• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
A Brief History of TP, From Silk Road Hygiene to Pandemic Hoarding
An author’s end-game expertise has never been more timely.
The roll truth, and nothing but.
IN THE LATE 1190S, AT a former Han Dynasty military base in China called Xuanquanzhi, archaeologists excavated wall inscriptions and writings on silk that had been buried underground for more than 2,000 years. But some of the artifacts on which ancient Silk Road travelers left their mark came not so much from their minds as from their rear ends. In a latrine used between 111 and 109 BC, researchers discovered a trove of bamboo “wipe sticks,” each wrapped at one end with a bit of cloth—the oldest bum fodder on record.
Around the same time that sticks were doing their hygienic duty along the Silk Road, the Chinese invented paper. Initially produced and sold as a luxury good, paper had a wiping prowess that wouldn’t be discovered by members of the Imperial Court for another 700 years. Several hundred more years would pass until toilet paper began to show up outside of China, replacing cheap local hygiene solutions like leaves and shells in an effort to soothe beleaguered bums.
Today the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of toilet-paper appreciation. In the past several months, shoppers from the U.S. to Australia have been hoarding rolls by the cartful, as if it were the only thing between civilization and total chaos. But while nobody anticipated the current hysteria over toilet paper, human comfort has been tied for thousands of years to the objects we use for personal hygiene.
For his 2017 book, Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper, Richard Smyth went deep into the bowels of toilet-paper history, beginning with TP’s invention in China sometime around the sixth century. …
Patterns of pain: what Covid-19 can teach us about how to be human
We can expect psychological difficulties to follow as we come out of lockdown. But we have an opportunity to remake our relationship with our bodies, and the social body we belong to.
When lockdown started, I was confused by bodies on television. Why weren’t they socially distancing? Didn’t they know not to be so close? The injunction to be separate was unfamiliar and irregular, and for me, self-isolating alone, following this government directive was peculiar. It made watching dramas and programmes produced under normal filming conditions feel jarring.
Seven weeks in, the disjuncture has passed. I, like all of us, am accommodating to multiple corporeal realities: bodies alone, bodies distant, bodies in the park to be avoided, bodies of disobedient youths hanging out in groups, bodies in lines outside shops, bodies and voices flattened on screens and above all, bodies of dead health workers and carers. Black bodies, brown bodies. Working-class bodies. Bodies not normally praised, now being celebrated.
We are learning a whole new etiquette of bodies. We swerve around each other, hop into the near-empty street, calculate distances at entrances to parks, avoid body contact, even eye contact, and keep a look out for those obliviously glued to their phones, whose lack of attention threatens to breach the two-metre rule. It’s odd and disconcerting and isn’t quite second nature.
Until the pandemic arrived, many of us were finding texting, email and Whatsapp more suitable to our speeded-up lives. But now we are coming to reuse the telephone, and to enjoy the sounds in our ears and the rhythm of conversation, instead of feeling rushed and interrupted. A few of my sessions as a psychoanalyst are now conducted on the phone but, for the most part, I am spending my time looking into a screen, and seeing faces rather than whole bodies. Until I learned to turn off the view of myself, I, like others, was disconcerted by the oddness of catching sight of myself – a view I don’t think we are meant to see.
Neighbours social distancing in Syracuse, New York.
Conversations in therapy defy many of the customs of social intercourse. There are silences, repetitions, reframings, links across time, reminiscences of fragments, rushes of emotion, shards of dreams, things told and then disavowed. There can be fidgeting or absolute stillness. These form the idiosyncratic and personal ambience between each therapeutic couple. As a therapist, I am also alert to how the dilemmas that beset the person or the couple I am seeing are brought to our relationship. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
‘We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial.’
I’m a New York City subway conductor who had Covid-19. Now I’m going back to work.
Since March 27, at least 98 New York transit workers have died of Covid-19.
When I heard that a co-worker had died from Covid-19 — the first in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — on March 27, I thought, “It’s starting.” More deaths followed in quick succession, frequently more than once a day. Some of those people I used to see every day and fist bump.
On Facebook, when bad news comes, my co-workers and I express grief and offer condolences to the families. But our spontaneous response is the numb curiosity of an onlooker. We knew this was coming. We knew many among us wouldn’t make it through the pandemic.
Every day I see posts on the M.T.A. workers’ group pages striking a jaunty tone: “Oh Lord, here we go. I got the symptoms, see you all in 14 days. Or not.”
