Crazed, Quarantined Mental Health Experts Recommend Scrawling ïEverything Will Be OkayÍ In Feces On Wall https://t.co/ZPDDy3nosx pic.twitter.com/OmrSlYb0Yo
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 18, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How Museums Will Eventually Tell the Story of COVID-19
Masks, ventilators, and Zoom recordings may one day be the artifacts of our time.
The New-York Historical Society’s collection of COVID-19 objects will eventually include these homemade masks, stitched by Heidi Nakashima.
IN EARLY MARCH, AS NEW York City braced for the spread of the novel coronavirus, hand sanitizer began flying off store shelves. That’s when Margi Hofer, museum director at the New-York Historical Society, got an email about it. Rebecca Klassen, the museum’s associate curator of material culture, sent her a note remarking on the scarcity, and how precious it seemed. She wrote, “Purell has become liquid gold,” Hofer remembered. Nervous shoppers were treating the alcohol-based product as a talisman, and the museum staff decided—to help tell the story of the pandemic—that they ought to add a bottle to the collection.
As the virus spreads, many cultural institutions have locked their doors to help slow transmission. Most staff members are working from home, while visitors explore galleries digitally, from a distance. Meanwhile, the pandemic has already claimed more than 10,000 lives in New York City, and killed more than 148,000 people worldwide. It is baldly, undeniably historic—and that means that institutions are hurrying to collect artifacts that tell the story of this scary, scattered time.
Many museums are collecting digital images of handwritten signs outside businesses. The New-York Historical Society is in the process of acquiring this one.
It’s a strange moment to be adding to a collection: Future exhibits aren’t necessarily always front of mind for either remote employees or potential donors, all of whom may be caring for sick family members, home-schooling their kids, and trying to stay healthy—and some institutions are also just trying to stay afloat. After the City Reliquary, a community museum in Brooklyn, put its in-person programming on pause, it let go of its only paid employee, says Dave Herman, the museum’s founder. The growing work to collect COVID-19 ephemera is a labor of a dozen or so passionate volunteers. (The museum is migrating paid events online.) The vast majority of the staff of the New-York Historical Society, in Manhattan, is currently remote. The 10 people working on the “History Responds” project—the effort to crowdsource objects relating to seismic events as they play out in real-time—have fanned out to at least three states, and stay in touch through emails and the occasional Zoom meeting. “It’s a very busy effort,” Hofer says. “It just happens, right now, to be very geographically dispersed.”
Collecting during a pandemic means that curators must grapple with both practical challenges and thorny moral questions. Herman would like the City Reliquary to eventually collect face masks, which have become a ubiquitous sight in Brooklyn and all over the world, but, he says, “we certainly don’t want to take masks off of people’s faces right now to make sure they go into an archive.” (Several museums, including the New-York Historical Society, have donated the protective garb that conservators wear, including face masks and latex gloves, to medical staff.) Scouting for artifacts “is not an essential service at this particular moment,” Herman adds. “But when we look back, it will be essential to see how this has affected us.” …
The Second Phase of Unemployment Will Be Harsher
For American workers displaced by recession, widespread public sympathy soon gives way to moralizing anger.
In the past few weeks the United States has witnessed an unprecedented spike in jobless claims that has overwhelmed state agencies. Alongside a health crisis and an economic crisis, we are now entering into a devastating period of mass unemployment, one that—decades of research tell us—will leave deep financial and psychological scars for the workers and families trapped within it. Today, Americans across party lines recognize the need to act quickly to minimize this harm, but that bipartisan support will soon fade, as it has in past recessions. If Congress and state governments are going to pass forward-thinking legislation to help unemployed and precariously employed workers, now is the time.
Having researched the experiences of unemployed workers over the past 20 years, we expect that the coming unemployment crisis will have two distinct phases. In the first phase, the country will largely respond with a sense of solidarity and compassion for the millions who have lost their jobs. Americans will recognize that external forces—the coronavirus and government policies to create social distance—have triggered these mass layoffs, and they will see the plight of unemployed workers in that light.
Those who lose their jobs will struggle to make ends meet in a stand-still economy, but they will at least be spared some of the blame leveled against the jobless in other economic downturns. When more than 20 million people file for unemployment in a month, even the hard-hearted will have trouble casting them as idlers or parasites. As a result, there should be sufficient political will to continue generous government support—perhaps even expanding upon the $2 trillion stimulus package that Congress recently passed, which dramatically boosts unemployment benefits and extends them to gig workers and other people who normally don’t qualify.
