new articles to eat lunch to

[mascotte]

Some of you guys might be interested in this

https://longreads.com/2018/11/19/an-oral-history-of-detroit-punk-rock/

[madness and chaos]

Some of you guys might be interested in this

https://longreads.com/2018/11/19/an-oral-history-of-detroit-punk-rock/

sick, thank you

[alaska]

crying for the first time in three years reading this

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/how-to-help-someone-who-is-suicidal/

yeah i stumbled on this one a couple of nights ago right before bed and skimmed it because i couldn't handle fully reading it that late. thanks for reminding me to go back to it, even the bit i read was incredibly moving

[mascotte]

An interesting scientific paper on Russian bots heating up the vaccination debate in the US

We report the results of a retrospective observational study assessing the impact of bots and trolls on online vaccine discourse on Twitter. Using a set of 1 793 690 tweets collected from July 14, 2014, through September 26, 2017, we quantified the impact of known and suspected Twitter bots and trolls on amplifying polarizing and antivaccine messages. This analysis is supplemented by a qualitative study of #VaccinateUS—a Twitter hashtag designed to promote discord using vaccination as a political wedge issue. #VaccinateUS tweets were uniquely identified with Russian troll accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency—a company backed by the Russian government specializing in online influence operations.20 Thus, health communications have become “weaponized”: public health issues, such as vaccination, are included in attempts to spread misinformation and disinformation by foreign powers. In addition, Twitter bots distributing malware and commercial content (i.e., spam) masquerade as human users to distribute antivaccine messages. A full 93% of tweets about vaccines are generated by accounts whose provenance can be verified as neither bots nor human users yet who exhibit malicious behaviors. These unidentified accounts preferentially tweet antivaccine misinformation.

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567

[madness and chaos]

this probably isn't new but I loved it

so many insane memories from growing up in this place

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/9832-everybody-is-a-star-how-the-rock-club-first-avenue-made-minneapolis-the-center-of-music-in-the-80s/

[incoherent grunting]

This is weird and good
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... .html#ch-4

Part I: Zooming Out
Recently, one of my students at Stanford told me a strange story. His parents, who live in Palo Alto, Calif., had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.”

I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LLC was indeed listed at his parents’ address. But it also appeared to be listed at 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 350, in downtown San Francisco. So were 140 other LLCs, most of which were registered in 2015. The names of many of these other companies were baffling and surreal. They included Bropastures, Dreamlish and Your Friend Bart LLC.

[Barthes Starr]

can't recommend that nyt article highly enough. it is both so utterly baffling in scope but also unsettlingly prophetic as a distillation of the times, yet it somehow nonetheless reads as practically banal. i love it

[coop]

jeez, i duno if i can read that.

this is (slightly) more upbeat and v good/interesting: https://www.thrillist.com/eat/portland/stanichs-closed-will-it-reopen-burger-quest#. covers a lot of ground about food(ie) culture, media responsibilities, and #content production

[guy forget]

I may have seen this posted here before and it’s not that long but

https://qz.com/1153516/americas-wholeso ... supremacy/

[blurst of times]

jeez, i duno if i can read that.

this is (slightly) more upbeat and v good/interesting: https://www.thrillist.com/eat/portland/stanichs-closed-will-it-reopen-burger-quest#. covers a lot of ground about food(ie) culture, media responsibilities, and #content production

i saw that and came here to post it. gross that he would gloss over the owner strangling his wife (among other things). i should've been more critical about something so navel-gaze-y to begin with tbh!

[blurst of times]

This is weird and good
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... .html#ch-4

Part I: Zooming Out
Recently, one of my students at Stanford told me a strange story. His parents, who live in Palo Alto, Calif., had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to “Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC.”

I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LLC was indeed listed at his parents’ address. But it also appeared to be listed at 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 350, in downtown San Francisco. So were 140 other LLCs, most of which were registered in 2015. The names of many of these other companies were baffling and surreal. They included Bropastures, Dreamlish and Your Friend Bart LLC.

also, just read this story and it's nuts. i'm a big fan of stories involving internet sleuthing and unraveling conspiracies, and this delivers on both.

[shizaam]

odell is so good. check out her instagram watch piece: https://www.topic.com/there-s-no-such-t ... free-watch

[neely o'hara]

wow i could read that jenny odell article forever

[Merciel]

gross that he would gloss over the owner strangling his wife (among other things). i should've been more critical about something so navel-gaze-y to begin with tbh!

I guess those were the unspecified "family troubles" that the author of the original piece alluded to but didn't want to elaborate on. I just assumed it was somebody in the family being addicted to something... which I guess is true, sort of, but obviously far from the whole story.

I don't know if you should blame yourself for not zeroing in on that right away though. The Stanich's surface story is hardly unique. There actually are plenty of little obscure restaurants that have gotten destroyed by suddenly being crowned "best of" whatever, and as far as I know, in those cases there wasn't a subplot of abuse and alcoholism going on in the background.

[deadbass]

crying for the first time in three years reading this

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/how-to-help-someone-who-is-suicidal/

This was incredibly heartrending and good. Thank you for sharing it.

[Beautiful Jugdish]

last night i had insomnia and reread this great ricky jay profile i found some years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993 ... -the-magus

really good to revisit in light of his death

amazing guy

[Julius Sumner Miller]

odell is so good. check out her instagram watch piece: https://www.topic.com/there-s-no-such-t ... free-watch

damn this was good.

[Fr. Blanc]

This will be a twisty turny podcast or Netflix doc at some point

[Julius Sumner Miller]

this is a good companion to the Odell articles:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-strange-brands-in-your-instagram-feed/550136/

[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

[woozy ducks]

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/