December 15, 2020 in 3,400 words

300,000. Thank you, heroes. pic.twitter.com/7Owli7UbC9

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 14, 2020

_{Ed. Seriously?}

_{• • • an aural noise • • •}

word salad: Echo Season (Peter Brefini) returns to Synphaera with Solarmetric, an expansive album full of movement, light and depth. Flowing pads, Synphaeric sequences, percussive textures & glitched beats trace the relationships between people, bodies of light and the ways human beings orient themselves through the physical domain, and throughout their shared life journeys. Location. Distance. Time. Measure.

_{^{• some of the things I read in antisocial isolation while eating breakfast •}}

The Hidden History of the First Black Women to Serve in the U.S. Navy

_{The Golden Fourteen were largely forgotten—but a few veterans and descendants could change that.}

_{Researchers and descendants are working to dust off the stories of the Golden Fourteen}

WHEN JERRI BELL FIRST WROTE about the Golden Fourteen, their story only took up a sentence. These 14 Black women were the first to serve in the U.S. Navy, and Bell, a former naval officer and historian with the Veteran’s Writing Project, included them in a book about women’s contributions in every American war, co-written with a former Marine. But even after the book was published, Bell couldn’t get their story out of her head.

“It made me kind of mad,” Bell says. “Here are these women, and they were the first! But I think there was also a general attitude at the time that the accomplishments of women were not a big deal. Women were not going to brag.”

Bell was one of a few researchers who have been able to track down documents that acknowledge the lives and work of these Black women. She knew that during World War I, the Fourteen had somehow found employment in the muster roll unit of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., under officer John T. Risher. One was Risher’s sister-in-law and distant cousin, Armelda Hattie Greene.

The Golden Fourteen worked as yeomen and were tasked with handling administrative and clerical work. They had access to official military records, including the work assignments and locations of sailors. At the time, Black men who enlisted in the Navy could only work as messmen, stewards, or in the engine room, shoveling coal into the furnace. They performed menial labor and weren’t given opportunities to rise in rank.

_{The Golden Fourteen tackled administrative and clerical work.}

Bell wasn’t surprised to learn about the barriers faced by service members of color. She knew that Josephus Daniels, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, was a documented white supremacist with ties to the Wilmington Massacre, in which a white mob overthrew a local Reconstruction-era government and murdered Black residents. During the First World War, the U.S. Navy maintained the status quo of racism that continued long after. Many Black service members were also targeted by white mobs after the war. …

How Science Beat the Virus

_{And what it lost in the process.}

1.

IN THE FALL OF 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries. Only 9,700 Ebola-related papers have been published since its discovery in 1976; last year, at least one journal received more COVID‑19 papers than that for consideration. By September, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had received 30,000 submissions—16,000 more than in all of 2019. “All that difference is COVID‑19,” Eric Rubin, NEJM’s editor in chief, says. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “The way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented.”

Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. In the U.S., the influenza pandemic of 1918, the threat of malaria in the tropical battlegrounds of World War II, and the rise of polio in the postwar years all triggered large pivots. Recent epidemics of Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications. But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told me.

That’s partly because there are just more scientists: From 1960 to 2010, the number of biological or medical researchers in the U.S. increased sevenfold, from just 30,000 to more than 220,000. But SARS-CoV-2 has also spread farther and faster than any new virus in a century. For Western scientists, it wasn’t a faraway threat like Ebola. It threatened to inflame their lungs. It shut down their labs. “It hit us at home,” Pai said. …

How Civilization Broke Our Brains

_{What can hunter-gatherer societies teach us about work, time, and happiness?}

_{Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots ^{BY JAMES SUZMAN PENGUIN PRESS}}

SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, I got into a long discussion with a colleague about the origins of the “Sunday scaries,” the flood of anxiety that many of us feel as the weekend is winding down and the workweek approaches. He said that the culprit was clear, and pointed to late-stage capitalism’s corrosive blend of performance stress and job insecurity. But capitalism also exists Monday through Saturday, so why should Sunday be so uniquely anxiety-inducing?

