• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Library-Themed Livestream Where Birds Stretch Their Wings
A little “library” that’s literally for the birds.
Shh! This is a library!
in Virginia, there’s food everywhere and droppings on the floor. Sometimes, visitors stand on the reception desk and squabble with abandon.
Welcome to Bird Library, a large bird feeder designed to resemble a public reading room, where feathered patrons from finches to sparrows (and the occasional squirrel) congregate. Perched in a backyard in the city of Charlottesville, it is the passion project of librarian Rebecca Flowers and woodworker Kevin Cwalina, who brought together their skills and interests to showcase the lives of their backyard birds.
“Both of us have a love for birds, but once we set up the library we really got into it, making up stories for them,” Flowers says. When she noticed that mourning doves look like they’re wearing blue eyeshadow, for example, she created a character named Miss Dove. “I imagine her as a children’s librarian who doesn’t actually like children. We have pictures of her being lazy or making some strange faces.”
Flowers and Cwalina created Bird Library five years ago after they discovered the Piip-Show, a now-defunct live feed of a birdhouse decorated as a coffee bar that became one of Norway’s most popular TV broadcasts. Their feeder can likewise be observed on a 24/7 livestream, and its activity followed on a website where the couple regularly posts photographs of particularly comical or rare encounters. Recent visitors have included a striking rose-breasted grosbeak, a cardinal that looks like it’s vaping, and a trio of mourning doves seemingly caught in a serious meeting. Cwalina rebuilt and expanded the library last year, but the original one featured miniature, handmade books that common grackles would steal and leave scattered around the yard. …
Annals of Gastronomy: How Apples Go Bad
The closer an apple is to rot, the more rot it spreads—one spoiling apple speeds the rot of every apple it touches, and even of ones it doesn’t touch.
There’s a few bad apples that are giving law enforcement a terrible name.—Robert O’Brien, the national-security adviser
An apple tree in bloom is a thing of majesty: armlike branches, held aloft in an eternal pose of praise (or perhaps exasperation), wreathed in a stippled cloud of blossoms. Bees rest on the flowers’ quivering stamens to sip their golden nectar, then move in drunken joy to another tree, their legs and backs powdered with pollen. When the pollen from one tree’s flower meets the pistil of the flower of another, a small miracle of creation occurs. Apples take months to grow: the fruit from a flower fertilized in April may not reach maturity until October or November. Only then will it begin to ripen.
All apples are born from members of the same species, Malus domestica, but, in a manner more familiar to us in Animalia than Plantae, their offspring don’t grow true from seed: the child of a round, speckled Winesap and a muscular Gravenstein might resemble one or both of its parents, or it might go off on a path entirely of its own. The calculated sweetness of a Honeycrisp, the astonishing ruby flesh of a Pink Pearl, the early ripening of a Carolina Red June, the bumps and warts of a Knobbed Russet—there are thousands and thousands of named cultivars and innumerable varieties unnamed.
Perhaps owing to these gonzo genetics, apples are remarkably susceptible to disease and rot. Their tender skin and light flesh are a haven for small creatures. Their trees embrace myriad molds, viruses, and fungi: apple scab, black pox, southern blight, union necrosis. For farmers and hobby gardeners, the business of apple-growing is not so much aiding the fruits in their growth as scrambling to ward off their demise. Blight spreads quickly, and it’s not always apparent on the fruit’s surface. Even without the influence of invader or infection, an apple abets its own spoilage: its skin, minutely porous, exhales ethylene, a gaseous compound that induces ripening, and the fruit has no interest in stopping at the point where it serves our needs. …
RELATED:
‘He just doesn’t get it’: has Trump been left behind by America’s awakening on racism?
The killing of George Floyd has been a turning point for for everyone but the president – who has seldom been so isolated from his own party and the public.
Longtime observers of Donald Trump have often compared him to an old man sitting at the end of a bar, holding forth with crazed opinions, overwhelming self-assurance and taboo-busting shock value guaranteed to draw a crowd.
Now, perhaps for the first time, it seems the US president may have lost the room.
Trump’s sixth sense for striking populist notes appears to have deserted him in the wake of the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, sparking Black Lives Matter protests nationwide.
Over the last three weeks the president has found himself on the wrong side of public opinion – and history – on everything from police reform to symbols of the Confederacy which fought a civil war to preserve slavery 150 years ago. Even a sport synonymous with his base, Nascar (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), is on a different wavelength having banned the Confederate flag from its events.
