#the expansion era started three years ago. this is fine

[polkadotpatterson]

happy anniversary to Dot throwing 115 pitches in a row to a frog

[bonezone44]

'Get a Grip' (18+)

Watch Model!Joel Miller x Manicurist!Reader

Word Count: 3,8k

Summary: Joel Miller comes to your salon for a manicure, then he invites you to assist him during a photoshoot.

Tags: afab!Reader, hand kink, glove kink, finger sucking, fingering, p-in-v, creampie

a/n: this story came about during a brief discussion of Pedro’s watch modeling era a few weeks ago. Thank you to @xdaddysprincessxx and @iamasaddie for the inspo!

+++++++

Hands. Fingers.

They’re your job.

Every once in a while someone will walk in with a nice set of digits and you admire them while they’re in front of you. While you push back their cuticles and clean beneath the nail. Add the acrylic and the polish. Then they’re out of your mind again as you wait for the next client to plop into the chair and request a full set or a simple repair. 

Your repeat clients usually want the nail art. That’s where you shine, to be honest. Delicately painted swirls. Boxes like Mondrian. Gold leaf. Rhinestones. Each nail a tiny little canvas for you to create something unique.

The male customers are different. The masculine ones, anyway.

They want simple hygienic maintenance. Maybe a massage. Maybe they just wanna flirt with a woman while she provides a service. And you appease them. It’s no bother to you.

It’s your job.

It’s just your job.

It’s the thing you do all the time every day and have done for years.

And yet no matter how many times you try to repeat those words in your head, you find yourself salivating over the man sitting across from you–with his playful baritone Texan voice and the beautiful steel and gold Cartier watch on his wrist. Not that you’re one to dig for gold. You simply admire fine craftsmanship.

Just like you admire the fineness of his hands.

The veins that rise on the top of his right hand, over his fingerbones, look like wandering rivers and you really wanna admire them with the tip of your tongue, tracing along their edges. His fingers themselves are long, thick rectangles that you wanna slip into your mouth one at a time.

In simple …admiration. 

“Not too smooth,” he says when you pull out your buffer. “They don’t want me lookin’ too clean.”

“Who’s that?” you ask, keeping your voice nice and even while your cheeks feel hot and your thoughts are a million miles away from ‘appropriate’.

“The… oh, whaddya call ‘em.” He hums. “The brand specialists, I guess.” He chuckles. “They hit me up about a month ago. Got a new line coming out that’s–get this–” he says with a flash of his eyebrows. “--’safari’ inspired.” He scoffs.

“Safari, huh?” You roll your eyes.  You can imagine the Cartier boardroom of pompous old Frenchmen glorifying the art and tales created during the French expansion of the 1800s—easily brushing past the eugenics-based mission of the violent nationalists. “Colonizers,” you mumble under your breath.

Joel laughs. “My daughter said the same thing.” He shrugs. “‘S no matter. I don’t mind takin’ their money if all I gotta do is have pretty hands.”

Your face burns immediately and keep your eyes and face focusing on the small nail at the end of his middle finger. “So, how’d you get started anyway?” You swallow thickly, trying to ignore the heat building between your legs. “No offense, I guess, but you don’t seem like the pretty boy-type.” Besides the watch on his wrist, he’s wearing plain Levi’s blue jeans and a black t-shirt that you can almost guarantee came from Target. You can tell his brown and grey curls don’t have any product in them and he’s got about two or three-week-old scruff on his face. 

He chuckles again and you glance up, watching the deep creases in his forehead soften. “Daughter’s the one to blame for it.” He shakes his head with a smile. “We were visiting Houston and she wanted to go shopping, so I let her pick the mall.” His brows go high. “This little 12 year-old picked a luxury mall and I didn’t realize it til we got outta the truck.” 

Your lips go between your teeth, imagining his embarrassment. 

“She was so excited, too. She hopped down out the truck and–fyoo!--took right off runnin.” He grins. “I had to chase her down and tell her not to touch anythin. I woulda had to take out a second mortgage to pay for it if she broke somethin.”

“I bet,” you smile. You finish buffing his nails and pull out the moisturizing oil. You begin to massage each of his fingers, one-by-one, rolling the flesh between your thumb and index finger, marveling at how long it takes you to get from base to tip. You were admiring the mathematics of it. 

The proportions. 

The number of fingers he might could get inside you.

“Next thing I know, she goes runnin into a Cartier store sayin that they can fix my watch ‘cause they got watches in the window.” He shrugs and rolls his eyes. “I was tryin to politely escort her back out, when some big wig saw me and started talkin to me.” He shrugs again. “They took a couple polaroids and got my info. And now every once in a while, they’ll call me up for somethin.”

You stop massaging and stare at him with your eyes big and wide. “I know women who would literally murder to have that happen to them.”

He chuckles and it gets your body even warmer. “Yeeaahh, that’s what I hear.”

You shake your head in disbelief, returning to your task. You can believe his story, too. You’ve only been staring at his hands for a few minutes and you are enraptured by them. Is it the hands? Or is it him?

Or is it all of it together?

You’re not sure. You’re just enjoying the muscle you feel beneath the surface of his nearly square palm, the thick round meat between the web of his thumb and the end of his wrist. You can’t help but admire the basin in the center where the heart and head line lie parallel. Not that you were a palm reader. But you couldn’t help but know a thing or two about the intuitive art.

Hands. Fingers.

They’re your job, afterall.

“What do you do for work?” you ask, because hands like his were used. Too thick not to be. They couldn’t just sit pretty all day.

“I’m a contractor.”

You blink. You look up at him with your brows high into your forehead. “These are not contractor hands,” you say, stroking along his palm. You don’t see a single cut or abrasion. The few calluses he had could barely be considered calluses at all. More like small rough spots.

“I wear special gloves,” he says with a smirk. “It’s a special kind of leather that fits around ‘em real tight.”

“Oh,” you answer, heat fully overtaking your chest and face. You imagine how nice his fingers must look wrapped in a second skin, smoothing over all his contours and lines, making each appendage even thicker and his hands even broader. You imagine what they would feel like, sliding up your bare calves and pulling you apart at the knees. You imagine the soft, conditioned leather moving back and forth across your clit, driving you mad ‘cause your aching for his skin and his touch and his heat.

“You know, I uhh… got a shoot coming up in a couple weeks. I’d love to see you again.”

Your heart races in your chest.

He smirks, his eyes soft and hazy. “You know, since you’re doin’ such a good job takin care o’ my hands right now.”

“Absolutely,” you try to temper your excitement. “Just give me the date, time, and place.” You shrug in a way that you’re sure is very nonchalant. “I mean, I-I-I can come to you if you need me to.” The Pope himself could have an appointment scheduled, and you would cancel it without regret if this man is implying what you are desperately hoping he is implying.

“Well, alright then.” He grins.