Eventually, the outbreak will subside, and economic conditions will improve. Yet, for workers who remain unemployed, the situation will worsen. We are likely to see a repeat of the unemployment crisis of the Great Recession—but the underlying dynamics will be amplified. …
SOMEWHAT RELATED: CEOs, not the unemployed, are America’s real ‘moral hazard’
Many Republicans believe economic relief for those without jobs encourages slacking off. But it is corporations that are bailed out again and again.
The coronavirus relief enacted by Congress is barely reaching Americans in need.
This week, checks of up to $1,200 are being delivered through direct-deposit filings with the Internal Revenue Service. But low-income people who have not directly deposited their taxes won’t get them for weeks or months. Worse yet, the US treasury is allowing banks to seize payments to satisfy outstanding debts.
Meanwhile, most of the promised $600 weekly extra unemployment benefits remain stuck in offices now overwhelmed with claims.
None of this seems to bother conservative Republicans, who believe all such relief creates what’s called “moral hazard” – the risk that government benefits will allow people to slack off. …
‘We’ve been abandoned’: a decade later, Deepwater Horizon still haunts Mexico
BP denied the oil reached Mexico, but fisherman and scientists knew it wasn’t true. Ten years on, Mexican communities haven’t received a cent in compensation.
A merchant weighs shrimp while fishermen talk and arrive to sell product by the edge of a lagoon in Tamiahua, Veracruz, on 27 February.
Erica Ríos Martínez grew-up in a riverside community filled with food and fiestas thanks to a booming fishing industry which supported tens of thousands of families across the Gulf of Mexico.
After high school, Ríos Martínez moved to a nearby town for college which she financed by selling blue crabs, shrimp and tilapia fished by her father in the Tamiahua lagoon – an elongated coastal inlet famed for its abundant shellfish.
But fish stocks began to decline in 2011 across the Gulf – the year after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 200 miles north of Mexican territory. The offshore rig sank and released almost 5m barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days. Oil plumes coated hundreds of miles of shoreline, causing catastrophic damage to marine life, coral reefs and birds.
Amid public and political outrage in the US, BP took full responsibility for the worst oil spill of the 20th century, which killed 11 crew members and injured 17 others. The company has paid out $69bn, including more than $10bn to affected fishermen and businesses.
But BP denied the oil reached Mexico, claiming the ocean current propelled the huge spill in the opposite direction. However, fishermen and Mexican scientists knew this wasn’t true. …
Unassuming Small Businesses That Hid Big-Time Scams
It’s always kind to frequent small businesses, but there’s always the risk that they might turn out to be running game on you. You can’t be sure that rustic veggie stand isn’t selling cherry tomatoes that are just spray painted ping-pong balls. And any stay at a charming little B&B runs the possibility of the owner’s inbred bat-son frantically licking the other side of your room’s secret two-way mirror.
Now while those concerns might seem unlikely, some unremarkable small shops and businesses truly were hiding some twisted grifts …
5. An Online Glasses Retailer Waged A Campaign Of Harassment Against Its Own Customers To Boost Its Search Rankings
DecorMyEyes was an online eyeglasses retailer run by New Yorker/Grand Theft Auto side-character Vitaly Borker. The company resold “designer” glasses and sunglasses using a bizarre scam that thrust countless unsuspecting buyers into an actual horror movie. According to Borker, the company started legit until he lost his temper and snapped at a few customers. To his surprise, their negative reviews caused his search rankings to improve. It pointed out a hole in Google’s algorithm — they boosted your search ranking the more your site was discussed, regardless of it being positive or negative. And so he began a bizarre reign of terror against his own customers.
As soon as a shopper complained about his shitty knockoffs, Borker would go completely insane. He would call them up and scream at them, bombard them with emails and fake lawsuits, harass them at 3 AM, and fraudulently charge their card. He told one buyer he would chop his legs off, threatened another with rape, and sent a third person intimidating photos of her house from Google Earth. Poor people that just wanted some goddamn RayBans found themselves dealing with the online equivalent of Robert de Niro in Cape Fear. All the while, Borker was basically daring them to complain online. So they did.
Social media and review sites quickly filled with nightmarish warnings never to do business with DecorMyEyes. Whole communities formed for the victims to comfort each other, only for Borker to show up and taunt them on forums. Soon, just Googling “DecorMyEyes” would turn up pages and pages of horror stories, which was precisely what Borker wanted since he was counting on the constant negative discussion to boost his site up the search rankings. And it worked.
