new articles to eat lunch to

[mascotte]

Good piece on The Boss

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a25133821/bruce-springsteen-interview-netflix-broadway-2018/

[black mamba]

two interesting articles about sex work

https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/al-shabaabs-mata-hari-network/

The strength and depth of this sex worker-militant network surprised me and many terrorism experts in the West I spoke with, but it’s an open secret among Nairobi residents. My first interview subject didn’t understand why I wanted more details — surely everyone knew about it? Many of my interviewees were neighbors of, or otherwise friendly with, the sex workers involved. They described an arrangement in which al-Shabaab offered money to women who picked up interesting information in the course of their regular sex work — pillow talk from politicians, police officers, and businessmen. One local memorably opined: “Of course! Half the reason these men go to [sex workers] is to complain about their lives. Why not get paid for listening?”

The co-option of sex workers as intelligence officers suggests that al-Shabaab is a rational actor willing to circumvent its highly public ideological stances when there is significant operational benefit to be gained. This calculating, bottom-line mentality runs counter to much of the international narrative about the group. The “Mata Hari” network also shows that al-Shabaab is an innovative organization that looks for unconventional solutions and is actively seeking to survive and expand, despite the long-running efforts by the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and its international military partners.

https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impact-an-overly-analytical-guide-to-camgirling/

I made a rough calculation chart to see where your hourly earnings might be in about six months of consistent work. This is extremely general and no guarantee and sometimes random chance just makes everything go crazy, but if you’re trying to make a decision about whether this is worth it, then this might help.

Rate your business acumen potential (sales, reading people, general intelligence, marketing, emotional labor capacity) on a scale of 1-10. Multiply this number by two, and add to the number of hours you plan on camming per week. We’ll call this number X.

If, on the traditional 1-10 beauty scale, you’re:
1-2, multiply X by 0.3
3-4, multiply X by 0.8
5-6, multiply X by 2.5
7-8, multiply X by 4.5
9-10, multiply X by 8

So, for example – if you consider yourself about a 6/10 businessperson, and if you plan on camming 25 hours a week, then 6*2 + 25 = 37.

If you’re 6/10 attractive, multiply 37 by 2.5, and you get a $92.5/hr estimate within 6 months, on MFC. This is the take-home amount after the MFC 50% fee.

None of this applies if you appear male. If you appear male, god help you.

[Merciel]

That last quote, in light of all the research showing that people are terrible at rating their own competence and abstract qualities (apart from attractiveness, where you get continual feedback whether you want it or not), is pretty hilarious.

[BlackSugar]

this might have already been posted but I stayed up late last night to finish this and I found it to be very interesting and devastating

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-white-darkness

[black mamba]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cable-tech-dick-cheney-sex-dungeon_us_5c0ea571e4b06484c9fd4c21

For 10 years, I worked as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Those 10 years, the apartments, the McMansions, the customers, the bugs and snakes, the telephone poles, the traffic, the cold and heat and rain, have blurred together in my mind. Even then, I wouldn’t remember a job from the day before unless there was something remarkable about it. Remarkable is subjective and changes with every day spent witnessing what people who work in offices will never see — their co-workers at home during the weekday, the American id in its underpants, wondering if it remembered to delete the browsing history.

[...]

I was filling out the work orders and emailing my supervisor to give him a heads-up on a possible call from a member of every cable tech’s favorite rage cult, when his wife knocked on my van window. She stepped back and called me “ma’am.” Which was nice. Her husband with the tucked-in polo shirt had asked my name and I told him Lauren. He heard Lawrence because it fit what he saw and asked if he could call me Larry. Guys like that use your name as a weapon. “Larry, explain to me why I had to sit around here from 1 to 3 waiting on you and you show up at 3:17. Does that seem like good customer service to you, Larry? And now you’re telling 7 to 10 days? Larry, I’m getting really tired of hearing this shit.” Guys like that, it was safer to just let them think I was a man.

