• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
The Restaurant Putting India’s Disappearing Tribal Cuisine Back on the Menu
In a Ranchi kitchen, local women fight to save indigenous food, one bowl of fish curry at a time.
Jharkhand state government officials visit Ajam Emba’s stall at the annual Dumka bamboo festival.
WHEN ARUNA TIRKEY, A MEMBER of Central India’s Oraon indigenous community, walked into her small town’s glossy new department store almost a decade ago, one product made her stop short: a packet of millet. Known locally among the Oraon as madua, millet was a staple in Tirkey’s family when she was growing up. As the influence of industrial agriculture spread to India’s hinterlands, however, the traditional grain had become increasingly rare. Seeing millet in an upscale store, marketed at a price many indigenous Indians couldn’t afford, Tirkey was shocked. “It was surprising for me to see the product in the store at a premium price, knowing that at the same time it was fast disappearing from our diets,” she wrote.
In 2018, Tirkey put millet back on the menu. That’s when she opened Ajam Emba, a restaurant, cooking school, and catering service run by local indigenous women in Ranchi, the capital city of the state of Jharkhand. In contrast to the packaged millet Tirkey stumbled across that day, Ajam Emba, which means “great tasting and healthy food” in the Oraon people’s Kudukh language, is part of a movement to bring indigenous foods back into India’s diet, on indigenous people’s terms.
From a cozy, white, one-story building on a bustling Ranchi street, Tirkey and her staff translate that vision into reality. The space’s exterior is bright with flower pots, while its interior is filled with multicolored lights and cheery murals of village life. The menu features traditional dishes of the Oraon and other tribes from Central India, using ingredients local to the jungles of Jharkhand. Specialties such as marh jhor, a blend of herbs and spices in brown rice starch, and curry made with the rare, local getu fish, provide visitors with a taste of one of India’s fast-disappearing cuisines. Meanwhile, the indigenous women who staff the restaurant undertake culinary and entrepreneurial training.
One popular indigenous cooking method is to steam foods wrapped in leaves.
“Ajam Emba is a concept all about tribal culture and identity through food,” says Tirkey. “It is more about that than only cuisine.” The project’s success has gone beyond filling visitors’ bellies and locals’ pocketbooks: In July 2019, Tirkey cofounded Slow Food Jharkhand, joining a worldwide network that works to preserve local food traditions. …
‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology
It can pick out shoplifters, international criminals and lost children in seconds. But as the cameras proliferate, who’s watching the watchers?
‘If you’ve got something to be worried about, you should probably be worried.’
Gordon’s wine bar is reached through a discreet side-door, a few paces from the slipstream of London theatregoers and suited professionals powering towards their evening train. A steep staircase plunges visitors into a dimly lit cavern, lined with dusty champagne bottles and faded newspaper clippings, which appears to have had only minor refurbishment since it opened in 1890. “If Miss Havisham was in the licensing trade,” an Evening Standard review once suggested, “this could have been the result.”
The bar’s Dickensian gloom is a selling point for people embarking on affairs, and actors or politicians wanting a quiet drink – but also for pickpockets. When Simon Gordon took over the family business in the early 2000s, he would spend hours scrutinising the faces of the people who haunted his CCTV footage. “There was one guy who I almost felt I knew,” he says. “He used to come down here the whole time and steal.” The man vanished for a six-month stretch, but then reappeared, chubbier, apparently after a stint in jail. When two of Gordon’s friends visited the bar for lunch and both had their wallets pinched in his presence, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “The police did nothing about it,” he says. “It really annoyed me.”
Gordon is in his early 60s, with sandy hair and a glowing tan that hints at regular visits to Italian vineyards. He makes an unlikely tech entrepreneur, but his frustration spurred him to launch Facewatch, a fast-track crime-reporting platform that allows clients (shops, hotels, casinos) to upload an incident report and CCTV clips to the police. Two years ago, when facial recognition technology was becoming widely available, the business pivoted from simply reporting into active crime deterrence. Nick Fisher, a former retail executive, was appointed Facewatch CEO; Gordon is its chairman.
Gordon installed a £3,000 camera system at the entrance to the bar and, using off-the-shelf software to carry out facial recognition analysis, began collating a private watchlist of people he had observed stealing, being aggressive or causing damage. Almost overnight, the pickpockets vanished, possibly put off by a warning at the entrance that the cameras are in use. …
False witness: why is the US still using hypnosis to convict criminals?
For decades, US law enforcement has used ‘forensic hypnosis’ to help solve crimes – yet despite growing evidence that it is junk science, this method is still being used to send people to death row.
