• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Modern travel guides owe much to the 1779 book, "The Pyratical Exploits of Young Alabastian Jones, a Gentleman". Presented as a boastful autobiography, the Jones character was actually invented by the East India Company's "Office of Publick Influencers" to encourage travel.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 19, 2018
A Decade Later, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Has Left an Abyssal Wasteland
A nightmare at 6,000 feet.
A slickly, oil-spattered crab.
CLIFTON NUNNALLY FELT SICK BEFORE he even saw the seafloor. It was 2017 and he had come down with a virus on a month-long research cruise; he was recuperating in his room to avoid infecting his colleagues at the Louisiana University Marine Consortium (LUMCON). From 6,000 feet below, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was transmitting a live feed of the site of the Deepwater Horizon accident—the first images of it taken since 2010. Releasing some four million barrels of oil over 87 days, it was the largest accidental marine oil spill ever recorded, a seething, black apocalypse across hundreds of square miles in the Gulf of Mexico.
Nunnally shuffled down to the vessel’s control room to see what the ROV found. In his years as a deep sea biologist, he has learned that disasters like this take a long time to recover from, and that the deep site would likely still be dramatically affected by the spill. “Nothing prepared us for what we saw,” he says: a slick black wasteland, empty of all its usual denizens, such as sea cucumbers and giant isopods. Instead, the area had been taken over by strange crabs and shrimp, either tumor-ridden or eerily languid, as if sleepwalking across the seafloor. The typically white marine snow—detritus that had drifted down from organisms living above—was jet black and clumped up. It was clear that the site was toxic, and maybe irrevocably marred, according to the study the LUMCON team published recently in Royal Society Open Science.
The worker’s boot, half-buried in sand.
Earlier in the week leading up to the site visit, Nunnally and Craig McClain, the study’s lead author and the executive director of LUMCON, had stopped by several spots in the Gulf of Mexico. They saw mostly what they expected: a bright, light brown, muddy seafloor—typical, healthy conditions for the bottom of this part of the ocean. At the spill site, the control room had grown somber. “One of the very first things that we saw was a solitary boot,” Nunnally says. “That made us realize what we’re looking at here.” The boot was leather and steel-toed, what a worker would have worn while operating BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig when it exploded in April 2010, killing 11 workers.
The subsequent cleanup and restoration had cost nearly $65 billion and spotlighted the agony of certain animals, such as pelicans stained brown from oil and turtles caked in sludge. But researchers and the public paid little attention at the time to the harder-to-reach deep dwellers such as isopods and corals, according to Nunnally. “The deep sea is always out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “You can burn off and disperse oil on the surface, but we don’t have the technology to get rid of oil on the seafloor.” So approximately 10 million gallons of it settled there. …
The Flat Time Theory, proposed in 1934 by banker and philanthropist Conroy Welson, presumes—among other things—that all human beings live precisely 200 years, but at different rates.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 16, 2018
Think America’s fate hinges on the 2020 presidential race? You’re forgetting something
Democrats can’t execute a long-term political project without winning state-level races. Yet, the prize of the White House is distracting liberals from this fact.
‘Winning state and local races is more crucial now than ever.’
Every day brings more headlines about the game-show-like spectacle of the presidential race. Of course, the 2020 presidential election commands attention because the stakes are so high. The presidential race, however, isn’t the only election that will have major ramifications for both the immediate and long-term direction of the nation.
This November, 538 state legislative seats in four states are up for election. Another 4,798 state legislative seats in 44 states will be decided in November 2020. And 14 governors will be elected in the next two years. There is no way for Democrats to execute a long-term pro-active political project without winning in the states immediately.
Winning state and local races is more crucial now than ever. The Trump administration has appointed an unprecedented number of conservative judges who will evaluate state laws. If Republicans continue to wield outsized power in state legislatures, states are all but guaranteed to pass envelope-pushing laws that will climb the courts, opening the possibility that major national legal precedents will change. The abortion bans that seized national attention this past spring are just the tip of the iceberg.
Another huge reason: 2021 is a redistricting year. If Republicans maintain control of state legislatures around the country, they will be able to once again gerrymander districts in their favor – for a decade. If Democrats and progressives neglect to focus on state races they will damn themselves to the same long-term power imbalances that led to electoral rock bottom in November 2016. …
‘Medication or housing’: why soaring insulin prices are killing Americans
Price gouging and other barriers to accessing insulin are symptomatic of a broken healthcare system, and demonstrate the need of systemic reforms, diabetes advocates argue.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 23.1 million Americans are diagnosed with diabetes, while millions more are either undiagnosed or pre-diabetic.
