to set a mood • • •
Not Every Place Can Be New York or San Francisco. So Then What?
In an unprecedented era of winner-take-all urbanism, left-behind cities need Washington to step up.
Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
As America’s big “superstar” cities pull away from the rest of the country, the former industrial hubs and rural towns left behind in today’s tech-driven economy are doing whatever they can to compete—and it isn’t always healthy. The contest to host Amazon’s second headquarters epitomized their problem. Desperate for tech cachet and tens of thousands of jobs, cities from Albany to Fresno stepped forward, in many cases by offering subsidies and tax breaks they could barely afford. Even then, Amazon anointed the thriving Washington, D.C., suburbs and (initially) New York City as its winners.
As my Brookings colleagues Mark Muro and Bill Galston and I noted in a recent report, the U.S. economy suffers from a stark geographic divide. America’s largest cities—places like New York, Seattle, and San Francisco—have accounted for 75 percent of the nation’s employment growth since 2015. Geographic inequality warps our politics. The counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 accounted for barely more than a third of the nation’s GDP.
Past presidents and Congresses weren’t shy about singling out the most troubled communities and directing federal help toward them. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt identified the entire South as “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem” and created agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Administration to address the needs of its most isolated communities. In the 1960s and ’70s, when central cities were seen as the locus of economic distress, successive administrations tried to arrest the decline of urban centers.
Today, the notion that Washington should “help poor people, not poor places”—to the point of urging people in declining areas to move—has become conventional wisdom. With the exception of the modest “Opportunity Zones,” a provision of the recent tax law that lighter capital-gains taxation for investors in certain troubled areas, place-specific aid has fallen out of favor.
But troubled communities don’t just give up. Left to their own fate, state and local policymakers often end up shoveling money at companies in the hope of attracting future investment. It isn’t working. For today’s left-behind communities to bounce back, the federal government has to act. …
Stanford’s new AI institute is inadvertently showcasing one of tech’s biggest problems
ANALYSIS
Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute’s lack of diversity is not an anomaly.
The artificial intelligence industry is often criticized for failing to think through the social repercussions of its technology—think instituting gender and racial bias in everything facial-recognition software to hiring algorithms.
On Monday (March 18), Stanford University launched a new institute meant to show its commitment to addressing concerns over the industry’s lack of diversity and intersectional thinking. The Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), which plans to raise $1 billion from donors to fund its initiatives, aims to give voice to professionals from fields ranging from the humanities and the arts to education, business, engineering, and medicine, allowing them to weigh in on the future of AI. “Now is our opportunity to shape that future by putting humanists and social scientists alongside people who are developing artificial intelligence,” Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne declared in a press release.
It’s a laudable goal. But in trying to address AI’s blind spots, the institute has been accused of replicating its biases. Of the 121 faculty members initially announced as part of the institute, more than 100 appeared to be white, and a majority were male.
Stanford just launched their Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (@StanfordHAI) with great fanfare. The mission: "The creators and designers of AI must be broadly representative of humanity."
121 faculty members listed.
Not a single faculty member is Black. pic.twitter.com/znCU6zAxui
— Chad Loder ❁ (@chadloder) March 21, 2019
AI’s “sea of dudes” or ”white guy problem” has been well-documented, and awareness of the topic is becoming more and more mainstream. Diversity and inclusion has become boilerplate language for any major industry event, including Stanford’s own literature on the launch of HAI, and the institute was quick to acknowledge the problems with its faculty makeup. …
Ketamine: can it really be an antidepressant?
A version of the club drug licensed in the US could usher in a wave of fast-acting treatments, but experts are worried.
‘It was like a spring breeze had blown through my head’: for some patients with depression, the benefits of ketamine can last for weeks.
Claudia Kieffer remembers the first time she encountered the drug she describes as having “saved my life”. Eight years ago, Kieffer, who had suffered from treatment-resistant depression for decades, was given ketamine as a routine anaesthetic, as part of a post-mastectomy breast reconstruction procedure.
But as well as alleviating the pain, Kieffer noticed an instantaneous change in her state of mind.
“My head suddenly felt different to any previous time in my entire life,” she says. “I wasn’t high. It wasn’t like I had smoked a joint or had morphine. It was like a spring breeze had blown through my head and just cleaned out all the detritus that had built up over years and years. And when you’ve suffered from depression for as long as I had, it feels like you’re drowning. So when something comes along that makes you feel so very different and healthy, you want to know what that drug is.”
At the time, Kieffer had tried almost every depression-related treatment available, without success. “I’d had three nervous breakdowns and been hospitalised three times,” she remembers. “I’d had 13 rounds of electric-shock therapy and it didn’t help. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I would self-medicate, just because that’s what you do when you don’t know what else to do. I was thinking about taking my life every single day. I just wanted to fall asleep and not wake up.”