She said she was sorry about him. I said, “It’s fine.” I said there really wasn’t anything I could do. She blinked back the flood of tears she’d been holding since God knows when. She said, “It’s just, when he has Fox, he has Obama to hate. If he doesn’t have that ...” She kept looking over her shoulder. She was terrified of him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just need him to have Fox.” I got out of my van.

[joe]

https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/precocious-puberty-patrick-burleigh.html

I got my first pubic hair when I was 2 years old.

I couldn’t talk, I could barely walk, but I started growing a bush. Or so they tell me. I have no recollection of a time before puberty, before the carnal cravings, the impulses, the angst and anger and violence. There was no prelapsarian age of innocence for me; I was born, I took a huge bite of the apple, and, by 2 years old, I was pretty much ready to get busy with Eve.

[mascotte]

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/terrifying-sex-organs-of-male-turtles/

[Shalabi]

i want to go to there

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/travel/in-search-of-britains-bothies.html

[dvr]

Bioterrorism and the Fermi Paradox

We proffer a contemporary solution to the so-called Fermi Paradox, which is concerned with conflict between Copernicanism and the apparent paucity of evidence for intelligent alien civilizations. In particular, we argue that every community of organisms that reaches its space-faring age will (1) almost immediately use its rocket-building computers to reverse-engineer its genetic chemistry and (2) self-destruct when some individual uses said technology to design an omnicidal pathogen. We discuss some of the possible approaches to prevention with regard to Homo sapiens' vulnerability to bioterrorism, particularly on a short-term basis.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9fb7/9 ... 32d31f.pdf

[mascotte]

https://www.triquarterly.org/issues/issue-153/we-who-are-about-die-salute-you?src=longreads

I met Scott while taste-testing sourdough pancakes during the first meeting. I’d planned to approach the elderly hosts, self-described “off-grid geeks” Al and Arn, who seemed, by nature of their more advanced position on the road to self-sufficiency, to be the group’s natural leaders. (If the Fayetteville Preppers had a graph to illustrate their value system, “Knowledge” and “Execution” would be on the x and y axes.) But before the first session had even begun, Scott, who turned out to be the garrulous teacher’s pet, and Chuck, the mustachioed class clown, had already discovered that in the event of an emergency, I could not make fire.

“Got a lighter?” asked Scott.

“Nope,” I said.

“Zippo?” asked Chuck.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I don’t care,” said Scott. “You at least need a pocket flint, or you could get stuck in a really bad situation.” He pulled out his flint, part of a hip-mounted multi-tool, which looked like an old Blackberry stylus. I nodded, like I’d go right out and get one.

“Better yet—ever go to Sonic?” he asked.

“Love Sonic,” said Chuck, nodding along.

“Sure, I guess.” I really didn’t go to Sonic that often, but I hated to keep disappointing them.

“Okay, so next time, ask for extra straws.”

I nodded along, took notes.

“Then you go home, roll some cotton balls in Vaseline—”

“Get ’em real saturated,” interrupts Chuck.

“And then you stuff the cotton-jelly down into the straws.”

“Like with a knitting needle,” interrupted Chuck.

“Anything long and narrow,” Scott nodded. “Just cut them up and seal the ends with the lighter you’re going to buy. And poof—instant fire starters.”

Chuck patted his front shirt pocket. “Then you keep ’em on your person. Just in case.”

“Just in case” becomes a familiar refrain, but when I push—“In case of what?”—I’m consistently rebuffed. The group spends between eight and twelve hours each month sharing skills on sustainable, off-grid living—how to can meat, how to store seeds, how to stock emergency medical kits—but no one seems all that keen on talking about why.