Some presidents capture a moment and give voice to a movement. At this time of national reckoning, however, Trump seems to have hit the wrong notes, out of tune with much (if not all) of the rest of the nation. …
The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You This
Peddle misinformation. Cry “conspiracy” when no one else reports it. Repeat.
This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.
IT IS STRANGE TO WATCH the creation of a new culture-war meme in real time. Talking directly to the camera from a fishing trawler, Nigel Farage takes a concerned and somber tone. The pro-Brexit politician says he has uncovered a huge scandal—migrant boats traveling from France to England, escorted into British waters by the French navy. He is worried for those on board: Once in Britain, they risk becoming “modern-day slave labor.” Gesturing offscreen, Farage adds: “You might as well have a big sign on the White Cliffs of Dover, over there, that says ‘Anyone that comes to Britain illegally can stay’ … We are being taken for a ride by everybody, including the French navy.”
Farage is a well-known figure in Britain, thanks to his leadership of the U.K. Independence Party, and then his own Brexit Party. Since Brexit was secured, he has reinvented himself as the closest thing Britain has to a Rush Limbaugh–style provocateur. His video has more than 250,000 views on YouTube, and has also been distributed to his 1.5 million Twitter followers and 974,000 Facebook followers. To put those figures in context, after years of decline and a precipitous drop caused by the coronavirus lockdown, no British newspaper now has a circulation as large as Farage’s Twitter following. Social media gives him the reach of a traditional media organization, but few of its obligations.
If you want to understand the conspiracist turn in modern politics, then Farage’s video series, shot during the pandemic, is a good place to start. His reports on migrant boats coming to Britain are filed on his YouTube channel under “Investigations” and are designed to look like traditional investigative journalism. They even adopt the tropes of British television-news reporting—the sad, falling intonation; the piece to camera; the languorous establishing shots of the sea.
They are, however, better seen as a dare: Unless media outlets repeat and amplify whatever he says, they are “sneering” and corrupt. Farage’s videos tell a simple story, with a victim—Britain, which is “being taken for a ride”—and a villain: not the migrants themselves, which might trigger accusations of racism, but France, a country typically presented in British folk mythology as arrogant and lazy. (Look at them with their short working weeks and their Gauloise-smoking intellectuals!) …
Don’t Take ‘Karen’ Away From Us
The name Karen has really blown up lately, hasn’t it? The “entitled white woman angry that she’s not getting her way” nickname has been making waves the last few months on social media. Blame quarantine boredom or that, lately, certain white women have gone nuts when asked politely by essential workers to put on masks or wait for their food like normal people. Whatever the reason, recently everyone’s had a joke about a Karen they know. We all get a great laugh out of it.
Which feels righttttttt about the time when white people take a good thing and ruin it for everyone.
See, “Karen” can technically be considered AAVE (African American Vernacular English) because it was a term created by black people to describe the angry racist white woman you tried your best to avoid completely. It’s quite similar to the old Miss Ann pejorative black people used to use to describe the Karens back in the day. Miss Anns were the wives and daughters of slave owners and mustache-twirling old-timey racists. The twist is that these women were just as violently racist as the white men in their lives, but usually hid their venom behind their “white female fragility.” For example, Carolyn Bryant making up lies about Emmitt Till, resulting in his brutal murder; this would be the Miss Ann version of a Karen calling the cops on a black man today, and it ending in his death. Both involve a white woman deciding to endanger a black man’s life just for shits and giggles.
Like a lot of words in AAVE, terms like Miss Ann and Karen isn’t just an inside joke; it’s a defense mechanism. A warning call. And just like a lot of words in AAVE, white people have enjoyed its popularity and begun using it (incorrectly) to appear cooler. Lately, shitty white men have started using it to describe any white woman determined to stand her ground, which makes the woman in me go “uh oh.” …
RELATED: Hell, Yes, Disney Should Overhaul ‘Splash Mountain’
Across the world, people are demanding that monuments associated with colonial oppression and racism be torn down — and apparently Disneyland is no exception. Fans are calling on Disney to overhaul their Splash Mountain ride, which is full of animatronic characters from the controversial racist 1946 movie Song of the South. Some Disney afficianos, on the other hand, are outraged at the outrage. There are already several YouTube videos dismissing the controversy. After all, it’s just a fun ride featuring harmless cartoon characters, right?
