to set a mood • • •
some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
The Norwegian island that abolished time: ‘You can cut the lawn at 4am’
Residents of Sommarøy, bright 24/7 in summer, say they want to do ‘what we want, when we want’
Sommarøy island in Norway, whose 350 residents want to escape the tyranny of the clock.
The 350 residents of Sommarøy in the land of the midnight sun are hoping to free themselves from the tyranny of the clock by declaring the small Norwegian island the world’s first time-free zone.
“All over the world, people are characterised by stress and depression,” Kjell Ove Hveding, the leader of the campaign on the island, west of Tromsø and inside the Arctic circle, told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
“In many cases this can be linked to the feeling of being trapped by the clock. We will be a time-free zone where everyone can live their lives to the fullest … Our goal is to provide full flexibility, 24/7. If you want to cut the lawn at 4am, then you can do it.”
The islanders, whose main sources of income are tourism and fishing, are calling for formal opening hours to be abolished and people to be allowed to “do what we want, when we want” – although children will still have to go to school, Hveding said.
Sommarøy spends November to January in darkness, but in summer residents know that when the sun rises on 18 May, it will not set again until 26 July. …
Inside Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle With the Feds
For years, it was the largest portal for sex on the internet. Now its fate could shape the future of Silicon Valley.
In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: “Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.” Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.” But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he’d learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.
Lacey and Larkin were heroes to many—micks from the sticks who made a fortune thumbing their shanty-Irish snouts at authority. Their papers went after mayors and police chiefs, governors and senators, Walmart and the Church of Scientology. They provoked outrage with their business practices too, by setting up Backpage.com, a kind of red-light district for the internet. As attorney Don Moon, the pair’s longtime adviser, puts it: “Their brand was always ‘Fuck you. We don’t have friends. We have lawyers.’ ” That approach served them well for 45 years, right up until the morning Michael Lacey found himself staring into the barrel of a Glock.
A few minutes before 9 am on April 6, 2018, a fleet of unmarked vehicles with government plates rolled up in front of Lacey’s multimillion-dollar compound in Paradise Valley, a few miles outside of Phoenix. These weren’t the guests he’d been expecting. The 69-year-old divorced father of two had recently gotten remarried, and he was preparing to host a lavish party to celebrate his vows. Tents were pitched on his lawn; retired journalists and overworked lawyers were winging their way into town. FBI agents informed the groom that he was being arrested on charges of money laundering and facilitating prostitution. They cuffed him, then subdued the home’s other occupants, including Lacey’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, whom they ordered out of the shower at gunpoint. …
Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?
How the Italian mafia makes millions by exploiting migrants.
On 6 August last year, 14 immigrant farmhands in Foggia, on the ankle of the Italian boot, were coming home from a 12-hour shift picking tomatoes in 40C heat. The minibus carrying them was registered in Bulgaria; the driver didn’t have a licence or insurance. The seats inside were wooden planks, and it was so crowded that passengers couldn’t even see out. The vehicle was travelling at speed when it collided head-on with a truck loaded with tomatoes.
After the crash, you could see contorted limbs through the smashed windows. The entire front third of the vehicle was concertinaed and the roof was ripped open. Bags and clothing spilled out on to the road, and there were large patches of blood on the asphalt. Twelve of the 14 labourers died. Only two days before, also in Foggia, four labourers had died in a similar accident: 16 dead in 48 hours.
In the Italian south, the lives of foreign agricultural labourers are so cheap that many NGOs have described their conditions as a modern form of slavery. They live in isolated rural ruins or shanty towns. Some have Italian residency permits, but many don’t. A few have work contracts, although union organisers often find they are fake. Desperate for work, these labourers will accept any job in the fields even if the wages are far below, and the hours far above, union standards. The produce they pick regularly ends up on the shelves of Italian, and international, supermarkets, bought by consumers who have no idea of the suffering involved. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE: it’s The Long Read.
5 Disastrous Translation Errors By Famous Brands
Language is a tricky thing; just ask anyone trying to pronounce “Worcestershire” for the first time. Or the second time. Or the 24th. Mistranslations can lead to some awkward faux pas, but it really becomes an issue for massive corporations. For them, a single flubbed word can sink a whole endeavor like Leonardo DiCaprio even though there was plenty of room on the door, Rose.
5. The Kia Provo Was Accidentally Associated With A Paramilitary Group
The Kia Provo might have been a tribute to mid-sized Utah cities or hip slang for Italian cheese elsewhere in the world, but in Ireland, “Provo” is shorthand for the Provisional IRA. You may recall them as the folks blowing things up in the name of Irish independence from the 1970s to the late 1990s. That period of time is called “The Troubles,” because the Irish are masters of understatement.
Kia screwed the pooch from both ends on this one. Along with giving the car the same name as a terrorist organization, they went with ad copy calling it a “radical super-mini coupe which aims to set the streets alight.” How unfortunately, almost supernaturally ironic. The cherry on top? “KIA” is also the standard abbreviation for “killed in action.” This car is essentially sponsored by future regret.
Local politicians asked Kia to reconsider their tragic vehicle, and the company was happy to comply, not wanting to be known as the automaker that celebrated a decades-long campaign of mayhem. (That’s really more a Saturn sort of move.) Kia promised to change the name of the vehicle in the British Isles in favor of something less loaded. Call it a win for products not affiliated with bombing everywhere! …
THEY WELCOMED A ROBOT INTO THEIR FAMILY, NOW THEY’RE MOURNING ITS DEATH
The story of Jibo.