—------------

You’re pressed into the door of the hotel room–the one right next to where Joel just finished his photoshoot. He’s got one arm wrapped around the back of your neck, pulling your face into his. His kisses are heavy and fervent. His tongue licks into you in a way that makes you want it even deeper–makes you wanna swallow him whole and keep him inside you. One of his hands is gloved–in one of the ‘special gloves’ he told you about. It’s a camel-colored leather, hand-stitched and form-fitting. And it is definitely not one he uses for work. They fit tight around the heel of his palm, like driving gloves. Must have gotten a new pair from Cartier themselves. 

His gloved hand is under your shirt, sliding up your mid-section and grasping your breast. You gasp and moan into his mouth when he starts pinching and plucking your nipple. 

“Open up for me,” he says after pulling away from you. 

And when you do, he shoves two fingers between your lips, the rest of his hand resting on your cheek, your head still cradled by his arm.

“Good girl,” he coos with a smirk. “Good girl.” He grinds his hardness into your side.

You’re melting into the door behind you, into him, into your own body. You close your lips and suck, not quite sure what to do or how to turn him on. You curl your lips beneath your teeth and slowly bob your head back and forth.

“No no no. Not like that,” he chides you. “This ain’t no cock in your mouth.” He shakes his head. “They’re my fingers.” His eyes are wide and serious. “And I don’t want you thinkin ‘bout anythin else but that. Alright, darlin?” He’s nodding up and down, waiting for you to mirror him.

You nod back the best you can and adapt.  You press the two fingers into the roof of your mouth and suck hard, scraping them along your teeth as you pull your head back. Your lips are wrapped tight around them. You rub your tongue back and forth between them as you engulf them again. You watch him as he watches you through heavy eyelids.

“Good girl,” he says again and licks his lips. His gloved hand moves to your other breast, squeezing it with a rough grip. “Good fuckin girl. Suck those fingers,” he says and you can feel him wiggle them in your mouth. 

You go weak in the knees and you’re not sure how you’re able to stay upright. By the grace of god, you’re able to reach up and grab his hand. You pull his fingers out and then take only one finger back inside. 

He watches you, curious, twisting your nipple in his hand.

Then you add the second finger back in, sucking it. Wetting it. Drool pooling around the edges of your mouth.

You pull those two out and then you suck three fingers in–not as deep and they’re scraping against your teeth more, but you try to give that third finger some extra attention, tracing along the bottom of it with the tip of your tongue.

“You want it bad, huh?” He looks like he’s scowling, but he’s still grinding against you–hard as ever.

You nod.

“You want my hands all over you, baby?” He applies the smallest amount of pressure to his bare, wet fingers in your mouth, causing you to gag. 

Tears tumble out the edges of your eyes as you nod.

He pulls his hands away from you and steps back. “I need you on that bed. Naked. Now."

You rush to do as he says, removing all your clothes in a flurry. You barely register the low hum of the A/C and the cool temperature of the room. You’re too focused on the towering man walking towards you, your legs spreading of their own accord.

His lips are tight and he sucks in a deep breath. "That is one good lookin pussy." He unbuckles his belt and rips it from the loops of his jeans. His eyes roam over your body as he tosses it to the side, the buckle thudding against the carpet. He tugs his t-shirt up his stomach and over his head. "Can't wait to make it mine."

Once his jeans are off and he's just as bare as you (except for the glove on his hand), he waves for you to scoot back before joining you. 

Joel settles himself on his side, propped up on his elbow. He makes no move toward his hardened cock. Instead, the hand you were sucking on before finds your face again–cradling it. And this time, his thumb tucks itself between your lips. 

You suck on it like a straw. 

"How many o’ these you think you can fit in there?" He says. But he’s not referring to your mouth. His gloved hand has found its way between your legs and folds. One lone finger is prodding at your wet entrance. He squints and looks down as he pulls it back out–only having gone in an inch or two. The tip of his glove glistens in the warm glow of the room's lamps. He looks back at you with a grin, sliding his finger in deeper. "Wonder if I can fit em all." He bites his lip as he stares at yours, plunging his finger in and out. "Fuck you with my whole hand."

You close your eyes and moan.

"Yeah? That sound good to you?" He adds a second finger, pushing both into you slowly.

You open your eyes and nod eagerly–humming in agreement. His thumb tugs at your cheek from inside your mouth. 

Joel chuckles. "Nah, not this time." He licks his lips. His eyelids are heavy. “My cock’s too hungry for it.”

 You pull his thumb out of your mouth. You lick his palm, tracing the deep creases with your tongue. "Whatever you want."

He curses under his breath.

His two gloved fingers curl and stroke your inner walls and while the sensation is high-pitched and pleasing, you're more focused on properly worshiping his bare hand. 

Your tongue leaves his palm and you turn his hand over so you can suck the knuckles. Fulfilling one of the many fantasies you've had about Joel since first meeting him. You swirl your tongue around the hill of bone beneath the skin before lowering your mouth and suckling. 

Joel groans. "You love it that much, huh?" He curls his fingers, scraping against your inner clitoris muscle. "Love sucking on me?"

"Yeah," you whimper as your hips jump. 

"Fuck, that’s what I like to hear." Joel removes the two gloved fingers from inside you. He glides them up and around your folds, spreading your slick and teasing your clit. 

It feels …different–how the hard and thin seams of the glove create an added sensation. A starker tease alongside the languid movement of his hand. 

You look down in time to see Joel adding a third finger inside you, the pressure growing too slowly for your taste. But again, you have another task to attend to. 

You suck Joel's pinky in your mouth and bob your head a few times before releasing it.  You suck it right back in with his ring finger alongside it.

He grunts and moans, his three fingers jerking inside you. Your pussy is wet and squelching. His lips go tight as he watches his glove shine more and more with your slick. 

He pulls his fingers out of your mouth and holds your head in place as he kisses you, biting and tugging on your lips. His tongue pushing in so deep, it feels like he's trying to drink you. 

"Fuck, that wet pussy sounds fuckin good. You gonna let me put my cock in there?" He speaks into your mouth. 

Your stomach swoops and your body is on fire. "Yes, please, Joel," you moan. "Please fill me up with your cock." 

He pulls his gloved fingers out of you. His eyes are big and wide. "You think you deserve it?"

"What?!" After everything? After all the sucking and fawning and–how? How could he deny you? You panic. 

"Please, Joel," you whine. You wrap your arms around him and kiss him up and down his neck. "I sucked your fingers so good. I sucked you so good." You're desperate. "I'm so wet for you." You kiss him down his chest. "Never been this wet."  You grab his cock, aiming to put it in your mouth. "Please-please-please!"

His gloved hand, covered in slick, wraps around your chin and jawbone, stopping you. "That's not the wet hole I want," he says and pushes you back, flat on the mattress. He quickly settles between your legs. There's no need for him to spit on his cock or glide it through your folds–your leaking arousal on the sheets. He uses his bare hand to guide it to your entrance. 

He groans and curses as he pushes in. 

"Thank you thank you thank you, Joel," you whisper and whimper as he sparks all your aching nerve endings. 

His forearms are on either side of you–his broad shoulders and body cage you in. “Fuck, this pussy is heaven, baby.”

The slow moving roll of his hips is the opposite of your panicked desperation, but it feels delicious. Turning all the glowing embers into full-blown fire. “So good, so good,” you mumble.