[shizaam]

this is great http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magaz ... m-Justice/

[mascotte]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/05/the-fatal-ensnaring-of-dan-depew/

[office plant]

e. nvm this was covered

[gauchebag]

An interesting perspective on the current transformation of New York City

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

this one is great thanks

so many of the statistics are just ridiculous

i've watched the very city i was born in vanish before my own eyes

that happens to every generation to be sure but the Red Lobster next to the Apollo (for example) seems worse. 7 Eleven, Dunkin Donuts, banks and CVS/Rite Aid/Duane Reade/Walgreens...there are a lot of them.

[mascotte]

This is amazing

https://www.gq.com/story/secrets-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-thief

[aububs]

^that is nuts! crazy story

[Sobieski]

This is amazing

https://www.gq.com/story/secrets-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-thief

this is kind of heartbreaking

both for that dude and those paintings

[aububs]

imo the mother burning all the paintingsToggle Spoiler is nearly worse than anything her son did

[aububs]

also don't really understand how the girlfriend got away with it when the article seems to be openly acknowledging she was an accomplice. and am surprised he ever got released from jail considering the extent of his theftToggle Spoiler

[aububs]

the wiki page adds a lot more to the story and doesn't romanticise him so much

[mascotte]

An x post with unsolved mysteries thread.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/the-psychiatrist-who-believed-people-could-tell-the-future

[Marza]

A collection of interview excerpts with a panel of content moderators from various social media platforms:

https://onezero.medium.com/your-speech-their-rules-meet-the-people-who-guard-the-internet-ab58fe6b9231

We have executives and product managers shadow trust and safety agents during calls with users. Sitting with an agent talking to a sexual assault victim helps build some empathy, so when they go back to their teams, it’s running in the back of their brain when they’re thinking about building things. Then, when we go into a room and say, “If you do that, you’re going to increase human trafficking,” they don’t think we’re just making it up.

I feel like I carry around the knowledge of how easily a person’s life can be destroyed. You might make a tasteless joke, or someone might accuse you of something or want to discredit you, and then a mob of millions can converge within hours to hate you and stalk you and lie about you and encourage unstable lunatics to kill you. It can happen to any of us. You will be torn to shreds. You’re one of the eggs broken to make the free speech omelet. Your life will never be the same. The internet will move on to the next thing. And the free speech absolutists and the disingenuous trolls will shrug together and say, “Gee, I guess some snowflakes just can’t handle hearing views they disagree with.”

[all day breakfast]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-alphabet-that-will-save-a-people-from-disappearing/506987/

[mercenaries of slime]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-alphabet-that-will-save-a-people-from-disappearing/506987/

ty this is really cool

[churrokbyme]

This is an unorthodox offering for this thread.

The majority of judicial writing, past and present, is horrible. Opinions about plain meaning notwithstanding, this is one of the best, and most easily digestible for lunch, judicial opinions I've ever read. Perhaps even more surprisingly, it's from a Texan state court.

https://cases.justia.com/texas/supreme-court/2017-15-0635.pdf?ts=1494597815

[mascotte]

‘Centurians of Rome’: How a Bank Robber Made the Most Expensive Gay Porno of All Time

https://www.thedailybeast.com/centurians-of-rome-how-a-bank-robber-made-the-most-expensive-gay-porno-flick-of-all-time

[dvr]

new Peter Hessler article:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/egyptian-refugee

[Merciel]

Good one about a tiny island off Haiti, incl. context for its poverty and vulnerability to climate change: https://longreads.com/2018/02/19/is-thi ... the-world/

I think that one might have been posted on this thread already (there was definitely another Haiti piece) but I didn't find it with my crummy googling skills so I'll pretend it's new.

Anyway one of the interesting things to me about that piece is that the guy who wrote it isn't a professional journalist or geographer or anything, he's just an enthusiastic amateur with a good eye and some writing skills. I'm always happy when I see an amateur do something really cool. It's just neat to know that there's that kind of talent randomly lurking around in the world, noticing things and thinking about them.

[scrambled]

[folkface]

Does anybody have an 'Theathletic.com' account that could post an article for me? That would be rad. Thanks.