• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
https://t.co/QyMHcTFhfj pic.twitter.com/WVLBelTFGn
— Jef Norton (@BirdJanitor) January 12, 2019
These early guided weapons were powered by tiny, suicidal warriors lionized by ancient Chinese manuscripts as “gods of the small death”.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 15, 2019
When Royalty, Scientists, and Gardeners All Wanted Fake Fruit
One collection of fake produce is a reminder of both ingenuity and loss.
Faux produce on display at Turin’s Fruit Museum.
THE CITY OF TURIN, IN northern Italy, is famous for unusual museums, from the National Car Museum to a museum dedicated to personal finance. But hidden in one of the city’s iconic Baroque buildings lies a cultural oddity overlooked by most guidebooks. More than 1,100 life-size models of apples, pears, peaches, and grapes sit on display in two large rooms adorned with 19th-century frescoes.
Until recently, the resin and wax fruits were scattered around the Royal Station of Agricultural Chemistry, a research outpost run by the local government. When the Royal Station closed in the early 2000s, workers sorting through old books and equipment discovered the unusual artifacts, abandoned for almost a century.
Two eerily realistic apples, made by Garnier Valletti.
The models turned out to be the work of Francesco Garnier Valletti, an eclectic 19th-century artist and scientist. “We really had no idea that the fruits were there,” says Paola Costanzo, head of the curatorial team tasked by the municipal government to arrange the collection for display. There was so much material that it took 10 years for the Fruit Museum to open in 2007, inside the University of Turin’s Anatomical Studies Palace. Some fruits dominate the collection, with 494 types of pears, 286 types of apples, and 44 types of apricots on display. Their shiny skin, real stalks, and blemishes make them virtually indistinguishable from actual fruit.
At first, Costanzo and her colleagues thought that the hyper-realistic produce served as a teaching aid for students. According to Jules Janick, a horticulture professor at Purdue University, botanical research relied on illustrations and wax models of fruit before the invention of photography. But after a dive into the dusty archives of the Royal Station, Costanzo and her team quickly dropped this initial assumption. From information stored in official letters, ancient invoices, and research bulletins, they pieced together that it wasn’t education that spurred Garnier Valletti to create hundreds of fake fruits. It was advertising. …
If you’re in the mood for a burger, you should avoid McDreadful’s, the controversial fast-food chain founded and operated by Banksy.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 14, 2019
The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world
The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap?
On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.
Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity.”
Power grids are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison’s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
One Very Bad Habit Is Fueling the Global Recycling Meltdown
It’s called “wishcycling,” and pretty much all of us do it.
If you’re like me, you’ve looked at a paper coffee cup or an empty tube of toothpaste and thought, “Is this recyclable?” before tossing it in the recycling bin, hoping someone, somewhere, would sort it out. People in the waste management industry call this habit “wishcycling.” According to Marian Chertow, director of the Solid Waste Policy program at Yale University, “a wishcycler wants to do the right thing and feels that the more that he or she can recycle, the better.”
Well, I hate to break it to you, but this well-intentioned reflex is doing more harm than good. Not only that, but wishcycling is playing a big role in the current global recycling meltdown.
First, a bit about the process. When my recycling is scooped up by a truck every week, it goes to a materials recovery facility (MRF) run by a company called Recology. After the goods travel through the facility’s jungle of conveyor belts and sorting machinery, they are shipped as bales to buyers in the United States and abroad, who turn that material into products like cereal boxes and aluminum cans.
But in an effort to get more people recycling, companies like Recology have become victims of their own success. In the early 2000s, many communities switched from a dual-stream system, where plastics and glass, and paper and cardboard, each had their own bins, to single-stream, in which all recyclables go into one bin and the sorting is done at the MRF. But when “we decided to put all the things together, we decided to create a contaminated system,” says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s almost impossible, for example, to put paper in a bin with beverage containers without the paper getting wet, which makes it unrecyclable.
And it doesn’t help that many of us are wildly confused about what we should recycle. A decade ago, according to one estimate, 7 percent of the objects Americans put into their bins weren’t supposed to be there. Today, it’s 25 percent. “For every ton of material we get in, there’s 500 pounds of trash that has to be taken out of it,” says Brent Bell, vice president of recycling operations at Waste Management, the country’s largest waste disposal company. This garbage ranges from recyclables that are too dirty to process—mayonnaise jars still coated in a thick layer of eggy goo, for example—to items that just shouldn’t be there in the first place, like plastic bags. …
Ed. Ever heard of municipal composting? A single stream bin where you can place soiled and wet paper, that dirty paper coffee cup, the lawn clippings, food scraps, etc., which is then collected for large-scale a composting operation.