“Yeah? You like that cock, baby?” he asks with a smirk.

“Cock’s so good, Joel.”

He thrusts harder, his speed only slightly increased. Each heavy, steady flick of his hips sends a shock wave of pleasure through you. His bare thumb finds its way back into your mouth. “Suck on this ‘til you cum, baby.”

You nod. You can’t imagine what you look like. The lower half of your face feels wet with your spit. Your eyes are barely open, but you can’t stop staring at the beautiful man above you. His furrowed brows. His tight lips. His flared nostrils as he pounds into you faster and faster.

“Good girl,” he says as he tucks his head down and presses his cheek into yours. “Good girl, suckin me so good.” His arm wraps around your shoulder and pulls your body closer. “Knew you’d take good care o’ me. Knew this pussy’d be so wet.”

The heat inside you is building faster than you expected. You’re meeting his thrusts with your own–your thighs slapping into his hips. 

“Love suckin my fingers, don’t you, baby? Don’t you?” His lips find yours again and he kisses you with his thumb still in your mouth. 

His hips slow down and a desperate groan escapes your lungs, punched out by your diaphragm. You plead, but your words are intelligible.

He pulls his thumb from between your lips. “Whatchu need, baby?” He's rolling into you again, languid and rhythmic. 

“Make me come, Joel. Please make me come.”

“You need to come, baby?”

“Please, please,” you whine. 

“Alright, alright.” He leans back, his bare thumb back in your mouth and his gloved fingers on your clit. He doesn’t thrust any faster and it drives you crazy.

You try to shift his pace, fuck yourself on him til he gets the point–but instead he stops thrusting altogether.

“You got this, baby, come on,” he says with a smirk, making you do all the work. “Come on.”

Well, except for his hand rubbing circles on your clit. You writhe and squirm on his cock, chasing chasing chasing that fiery, burning heat. It’s there. It’s so close.

“Good girl, good li’l thumb-sucker,” he says and something twists inside your gut so hard you immediately come with a loud whimper. Body pulsing and pussy contracting around him. He grunts and curls his hips–as if he didn’t have a choice but to push himself deeper into your orgasm. He pulls his thumb from your mouth and strokes your chin with it. “Good fuckin girl, comin all over me.”

He falls back on top of you and wraps you up in his arms.

Your vision is blurry and you’re trying to catch your breath when he starts thrusting again–hard and fast.

“Knew you’d be good for me. Knew you’d be so fuckin wet.” 

Your body jerks and trembles from the stimulation, and you’re too blissed out to do anything but take it. 

“Knew you’d love suckin me.” He speaks through panting breaths. “Knew this pussy’d be so fuckin good.” He pushes himself up onto his hands. “You wanna come one more time, baby?” he asks.

You’re not sure, but you think the noise that comes out of you is one of agreement. You nod your head, whole body bouncing from his thrusts.

“‘M gonna fill you up,” he grunts with his brows pulled tight. “Come with me while I fill you up.” 

You want to, you really want to come one more time. And he’s pounding into you so hard, your bodies are slapping again. And his eyes and his voice and the determination on his face.

“Come with me, baby, come on,” he chokes out. Then he groans, heavy and low, and you can feel it–you can feel his milky release spurting out and filling you up. He stays above you, trying to catch his breath. “Didja come again?”

You smile. “No, but that’s okay,” you say. God, he’s beautiful. The way his eyes crinkle at the edges and how his beard frames his face.

“Like hell it is,” he murmurs and pulls out of you. He falls to your side again and two gloved fingers dip inside of you, his come spilling out. “You want my thumb again, baby?”

You nod and he gives it to you. You suck on it, pressing the pad of skin against your teeth. He pulls his fingers out and spreads his seed around your clit in circles, making a big mess of your folds.

You’re still dizzy and still over-stimulated, but his eyes are so big and sweet.

“I’ll stay here as long as it takes,” he says as he alternates between thrusting his fingers inside you and rubbing your clit. His brand-new gloves likely ruined.

You grab his wrist when you feel yourself getting close. When the heat hotter than fire starts to build inside of you again. You pant through your nose, your mouth glued to his thumb.

“Took such good care o’ me, baby.” He leans over you and presses his cheek to yours. His voice echoing through you. “Lemme take care o’ you. Lemme make you come, beautiful. Lemme make you come. Wantchu comin on my fingers every day with this pretty li’l pussy. So good for lettin me fill you up. You sucked me so good. Lemme take care o’ you, baby. Lemme make you come.”

It’s less powerful than your first, but the pulse of pleasure your orgasm sends through you is strong and satisfying. You moan and tug Joel’s hand away now that you're starkly overstimulated. “Oh my god,” you sigh, barely able to open your eyes.

Joel chuckles as his hand slides up your body. “Knew you’d be good for me.”

++++++

a/n: It’s been so long since I’ve written just-smut that I really don’t know how to end it. ‘And then they showered and took a nap!’ lol!

[politicalprof]

2019 in books:

David McCullough, 1776: A highly accessible, if somewhat naive, depiction of the year that defined the prospects for American independence. I wouldn’t go there for deep, critical analysis. But for a story of a year, it is well done.

Michael Palin, Erebus: HMS Erebus was a British naval vessel that spent much of its career in Arctic and Antarctic exploration. If you are interested in Victorian era explorations of hard places, a fascinating read.

Emilio Corsetti III, 35 Miles from Shore: The story of an airline crash in the early 1970s in the Caribbean. What happened, why, how, who survived and what we learned. Interesting if not brilliant.

Raymond Thorp, Crow Killer: Old-fashioned tale of the inspiration behind the Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson. As much fantasy as history. But it offers a flavor of a time and a subgroup few Americans would know.

James Corey, Caliban’s War: The second book of “The Expanse” series. The protomolecule is working its mojo, and Earth, Mars and the Belters are none too happy with one another. A fun read of a massive space opera.

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing: Set in the context of the collapsing Eastern Front during WWII, this story proceeds from the fractured point of view of the Germans who are about to be turned into refugees fleeing oncoming Soviet forces. The book, notably, does not make these Germans sources of sympathy: the mood is dissonant and disordered. A real piece of literature.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: Because who doesn’t want a point-of-view account of a key counselor to Henry VIII, one who rose to extraordinary wealth and power despite his humble birth and then managed the, how shall we say, removal of Kathrine as Queen? Replaced by Anne Boleyn? Who wouldn’t want to read it? It’s excellent, by the way.

James Corey, Abaddon’s Gate: Book three of The Expanse, and the protomolecule has remade humanity’s relationship to the universe. But we’ll probably screw that up, too. Another good story, filled with actual thought about the problems of space travel and space living.

MIchael Krondl, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice: Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam each in their turn dominated the global spice trade -- a trade that was one of the main stimuli for early colonialism and imperial conquest, and which strongly influenced the rise of the modern corporation as a linch-pin of global capitalism. The book is not as good as it should be, but the story is one that few people know, but should.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies: Hey, it’s time to get rid of Anne Boleyn everyone! Or, at least, to separate her head from her body. And let’s manage the English Reformation, too ... all just a few years before losing our own head. Welcome to the early/middle 1500s in England everyone!