In January 2016, Charles Flores, a Texas prisoner, was moved to death watch, where inmates awaiting execution spend their final months. Seventeen years earlier, Flores had been convicted of murdering a woman in a Dallas suburb in the course of a robbery, a crime he says he did not commit. All of his appeals had been denied and his lethal injection was scheduled for 2 June.
Flores’s new neighbour on death watch, who was due to die in two weeks, gave him the name of his attorney, Gregory Gardner. Gardner specialised in fighting capital punishment convictions and had helped this man take his case to the US supreme court. Flores wrote to Gardner, telling him about the troubling course his trial had taken. No physical evidence had been presented to tie him to the murder, his defence had failed him in multiple ways and, perhaps most troublingly, the only eye witness who claimed to have seen him at the scene of the crime had been hypnotised by police during questioning.
Hypnosis has been used as a forensic tool by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies since the second world war. Proponents argue that it allows victims and witnesses to recall traumatic events with greater clarity by detaching them from emotions that muddy the memory. In the case that led police departments across the country to begin using forensic hypnosis, a school bus driver in California, who had been abducted and buried alive with 26 students in an underground trailer, later accurately recalled most of the licence plate of his abductors while under hypnosis. (All 27 captives survived the ordeal, after they dug themselves out of the trailer with a piece of wood.)
That was in 1976. In recent decades, the scientific validity of forensic hypnosis has been called into question by experts who study how memory operates, especially in police interviews and courtrooms. It is one example of a growing number of forensic practices – including the analysis of blood spatter patterns and the study of what distinguishes arson from accidental fires – that prosecutors once relied on to secure convictions, but which are now considered to be unreliable. “The breadth of scientific error in forensic disciplines is breathtaking,” Ben Wolff, an attorney for Flores, told me. …
The 4 Most Misogynistic Marketing Campaigns Of All Time
No demographic is too scummy that an advertiser would pass them over in their never-ending efforts to hawk terrible sodas and noxious body sprays. In fact, there have been several (thankfully short-lived) ad campaigns aimed squarely at bottom-feeding creeps. For example …
4. Danish Tourism Commercials Encourage You To Bang Their Women
Like other cold places that faintly smell of fish, Denmark is having a small depopulation issue. Not enough tourists are popping in, and not enough babies are popping out. So in order to kill two birds with one stone, the country tried to entice foreigners to come over and exploit their greatest natural resource: hot Scandinavian women.
In 2009, a YouTube video went viral of a beautiful Danish single mother trying to discover the identity of her baby daddy, a foreign tourist she had unprotected sex with. The video received 800,000 views in just five days, and audiences were moved by her account of their romantic night, though she was but one of many women who wanted to show the tourist the famous Danish concept of hygge (their local precursor to Netflix & chill). But Karen wasn’t making a sincere plea for a lover’s reunion at all. It was actually a stealth commercial from the Danish ad agency Grey Group, one made on the taxpayer’s kroner.
Commissioned by none other than VisitDenmark, the government’s official tourism organization, the video was a brazen attempt to lure male tourists to Denmark with the promise that its women are all both pretty and pretty easy. The video was quickly taken down, yet Grey Group still defended their choice to pimp out the nation’s women and boasted of finding a cheap way to go viral — which is exactly the attitude you’d expect from an organization that promotes not wearing condoms. The sordid revelation spawned a slew of terrible parody videos, including one with the original actress getting it on with a fish — probably a stealth marketing scheme to entice more merman tourism.
Nonetheless, after plenty of public outrage, the Danish advertising industry learned its lesson. Which is why, a few years later, they came up with a completely different tourism campaign encouraging Danish women to travel abroad and get knocked up over there instead.
…
Searching for an Alzheimer’s cure while my father slips away
At the beginning, we hunted frantically for any medical breakthrough that might hint at a cure. Then hope gave way to the unbearable truth.
One night several years ago, I checked out of a hotel in Cairo and hailed a cab to the airport. It was just after 1am. I had been in Egypt for a week, researching a story on the Muslim Brotherhood, and I had come down with a nasty bug. A blood vessel in my right eye burst, but the doctor said it would probably go away in a few days. I had with me my laptop, a duffel bag crammed with T-shirts, a crushed-velvet blazer, a toothbrush, a razor, medications, an exceptionally tattered copy of Herzog, and an empty, oversized suitcase, which I had been dragging around the world for several weeks and was starting to feel like a vestigial organ. That evening, when my flight landed in Hamburg and I checked into a hotel across the street from the terminal, the woman at the front desk said: “This arrived for you.”