Nearly 75% of the waste generated at my house ends up composted. Nearly 75% of the remainder is single-stream recycled. Very little ends up in my solid waste bin.
4 Inspiring Stories Of Weirdos Who Just Wouldn’t Stop
There’s nothing more inspiring than a tale of human perseverance — people who dedicate their lives to climbing every mountain, learning every language, winning a morally questionable reality show, etc. These are not their stories. These are the ones about weirdos whose low-stakes zealotry impresses even as it disappoints. For example …
4. The Man Who Has Eaten Big Macs Every Day Of His Life
Donald Gorske, a former prison guard from Pond du Lac, Wisconsin, is all about that BM life. Big Macs, that is. At the age of 18, while his classmates were losing their virginity at prom, Gorske ate his first Big Mac at a local McDonald’s. He then proceeded to eat a thousand more of the towering burgers the following year, which averages to about three burgers and two horrible stomachaches a day. Now addicted, Gorkse embarked upon an epic quest to eat Big Macs every day for the rest of his life. He got his first car so he could drive to the restaurant. He got married under the McDonald’s golden arches (and we’ll assume registered there as well). He only ever ate another fast food burger once — a Whopper, and that was on a bet so he could afford to buy more Big Macs.
How many smooshed patties does that devotion add up to? In 2016 it was 28,788 Big Macs, the number he needed to beat the Guinness World record for most McDonald’s bathrooms ruined. Since then, Gorske has broken the meaty barrier of 30,000, adding that “approximately 90% of my solid diet is probably Big Macs.” Even more impressive is that in the nearly 50 years of his adult life, he reckons there have been only eight days that he hasn’t set foot in a Mickey D’s. One time it was because a blizzard had shut down the town and closed the restaurant (he still drove through the storm to check). Another was the day his mother died — not out of grief, but because it was his mother’s actual dying wish that he would knock it off for just one day.
But despite what such a diet (and mullet) may suggest, Gorske is in perfect health. He even had a medical checkup on Ellen to dispel any assumptions that he’s basically a living meat patty. Shockingly, he’s probably in better shape than most of us, seeing as how he ran the San Diego marathon at age 53, all while holding aloft his favorite burger. And with his perfect blood pressure and cholesterol, the most challenging part was probably not biting down on that delicious Big Mac for 26 long miles. …
Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens
- Panera Bread loses close to 100% of its workers every year.
- For fast-food chains employee turnover runs as high as 130% to 150%, according to industry measures.
- McDonald’s is spending nearly $1 billion in 2019 to add ordering kiosks and other tech to stores.
- Some experts believe it is inevitable that fast food will be the first job sector ruled by robots.
The bakery racks at the counter of Panera Bread in Monroe, New York.
If you think it sounds like a mathematical impossibility for a company to lose more than 100% of its workers every year, you’ve never worked in the fast-food industry. At fast-food restaurants, losing 100% of employees — and then losing still more of the employees hired to replace those workers — is a common, and worsening, labor problem.
The case of Panera Bread shows just how deep the employee turnover issue is for restaurant companies. Panera loses close to 100% of workers every year, and by fast-food industry standards that’s considered good.
“In the restaurant industry, turnover is 130%, turning over more than a full workforce every year,” said Panera bread CFO Michael Bufano at CNBC’s @Work Human Capital + Finance conference in July. “We are a little under 100%, but still a huge number.”
The official Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015–2017 period, but industry estimates are much higher, reaching 150%, and the problem has gotten worse in recent years. “It’s definitely been going up,” said Rosemary Batt, chair of HR Studies and International & Comparative Labor at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations.
Batt said decades of fast-food industry efforts to standardize and “routinize” jobs — take the skill out of them — has been intended to create turnover-proof jobs. “If you lose someone, it is not a real cost, because they are so easily replaceable. … The industry has thrived on this HR model of turnover-proof jobs for many years, because they could get away with it,” she said, through a slack labor market or absorbing the cost of high turnover. But that model is being stretched. …
The Reluctant Propagandist
Massood Sanjer, Afghanistan’s most famous radio host, had an unlikely start to his career as a beacon of free speech. Under the Taliban rule, his voice used to carry Taliban propaganda all over the world.