Leigh Perry, A Skeleton in the Family: Who doesn’t have a skeleton living in their house who helps solve mysteries. I mean, who doesn’t?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: So my son has started reading Harry Potter. So I have started reading Harry Potter. I liked this book: it’s tight, it’s focused, it’s a fun read. I see the appeal.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The answer to the questions: “What if the angels and demons charged with over-seeing Earth as humans go from the Garden of Eden to Armageddon decide that they like Earth and don’t want Armageddon to happen (even if their allies do)? And what if the Anti-Christ were raised in a perfectly mundane family in a perfectly mundane English village? How might it all turn out?” To delightful and funny effect.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Meh. Okay. Not as good as book one. But still a good story.

Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America: A broad pastiche of events surrounding one of the many civil rights cases of the 1940s and 50s: the abuses and murders of several African American men accused of raping a white woman in Lakeland, FL, in 1949. With a whole lot of associated discussions of other cases, the NAACP, corrupt and criminal law enforcement, race riots, and the like. A good read. And how can it be that the bastard George HW Bush, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to fill a seat once held by the staggering legal figure that was Thurgood Marshall. Shameful is the only word.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Certainly better than the Chamber of Secrets. A darker turn. But beginning to get padded as readers demanded “more” if not “better.”

James Corey, Cibola Burn: Book 4 of The Expanse ... and I didn’t like it. It seemed like filler, a book written to a contract deadline. Maybe it will pay off in the end. But another one like that and I’m not going to care.

Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up: Did you know our oldest known ancestor, Lucy, probably died by falling out of a tree? If stories about how people have messed things up, have suffered both intentional and unintentional consequences, turn you on, do I ever have the book for you. Schadenfreude much?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Dear lord is this book long. Why? No doubt because the fans wanted it to be. But it is as gratuitously padded as any book I have ever read. It’s okay. But I wasn’t particularly impressed. Perhaps another six Quidditch matches would have helped ....

Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: Thought the HBO miniseries was scary? It was tame. I mean: the Soviets, with their level of “technical prowess” and their industrial “quality control checks” ran the facility. Heck, Chernobyl wasn’t even their first disaster. Let’s just put it this way: the actual fuel piles in each of the FOUR Chernobyl reactors were so big that: 1) different sections had different characteristics, and didn’t all operate at the same rates or temperatures; and 2) the monitoring equipment couldn’t record how all of the pile was operating at any time. Happy now? Russia still has 10 Chernobyl-style reactors in operation. Enjoy your good night’s sleep everyone!

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Yes, yes: I know. This isn’t Order of the Phoenix. Well, I read Order of the Phoenix many years ago, and thought it was deeply annoying. A pile of words with little point. A way to keep the audience happy with long passages about very little.

Meanwhile, I, like my son, roared through Half-Blood Prince. A ripping good tale. Much tighter than the last several of the series.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A fine read. A bit slow getting going: let’s go here! Let’s go there! Let’s recap the plot! But after the first 1/3 or so, the story got moving and I enjoyed it. Didn’t expect great literature; didn’t get great literature. But then again, I deeply appreciate how much pleasure my son got from this, and how excited my daughter is to engage with it. If it hadn’t been conceived and written, it seems like there’d be a Harry Potter sized hole in the universe.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods: In all honesty, I didn’t really like the first 2/3 of this book: too many tangents; too many sub-stories for the sake of sub-stories. And I’m still not sure I think it was a great book. But I really enjoyed the last third of it, and there were moments, vignettes, and sentences that truly blew me away. So I am glad I stayed with it.

Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade: A sci fi story of soldiers apparently engaged in a war with Mars who are transported to the battlefield as beams of light. One gets unhinged from time. I am not sure it was worth the work, and I came to understand it was based on a short story and so, at times, it seemed a bit one-trick pony-ish. But it had its share of moments.

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: A bit slow going at first, but it grows more compelling as it moved forward. This is the story of the 1936 crew (rowing) team at the University of Washington that went to Berlin and won the gold medal as Adolf Hitler watched. An interesting story about crew as a sport (about which I knew basically nothing), and life in Depression-era Washington state -- with a little, somewhat gratuitous, commentary about life in Nazi Germany layered in. One takeaway? The actor Hugh Laurie’s father was the lead oarsman on the British crew at Berlin in 1936. Hugh Laurie rowed crew at Cambridge as well.

James Corey, Nemesis Games: The next in the Expanse series. Much more enjoyable than the last one, but still a bit strained. One heck of a plot “twist.” A perfectly lovely way to relax; didn’t change my life. Some interesting character twists. But also a lot of “here are some giant developments (a lot of giant stuff) that give us lots of things to write about going forward!”

Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons: the story of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Interesting behind the scenes look at how the mission got funded, planned and implemented. Accessible in terms of the explanations; thick with bureaucratic story-telling and summary. It turns out this stuff is really, really hard. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.

And to end the year, I am reading: Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal: What if 13 year old Jesus had a buddy who, 2000 years later, wrote a gospel that filled in those missing years of Joshua’s (as Biff calls Jesus) life? Well, here’s your answer.

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Movie Review: Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the day the movie formally drops in the U.K, so if you haven’t yet seen the movie don’t read on.

General Reaction:

This is singularly and categorically the most frustrating movie I have ever seen and I genuinely mean that!

I have walked away from this, I believe, two and a half hour movie and have had maybe 3 hours to digest what I have just seen and I still do not know whether or not I enjoyed what I saw or found it completely frustrating.

I know I've talked about my history with Star Wars with the last 4 movies that Disney has released, but I for these two reviews it is imperative to cement my relationship with this universe going in because it should help make my case for my opening statement.

To clarify, when it comes to the Star Wars universe, I only know the movies. I am not old enough to have grown up with the original saga before seeing The Phantom Menace but I did complete the original trilogy before seeing Revenge of the Sith and have watched those first six movies in chronological order numerous times because I am that sad.

When it comes to the Disney-era movies, as I mentioned I have seen all four that have come before Episode IX and again enjoyed all of them to different degrees.

I have not however seen any TV series, as in the animated Clone Wars and Rebels series nor The Mandalorian. I don't really have time to commit to TV shows, particularly the length of animated shows, and with regards to the recent Mandalorian I've had university work to keep me occupied.

I have also not read any Star Wars novel or comic, the main reason for both of these, aside from the time constraints, is because I don't enjoy homework and that's what both the TV and book series feel like.

I get the point of movies these days is to franchise with an expansive universe and, to it's credit, Star Wars was the first franchise to start this despite the MCU simply doing it better.

However, I am not as die hard a Star Wars fan that I want to find the time to fit all of this expansive universe viewing and reading in to get the most out of my enjoyment of the movies, let alone can. I enjoy the movies just fine, and have not yet found a situation in the movies to dig a little deeper into the Star Wars mythology...save for one particular scene in Solo: A Star Wars Movie which I’ll get into during my spoiler review.