Well, not exactly. First of all, the top comment on that video features the famous aphorism: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But there’s a big difference between learning about history and enjoying a log ride full of robotic cartoon characters. It’s highly doubtful that anyone is spending their time on Splash Mountain somberly reflecting on the horrors of slavery. Secondly, there’s a weird disconnect between Disney restricting access to the movie Song of the South while celebrating its characters in theme parks all over the world. Why even have a ride featuring characters no child could possibly recognize? You may as well fill Splash Mountain with the California Raisins and Joe Camel.
By maintaining the cartoon elements of Song of the South, which blended animation with live-action segments set on a Southern plantation, Disney seems to be suggesting that those characters are somehow divorced from the movie’s controversy. You can literally still buy Song of the South plush toys at the Disney Store. But this isn’t totally accurate. The movie was based on the written work of Joel Chandler Harris, who penned books about the fictional Black storyteller Uncle Remus and his yarns featuring the wily Br’er Rabbit.
But these stories didn’t just pop into Harris’ head…
How cities can reimagine their police forces and still fight crime
THEN WHAT?
Police in Washington during protests on May 30.
FROM OUR OBSESSION Being Human
We’ve never been as connected, or as isolated.
Over the weekend, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members said they would tweeted on June 4. “We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due.”
For now, council members are looking at studies and other examples to figure out what’s next. And they’re unlikely to be alone. At US protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, “defund the police” has become a rallying cry.
As a call to action, defund the police can have a variety of meanings.”Dismantle, disinvest, defund, redirect, abolish—there may be some subtle differences between these… [but] there are some themes underneath them,” says Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University. “You’d be hard pressed to find an abolitionist position,” Skogan says. (Camden, New Jersey is one of very few locales that has disbanded and restarted its police force from scratch.) “So it’s all really a question of the adjustments that need to be made.”
Those adjustments can have a major impact. Past examples show that reimagining the police—in particular the organization’s scope and function—can make them more effective at fighting crime, and at earning the trust of their communities. …
America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic
Businesses are reopening. Protests are erupting nationwide. But the virus isn’t done with us.
After months of deserted public spaces and empty roads, Americans have returned to the streets. But they have come not for a joyous reopening to celebrate the country’s victory over the coronavirus. Instead, tens of thousands of people have ventured out to protest the killing of George Floyd by police.
Demonstrators have closely gathered all over the country, and in blocks-long crowds in large cities, singing and chanting and demanding justice. Police officers have dealt with them roughly, crowding protesters together, blasting them with lung and eye irritants, and cramming them into paddy wagons and jails.
There’s no point in denying the obvious: Standing in a crowd for long periods raises the risk of increased transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This particular form of mass, in-person protest—and the corresponding police response—is a “perfect set-up” for transmission of the virus, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a radio interview on Friday. Some police-brutality activists (such as Black Lives Matter Seattle) have issued statements about the risk involved in the protests. Others have organized less risky forms of protests, such as Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project’s massive “caravan for justice.”
The risk of transmission is complicated by, and intertwined with, the urgent moral stakes: Systemic racism suffuses the United States. The mortality gap between black and white peoplev persists. People born in zip codes mere miles from one another might have life-expectancy gaps of 10 or even 20 years. Two racial inequities meet in this week’s protests: one, a pandemic in which black people are dying at nearly twice their proportion of the population, according to racial data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic; and two, antiblack police brutality, with its long American history and intensifying militarization. Floyd, 46, survived COVID-19 in April, but was killed under the knee of a police officer in May. …
The Virus Will Win
Americans are pretending that the pandemic is over. It certainly is not.
Embiggenable.
A SECOND WAVE OF the coronavirus is on the way. When it arrives, we will lack the will to deal with it. Despite all the sacrifices of the past months, the virus is likely to win—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it already has.
In absolute terms, the United States has been hit harder than any other country. About a quarter of worldwide deaths have been recorded on these shores. And while the virus is no longer growing at an exponential rate, the threat it poses remains significant: According to a forecasting model by Morgan Stanley, the number of American cases will, if current trends hold, roughly double over the next two months.