She produced a box that had been shipped from Brussels and loaded it on to a luggage cart. I took it to my room and ripped it open. It was filled with miniature bottles of a yoghurt-like drink that was supposed to cure dementia. I put the bottles in my suitcase, and the next morning I caught my connecting flight to New York.
At any given moment, thousands of trials are taking place all around the globe, geared toward eradicating Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia and all the other dementias, disorders and syndromes that gradually, inexorably turn once-intact brains into hollowed-out husks. Each trial usually includes scores of patients, who researchers call enrollees, and each enrollee has at least one caregiver, and sometimes two or three. Before the enrolment, and before the caregiver signs the paperwork and commits to monthly visits, there are all the conversations between the caregiver and other concerned parties (the enrollee’s children, for example) – the strategy sessions. The thinking is: we can only take part in so many studies; if we pick the right study, we get first dibs on the magic potion, before anyone else, at a reduced rate. So you do your due diligence. You follow developments.
You can track ongoing trials on a website provided by the US National Library of Medicine. In the first few months after my father was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment – it did not feel mild at the time – I scoured, frantically, ClinicalTrials.gov in search of an elixir. Initially, the maths looked promising. There are, as I write, 508 active Alzheimer’s trials. Since not all cases of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) convert to full-blown Alzheimer’s, and since it takes about a year for those that do, and since it takes another six to eight years to die from Alzheimer’s – some patients live as long as 15 or even 20 years – you can convince yourself that some neuroscientist or clinical biologist will unearth the magic bullet or bullets, the hoped-for “cocktail”, just in time, and we will be able to rectify this madness.
Madness is the nub of it. In the beginning, everyone – the patient and the people who love the patient – goes a little crazy. It’s only later, after you begin to see things better – not through the prism of denial or hope, but through statistics – that you realise none of those pills are likely to accomplish anything; that garden therapy and watercolour therapy cannot, in fact, heal damaged tissue; that the numbers cannot be spun. You are in a darkened room without doors or windows. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while; it’s The Long Read.
Fentanyl in the family
Ben Westhoff’s dive into the ‘deadliest wave of the opioid epidemic’ is the most frightening book of the year, and it’s mandatory reading.
Boulder County is far from immune to the national opioid epidemic. Whether it’s high-profile overdose deaths, like that of Eric Chase Bolling Jr., a 19-year-old CU student and son of former Fox News personality Eric Bolling in 2017, or the 33 arrests connected to suspected opioid trafficking, like the one in Longmont in July 2019, the reality of the crisis is never far away. In late 2017, President Donald Trump declared it a national health emergency, as the rate of overdose deaths nationwide increased 45% between 2016 and 2017 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2017 alone, 1,012 Coloradans died due to drug overdose, 57% of which involved an opioid as reported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. In Boulder County, 191 residents have died of an opioid overdose, either from prescription drugs or heroin, since 2010, which has led public health officials and law enforcement to pour increasing resources into fixing the problem.
As the story below describes, at the center of the crisis is the increase of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which can be 50 times as potent as heroin.
“It’s an incredibly dangerous drug,” says Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty. “It’s cheap to manufacture and easier to distribute because it’s harder to crack and detect. It’s also more difficult for people using the drug to understand or to know what they’re putting in their bodies.”
Boulder County is combating the crisis on two fronts, he says, first targeting the distribution of such drugs within the community and also focusing on substance abuse treatment and prevention.
In July, local law enforcement — with the help of the Drug Enforcement Agency — seized 1,472 counterfeit fentanyl pills in Longmont, along with other prescription drugs and methampetamine, and made 33 arrests. Although the case is still pending, Dougherty says his office is prioritizing such distribution cases.
On the other end, the DA supports Colorado’s defelonization of drug possession (see “High county defelonization,” Sept. 5) in an effort to divert people from the criminal justice system into treatment. Dougherty also correlates an increase in property crimes with increasing drug offenses, “because they’re trying to feed the addiction,” he says. He also believes more resources are needed within the community to keep people from touching the criminal justice system in the first place.
“Whether we address this addiction and take it head on because we’re compassionate and we want to help our fellow community members or we do it because we want to make sure that the crime rate doesn’t continue to rise,” he says, “either way, we need to give this all our energy and resources in Boulder County.”
