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The Idea That Changed the World But America Never Learned
How Did America Become the Modern World’s Most Inhumane Society
The Idea That Changed the World But America Never Learned
How Did America Become the Modern World’s Most Inhumane Society
Here’s a tiny question: what do you think really went wrong in America? Let me recite just a partial litany of dismal truths: school shootings, “active shooter drills”, elderly people who’ll never retire, young people who can’t afford to start families, an imploding middle class, falling life expectancy, life lived at the edge of ruin, 80% living paycheck to paycheck, unable to scrounge up $500 in emergency expenses — not to mention the terrible things that are beginning to happen to immigrants and refugees.
Americans, it seems to me, don’t treat one another like human beings. Perhaps they don’t even really know how how to. They’re constantly dehumanizing, objectifying, and degrading people — beginning with themselves. Am I being unfair? I’ll make my case, and you be the judge.
What are Americans to each other? What do they really see each other as? Consumers, producers, shoppers, taxpayers, shareholders. Their identities are economic first, then tribal, then social. Ask an American: “so, what are you?” And the first thing you’ll hear is probably their job title, or their social stratum, or their profession. Isn’t that weird? A little strange? It is to people from all over the world, who note that Americans play this game with each other, and roll their eyes.
Why is that, though? One answer is capitalism. But that is just political economy. What about at the level of ideas, beliefs, philosophy, culture? When we look at America that way, a curious and weird truth emerges — which instantly explains why Americans don’t treat each other like human beings. There’s an idea which changed the world — but America never learned. …
As the US deports a 95-year-old Nazi camp guard, neo-Nazi groups flourish
BOOTED
Jakiw Pali, Nazi camp guard, deported by ICE.
The US has deported Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi Germany prison guard who had been living in the US for nearly 70 years.
Palij, an American citizen since the 1950s, had been stripped of his status in 2003, when his cover-up of his history was discovered by US immigration officials. Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been trying to deport him to Germany, which would not take him because he was originally a Ukrainian citizen.
Richard Grenell, US ambassador to Germany, told reporters today (Aug. 21) he’d convinced German officials to take Palij, 95, by making a “moral argument about the fact that this individual served in the name of the former German government.”
Palij was taken out of his home in New York City on a stretcher, under the watch of TV cameras. He is unlikely to be tried in Germany, as an investigation there earlier this year found no evidence of his having participated directly in killing any of the thousands of prisoners who died at the camp where he served. …
‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’
How online shopping and cheap prices are turning Americans into hoarders.
It’s easier than ever to buy things online. It’s so easy that Ryan Cassata sometimes does it in his sleep. Cassata, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter and actor from Los Angeles, recently got a notification from Amazon that a package had been shipped to his apartment, but he didn’t remember buying anything. When he logged onto his account and saw that a fanny pack and some socks were on the way, he remembered: A few nights back, he had woken up in the middle of the night to browse—and apparently shop on—Amazon.
He shops when he’s awake, too, buying little gadgets like an onion chopper, discounted staples like a 240-pack of gum, and decorations like a Himalayan salt lamp. The other day, he almost bought a pizza pool float, until he remembered that he doesn’t have a pool. “I don’t really need most of the stuff,” he tells me.
Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, Americans are amassing a lot of stuff. Before the advent of the internet, we had to set aside time to go browse the aisles of a physical store, which was only open a certain number of hours a day. Now, we can shop from anywhere, anytime—while we’re at work, or exercising, or even sleeping. We can tell Alexa we need new underwear, and in a few days, it will arrive on our doorstep. And because of the globalization of manufacturing, that underwear is cheaper than ever before—so cheap that we add it to our online shopping carts without a second thought. “There’s no reason not to shop—because clothing is so cheap, you feel like, ‘Why not?’ There’s nothing lost in terms of the hit on your bank account,” Elizabeth Cline, the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, told me.
Shopping online also feels good. Humans get a dopamine hit from buying stuff, according to research by Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. “As a general rule, your brain tweaks you to want more, more, more—indeed, more than those around you—both of ‘stuff’ and of stimulation and novelty —because that helped you survive in the distant past of brain evolution,” Duhaime wrote in a Harvard Business Review essay last year. Online shopping allows us to get that dopamine hit, and then also experience delayed gratification when the order arrives a few days later, which may make it more physiologically rewarding than shopping in stores. …
6 Real Places That Show Up In The Background of Every Movie
Hollywood loves to recycle things — plotlines, ideas, even specific phrases — but sometimes it’s a bit jarring to see the same locations being reused over and over, like backgrounds in a Flintstones episode. We’ve already told you about things like the Quality Cafe and the most famous clock tower in movies, but there are many other places that get passed around shoots like a blunt at Snoop Dogg’s house. Such as …
6. Santa Fe’s Historic Railway Yards Are Home Of The Best Action Shootouts
At the height of its industrial glory, the Santa Fe Railway Shops (or simply “The Yards”) was the largest employer in Albuquerque, with over a quarter of the city’s population working there. These days, it hosts no more than a few crumbled buildings, the odd illegal rave, and just about every other grimy movie fight you’ve ever seen.
You might recognize the interior of the largest building (what used to be the machine shop, where steam engines were repaired) as the background in Breaking Bad‘s “All Hail the King” poster.