See people don’t actually try to buy glasses by Googling some random reseller, so they never saw the DecorMyEyes reviews. Instead, buyers would search for the name of a luxury glasses brand, which would turn up the DecorMyEyes page as the top result, often above the designer’s own site. Borker was also careful to attack only a few shoppers per month, keeping him below the complaints threshold for being banned by most credit card companies.
He kept this up for years until the New York Times did a story exposing the whole thing. Borker subsequently went to prison, while Google changed its algorithm to be slightly better at discouraging pure evil. …
UNRELATED: We’re Finally Free To Breathe In All The Mercury We Want!
I cannot tell you how happy I am now that my Big Genius president has finally granted me the freedom past FASCIST presidents had stripped from me: The freedom to breathe in all the wonderful mercury my lungs can handle before they turn into a light-brown chunky puddle, like chocolate milk left out in the summer sun. Thank you, Mister President, for loosening EPA regulations on the mercury that oil and coal-fired plants can release. The fact that it’s happening during a viral pandemic that puts people with respiratory conditions in particular danger just couldn’t be better timing, as I have a lot of enemies with respiratory problems (I will avenge my losses to the elderly at BINGO. I must.).
When I step outside my front door, I like to take a big, deep breath of air laced with heavy metals that can cause what some derogatorily call “brain damage” but what I call “cutting the brain fat.”
To anyone who doesn’t want to breathe in delicious air that can ruin your eyes, skin, gastrointestinal tract, blowout your kidneys, weaken your immune system, and short circuit your nervous system, simply breathe other air. We like choice in America. Clean air is nice, but with this bold re-freedoming of the air, President Trump has put the power in my trembling hands (another side effect of mercury inhalation) and brought me one step closer to achieving my dream of one day becoming this guy from the end of Robocop. …
Scientists Announce They Have Probably Successfully Taught Sign Language To Snakes https://t.co/ilEMq6U28I pic.twitter.com/JEOWeDO7p1
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 18, 2020
Five fishermen, a stormy night and £53m of cocaine: were the Freshwater Five wrongly convicted?
A decade ago, the fishermen were sentenced to a total of 104 years in prison. Now, new evidence suggests they are innocent.
Daniel Payne, 45, one of the crew members, was convicted but is now out on licence.
The first arrests took place on the harbour at Yarmouth, the cobbled, picture-book port that lies on the Isle of Wight’s quieter western side. It was a Sunday evening, 30 May 2010, almost a decade ago, but Nicky Green still sees it in Technicolor. She was working in Salty’s, the family’s restaurant just yards from the marina. “It was the bank holiday weekend and we were absolutely stacked,” she says. Her parents were serving behind the bar, her daughter was waiting tables and her younger brother, Jamie, a 42-year-old fisherman, was out on the quay, just back from sea. “I’d called and asked him to bring in some lobsters,” Nicky recalls. “I was expecting him to walk through the door when someone told me he’d been arrested.”
In the moment, she was too busy to follow it up. “I was juggling the food, the crowds, the tables, and I knew Jamie was having an issue with some other fishermen – they were accusing each other of pinching lobster pots, and he was dodging the CID guy trying to deal with it. I thought this was fishermen bickering. I never on this Earth thought it was serious. How would I have ever imagined the gravity?”
But Jamie Green never came back. A year later, on 2 June 2011, Green, his crew of three – Scott Birtwistle, Daniel Payne and Zoran Dresic, as well as Jonathan Beere, a local scaffolder – were found guilty of conspiracy to import class A drugs. Their sentences, a combined total of 104 years, reflected the scale of the haul: a fisherman had found 250kg of cocaine worth an estimated £53m roped together in holdalls and floating in the island’s Freshwater Bay.
Nicky Green, whose brother Jamie was one of the five men found guilty of conspiracy to import class A drugs.
The men, now known as the Freshwater Five, were not typical multimillion-pound drug smugglers. They had no previous convictions relating to drugs or dishonesty, no forensic evidence linked them to the cocaine, and a Proceeds of Crime Act inquiry assessed their gains from criminality at zero. They did not lead lavish lifestyles, and how they planned to distribute such a quantity of drugs was not made clear. The case has rocked the island, dividing friends, family and fishermen. While Birtwistle and Payne are out on licence, the remaining three men are nine years into 24-year sentences. Now new evidence means their case is coming back to the appeal court, a chance for all five to clear their names. …
Take me to your Lada: Cuba’s passion for a little Russian box
The rugged Soviet-era car is 50 years old – and in Havana, classic models still sell for the price of a house.