But unbeknown to her at the time, a growing number of clinical trials was already investigating the potential benefits of ketamine infusions as a treatment for depression. Two years after her operation, Kieffer enrolled on one such study, run by the US National Institutes for Health. …
5 Horrifying Ways Lawyers Keep Screwing Up
There’s an old joke that goes “What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!” The first time I heard it, I wondered what the deep-sea legal emergency might be that would require so many lawyers. Now I know it has to do with Aquaman’s complex drug empire, but the point is that lawyers get a lot of shit in life. And it seems like a lot of them bring it on themselves …
5. Drunk Lawyering Appears To Be A Real Problem
You know how you keep a pitcher of mojitos on the nightstand next to the bed so you can wake up the right way? That’s how most of us work, but lawyers have to be held to a different standard, dammit. They’re the people’s avatars of justice! Or something.
Despite that, lawyers like John Wayne Higgins are willing to show up in a courtroom they don’t even have business in shitfaced enough to get themselves a contempt charge. That’s still a step down from the Topeka attorney who got fully disbarred for having a blood alcohol level 2.5 times the legal limit in the courtroom. With a judge sitting right there! And a client depending on his drunk ass!
Is this an epidemic? A series of isolated incidences? I don’t know! But lawyers will show up wasted to court, which can even force judges to drop charges. And those are almost disappointing compared to the remarkable heights of drunken stupidity achieved by Las Vegas defense attorney Joseph Caramagno. How bad were his antics? It’s on video!
If you don’t have the half hour to invest in watching a grown man spin lies like Rumpelstiltskin turning straw into gold, here are some highlights. The whole event is kicked off by the fact that Caramagno was late for trial, which he blames on a double hit and run (that is, when you get rear-ended into another car, and then both cars take off before you can do anything about it). Did the cops agree? No! Because, as Caramagno explains to the judge, he will never call 911, on principle.
Times and locations change from one statement to the next, and eventually, the judge starts talking to a woman in the gallery who Caramagno said was his girlfriend. Except she was actually just a woman he picked up at the bar literally right before his late trial. Everything comes crashing down when the judge makes him take a breathalyzer test and determines that he’s more alcoholic than a Tom Collins. Give Caramagno credit, though, he tries to claim it’s simply residual booze from the night before. This did not work. His client got a mistrial, and we got 30 minutes of a drunk dude trying to craft a bucket full of lies. Allegedly. …
Lady Plantagenet Cherokee, Duchess of Westhaven, requested priests to transfer her soul into her favorite boulder
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2017
The Smallest Museum in Switzerland Is a Window in a 600-Year-Old House
Two collectors display their favorite memorabilia in this two-foot-by-two-foot display.
The 2019 Eiffel Tower exhibit at the Hoosesagg Museeum.
EVERY FEW MONTHS, A NEW assembly of items appears in the window of the door at 31 Imbergässlein (Ginger Alley) in Basel, Switzerland. At the beginning of 2019, it was Paris-themed, or really, Eiffel Tower-themed: A plastic snow globe with a miniature Montmartre and a tiny Eiffel Tower sat above a glass Eiffel Tower filled with colored sand. Matted photos of the landmark hung behind brass and plastic Eiffel Towers of varying sizes, Eiffel Tower key chains, and an Eiffel Tower-embossed pocket watch. In December 2018, the window held Magi figurines. Five months before that, there were rows of green knitting needles.
Welcome to the Hoosesagg Museeum, which translates to the Pants Pocket Museum in English. There’s no admission fee, but there’s also no admission. The entire museum is contained within the two-foot-by-two-foot window in the door of Dagmar and Matthias Vergeat’s 600-year-old house, located in a narrow pedestrian alley in Basel’s Old Town. The Vergeats have run what is likely Switzerland’s smallest museum for 24 years, and while many of the displays come from the couple’s own assemblage of memorabilia, they welcome anyone with a collection of 30 or more items to submit it for consideration.
Details of the Eiffel Tower exhibit.
Dagmar’s love of collecting is a lifelong one. As a child, she started by amassing a variety of Swiss cowbells. “I like to collect because I don’t like to throw things away,” she says in German.
A look into the room behind the Pocket Museum door makes that clear. There are countless objects lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling, and arranged in display cases. Wristwatches surround bottle stoppers with carved faces. There are tea eggs, a spectrum of plastic sunglasses, Rubik’s cubes, toy televisions, and Dagmar’s childhood collection of bells. The collectibles room used to be the Vergeats’ oldest daughter’s bedroom. When she moved out, the couple moved all their collections inside. Dagmar has not cataloged her items but guesses there are several thousand. “Each individual object is not really worth that much, but all the objects together make one great picture,” Dagmar says. …
I LOVE IT: “I like to collect because I don’t like to throw things away.”