The reason I won’t go into why I felt a small urge in Solo of all Star Wars movies is because the element in question from that movie I would have used during this movie but they don’t. In fact, The Rise of Skywalker should really be called The Fandom Menace because, despite the fact this movie promises a lot and delivers some good stuff, it does not deliver on what the Star Wars fandom has either theorised or to a degree been promised, again save for two aspects of fan service that go absolutely nowhere.

In fact “The Rise of Skywalker” as a title is the biggest tease and letdown of the movie. It’s the movie’s biggest promise and equally its greatest obstacle particularly after you’ve seen it once and discover why it is such a letdown.

I will also say, because of how shaky this “sequel trilogy” has been in the development of the characters, they seem to be wanting to wrap everything up, promising this as the “End of the Skywalker saga” which seems to also be a false promise when your title is “The Rise of Skywalker” which in itself is a complete and utter cheat and I will definitely talk about that in the spoiler review, but what the to-do list is really is to both wrap up the original trilogy because they included the original characters and borrowed from the actual original movies HEAVILY, but also wrapping up this new trilogy because I do believe that Disney have heard the backlash this trilogy have been getting and so are trying to not have us go back to this trilogy in future as was the biggest mistake for this trilogy.

But what actually happens is not only do the “wrap ups” seem either rushed, forced and/or sloppy as hell, but then you have new things cropping up or still unanswered questions which either prod or demand exploration in a sequel. I know Star Wars is getting the Disney+ spin-off series treatment but I don’t think LucasFilm are as bold as Kevin Feige, or as successful, and therefore won’t bombard the Disney+ schedule with shows.

It is a shame this trilogy has somewhat fizzled out the way it has because there are new characters and concepts introduced during the trilogy that I would enjoy seeing continue, because I’ve either liked them from the start or have been rooting for them and they finally had their pay-off moment here.

But if Star Wars ever wants to stand a chance at reclaiming its former glory not only as one of the most beloved universes in film but also, even with the prequel trilogy, one of the most successful cinematic universes, then I believe this extended hiatus is a blessing since Benioff & Weiss dropped out of a future trilogy for everyone in-house from Bob Iger and Kathleen Kennedy to even the actors involved such as the newer main cast to revise what the last four years have amounted to for the franchise and what the takeaways can be from it.

Cast:

All this being said, there are still good and impressive points to this movie, largely in the cast of the movie. It is just a shame that for the large part they will be affiliated with such a shambles of a movie.

The sequel trilogy’s new trinity of characters finally all come into their own in this movie with not only the three of them actually sharing a reasonable amount of screen time together but also the three of them falling into their respective roles that particularly made the likes of Han, Leia and Luke so loved.

However, while Daisy Ridley finally comes into her own as a Jedi and the bromance between Poe and Finn is reignited, the writing and pacing of the movie does very much fall back into that rushed wrapping up I touched on earlier because they haven’t really been that way for the entirety of The Last Jedi.

I really don’t understand the fascination with either Kylo Ren or Adam Driver personally. While I do think they’ve played on the two sides of the same coin angle not just with Rey and Kylo but also Kyle and Ben rather well and Driver does play both quite well, Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader yet that’s the road they’ve been trying to take the character down.

It’s also a very sad and somewhat distracting aspect for this to be Carrie Fisher’s final outing as Leia, Distracting because of course Carrie Fisher’s tragic passing almost three years ago to the day casts a looming shadow over this movie, but sad because as great as digital reconstruction can be, and Star Wars can definitely say they are early pioneers of it, doesn’t change the fact that there Leia’s scenes are being scrutinised to see which lines are archive footage, where there’s a body double and ultimately how the character and actress will be honoured in their final scenes...unfortunately as a whole they do not pay off.

But speaking of old favourites, three aspects of this franchise that will never get old for me are the Droids, Chewie and Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian. As much as Donald Glover tried during Solo, no one does Lando like Billy Dee.

Chewie I became surprisingly emotionally invested in during this movie.

Meanwhile, R2-D2, BB-8, C-3PO and even new droid D-O are essentially the house fixtures, you could not imagine a Star Wars movie without them.

The rest of the cast are serviceable, despite their roles either being minimal or laughable. Not only do the returning minor characters continue to either be minor or practically invisible, but the new characters they introduce simply take away extra screen time to further develop our main cast.

Recommendation:

I can’t not advise people to see this movie, particularly if you have followed the Skywalker saga (all nine-movies or even just this trilogy). I do not believe a virgin to this universe seeing this movie would get any enjoyment out of it aside from the occasional laugh either with it or at it.

It’s definitely not a great movie, I can’t even say it’s commercially a good movie but I think it’s a movie that needs to be seen for the pure and simple reason of closure for the trilogy. I for one as an Aspergic OCD individual cannot leave things unfinished. If I start something I have to finish it and I do believe for the foreseeable this is finished.

What I will say in the movie’s defence is if you do find something in this movie you like, defend and support the movie for it because I feel it is going to need all the help it can get.

So that’s my non-spoiler review of Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Movie Reviews as well as other reviews and posts.

[scifimagpie]

Game of ZZZs: How Long Stories Ruin Everything

I've been putting this one off because I was kind of busy writing an 18-part series deep-dive involving journalism and undercover work, but since Lindsay Ellis has released her video essay conclusion, I have finally put my thoughts in order.

So, today we're going to talk about something contentious. I have no issue with books being long, or shows being long, or movies being long - but at the same time, I do. And yes, I know some people adore epic scale stories for their own sake.  Not everything needs to be a thousand-page-long ten-book series with three spinoffs and prequels. Oh, sure, market forces and advertising play a role in this, but creators still participate in it.

But sometimes a story isn't long because it needs to be, it's long because the writer thinks it HAS to be. From my personal experience as a reader and writer, and especially as an editor, I've come to some conclusions about how stories are artificially extended. And in a world of global warming and climate change, shouldn't we be fighting waste everywhere, on every level?

Now, a certain show ended its eighth season not long ago; Big Bang Theory came to a whimper of a close after ten seasons, and Veep - which I only heard about towards its grand finale, alas - has also finished up a seven-season run. 

I'm not saying all of these shows participated in various errors. I'm saying pretty much every show, book, and movie series will partake in them eventually. So how do we do better than the bad ones, and how do we echo or even improve on the good ones? We can't fight what we don't know about, so let's get into it.

Spacing

Everything happens, but not right away. No, the important events are distanced from each other, to the point where there are long stretches of dead zones or deserts of nonsense in between them. I'm not talking about character interactions as nonsense here, but unfortunately, a lot of authors seem to think that they count, and that human drama isn't interesting enough to be a climax. Older fantasy works--cough, cough, Wheel of Time--can be particularly bad about this. The problem with spacing out events and using human drama between the big McGuffin/army-driven fights is that readers get frustrated by the human drama rather than finding it rewarding. Or worse, they find the army and McGuffiny-crap a distraction from the human stuff.

Padding

I know about this issue from the inside. Bad Things that Happen to Girls started off as a book called Foreverland, and then was untitled for a while before getting its current name. It went through two full rewrites before arriving at its current published form. When I wrote it at first, I thought it absolutely had to be a long novel, with lots of details about the girls' lives and a slow-burn breakdown, then an extended road trip in the middle and a bunch of scenes about their experiences in university.