—Angela K. Evans
First a spoiler alert: Among the multiple apocalyptic revelations in Ben Westhoff’s book, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, is sour news for all hard drug users, from casual weekend abusers to full-time cocaine cowboys. In light of developments presented in this epic book in gruesome and unprecedented fashion, putting questionable substances up your nose, in your veins, or even on your tongue is highly discouraged from here on in.
“Any drug where it’s a powder or a pill, you just can’t trust it,” Westhoff said in an interview about his latest project. “There can be fentanyl in anything … [Home drug-testing kits] are getting very sophisticated, and there are websites you can consult, but in terms of going to a party and someone offering you some blow or something like that, it’s over.”
Of course, many will not see this book or heed such warnings, and in tens of thousands of cases this year will steer directly off a cliff. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “among the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths estimated in 2017, the sharpest increase occurred among deaths related to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs (other synthetic narcotics) with more than 28,400 overdose deaths.”
When he started this endeavor nearly four years ago, Westhoff couldn’t have imagined those statistics. Fentanyl showed up and kicked the hinges off a prior psychedelic focus that turns up in trace amounts throughout the book but that is overshadowed by the eponymous grim reaper. Quoting a CDC report, Westhoff notes, “in 2013 the ‘third wave’ of the opioid epidemic began.” And “because of fentanyl, it is the most deadly one yet.” Focusing on urban Missouri in one especially harrowing chapter, he reports: “In 2012, St. Louis saw 92 opioid-related deaths, a number that rose to 123 in 2013 and up to 256 in 2017.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Desi Lydic meets with a restaurant owner who claims Yelp extorts businesses and one of Yelp’s community managers (and former “Bachelor”) Ben Flajnik who defends the company’s policies.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
We don’t know if VP Mike Pence is a participant or a patsy in the Ukraine scandal, so it’s time for a game of everyone’s favorite game show: Corrupt or Dumb.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s some commentary on a few sensational travel fails.
職人技的にフィット感を得るまる。Maru wishes for more fitting feeling.
FINALLY . . .
The Viral Video Game Where You Play a Horrible Goose
Honk!
Untitled Goose Game begins with a honk. A goose emerges from a bush, focused and ready, with no other purpose than to test the mettle of local villagers. The makers of this video game—the best-selling title for the Nintendo Switch as of this week—describe it as a “slapstick-stealth-sandbox” experience, in which players direct a bird to do mildly mean things to people as they go about their day. This rude creature shrieks at villagers, takes their things, and gets in their way, all while solving puzzles that grow more complex and twisted. The best encapsulation of the game comes in its tagline: “It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.”
The work of a tiny Melbourne studio called House House, Untitled Goose Game got its start as a gag on the messaging platform Slack. Two weeks after its official release, on September 20, the game is wildly popular and has already become a meme generator. It’s currently topping the lists for both all games and digital downloads for the Nintendo Switch, beating out recent releases from two megahit series, Dragon Quest and The Legend of Zelda. Goose is hardly the first indie game to resonate so strongly with people; another surprise best seller, Stardew Valley, which lets players realize their dreams of raising crops on a farm, has inspired a whole category of Etsy wares. But in contrast to that pleasant concept and to other classic titles that invite players to take up the hero’s mantle, Untitled Goose Game’s appeal lies in how it encourages people to be their petty selves.
The game is most gratifying when players devise the canniest, most unexpected, and most unnecessary ways to trick the poor villagers whose unfortunate assignment it is to share a world with this wicked waterfowl. Sneaking and cheating are game-play elements that get rewarded; being a bad goose is what it must feel like to be a card sharp, or a pool shark, or a Patriots fan. Though delightful, the game revealed its dark side to me early on. Like anyone else, I quietly endure tiny slights in my everyday life—when someone passes me abruptly in the bike lane or doesn’t hold the elevator—because I’m a socialized adult. But the goose knows no law, and through this avatar I can channel my silent screams into a cri de coeur. Honk! It can’t be healthy to take this much joy in harassing strangers, even if virtually.
A goose turns out to be a perfect vehicle for carrying out various misdeeds and misdemeanors. With its low frame and snaking neck, this bird is anatomically designed for snatching objects and causing mischief (its abilities in the game include honking, grabbing, crouching, and flapping). Players guide their goose through four open-ended, nonlinear stages: a garden, a market, a pub, and a pair of neighboring backyards. Gentle cel-shaded graphics, presented in an axonometric overhead view, are bright and legible, and each destination has its own set of puzzles. Accomplish a task or solve a puzzle, and a menu will show that you’ve crossed that item off that to-do list. (I should note that there’s no obligation to do any of this stuff; screeching at people is its own fun.) …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? I have absolutely no idea.