We work at the epicenter of the epicenter, with a mortality rate substantially higher than that of first responders. Common sense tells you that subway trains and platforms are giant vectors of this virus. We breathe it in along with steel dust. As a conductor, when I stick my head out of the car to perform the required platform observation, passengers in many stations are standing 10 inches from my face. At other times, they lean into the cab to ask questions. Bus drivers, whose passengers enter right in front of them, are even worse off. …
Into the dark: Can we escape from information overload?
We live in an age of infinite scrolling and endless interruptions. So what happens when you switch off the lights? Tom Lamont finds out.
One day in December 2016 a 37-year-old British artist named Sam Winston equipped himself with a step-ladder, a pair of scissors, several rolls of black-out cloth and a huge supply of duct tape, and set about a project he had been considering for some time. Slight and bearded, with large grey-blue eyes, Winston had moved to London from Devon in the late 1990s. He supported himself through his 20s and 30s by teaching, doing illustrations for magazines and selling larger, freer-form artworks, many of them pencil-drawn, to collectors and museums. He had just collaborated on a children’s book with author Oliver Jeffers, and done his part to propel “Child of Books” up the bestseller lists. Grateful as he was for commercial success, Winston found he disliked corporate publishing. All the emails! He saw himself as a lead-smudged idealist, an artist-hermit at heart. He’d been troubled by nervous energy and stress since he was young, was an intermittent insomniac, had difficulty filtering noise and distractions in public spaces, and was someone who – like so many of us – increasingly relied on his phone and computer. So Winston decided to hole up for a few days. No screens. No sun. No visual stimulation of any kind. He was going to spend some time alone in the dark.
It took him hours, climbing up and down the ladder in his studio, to cover every last aperture and pinprick of inbound light. The studio, in a converted factory in east London, has large tenement windows and a sloped roof inlaid with skylights that were especially tricky to seal. By Winston’s conservative estimate he used 200 metres of duct tape before he was fully satisfied that here, at last, was darkness. He would sit in it, drawing with pencil and paper, doing yoga, snacking a bit, waiting to see if the dark had any sort of palliative effect.
The world in the 21st century is no more richly textured or exotic to touch than it used to be. It smells about the same and there are no new flavours. Not since the coming of factories, then aeroplanes, domestic appliances and motorways has there been a serious uptick in sound pollution. Yet the spill of information and distraction that comes at us by eye has grown and grown ceaselessly for two decades, without any sign of a halt or plateau. DM! Breaking-news! Inbox (1)! This is a time of the scrolling, bottomless visual, when bus stops and the curved walls of Tube platforms play video adverts and grandma’s face swims onto a smartphone to say hi. People watch Oscar-nominated movies while standing in queues, their devices held at waist height. A Netflix executive can quip, semi-seriously, that he covets the hours we sleep (hours in which we do not, currently, stream Netflix shows). Apple has put an extra screen on our wrists and Google retains quiet hope that we will eventually wear a screen inside our specs. Big news lands in 140 characters or less, ideally with a startling picture or piece of video, else it doesn’t register as big news.
Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what’s-next-what’s-next of this world through our peepers. As an artist, Sam Winston was often on the lookout for topsy-turvy projects – weird, sidelong ways to unmoor familiar habits or nudge his work in new directions. He wanted to know what would happen, to him and to his work, if he hid away from the ocular blitz for a while. …
Weird Ways Science Is Screwed
Science is all about solving problems. How did we get here? How does that thing work? How many of those can I eat before dying? Except there are some problems that science isn’t capable of solving, namely because they’re problems with science itself …
4. The Svalbard Seed Vault is Screwed
Situated amid the arctic tundra, there’s a vault whose contents hold the key to surviving the apocalypse. Guns? Canned goods? Toilet paper? Please, God, let it be toilet paper. No, no, and no. It’s seeds. To be precise, the vault holds nearly a million seeds and grains, comprising 6,000+ species taken from all over the world — so that if/when the end comes, we can revert back to being agriculturists like our prehistoric ancestors, albeit without the dinosaurs.
In the years since this vault opened, however, the apocalypse has gone from being a fun thought exercise involving out-of-control nanomachines and supervolcanoes to something that’s staring us directly in the face. On the plus side, all those seeds, right?
Um, no, actually. As it turns out, the seed vault isn’t an impenetrable, indestructible fortress of solitude. Thanks to climate change, the permafrost on the island peninsula where the vault is located, is melting at an accelerated rate that scientists never could’ve predicted. It’s this permafrost that, along with the vault’s air conditioning system, helps to keep the seeds in stasis for when we need them.