Which suddenly seems a bit excessive for a some storage boxes and a folding chair.
That building also shows up in the prequel series, Better Call Saul. You can make out those distinctive windows in the scene in which Mike executes two crooked cops.
And police corruption was never an issue in American ever again.
It’s also the place where Hulk lands in The Avengers, smashing through the roof of a disused warehouse before having a short chat with Harry Dean Stanton.
Presumably about where all those bricks came from if he fell through a steel roof.
Filmmakers love The Yards because that warehouse is so vast and empty. It’s great for large-scale action setpieces while still offering enough space for a camera to swing around. …
Are Your Escapist Habits Wrecking Your Life?
Use these questions to conduct an honest assessment
We all need to check out from time to time: to recharge, refresh, reset. That’s why we take vacations, read novels, meditate, and watch Netflix.
Sigmund Freud believed that it was part of the human condition to desire escape. “[Humans] cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction they can extort from reality,” he wrote.
Escape, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad, though the concept has a lot of positive and negative connotations. For a summer superhero movie, “escapist” is a thumbs-up. For habitual smartphone use, it’s a problem.
With so many ways to check out these days, it’s worth taking some time to think about your escapist habits, because why you choose to escape, and how you do it, can have an impact on your mental health, shoring you up, or tearing you down.
Why We Check Out
It seems self-evident. We choose to escape to get away from something that bothers us, whether it’s the workaday grind, the fractious political climate, rebellious kids, or our own anxious minds. Daily life can be intense and demanding, and getting away can help us decompress and gain perspective. Just the prospect of a vacation can boost your happiness, according to a 2010 study. The idea of an escape, the study found, can often be more gratifying than the escape itself. …
The world’s first customer complaint is almost 4,000 years old
WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?
“How would you rate your service on a scale of 1-5?”
What could be the world’s first complaint about shoddy service is on a clay tablet that was first sent about 3,800 years ago in southern Mesopotamia from the city of Ur, which is now Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq.
Held in the British Museum in London as artifact 131236, the Old Babylonian-era tablet is from a man named Nanni to Ea-nasir complaining that the wrong grade of copper ore has been delivered, and about misdirection and delay of a further shipment. (It was resurfaced on Reddit this week.)
The letters are written in the Akkadian language in cuneiform script, one of the earliest forms of writing, engraved into the tablet, which is 11.6 cm high (4.6 in) and 2.6 cm thick. The amount of effort required to make it gets across the magnitude of Nanni’s grievance.
A Redditor in the same thread provided a link to a translation of the tablet provided by the Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim in his out-of-print 1967 book, “Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia:”
Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:
When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew embarked upon the vessel Endurance. Their destination: the South Pole, in an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. But the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition met an untimely end when the ship became trapped by ice just 97 nautical miles from the earth’s most southerly point. Shackleton and his crew became severely ill and eventually abandoned the ship, drifting on sheets of ice for months until they reached Elephant Island, where they were rescued. Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…
“Letters of Fire” was directed by Glen Milner. It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent creators, curated by The Atlantic.
Comedian D.L. Hughley describes how society devalues black people and why white people are ill-equipped to identify when something is racist.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
肉てんこ盛りまるバーレルはいかがですか？Would you like Maru Bucket?
FINALLY . . .
How a Football Team Became Mascots for Vegetarianism
In 1907, a championship squad changed what it meant to eat meat-free.
University of Chicago vs University of Illinois, October 1907.
As Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg limped out onto the University of Chicago’s Marshall Field for the first day of fall football training in 1907, he had no shortage of strategies to carry his Maroons to the championship. For summer reading, he had required every player to memorize the new rulebook (football was a fast-evolving sport). He’d planned an exhausting circus of novel drills. And tight under his arm, he held a notebook bursting with top-secret new plays.
Fans across the nation, having watched in awe as the Maroons clinched a perfect-record Western Conference victory in 1905, expected nothing less of the renowned coach. But one of Stagg’s strategies took everyone by surprise: For the 1907 season, he was putting his team on an all-vegetarian diet, the same one he himself had followed for nearly two years.
“Vegetarians Only,” sneered the Boston Globe. “Vegetable Football,” quipped a wire story carried in smaller rags. Most hometown newspapers offered a fuller menu: The Chicago Inter-Ocean wrote, “Dried Apples, Prunes, Nuts, and Water for Maroon Team,” while the Tribune declared “Kickers to Train on Squash.”
No newsman mined the story for mirth more than the Tribune’s new sportswriter, a former Maroon himself. Walter “Eckie” Eckersall, the bad-boy superstar quarterback who had been extravagantly mourned during his final season in 1906 (then quietly expelled) gave the Maroons their mocking new moniker: the Vegetarians.
Coach Stagg and the 1907 University of Chicago Football Team.
The “training table” (a mandatory diet and dining regimen) had recently been banned, over Stagg’s vocal objection, for most teams in the Maroons’ conference. So officially speaking, vegetarianism was only a “suggestion.” But Stagg, who had long insisted on abstinence from smoking, drinking, and cursing, enjoyed fierce loyalty from his squad, which meant, as one paper put it, “his suggestions are law.” …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?