In 19th-century London, naughty children might be threatened with a visit from “Chimney-Pots Calhoun”. Disturbingly, he actually existed
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2017
This is what it’s like to wake up during surgery
CONSCIOUS
There’s evidence that one person in 20 may be awake when doctors think they’re under.
It can be the smallest event that triggers Donna Penner’s traumatic memories of an operation from more than ten years ago.
One day, for instance, she was waiting in the car as her daughter ran an errand, and realised that she was trapped inside. What might once have been a frustrating inconvenience sent her into a panic attack. “I started screaming. I was flailing my arms, I was crying,” she says. “It just left me so shaken.”
Even the wrong clothing can make her anxiety worse. “Anything that’s tight around my neck is out of the question because it makes me feel like I’m suffocating,” says Donna, a 55-year-old from Altona in Manitoba, Canada.
Donna would not be like this if it were not for a small medical procedure that she had before her 45th birthday. She was working in the accountancy department of a local trucking company and had just celebrated the wedding of one of her daughters. But she had been having severe bleeding and pain during her period, and her family physician had suggested that they investigate the causes with exploratory surgery.
It should have been a routine procedure, but, for reasons that are far from clear, the general anaesthetic failed. Rather than lying in peaceful oblivion, she woke up just before the surgeon made the first cut into her abdomen. With her body still paralysed by the anaesthetic drugs, she was unable to signal that anything was wrong.
So she remained frozen and helpless on the operating table as the surgeon probed her body, while she experienced indescribable agony. “I thought, ‘This is it, this is how I’m going to die, right here on the table, and my family will never know what my last few hours were like because no one’s even noticing what’s going on.’” …
ONE IN TWENTY: This is probably the biggest reason they use Versed as pre-anesthesia sedation. It produces short-term memory loss.
I recently had a colonoscopy where they were supposed to be using Fentanyl and Versed. But, oops, they forgot to put Versed in my I.V. I have vivid memories of what it felt like to have all sorts of large appartus being snaked out of my body.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
New Zealand takes swift action to ban assault rifles after the Christchurch shooting and rumors swirl that Joe Biden is announcing a 2020 run with Stacey Abrams.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
There are no coincidences in Russian Doll. Every detail has a purpose.
Watch the full series, Russian Doll is now on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/in/title/8021…
Ed. I’ve watched it twice and hadn’t connected any of this.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on the most vicious cat fights I’ve stumbled upon on the world wide web.
光で遊ぶはなとふみふみするまる。-Hana runs after light and Maru continues to knead.-
Ottawa’s Sardine Dome is surfaced with vulcanized sardines. Scientists believe “sardinite” is more durable than plaster
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2017
FINALLY . . .
Found: The First Egg Inside a Bird Fossil
Everything’s better with an egg on (or in) it.
A holotype of Avimaia schweitzerae.
AROUND 110 MILLION YEARS AGO, a sparrow-sized bird died in northwestern China with an entire, imperfectly formed egg in its abdomen. After paleontologists dug up the bird’s preserved remains in the mid-2000s, this unidentified fossil gathered dust for over a decade in storage at China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. So in 2018, when the researcher Alida Bailleul was combing through specimens in IVPP’s archives in search of soft tissue samples, she didn’t expect to find much, according to a report from National Geographic. After noticing a squashed and leathery lump in the fossil’s abdomen, Bailluel analyzed the membrane-like mass only to discover the lump was an unlaid egg, preserved within the bones of a prehistoric bird.
This remarkable specimen marks the first time scientists have found an egg inside a fossilized bird. It is therefore one of the most notable bird fossils discovered from the Cretaceous Era—especially considering that adult birds only retain fully formed eggs for around 24 hours. Bailleul and her team published their findings on this newly described species, Avimaia schweitzerae, this week in Nature Communications. The team named the specimen in tribute to the paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer, who helped establish the field of molecular paleontology and once used soft tissues to identify a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil as a pregnant female.
This egg doesn’t just hold Avimaia’s claim to fame. It might also explain how she died. Most of the shell contained an abnormal two layers (normal bird eggs just have one), with a second layer that lacks a necessary eggshell cuticle. This evidence indicates that the bird held the egg inside its body for far too long. Due to this aberration, the researchers believe the bird suffered from a common condition called “egg-binding,” in which an egg becomes stuck inside an animal. This trauma can lead the bird to add additional shells around the egg, which can suffocate the embryo and even kill the mother. If the researchers’ egg-binding theory is correct, Avimaia would represent the oldest documented case of this reproductive disorder. …
Norwegian researchers think they have unraveled the mystery behind the Worawirragoo, a spirit found in showerheads
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 22, 2017
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not. Groundhog Day.