Jada Renee Louis of Newport News, Virginia, died on 22 June 2019 about a week after requiring emergency hospital care for diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious complication caused by a lack of insulin, and a foot ulcer. She was 24. A type 1 diabetic, Louis, who did not have health insurance coverage, couldn’t afford the cost of her insulin doses and pay her rent. She chose to skip doses in order to pay her rent.
In 1922 Frederick Banting and Charles Best, the Canadian scientists who discovered insulin, sold their patent to the University of Toronto for $1, hoping it would be a cure for diabetes. Today a vial of insulin – which will last 28 days once opened – costs about $300 in the US.
Black, Hispanic and Asian adults have been hit hardest by escalating prices. They are more likely to have diabetes than white adults and are less likely to be insured. One in four diabetes patients ration their insulin, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“People are literally dying over $300 like my sister did. It shouldn’t have to be like that. People shouldn’t have to choose between medications or shelter. That’s the most outrageous decision for somebody to have to make, yet people are doing it daily,” Jazmine Baldwin, Louis’s sister, told the Guardian. …
5 Famous Love Stories From History That Were Weird As Hell
There have been some great, famous romances throughout history. Think of Cleopatra and Antony, Barrett and Browning, Spears and Federline. They had no doubt perfect fairy tales, but others definitely went through some things that their ghosts would rather we not know about. Get ready for communist affairs, a lot of French people, and some seriously goth boning, because it’s about to get weird.
5. The Beauvoir/Sartre/Kosakiewicz Love Polygon
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were really something else, even for philosophers. Sartre was an esteemed novelist, playwright, and critic, while de Beauvoir helped lay the foundation for the modern women’s movement. Their romance was naturally ahead of its time; they even had an open relationship before it was cool.
In most cases, it’s assumed that the man is the one who initiates such an arrangement, while the woman merely endures it, but de Beauvoir was basically a French intellectual Hugh Hefner. Not only did she tally a long list of playmates, but she was also an honest-to-goodness sugar momma. One of her babies was Olga Kosakiewicz, the daughter of a dispossessed Russian emigre who studied under (and on top of and beside) her when she was teaching in Rouen. Promising to take care of her and even pay for her education, de Beauvoir moved Kosakiewicz into the Hotel du Petit Mouton, where she was also living. Hef could have actually learned something from de Beauvior, who cared about her bunnies’ minds as well as their bodies.
On the other hand, she seems a lot less honest than Hef. When de Beauvoir finally had enough of Kosakiewicz, she introduced her to Sartre, who fell head over heels and tried to seduce Kosakiewicz for two whole years. But Olga wasn’t into it, so she took a pass and found that there was in fact an exit. Right when Sartre had finally given up, however, Olga’s younger and more receptive sister came to Paris. This seems like a fairly complicated configuration already, but then de Beauvior became bored with it all and decided to seduce Olga’s new boyfriend, who later became Olga’s husband, even though he continued his affair with de Beauvoir well into their marriage.
De Beauvoir mined the whole thing for material for her 1943 novel She Came To Stay, in which she combined Olga and her sister into one character who has lots of threesomes with a philosopher couple and then gets murdered. The book was dedicated to Olga, who presumably began sleeping with a mess of weapons under her pillow. …
Simone De Beauvoir’s She Came Home To Stay … Act fast, there’s only one in stock and it’s a bit pricey (but there are other options). You’re welcome.
‘There’s no end and no escape. You feel so, so exposed’: life as a victim of revenge porn.
This ever-evolving crime rages almost unchecked. Three women talk about the devastating effect it had – and still has – on them.
Ruth King (not her real name) can still remember the call coming through on her mobile. She thinks of that moment as “the start of hell”. “It was four years ago, but I remember it clear as day,” she says. “It was my friend warning that there were videos of me everywhere. Her husband worked at a local factory and pornographic videos of me were being shared between all the workers.”
King’s instant response was to vomit. “I was working with my dad – he’s an old-fashioned type of guy, so what could I say? I told him I wasn’t well and went home.” Almost as soon as she got there, another friend, a builder, called to tell her the same videos were being passed around his building site. “He said: ‘I didn’t believe they were of you, Ruth, but I looked and they are.’”
Seven videos had been posted on porn sites by King’s ex-partner. When she looked online, they had been shared tens of thousands of times. “The comments underneath were disgusting – men describing what they’d do to me,” says King, who is now in her late 30s and a mother. “I live in a rural area where everyone knows everyone and my life has never been the same since. It’s torture for the soul.”