The deeper cause, I thought, might have something to do with the modern psychology of time. Imagine the 21st-century worker as accessing two modes of thinking: productivity mind and leisure mind. When we are under the sway of the former, we are time- and results-optimizing creatures, set on proving our industriousness to the world and, most of all, to ourselves. In leisure mode, the thrumming subsides, allowing us to watch a movie or finish a glass of wine without considering how our behavior might affect our reputation and performance reviews. For several hours a week, on Sunday evening, a psychological tug-of-war between these perspectives takes place. Guilt about recent lethargy kicks in as productivity mind gears up, and apprehension about workaday pressure builds as leisure mind cedes power.

If only we could navigate our divided lives with seamless ease—except what if ease isn’t what most of us really want? In 2012, the University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson reviewed more than 40 years of happiness and time-use surveys that asked Americans how often they felt they either were “rushed” or had “excess time.” Perhaps predictably, he concluded that the happiest people were the “never-never” group—those who said they very rarely felt hurried or bored, which isn’t to say they were laid-back. Their schedules met their energy level, and the work they did consumed their attention without exhausting it. In an essay for Scientific American summarizing his research, Robinson offered a strenuous formula for joy: “Happiness means being just rushed enough.”

Despite the headline focus on happiness, Robinson’s most unexpected insights were about American discontent. We may constantly complain about our harried schedules, but the real joy-killer seemed to be the absence of any schedule at all. Considerably less happy than the just-rushed-enough, he said, were those with lots of excess time. He found, as other workplace studies have shown, that Americans are surprisingly fretful when not absorbed by tasks, paid or otherwise. And at the bottom of his rankings, registering an “unparalleled level of unhappiness,” were those whose plight may sound puzzling: people who, though they almost always felt underscheduled, also almost always felt rushed. Such is the psychological misery of an undirected person for whom an urgent need to overcome idleness—to find purpose—becomes a source of stress. This always-always condition struck me as the most peculiarly modern anxiety: It’s the Sunday scaries, all week long. …

5 Medical Procedures From 30 Years Ago (That Now Seem Barbaric)

Medicine has walked a long and weird road to reach where it is right now. But today, we’re not going to tell you about the gross and painful excuse for health care they had back in ancient Egypt, or medieval times, or even during the world wars. Today, we’re talking about the 1970s and 1980s. It was a time when 60 Minutes and Danny DeVito were on TV and Star Wars films were in theaters, but when it came to basic medicine, it wasn’t much like the world we know at all.

5. In The ’80s, Doctors Pumped Alcohol Into Pregnant Women To Halt Labor

In the ’60s, a chemist named Anna-Riitta Olsson was feeding alcohol to rabbits because it was the ’60s, and people back then knew how to have a good time. She discovered that pregnant rabbits were a lot less likely to go into labor after sweet booze in their veins calmed them down. Then Olsson went and got pregnant herself, and just seven months in, her own labor began. Her husband, the obstetrician Fritz Fuchs, figured “what’s good for rabbits is good for my wife” and stuck a tube in Olsson with some ethanol flowing down it.

The contractions stopped. Having succeeded in making his wife give exactly zero Fuchs, and with the pregnancy lasting another two months and ending with a normal delivery, Fritz decided to bring their discovery to the masses. Soon, hospitals were using alcohol as a standard method for delaying premature births. Sometimes, it was very clinical, with ethanol solution dripping in through an IV. Other times, it was less formal and more fun, with women going into premature labor being handed a vodka and orange juice cocktail as soon as they entered the hospital.

Then came the ’70s, and the medical community identified a little something called fetal alcohol syndrome. Did that put an end to the practice of sending alcohol toward the escaping fetus? Nope! Doctors reasoned — correctly, to be fair — that chronic exposure to alcohol during the first couple trimesters is very different from a sudden shot toward the end. Also, getting chucked out of the body altogether could be worse for a fetus than a drink or two. Also also, the hospital’s barkeep was practically part of the family now, and no one wanted to fire him.