A couple kiss between two classic Ladas in Havana.
Landy is a stylish man. He has an ageing crooner’s slicked-back hair, the short-sleeved cool of a Miami Beach architect, and a terrible, terrible Lada car.
He’s my go-to chofer in Havana, which sounds a little grand, but it’s more economical than buying one of these babies, which will set you back £15,000. It’s also why, despite the windows having no handles (a wrench is passed back) and the rear seat containing a loose spring like an unkind proctologist, Landy fusses over it like a baby.
For this little blue car completes his look. On this island better known for its American incredible hulks, it marks him out as a member of the Ladaocracia, Cuba’s revolutionary Lada aristocracy.
It’s 50 years to the day since the first Lada ran off the production line in Tolyatti, a Russian company town – also known as Togliatti – on a bend in the Volga. That means it’s also three days until the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose centenary that moment celebrated.
Havana resident Leandro Cueto poses for a portrait with his prized 1986 model, which he has owned since new.
A collaboration between the Soviet state and Italy’s Fiat, the Lada was the vision of designers who set out to make these small cars virtually indestructible. The result was the Zhiguli, a bulked-up Fiat 124, that even poets have struggled to describe as anything other than “boxy”. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
This week’s good news: people dress up to take out the trash, the quarantine Olympics are on, and Dr. Fauci might be People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
ベイビーチワワの家に不法侵入したら怒られた！？
As Maru intruded into the house of Baby Chihuahua, he was scolded by the Baby Chihuahua!?
FINALLY . . .
Hear the Soundscapes of Cities Transformed
“It is, in a word, quiet.”
Times Square, almost entirely empty, March 18, 2020.
DEEP IN OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK LIES one of the least noise-polluted places in the United States, maybe the world. The distant drone of the Hoh River fills the valley, as the piercing song of Swainson’s thrush bounces around 800-year-old Sitka spruce trees, a cathedral-like reverberation. It is home to One Square Inch of Silence, a research project started by nature sound recordist Gordon Hempton to protect and preserve the rare ecosystem from noise pollution. I took Atlas Obscura to this magical place in 2018 for a collaboration with NPR’s All Things Considered. The Hoh Rainforest remains a special, transformative place in part because of the way it forces you to listen, really listen, to the world around. And it highlights some of what we are all experiencing today. The sonic landscape has changed. Even in the biggest, most densely populated cities, amid the uncertainty and suffering of the pandemic, people are beginning to hear something entirely new.
I am a nature sound recordist. Yes, that is a job. I seek out and record sounds that get used in movies, television, video games, and apps. I capture the sounds of factories, mines, farms, and cities around the world, but I specialize in trying to document the pristine, sans-human world. Recording the uninterrupted sounds of nature in our industrialized world is difficult, if not nearly impossible. All you have to do is look at a map of air-traffic patterns to grasp how few places in the world are truly quiet—even in Olympic National Park, a plane flies overhead every 15 to 20 minutes during peak traffic. It’s amazing how much we’ve just grown accustomed to the noise. I work to protect the few remaining “quiet” places through a nonprofit called Quiet Parks International.
The author with his recording equipment in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park.
Like many people around the world, my professional life has been upended by COVID-19. Each day we see news of the rising death toll, economic turmoil, and social isolation—the new constants of our lives. But there are also moments of connection and grace: people smiling and waving from across the street, check ins with neighbors we may not have spoken to before, expressions of support for healthcare workers, first responders, and other essential workers. It seems like there’s nothing that hasn’t been affected by this crisis, including the way the entire world sounds. It is, in a word, quiet.
Passenger air traffic has declined dramatically, streets are almost empty, and most people are staying home. I live just south of Yellowstone National Park, where the population density is just six people per square mile. Even in this normally quiet place, I’ve noticed an incredible change in my sonic surroundings. On a hike I took last week, I heard two planes in three hours, compared with one every 10 minutes or so under normal circumstances. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Geneticists Debate Ethics Of Cloning Humans And Forcing Them To Fight To Death In Pit For Our Amusement https://t.co/9m4HUu6rsC pic.twitter.com/eq8JMLjKwk
— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 19, 2020
NEED SOMETHING ELSE barely uninteresting at all to do? Google suggests the Fall of Civilizations Podcast.
Fall of Civilizations tells the story of what happens when societies collapse.
Each episode, we look at a civilization that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. We ask: Why did it collapse? What happened next? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time?