I didn't realise I was padding it, but when I experimented with radically decreasing the timeline of events, I had a revelation. I didn't need years and paragraphs on paragraphs chronicling their lived experiences, full of pointless dialogue and meandering descriptions. All I had to do were give little samples and important moments, and that would get the idea across. Sometimes a flash reveals more than a long exposure shot, to put it in cinematic terms.

Cramming

EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW AND HERE ARE TEN NEW CHARACTERS AND A NEW SUBPLOT AND HOLY CRAP WE MUST MAKE UP FOR WRAPPING UP TOO MANY THREADS AT THE END OF THE LAST SEASON OOPS.

The caps lock here was entirely necessary and appropriate, because with cramming, the story often feels like it's shouting at you. (Probably in German.)

The biggest problem with cramming, too, is that it requires glossing over things. If readers get interested by a small detail, they might end up screaming, "wait, go back!" long after the author's moved to another topic, or three other topics. Finding the balance between this and padding can be tricky, but the best solution I can offer is "external perspective." Get someone to read over your work, and when they lose attention, that's time to cut. It's a trick I often use with editing manuscripts - the minute my attention wavers, I mark it, just in case.

Crashing

this tends to happen to shows that have lived past their expiry date. Supernatural is a fine example of this. This is where "shark-jumping" tends to come into play; characters do things that go against their nature and development for the sake of jump-starting a narrative or adding some excitement.

Oh, the shark-jump. That's worth a mini-section of its own. Honestly, most shows either end or jump the shark in order to keep going. There's no such thing as a perfect writer or a perfect story; mostly because these things are subjective, but partly because keeping all the balls in the air for a story is just plain hard. 

Endless escalation 

Science fiction authors are prone to this, and so are epic fantasy authors. In an effort to keep reader interest, stakes rise and rise and rise, and then lose sight of the human scale of things. The problem is that stories are made of people, and if you forget about the people, you don't have a story anymore.

As with Cramming, this can lead to glossing over interesting bits as well. The full impact of a big change or shift isn't always felt if we rush to the next big, shiny thing. In real life, though, long-reaching consequences of events can have ripples for decades or even centuries. The Magna Carta was a big deal when it was signed; the effects of the Spanish Inquisitions, the Crusades, the unification of China (which happened more than once), the Viking cultural expansions, and the colonization of North America (by which I mean the land-theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples) are all still talked about to this day. 

Bad things that happen to characters need room to resonate. PTSD and trauma are not only interesting, they're natural, and even when people mostly recover from them, they leave a lasting impact. Let your characters get wrecked by something. Have characters reference things that have happened. Let characters get fatigued, collapse, and have to fix themselves. It'll not only demonstrate the actual impact of your events, it'll keep you from having to throw together another big, shiny thing to make the story more exciting (looking at you, Avengers series and mainstream comics). 

So, what tends to actually cause these writing techniques behind the scenes? 

Burnout or boredom

One of the most difficult and important factors - one which arguably contributed to the absolute mess that was the GoT finale - is just getting tired of your own damn story. When this happens, authors and creators will end up trying to revamp something with weird new twists partly to keep themselves interested, might engineer an awkward left turn to justify a foreshadowed plot element, or might just do a half-hearted wrap-up of the previous plot elements.

Here's the thing - audiences don't always consume stories at the same rate as authors write them. Many times, readers or viewers will stumble on a work and binge it in a relatively short time, so what took years for the writer will take months, at most, for the consumer. This can make tonal clashes very jarring. 

In other cases, an author will abandon a series due to writer's block or life events - a sin of which I, cough, am guilty - and then try to pick it up later. This will still impact the story, often negatively. Maybe one has just gotten well and thoroughly tired of the subject matter, or it's been done to death in the popular sphere. It doesn't really matter - either way, authors are subject to the world around them, and sometimes, the only way to deal with burnout or boredom is rotating to another project. That's fine - the only issue comes when the first project is completely abandoned, and languishes, unfinished. 

Societal changes and personal development 

I'm combining these two because the world around us affects us, and sometimes, we even affect the world. If you'd told me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were going to rise to power during my lifetime, I wouldn't've believed you. To many, it sounded like a bad dream. Well, here we are, and the long night has not yet come to an end. Using art to cope with dark times and critique them is a long-celebrated human trend, and there's no reason to stop now. Sure, we might fear our work aging poorly - but stories that try to be timeless always age anyhow, and an earnest time capsule often lasts longer, because it can tap into the problems of an era (which echo forward, as discussed in the section above).

If you'd told me that I'd be able to deal with my family issues in a more satisfactory way, I might have believed you - but realising the impact of that on my writing both as a Game Master and an author is another matter. However, the additional perspective and maturity of healing has, rather than distancing me from characters' struggles, provided additional objectivity and even empathy. Fixing ourselves and healing doesn't "take away our artistic magic" - far from it. If anything, getting over issues unlocks the ability to deal with them in fiction much more effectively. 

Disillusionment and insecurity

These are nasty brain demons, all right - perhaps one has taken a look at the broad span of one's work, compared it to one's goals, and feels they are just - well, left wanting. Every creator struggles with this at some point, whether crafting a story for a D&D party or for hundreds of readers or thousands of viewers. The only way to deal with it is with external perspective and turning to objective sources of both external critique and validation. 

After all, we tell ourselves things that may or may not be true all the time, and measuring them against the perceptions of the audience can drastically correct things. Your readers might just be happy to see the characters get married - never mind that it took you five years to write about them getting together. And even if they don't like something specific or complain about it or nitpick - hey, they're coming back. You compelled them. Even if the readers, say, abandon their fandom and proclaim it a trashfire - they're still paying for or giving your story attention and money. And ultimately, from a marketing perspective attention is always neutral or positive - even if that attention is controversial - because it increases profits. 

How do we even begin to fix all this? 

But.  All hope is not lost.

By acknowledging burnout, boredom, disillusionment, insecurity, personal development, and societal change - the factors which often lead to writing shortcuts detailed in the previous section - we can compensate for the natural creative struggles by accepting and anticipating them. 

Try to write books in a series in a continuous stretch when possible, making it harder to lose track of the tone or style or character journeys. Plot things out, and get yourself a hands-on editor and/or extremely trustworthy beta-readers. And forgive yourself for screwing up - then get back to writing. At least, that's what I'm doing! 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people's manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * 

* Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

[currentclimate]

Start A Revolution, in Response To Permafrost Thaw

“Permafrost Thaw Looks Alien: What You Need to Know” Via Climate State, March 16, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCoo8MA4eI8)

For context, a few short years ago, the melting of the permafrost was seen by scientists as a harbinger of doom, as a marker of abrupt and potentially catastrophic (for humans and the biosphere) climate change.

It’s happening.

This is a major positive feedback that is well underway, with the potential (according to the video, Dr. Charles Miller, NASA JPL), of compounding anthropogenic carbon release by up to 30%.