By the ’80s, doctors were starting to notice that alcohol left the pregnant patient needlessly throwing up or suffering from headaches, and it occasionally led to such undesirable effects on the fetus as death. Plus, it’s possible ethanol was never as effective at delaying labor as everyone originally thought. They went on using it for some years more, though, till they landed on better alternatives. Today, we have other drugs for keeping the preemie in, ones that accomplish the job without being alcohol. Drugs — they’re great! …

RELATED: Amateur Codebreakers Crack Zodiac Killer’s Message After More Than 50 Years

Bad news for Ted Cruz — last week, a group of amateur codebreakers were able to decipher one of the Zodiac Killer’s messages from 51 years ago, bringing a new meaning to the old adage of “better late than never.” Back in 1969, the mysterious killer, who committed five murders in the late 1960’s and was ultimately never caught, sent a cryptic message, known as “340 cypher” to the San Francisco Chronicle. Now, more than a half-century later, a dream team consisting of an American software developer, a mathematician from Australia, and a computer programmer from Belgium, say they’ve cracked the code, revealing this very unsettling, spelling-error-rife message:

“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me,” reads the note, which was written with no punctuation and in all capital letters, according to CNN.

“That wasn’t me on the TV show which brings up a point about me

I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice all the sooner

Because now I have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death

I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradice death.”

While the show in question seems to be The Jim Dunbar Show, where someone alleging to be the Zodiac Killer called in two weeks before the letter was sent, it’s unclear whether or not “paradice” is an error or a potential enigmatic clue. Spelling mistakes aside, since the story broke last Friday, San Francisco’s FBI issued a statement on Twitter acknowledging the revelation. …

_{Ed. Regarding that last hyperlink: You’re welcome.}

Endless Creation Out of Nothing

_{Could our universe have been an experiment by an ancient civilization?}

Astronauts describe the emptiness and darkness of space far from Earth as a startling experience. So did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in a poem e-mailed to me by writer Dror Burstein. Without ever having ventured into space (obviously), Rilke wrote a century ago: “Night, shuddering in my regard, but in yourself so steady; inexhaustible creation, enduring beyond the fate of earth.

Is there a modern scientific interpretation to Rilke’s poem?

The reality is that space in neither empty nor dark. Even outside galaxies, an astronaut could find at least one proton, on average, in every cubic meter. Also, one electron and half a billion photons and neutrinos, all left over from the big bang. Still, one might naively imagine that the space in between these particles is empty. Indeed, the early atomists in ancient Greece thought that the vacuum is literally nothing.

Not so. A dominant fraction of the cosmic mass budget—roughly two thirds—is currently associated with the “dark energy” that pervades the vacuum, exerting a repulsive gravitational push on matter and accelerates the expansion of the universe. The latest measurements indicate that the vacuum behaves like the cosmological constant that Albert Einstein added to his equations a century ago when he considered the hypothetical possibility of a static universe, in which the attractive gravity of matter is balanced by the repulsion from the vacuum. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Georgia turned blue for the first time in 20 years thanks to a massive voter registration effort that turned out hundreds of thousands of new voters. Now ahead of the Senate runoff – organizers are trying to pull off the same feat twice.

_{THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.}

The Supreme Court declines to even hear President Trump’s latest election case, the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden, Stephen Miller calls for alternate electors to back the president, and MAGA-heads might try to take things into their own hands.

_{THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.}

Seth takes a closer look at Trump and the Republican Party desperately attempting to dismantle our democracy, even after the Electoral College voted to make Joe Biden the next president of the United States.

_{THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.}

まるはなみり、それぞれお気に入りの箱で過ごす夜。Maru&Hana&Miri spend night time in their favorite boxes.

FINALLY . . .

What happened when the Tarahumaras’ love of ultrarunning went global?

_{The book Born to Run brought attention to an indigenous Mexican’s people feats of long-distance running. A new documentary looks at what happened next.}

_{The Ultra Maratón Caballo Blanco draws competitors from around the world.}

Next up in ESPN’s venerable 30 for 30 series is The Infinite Race, a documentary on a sports topic that hardly checks the biggest 30 for 30 box, in that the film does not involve a famous star athlete, sport or event. In fact, The Infinite Race kicks off with a simple story about an indigenous people’s joy of long-distance running.