It’s 7 a.m. in Kabul. As usual, hundreds of thousands of cars are stuck in traffic jams around the city, where police checkpoints, Humvees, and blast walls congest the perilous streets. Taxi drivers in faded yellow Corollas roll up their windows and try to shoo off street children blowing heady incense — meant to ward off evil spirits — inside their cars. Policemen yell “boro, boro” (move) through the loudspeakers of their dark-green pickups. Fruit sellers calmly navigate the madness, pushing heavy carts laden with dark-red pomegranates, juicy grapes, and Pakistani mangoes while dust lingers in the air behind them.
Here, nothing is ever certain: Any minute, a bomb could go off, destroying families, livelihoods, and hopes.
But in this chaos, one thing is a constant: the energetic voice of Massood Sanjer, one of the hosts of a popular morning show called Safay Shaher (or “Cleaning Up the City”) on Arman FM, the country’s first private radio channel. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, his show is undoubtedly one of the most widely listened-to in Afghanistan.
“If you walk on the street between seven to eight, you just open a car’s door and you can listen to it,” Sanjer says.
Almost everyone tunes in while commuting to work, getting through their morning chores, or standing in line in front of a bakery.
Over the past decade, Sanjer has become a celebrity in Afghan media. His ability to find humor in serious matters brings relief to Afghans who have suffered from war for four long decades now — starting with the Soviet invasion in the late ’70s, civil war and Taliban rule in the ’90s, and the past 18 years of increasingly worsening conflict between terrorist groups and Western-supported Afghan government forces. But more importantly, the fact that the show holds the country’s leaders to account for their incompetencies and apathy has given a sense of power to regular people in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Every day, people from all over the country call in with their complaints about the security situation, lack of electricity, or any other issue they might be facing. Sanjer then calls the responsible authorities and questions them live on-air. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
“I know that Saudi Arabia will try to send us back, 100%.”
Over a period of two months, VICE News follows two Saudi sisters who escaped from their family and are struggling to break free from their old lives, once dictated by Saudi Arabia’s oppressive guardianship laws.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me aussie review of a MMA knockout in under 10 seconds.
Chinese spies once constructed an entire opera hall in the middle of the Gobi desert for “Operation Seven Tridents”. The hall is still used today.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 14, 2019
FINALLY . . .
The Dark Past and Unsettled Present of a Paris Housing Project
“Drancy is like the French bad conscience.”
A policewoman guards the railway car memorial at Drancy in 2005, after an attempt to burn it.
IT HAS BEEN A TIME OF PARTICULAR UNEASE in Paris, and the signs are everywhere. Tear gas has clouded the Champs-Élysées. Swastikas have been scrawled on public portraits of the French Jewish politician Simone Veil. Notre Dame burned. In the suburb of Drancy, a few miles northeast of the city, things are almost eerily calm, but the sense of malaise seems to carry. There, when you step off the bus at Liberation Square, you’re greeted by a U-shaped concrete building that partially encloses a wide-open grass courtyard. This pale yellow apartment block has changed from an affordable housing complex to an anteroom of death and back again in less than a century.
In the early 1940s, Nazis and their French collaborators rounded up more than 60,000 French Jews and held them here before dispatching them to death camps in what is now Poland, including Auschwitz and Sobibor. In the apartment complex—conceived just a decade earlier as a model for urban living— internees were hemmed in by barbed wire, wore yellow stars marked “Juif” (“Jew”), and suffered from dysentery and other diseases. Almost all of the people who passed through the camp, also referred to as Drancy, then died in the Holocaust. But the rooms they were interned in remain, now occupied by a new generation of people on the margins of French society.
The Germans called Drancy a “durchgangslager” or “transit camp”—“durchgang” meaning “the way through.” Nearly eight decades later, the repurposed housing complex remains a place of transit and transition. It houses immigrants, the working poor, and others who are looking for a way to their own version of belonging. To find it, they must contend with Drancy’s legacy—not just the atrocities it will always carry, but also age-old conceptions of Frenchness that nudge many to the periphery.
The Drancy housing complex under construction in 1933.
There was a time when the Drancy housing complex was all optimism. Its pre-war planners saw the project as the pinnacle of 20th-century living. French architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin hoped to provide safe, affordable housing to as many city-dwellers as possible. The four-story U-shaped building that served as the wartime Drancy camp was erected in the 1930s, and construction had begun on five 14-story towers adjacent to it, packed with studios and one-bedroom apartments. “Before the war, there were postcards of those towers,” says Benoit Pouvreau, a historian at the Department of Cultural Heritage in Seine-Saint-Denis, the region where Drancy is located. “It was a symbol of modernity.” Altogether, the development consisted of 1,200 units. …
Recently unearthed documents suggest that President William Howard Taft was an accomplished witch.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 11, 2019
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?