This is dire news.

Abrupt climate change is underway. We are living through a climate change emergency, right now, before our eyes. We are witnessing a failure of human culture on a critical scale. More than half of Russians believe climate change is a good thing that will improve their lives through economic benefits from a warming climate, as well as the personal benefit of warmer winters. China continues to build coal-fired power plants while at the same time investing heavily in renewables.

Can you say double-speak?

Can you say thought-crime?

Can you say crimes against humanity, against current and future generations, and against the entire biosphere? Yes, all you sunny-siders, the earth will be fine, even with climate change, but every living thing on this planet will suffer, and many will go extinct . . . many have already gone extinct, because of climate change.

Crimes against humanity are codified by the UN in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal court, Article 7, which states: For the purpose of this statute, ‘crime against humanity’ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.  Scientists have known, for more than 100 years, of the impacts of increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and we have had a running record of CO2 levels taken from a peak in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958.  Michael Mann is now famous for creating the “hockey stick” diagram showing the unprecedented rise in carbon concentrations in the atmosphere.  This is not new information. Exxon/Mobile, and other fossil fuel companies, spent vast sums of money researching climate change, and by the 1980’s, even among scientists for the fossil fuel industry, the markers of climate change were clear.  This attack on humanity has been both knowing and widespread.

In contrast to genocide, crimes against humanity do not need to target a specific group, the whole of the population of the planet will suffice to meet this definition. Moreover,  to be convicted of crimes against humanity, specific intent is not necessary, so, even if Exxon/Mobile knew, or the Bush or Clinton or Obama administrations knew about climate change, a specific intent to harm vast numbers of people is not necessary for guilt.  A general knowledge of potential deleterious impacts is enough, so, maybe we can’t blame Clinton for climate change inaction, because even though we knew about climate change during his administration, the coming impacts were not yet clear.

The impacts are clear and present now. There is danger. People are dying, property damaged, and the biosphere compromised because of climate change. This has been clear since at least the Obama administration. I am not partisan. There is plenty of blame to go around and the blame does not center on a single administration or ideology.

It’s not just China or Russia that are the bad guys. Canada continues to develop and invest in tar sands. The US has exited the Paris Accord and rolled back Obama-era regulations on coal.

It’s the whole world, outside of a few indigenous groups who are sounding the alarms.  These groups can imagine a different world, without capitalism, consumerism; living in a real democracy.  These groups are not bent at the knee to the Economy, to Corporations, to growth and expansion of all markets, regardless of the negative human costs, and, sadly, to self-interest.  These indigenous groups can imagine the ways of life, the radical changes to human society, valuing, and functioning, that would have to occur in order to make even a half-assed attempt at effectively combating climate change.

The rest of the world can’t. The rest of the world buries its head in the sand, choosing instead to look the other way, to stay sunny-sided, or stand steady in the faith that fate offers.

Human culture has failed. Human culture has agreed to value comfort, self-interest, denial, and untruth, instead of the requisite virtues for a functioning and sustainable civilization.  There is not a person on this planet that is not aware the climate is not changing. They may deny it, to their dying breath, but they know it’s there, because all you have to do is step outside your front door to see it.

We need a revolution. An immediate revolution.  To save this planet.  This is no joke. This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan. This is not open to interpretation.  We need to start by respecting intelligence, education, and experience.  

We are not all equal, in terms of experience, education, or intelligence. We are equal under the law. We are equal in the eyes of God, if you believe that sort of thing.  Because you are smart, or educated and experienced, does not mean you are better than a street-sweeper, but it does mean, when it comes to things that matter, that you know about and the street-sweeper doesn’t, that you are given credence. For certain, there are things the street-sweeper knows about through experience or education that you do not, and you should offer the street-sweeper the same level of respect and listen.

Science and scientists have been telling us for years, decades, more than a century, that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will change the climate. Your Uncle Joe, and your representatives in congress, your news media, your president and his cabinet, all these people all over the world have said to themselves -- I know better . . . climate change is not real.

We can argue about the reasons. We can talk about human nature. We can discuss intellectual history. We will surely need to introduce religion, anthropology, sociology, psychology, mythology, and much more, to get at the heart of the reasons. It doesn’t really matter why, it just matters that it's happened, and, now, with abrupt climate change, what the consequences will be and how we will respond.

We need a revolution, but that’s not what is happening. Tribalism is happening. Anger, skepticism, cynicism, they are happening. Brutality is happening.  These are all natural human responses to stress.  They are not surprising. We need a revolution to change this, to change these horrible values, and to push us all beyond denialism into concrete and immediate action.

A revolution.

What better reason to start a revolution than your own family, kin, offspring, and to protect the potential for future generations (this is NOT a given -- “future generations” -- do you understand this?!?! -- the earth has undergone 5 mass extinctions in the past; never at this speed, in case you were about to suggest what’s happening around us is natural)?  

If you need to, think about the polar bears, and the penguins, the Pacific Redwood forests, the salmon and trout in your own streams, which will disappear completely in a much warmer world.  If you need to, think of red tides, toxic algae blooms the size of three states. Think of desertification.  Think of storms the size of continents.

Think whatever you need to get your ass off the couch and into the streets with a sign in your hand, or into your congressperson's office or e-mail or phone. Get your son or daughter or father or brother, sister and uncle and aunt, and tell them we have a climate change emergency and there is no time to waste.

We are witnessing crimes against humanity, against you and me. I know, it’s not about you and me, it’s about all of us, present and future, and it’s about all the living things on this planet. We can’t do it individually; I cannot combat climate change on my own. We need systems and structures of power, government, institutions and infrastructure, to support a project of this kind.  

It’s not your fault you don’t own an electric car. It’s not your fault, you don’t believe me. It’s not your fault, you don’t know anything about climate change, and how dire it already is. It’s not your fault because the systems and structures of power, the institutions we depend upon to protect and guard the public good, the world over, have failed each and every one of us.  We can’t know everything through personal experience and investigation. There is not time for a single person to do this, which is why we have governments and institutions to keep a watchful eye out for all of us, and warn us when necessary, let us know what should be on our radar and what we should learn and pay attention to.  

It’s not your fault you don’t know.

Once you know, if you do not act, then it is your fault. You are culpable. You must look your children and grandchildren in the eyes.  Once you know, you must act, and now you know what you must do, and that is . . . start a revolution.

This is no joke. This is not hyperbole. I am not a radical. I’d much rather sit on my couch. I’d much rather follow my own self-interest.  This is no longer possible, because the environment for which each of us depends for our personal freedom is threatened. Seriously threatened.  People are already dying. There is already a mass refugee crisis, and just like the unprecedented wildfires in the West, nobody mentions climate change in connections with these massive tragedies.

But we all know it’s there. Not a single one of us needs to wait to be told. We know. It’s there.

It’s doesn’t take much to change the world. Think about Rosa Parks. Think about that single act of civil disobedience. Think about the moral outrage that inspired Rosa Parks.

Now, think about climate change, think about yourself, and think about starting a revolution.  That’s what we need, because a miracle is not going to fix this.