“Couldn’t they put in a bigger air conditioning unit?” Maybe, but that’s not going to help much in the long-term. The loss of the surrounding snow, ice, and permafrost could also cause the vault to become structurally unstable, as has already happened to several nearby houses and structures, which have started to wobble as the icy bedrock which they’re anchored to has begun to melt.
And the vault is melting, by the way. In 2017, melted permafrost water flooded the main entryway into the vault, which damaged a bunch of electrical equipment and forced renovations totaling a cool (literally) $13 million. The seeds were safe the whole time because they’re secured behind a secondary vault door, but that shit is still concerning considering at the current rate, Svalbard is going to be between seven and ten degrees hotter by 2100.
Put it this way; don’t get too attached to carbs. …
UNRELATED: Why Trump Can Just Get Away With It
Yesterday, Attorney General and real-life stand-in for Kapp’n from Animal Crossing, William Barr dropped charges against Michael Flynn.
If you can’t remember back far enough in the 10,000 years of this administration, Michael Flynn was the first guy to get indicted during the Russia investigations and even plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Understandably, you might be thinking, “This is outrageous! How can the Trump administration get away with this?” Or maybe you’re so used to Trump blatantly abusing the powers of the presidency without repercussion as he did with Ukraine and Russia, that by now you’re resigned to thinking “at least history will judge him.” We wouldn’t be so sure of that either.
AG Bill Barr speaks to CBS about Flynn.
CBS: When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?
Barr: Well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who's writing the history. pic.twitter.com/aJomw4Da7A
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) May 7, 2020
In the interview above, Barr is asked, “When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?” Barr responds, “Well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.” He then chuckles his goomba-shaped head, and it makes you want to scream with every ounce of your soul and stomp him into nothing because he’s right. History is written by the winners, and history may very well give this administration a pass as it has done for so many fucked-up things before.
Let’s think back to the Iran/Contra scandal circa 100,000 BC (Before COVID), and if you’re having trouble remembering that one, here’s a song.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council secretly used the money gained from Iranian arms deals to fund the Contras, an anti-insurgency group in Nicaragua. The press found out, and North took the fall for Reagan as Reagan denied he knew anything about it, much like Trump denied knowing all about the various people within his circle having secret meetings with the Russians. Oliver North’s charges ended up getting dismissed, and he was as recently as last year President of The NRA with no one really giving a shit. Reagan also ignored the AIDS epidemic well past the point of it being too late — hey, sounds like another guy we know — and again, he is now basically deified as the GOAT of the GOP. …
Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years
At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is his story.
Evergreen forest in fog Lower Hadlock Pond trail Acadia National Park Maine USA.
Christopher Knight was only 20 years old when he walked away from society, not to be seen again for more than a quarter of a century. He had been working for less than a year installing home and vehicle alarm systems near Boston, Massachusetts, when abruptly, without giving notice to his boss, he quit his job. He never even returned his tools. He cashed his final pay cheque and left town.
Knight did not tell anyone where he was going. “I had no one to tell,” he says. “I didn’t have any friends. I had no interest in my co-workers.” He drove down the east coast of America, eating fast food and staying in cheap motels – “the cheapest I could find”. He travelled for days, alone, until he found himself deep into Florida, sticking mostly to major roads, watching the world go by.
Eventually, he turned around and headed north. He listened to the radio. Ronald Reagan was president; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had just occurred. Driving through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia, blessed with invincibility of youth, buzzed by “the pleasure of driving”, he sensed an idea growing into a realisation, then solidifying into resolve.
All his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision.
He drove north to Maine, where he had grown up. There aren’t many roads in the centre of the state, and he chose the one that went right by his family’s house. “I think it was just to have one last look around, to say goodbye,” he said. He didn’t stop. The last time he saw his family home was through the windscreen of his car.
He kept going, “up and up and up”. Soon he reached the shore of Moosehead Lake, the largest in Maine, and the point where the state begins to get truly remote. “I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that.” He went as far into the wilderness as his vehicle could take him.
Knight parked the car and tossed the keys on the centre console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, with no particular place in mind, he stepped into the trees and walked away.
A forest tree canopy in Rockport, Maine.
…
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman.
A still from the 1963 film of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.
When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.