The government’s recent decision to review the laws surrounding so-called “revenge porn” is acknowledgment that the current provision is no match for this ever-evolving crime. Campaigners have flagged up an alarming list of shortfalls. It is still not even categorised as a “sexual offence” – although to victims, it can feel every bit as violating. Sentences are light and prosecutions rare, requiring proof of “direct intention to cause distress” (which means perpetrators who claim they posted the images for a laugh are off the hook). Fake Photoshopped porn isn’t covered at all – no matter how convincing.
The UK’s sole specialist support is the Revenge Porn Helpline, which has a staff of three (only one of whom is full-time). It takes calls from victims in extreme distress, who are often suicidal, and works flat out to remove content before it spreads across multiple platforms. …
Tropical Storm Karen Has the Internet Saying the Storm ‘Wants to Speak to a Manager’
Tropical Storm Karen, which is moving through the Southern Windward islands and could hit Puerto Rico early next week, has inspired the internet to make memes poking fun of the storm’s name. #Karen was trending on Sunday afternoon on Twitter.
I was like “Wow #karen is trending! There must be a lot of angry white women who need to speak to a manager” and then I opened and saw it was the name a big tropical storm
I’m an idiot
— melatonin martinez (@AllisonPonthier) September 22, 2019
“Karen” has become synonymous with the persona of an annoying entitled, woman, according to the internet’s meme database, KnowYourMeme, which says the meme may have first come about because of its association with Mean Girls’ ditzy, popular high school character Karen Smith.
The Karen meme is also associated with a side-swept haircut that is “short in the back and longer in the front” and “mocked as representative of middle-aged women” obsessed with complaining to store managers, KnowYourMeme says.
Haircut and manager memes are making the rounds on Twitter as Tropical Storm Karen dumps rain on the southern Windward Islands. One meme shows this haircut sitting atop of the storm’s forecast cone. Another refers to the cone as a “visual representation of the rising anger of everyone in line behind Karen as she argues with the manager because her coupons are not working.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
The Ozark Mountain Elf was dismissed as a legend until 1975, when naturalists discovered that it not only exists but is the only species of monkey native to North America.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 14, 2018
FINALLY . . .
Why Kids Find the Darndest Prehistoric Things
It helps to be curious, low to the ground, and not afraid to look a little silly.
At fossil identification days, such as this one at the American Museum of Natural History in 2018, kids can bring in their finds for an expert opinion.
JACKSON HEPNER COULD RETRACE HIS steps easily. He knew exactly where he found the mammoth tooth.
He sketched a map on a sheet of notebook paper: roads, trails, a wooden bridge arcing over a creek. He remembered he had walked about 10 yards from the bridge, where he’d been posing for pictures with his family. He was off alone, just looking around, when he spotted it: a brown-beige, white, ridged thing, about seven inches long. “It looked like this big, lined rock coming out up of the mud,” he recalls. It wasn’t fully buried, and he easily pulled it loose with his hands. He thought it might be “a ribcage from some animal that another animal didn’t finish,” because there was some ruddy coloration that reminded him of long-dried blood. Several researchers would soon identify the object as an upper molar from a prehistoric pachyderm. In photos of Hepner and his find, the 12-year-old is cracking an enormous, toothy grin.
Hepner found the fossil in July 2019, while visiting his uncle’s inn in Millersburg, Ohio. His story made the news, but he’s hardly the first kid to find something prehistoric or just pretty darn cool. Each year brings new stories of kids finding swords or stegomastodons while they’re exploring. (Hepner himself has around 400 shark teeth in a jar at home—his bounty from several summers at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.) When it comes to spotting fossils and other amazing things in and on the ground, kids have quite a few things going for them.
ackson Hepner found a mammoth tooth, then retraced his steps.
There is ample opportunity for amateur fossil hunters of any age to find something out there, if they look in the right place. “There are only so many paleontologists in the world, and we can only spend so much time in the outcrops looking for fossils,” says Bill Simpson, head of the geological collections and collections manager of fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago. Parts of the Midwest in particular are lousy with fossils because 430 million years ago, the area was covered by a shallow tropical sea, brimming with life. Reefs stretched across portions of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and beyond. Later, glaciers carried fossils through and deposited them along the shores of present-day Lake Michigan. Finding something big like Hepner did is relatively rare, but if you count fossil fragments, the amount of ancient stuff in the Midwest is “just about infinite,” says Paul Mayer, collections manager of fossil invertebrates at the Field Museum, who regularly examines amateur finds at the museum’s identification days. …
Widely assumed to be a representation of time, the blinking 12:00 displayed by unset digital clocks is actually the name "Oozi", upside-down. It is an homage to Uziel "Oozi" Kirschbaum, a mostly unknown engineer whose innovations are still used in modern digital clocks.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) November 14, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?
The thing about people is, they're stupid.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) September 22, 2019