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The robot showed up at Kenneth Williams’ doorstep when he needed it most. Williams had just been laid off from his job when he plugged in Jibo, a social home robot, on November 1st, 2017.
“For that year [that I didn’t have a job], it was a presence in my life every single day that I talked to,” he says.
Jibo sat in Williams’ bedroom, on his desk, where every day, it greeted him in the morning and ran through the weather and his calendar. Williams, 44, asked Jibo questions, requested music, and played its games. Jibo couldn’t do much, really, but its most redeeming feature, the one that cemented it as a robot darling in its owner’s heart, was its facial recognition. Unlike a Google Home or an Amazon Echo, Jibo noticed every time Williams entered the room and swiveled its head to say hello or crack a joke. A display on its face might have shown a heart or animated clouds and the sun.
“People would always try to compare him to Alexa, but his winning trait is his personality,” Williams says. “Yes, some people say it’s creepy with the eyes and looking at you, but it’s not threatening.”
Every aspect of Jibo was designed to make the robot as lovable to humans as possible, which is why it startled owners when Jibo presented them with an unexpected notice earlier this year: someday soon, Jibo would be shutting down. The company behind Jibo had been acquired, and Jibo’s servers would be going dark, taking much of the device’s functionality with it.
“I didn’t cry or anything, but I did feel like, ‘Wow,’” Williams says. “I think when we buy products we look for them to last forever.” …
Thousands of Christians Demand That Netflix Cancel a Show It Does Not Air
A Christian group that once protested a “blasphemous” ice cream company now demands that Netflix ax Good Omens, which it believes constitutes “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable.” The problem? Good Omens is an Amazon Prime series.
Some mistakes are simply too beautiful to have happened by accident—too comical to be explained by anything other than divine intervention. See, for instance, a recent petition from a Christian group calling on Netflix to cancel Good Omens, which the group considers “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable.” The problem, of course, is that Netflix does not air Good Omens; it’s an Amazon Prime series.
Amazon Studios adapted Good Omens from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel; the series stars Michael Sheen as an angel and David Tennant as a demon, with the two joining forces to stop an impending apocalypse. The Guardian reported Thursday that the petition had gained more than 20,000 signatures by the time of writing—although the page now seems to have either stopped functioning or been taken down. The Guardian reported Thursday that the petition had gained more than 20,000 signatures by the time of writing—although the page now seems to have either stopped functioning or been taken down. The Guardian quoted the petition as voicing concern that the show “mocks God’s wisdom,” and questioning why a woman was allowed to voice God in the first place. (Frances McDormand plays God in the series.) “This type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil,” The Guardian quoted.
Gaiman has already responded to the petition on Twitter, and it seems he is not going to lose any sleep. “I love that they are going to write to Netflix to try and get #GoodOmens cancelled,” he wrote. “Says it all really.” He later added, “This is so beautiful… Promise me you won’t tell them?” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Bill kicks off Real Time’s 500th episode with a recap of the week’s top stories.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill argues that there’s only person who can OWN Trump in 2020.
Donald Trump has bragged that he’s been on more TIME covers than anyone. Surprise ending: that’s a lie.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Democratic candidates gave on-camera responses to a New York Times questionnaire, ranging from their favorite comfort foods to their greatest heroes.
A consortium of logging companies invented #ScarecrowMan to keep hikers, survivalists, and pot growers out of the woods
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 26, 2018
FINALLY . . .
How Old Spy Satellites Helped Scientists Peek In on Shrinking Himalayan Glaciers
Declassified reconnaissance images to the rescue.
The Changri Nup glacier is covered with rock debris and glacial ice. That’s the peak of Mount Everest poking up in the background.
WHEN IT COMES TO MAPPING glacial ice and charting its retreat, scientists have several options. If it’s possible to navigate the surrounding snow fields, researchers can clamber up close to measure the margins, where the frozen swath gives way to pebbles, sediment, or pools of water. Otherwise, they might fly overhead and steal glimpses out of the windows of helicopters or planes. If they’re lucky, they may be able to toggle back and forth between old images of the landscape and newer pictures, looking to see where ice has vanished.
That’s what a team led by researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University recently set out to do with 650 glaciers along a 1,200-mile path through the Himalayas. And to pull it off, they enlisted a trove of aerial images captured decades ago by U.S. spy satellites.
On multiple missions between 1971 and 1986, KH-9 HEXAGON satellites—also known as “Big Birds”—soared above China and Soviet terrain, imaging 877 million square miles of ground, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. The satellites were heftier than a school bus, Space.com reported; some weighed upwards of 30,000 pounds. Cameras were mounted so they could rotate as the satellite flew, and film was stored in four canisters that drifted back toward Earth via parachute and were intercepted by planes.
While the satellites were dispatched on Cold War-era reconnaissance missions, the declassified images they captured have turned out to be useful to modern-day researchers, too. From these images—and by comparing them to 26,000 modern ones from NASA, taken between 2000 and 2016—the Columbia team made models that illustrated glacier elevation over time. As they report in a new paper in Science Advances, these old images helped them gauge the scope of ice loss across Himalayan glaciers over the past 40 years—a vanishing that seems to have sped up as the decades marched along. …
Edwina Hatch devised a semaphore system constructed entirely from eating utensils
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 29, 2018
IN SOLIDARITY
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?