The documentary explores what happens to these people, the Tarahumara, who live deep in the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico, when their love of running, or even their calling to run, spills out to the rest of the world because of a popular book about running and an American known as Caballo Blanco, or the White Horse.

“It’s a story about resilience, survival and continuance,” Bernardo Ruiz, the veteran Mexican and American film-maker who directed The Infinite Race, tells the Guardian.

That the 50-mile Ultra Maratón Caballo Blanco, which The Infinite Race revolves around, will be held again next March in the rugged terrain of Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon is a testament to the event’s durability. Running won out, as it has for generations among the Tarahumara, but only after the event survived a culture clash that involved a lot of dollars and pesos, good and bad.

Although he directed an award-winning 2008 documentary about baseball star Roberto Clemente and says he always wanted to make a film about running, Ruiz deals with tougher subjects, like the US-Mexico drug war in his 2016 documentary Kingdom of Shadows. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.}

ONE MORE THING:

Trucks carrying 184,275 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine left a Michigan manufacturing plant on Sunday morning after the CDC authorized the vaccine for widespread use. What do you think? https://t.co/NS4HRoXhlk #WhatDoYouThink? pic.twitter.com/uZvmjHp5Pc

— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 15, 2020

ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:

TIP: If you don’t want to buy a Christmas tree, try making your own out of seeds, water, and sunlight. https://t.co/6a1Bx7geSz pic.twitter.com/u1AZoWhxcv

— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 14, 2020

ONE MORE ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:

I’m Really Sorry, but Let’s Talk About That Chicken Movie
_{In a time of rampant lies, a KFC-Lifetime rom-com is about as refreshingly blunt as you can get.}

Late last month, the crew of a helicopter surveying a desolate stretch of the Utah desert came across an unexpected finding: a metal structure, tall and thin, gleaming among the matte-red rocks. Soon after, the object vanished. But people began finding similar ones, in California and Romania and the Netherlands—elongated prisms studding the earth, their provenance, for the most part, unknown. The public reaction to all the mystery has been, primarily, not wonder so much as weariness: Please, please, let it be aliens and not a publicity stunt.

I mention this because last week, Kentucky Fried Chicken announced the latest in its own long-running series of marketing stunts: a 15-minute-long “mini movie” starring Mario Lopez as KFC’s founder, Harland Sanders, titled A Recipe for Seduction. The trailer for the ad (yep, this ad has a trailer) promised a “steamy holiday love affair” and offered up a version of Sanders—a figure most familiar as white-haired and spectacled—retrofitted with the iconography of romance: shirt tight, sleeves short, the traditional bowtie replaced by a louchely knotted neckerchief. The Harland-meets-Harlequin premise, pulsing with irony and coupled with the fact that this mini movie has been made by a fast-food brand, inspired questions similar to those wrought by the Utah mystery monolith: How did this thing get here? Why is it here? Is it … real, whatever that means?

In this case, the answers were refreshingly straightforward: A Recipe for Seduction may be long, as traditional ads go, and it may manifest more as branded content than direct marketing message—but it is, transparently, an ad, created by agents of Yum! Brands to generate desire for its subsidiary’s meal deals. Recipe is a joint production of Lifetime, which is selling escapism, and KFC, which is selling chicken. It aired yesterday, nestled between the holiday rom-coms The Christmas Listing (rival real-estate agents find love over the holidays) and Feliz NaviDAD (a single father, played by Mario Lopez, finds love over the holidays). I watched it. And I would like to pay it the highest compliment I know how to give to an ad: It is exactly what it claims to be—nothing less, nothing more, nothing else. …

_{Ed. I’m finished now.}

One More One More Thing:

Dick Van Dyke Finally Confesses To Zodiac Killings https://t.co/axlygSqjSU pic.twitter.com/FL2BsZilsO

— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 14, 2020

The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020

P.S. I was late getting this up today because my web host was recovering from a DDOS attack.