This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us? …
Experience: I found a stranger in my front room
My immediate reaction was fear. I bent down and shouted at him. He bolted upright, spluttering and looking a bit wild.
Mikey Lennon near his home at Kilmarnock, Scotland.
It was early on a Monday morning, about 5.30am, and I’d got up to use the toilet. Afterwards, I nipped into the kitchen to get a drink. As I stood at the sink, I could hear snoring from the living room. At first I thought it was the dog. Then I realised it wasn’t. I went into the room to find a stranger asleep on the sofa. He was wearing a grey Adidas tracksuit and, bizarrely, only one shoe. I stood there in my shorts and T-shirt, staring at him.
My immediate reaction was fear. I live in a modern block of four flats on a busy road in Kilmarnock, about 20 miles south of Glasgow. The main door to the block is a buzzer-entry, secure entrance. My front door is also locked and the dog, a labradoodle called Molly, normally barks like anything when anyone comes through the door. You’d have to really know what you were doing to break in.
My eldest daughter lives with me, and my younger girls, Emily and Eva, stay regularly, and were with me that night. I ran upstairs to check on them. All good – they were asleep. I was determined to resolve this calmly. I didn’t want the girls waking up to find a disturbance or any unpleasantness.
I went back downstairs, took a deep breath and composed myself. I decided to wake the stranger. I went over and gave him a wee shake. “Hey,” I said. He just grunted at me. I gave him a bigger shake. He roused a bit, but I could tell he was hammered.
I bent down and shouted at him. He bolted upright, spluttering and looking a bit wild. He asked me who I was. I asked him how he’d got in, but he just looked confused. He asked me what town he was in. When I told him he was in Kilmarnock, he looked shocked. It turned out he was from Dalkeith, 70 miles away.
We swore loudly together and laughed. I asked him for about the fourth time how he’d got into my house. He said he had no idea. Then he looked at his feet. He asked me if I had his other shoe. By this time I was properly laughing and my fear had disappeared. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
With so much misinformation floating around, you may feel like you don’t know something for a fact…you just know it’s true.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
In his editorial New Rule, Bill questions the timing of sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden and argues that, while serious, they could end up doing more harm than good.
From “it’s a hoax” to “nobody knew,” here’s a timeline of Trump’s coronavirus response
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まるの頭にスープが少しついていたので、はながキレイにしてくれました。
Some soup of dinner on Maru’s head, so Hana licks and cleans his head.
More American retailers are doing their part to help protect our most vulnerable populations. Hear how Walgreens stores nationwide will now be open from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. exclusively for brain-dead morons who have no fucking clue how to maintain a safe distance from their fellow shoppers.
FINALLY . . .
In the Era of COVID-19, Fieldwork Is Scrappy and Socially Distant
And sometimes involves storing dead fish in your in-laws’ freezer.
Once the experiments are set up, humans can hang back for a while. This cage was placed in peaceful Cedar Lake, British Columbia, in 2015.
IF MAY 2020 WAS LIKE any other spring, Daniel Bolnick, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, would be wrapping up a semester of teaching and preparing to head into the field. He and as many as two-dozen collaborators would be fanning out to sites in Alaska and Canada’s Vancouver Island, where they would traverse lush forests with snow-capped mountains in the distance, and splosh into lakes and streams.
By day, they would wade into the cold water to study threespine stickleback—metallic little fish that measure approximately two inches long and weigh a little more than a penny—and investigate ecology, evolution, and immunology, focusing on, among other things, the comparatively enormous parasites that hunker down inside the fish. (Picture a translucent gummy worm about half the mass of the unfortunate stickleback itself. Or wince at the thought of a 150-pound human wandering around with a 75-pound worm wriggling inside them.)
At night, the whole team would crash in a cozy cabin, with people sleeping wherever they could find room—on the couch, on the porch, in hammocks in the nearby woods. “In a normal year, it’s fun and entertaining, and people get along well, so it works,” Bolnick says. “But cramming 10 people into a 600-square-foot cabin would not be a good idea right now, to say the least.”
In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, nothing is normal—including seasonal fieldwork. Bolnick and his team, like many researchers around the world, are scrambling to figure out how to make it happen in the era of social distancing. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
70% of the Earth is covered in water and 70% of the rest is covered in bullshit.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 8, 2020
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs amid bits of plastic flapping in the wind. The other bird is away, probably looking for something tasty to kill for their morning repast.
Yesterday I was the delivery boy. It was nice to get out and see people at their homes. It felt surreal wearing a mask the whole time.