to embiggen]
[Click to embiggen]
This coming Saturday is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death! Not sure what Shakespeare play you should see or read to commemorate the occasion? No worries! I’ve put together a little flowchart to help you make up your mind.
[It’s gonna be an ugly, ugly future for a lot of people right up until the moment we provide a solid guaranteed income. -egg]
Some gig-economy workers and unions are bringing this question to court. They argue that these companies’ algorithms exert so much control over workers that they are really employees in the eyes of the law and thus owed hourly minimum wages, sick pay, holiday pay and the like. This is the kernel of the argument the law firm Leigh Day made on behalf of the GMB union against Uber, which was heard in a London employment tribunal earlier this summer. James Farrar, an Uber driver who was one of the claimants in that case, submitted a long witness statement detailing all the ways in which he said the algorithm controlled him. He was subject to 10-minute log-offs for cancelling too many rides (a process Uber says it has now updated), which presented him with a choice between “a 10-minute sin-bin when I cannot work or earn, and carrying out a trip which is uneconomical or risky for me”. If he worked for himself and Uber’s only function was to connect him with passengers, he argued, he would be able to do “just the journeys I want to do and that I judge are safe”. Uber’s defence was simple: drivers can’t be deemed employees because they have no obligation at all to log on to the app.
[This whole blog post is well worth a read, as is Bridle’s essay on airport chapels. -egg]
The other place in the airport that might be closer to God is the meditation centre, or Stille Rom (above). I’ve written before about these fascinating spaces, which seek to create a zone of quiet, stillness and reflection within the highly networked, busy and omnidirectional space of the airport. You can read my essay on these spaces, which discusses Gardermoen as well as a number of other airports, at the Witte de With Review website (or download it here if on mobile).
That essay dwells on one recurring feature of the multifaith space: the inclusion of a qibla, the arrow which points the faithful in the direction of Mecca. The qibla appears in many forms in different places. At London’s Heathrow, it’s a metal stud screwed to the floor; at Stansted a laminated card pinned to the wall, in Athens, a beautiful beam of light. (For a taste of these spaces, see this collection of photos I’ve taken over the years.)
Oslo’s meditation room contains no such direction – but, as I note in my essay, this is less necessary now that the qibla and tools like it are available to anyone with a smartphone, in the form of a downloadable app, which uses the phone’s in-built compass to determine the direction of prayer. Nevertheless, as I found at Gardermoen and elsewhere, those praying often leave a trace on the floor or skirting board for others who may not have the same kinds of access. (Biro marks at at Gardermoen, above).
This reliance on networks consisting of both smartphones and more traditional forms of communication mirrored my experience of the refugee crisis in Athens and the Greek islands. The camps on Lesbos, the squares of Athens, and all ports in between, are thronged with SIM card vendors, offering cheap data packages. On the ferries, those in transit share information about which border points are open, which countries are (relatively) friendly, where to buy bus tickets – information often passed back from those who have already gone ahead, via Whatsapp messages and Facebook groups. Such information is not always reliable, but forms a vital part of any journey, and mirrors once again the systems of calibration, control, and flow engineered in the contemporary airport space.