But neither the impact of mass protests over police brutality nor the effect of the recent reopening of much of the country—including the casinos in Las Vegas—is reflected in the latest numbers. It can take at least 10 days for people to develop symptoms and seek out a test, and for the results to be aggregated and disseminated by public-health authorities.
Even so, the disease is slowly starting to recede from the public’s attention. After months of dominating media coverage, COVID-19 has largely disappeared from the front pages of most national newspapers. In recent polls, the number of people who favor “reopening the economy as soon as possible” over “staying home as long as necessary” has increased. And so it is perhaps no surprise that even states where the number of new infections stands at an all-time high are pressing ahead with plans to lift many restrictions on businesses and mass gatherings. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
George Floyd’s death at the hands of men sworn to serve and protect him was a literal and symbolic tragedy which has now reverberated around the world. As news of his death spread, sorrow, fatigue, and frustration filled the streets.
Many of us have witnessed this chain reaction of events in pieces both distant and personal. This is a distilled representation of those pieces: fragments of hope, of horror, of hardship, and community action.
It is not meant to speak for everyone and could never fully represent what took place in the days after Mr. Floyd was murdered, but we hope that it is a reminder of how strong the people are, and how immediate the issue of police militarization and brutality is to all people.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Comedian Larry Wilmore and journalist Matt Welch join Bill to discuss President Trump’s return to rallies and the political impact of the Black Lives Matter protests.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill wonders if we’ll ever see a crack in the “red wall of silence” that keeps Republicans from acknowledging President Trump’s outrageous behavior.
With states opening up and people protesting in the streets, many feel like coronavirus is over, despite cases being on the rise in a dozen states and a projection that the death toll could reach 200,000 by September.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Top U.S. health officials are worried the massive in-person demonstrations could be a fertile breeding ground for excessive force that may stretch the nation’s healthcare system to its limits.
FINALLY . . .
How a ‘Flying Photographer’ Sees the World From Above
The perspective made George Steinmetz an “accidental environmentalist.”
From his paraglider, Steinmetz appears to have captured a colorful, abstract mosaic made up of round tiles. In fact, these are shallow basins lined with mud, about three to five feet wide and made by hand, holding salt water that slowly evaporates to yield mineral solids, which are sold to be consumed by livestock. The colors depend on the mix of mud, algae, and salt. Embiggenable.
IN 1997, NEW JERSEY-BASED photographer George Steinmetz decided to learn to fly, when he was assigned to shoot in the central Sahara and learned that his bush pilot had backed out. Steinmetz’s aircraft of choice was not an airplane but a motorized paraglider, which is more or less a backpack-mounted motor connected to a single-seat harness hanging under a parachute-like wing. “I originally got into paragliding because I wanted to fly in the Sahara,” he says, “and where I was in the Sahara you could take off and land almost anywhere, so it was a very safe environment for an unreliable motor.” On his website, the photographer refers to it as his “flying lawn chair,” which let him “fly low and slow over the ground with a minimum of disturbance to people and animals below.” It could also be conveniently disassembled and packed into three bags, weighing less than 50 pounds each. Steinmetz could fly commercial with his own plane in the cargo hold.
Since then, Steinmetz, now known as the “flying photographer,” has recorded stunning views around the globe which are compiled in a new book, The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, published by Abrams Books, with text by science writer Andrew Revkin. With the help of his paraglider, helicopters, and professional-quality drones, Steinmetz reveals not only extraordinary natural wonders, but also the enormous imprint of human activity, from the colorful salt pools of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt, Niger, to the replanting of a palm oil plantation in Sapi, Malaysia, to pandemic burials on New York’s Hart Island. (The latter is not included in the book, and the New York Police Department seized his drone.)
Steinmetz with his motorized paraglider in Giza, Egypt.
Though the photographer currently shoots almost entirely with drones now because they’re often the best, safest tools for the job, he appreciates the time he spent in the paraglider. “It’s very different, with a drone. Yes, you can get a camera up there,” he says, “but it’s kind of like a periscope in the sky, where you can only see what’s on the screen, you can’t see what’s outside of it.”
Also, he says, “The glider is really quite amazing because you have an unrestricted view, in horizontal and vertical dimensions. Like a motorcycle, everything is out there … Oh! You’re there!” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
This photo will haunt everyone in it forever. https://t.co/brLA8sIpgO
— Molly Jong-Fast
(@MollyJongFast) June 13, 2020
(@MollyJongFast)
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