“A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation . . . .” Vladimir Lenin, a guy who knew a thing or two about revolutions. 

Now go to it.

[standuphippy]

May Favorites

Here’s what I enjoyed in May. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6G0CPjAQFlGFCTXXbx6jZg?si=B5-28pckSb2vC0pim46A7A

NEW MUSIC: The Bad Bad Hats “The Wild Honeypie Buzzsession” A charming band from Minneapolis. They’ve been livestreaming every Saturday for the past few months and they sound great doing it.

Café Racer “Shadow Talk” If you’ve wanted to get a fix of Cryptograms/ Fluorescent Grey era Deerhunter this will set you right.

Caleb Landry Jones “The Mother Stone” He’s a captivating actor. His record is a woozy, brassy affair.

Carly Rae Jepsen “Dedicated Side B” This record is every bit as good as the “actual” record.

Charli XCX “Detonate” A great song from Charli XCX’s quarantine album.

Christian Lee Hutson “Beginners” An intimate folk record, produced by Phoebe Bridgers.

Deau Eyes “Let It Leave” Alt country goodness.

Fontaines D.C. “A Hero’s Death” Good advice.

Jaime Wyatt  “Neon Cross” More alt country goodness.

Jeff Rosenstock “N O  D R E A M” Rosenstock’s 2018 record “POST-“ is an equal to Superchunk’s “What A Time to Be Alive” in terms of examining the current age by asking ”What the fuck is going on?” in the form of a punk album. Rosenstock keeps that energy alive with “N O  D R E A M”.

Jim White and Marissa Anderson “The Quickening” Experimental drums and guitar from two captivating artists.

Mark Lanegan “Straight Songs of Sorrow” …and drugs. Sorrow and drugs.

Moses Sumney “grae” I saw Moses Sumney open for A Hundred Waters at the beginning of 2015. He ended the set by saying, “I think I have a few tapes left, come find me if you want one.” Greatest merch pitch ever.

Perfume Genius “Set My Heart On Fire Immediately” I look forward to each record with an expectation of greatness but no idea what it will sound like. A Perfume Genius preorder is one of my safest bets.

Prince and the Revolution “Live in Syracuse 1985” Prince followed his own whims onstage; he shifted gears quickly and rarely played entire songs. This set captures him at the hight of his powers at a time when he was still playing what could be considered a conventional set. He played the whole songs here; the setlist is incredible and the performances are expansive.

Rose City Band “Summerlong” Summer jams.

The Soft Pink Truth “Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?” Experimental house from Drew Daniel of Matmos.

Sparks “A Steady Drip Drip Drip” A new Sparks album. Charming, pointed, and very funny.

Sweet Spirit “Trinidad” Sweet Spirit seemed like a glam band (Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen also helm the excellent punk band A Giant Dog) but this album is straight pop and it’s wonderful.

Varsity “Fine Forever” I saw Varsity open for Japanese Breakfast in Chicago a few years ago, “Fine Forever” is a leap forward. It’s a great record.

X “Alphabetland” I love the sound of X.

OLD MUSIC (revisits and new discoveries) :
 Gospel Music “duettes, How to Get to Heaven from Jacksonville FL” Tracyanne Campbell tweeted about singing on “Automobile” and that led me to this EP and LP by Gospel Music. Wry lyrics in the spirit of Beat Happening or The Magnetic Fields.

Ministry “The Land of Rape and Honey, Psalm 69, Filth Pig, The Dark Side of the Spoon, Animositisomnia, No W, Rio Grande Blood, The Last Sucker” Upon reading the visual history book Prescripture, I went to revisit a few Ministry albums. My shorthand takeaway is that I’m never going to like “Filth Pig” (a land-of-a-thousand-chances record for me) but “The Dark Side of the Spoon” - where Al added a saxophone to the sludge - is still one of my favorites.

The Pipettes “We Are The Pipettes” They were fabricated to make modern girl-group music (“Pipettes” like they were formed in a lab, get it?) but had authentic talent. They have a handful of other releases, but “We Are The Pipettes” is the one to check out.

OLD MOVIES: Art School Confidential (2006) Director Terry Zwigoff revisits Daniel Clowes material for this cynical, funny look at art school.

Everyone Else (2009) The Forest for the Trees (2003) A few years ago I spent three hours on Christmas Day at the NuArt watching Toni Erdmann, the third feature written and directed by Maren Ade. It was one of my favorite films of the year. Her first two films are excellent as well. “Everyone Else” observes a young couple in what could be their final days together, and “The Forest for the Trees” chronicles the painful devastation of an idealistic young school teacher. Ade’s films aren’t always “fun” to watch, but I cared about all three of the leads. She works with the actors to capture authentic characters and then lets those characters guide the story.

Godzilla (Showa Era 1954-1975) I was halfway through “Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster” when my six-year-old passed through the room on her way to bed. “What’s this about?” What started as an attempt to delay bedtime for a few minutes has turned into part of our nightly routine: we’ve watched the entire Showa Era run of 15 films, plus “Rodan” and “Mothra.” My daughter marvels at the monsters and I marvel at what she sees and hears. We watched half a dozen films before she turned and exclaimed, “I like the Ghidorah music the best!” She made me realize how much kids appreciate a child’s perspective: her favorite film from the period is “Son of Godzilla”. She even enjoyed “All Monsters Attack!” aka “Godzilla’s Revenge” (where footage from other films is integrated as dream sequences) because the narrative is about a boy figuring out how to deal with bullies.

Tomboy (2011) I loved “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and the Criterion Channel had some of Céline Sciamma’s  older films available for streaming. Tomboy is about a ten-year-old who presents herself as a boy when her family moves to a new neighborhood.

Un Flic (1972) Jean-Pierre Melville’s final film. Alain Delon is a brute as the titular cop who suspects that he’s caught in a love triangle with a criminal mastermind. I loved the heist scenes, I loved the color palette.

[johnmauldin]

Mauldin: 7 Forecasts from the Brightest Financial Minds I Know

In my fairly upbeat 2018 forecast, I predicted that the US economy and markets will probably hold up well, thanks to tax cuts and deregulation. That’s, of course, assuming the Federal Reserve gets no more hawkish than it already has.

Continuing my series of forecasts, here I’ll look at predictions from some of my most trusted friends and colleagues (subscribe to Thoughts from the Frontline to receive all my forecasts). Some disagree with my own views—and that’s perfectly fine. I want you to see all sides so you can make good decisions for your own family and portfolio.

I’ll let these forecasters speak for themselves in longer quotes than I usually allow, then add my own comments.

The article runs long, but I’m sure you’ll take away a lot from it, so bear with me…

Ben Hunt: No Algorithm Can Predict the Future

Let’s start not with a forecast but with an important story about forecasts from Ben Hunt.

Ben’s wide-ranging essays are hard to summarize or excerpt in a way that captures their breadth and depth.

I’ll give you a tiny snippet, but please, set aside some time this month to read the entire article. It is long but worth your while.

The Three-Body Problem is a famous example of a system which has no derivative pattern with any predictive power, no applicable algorithm that a human could discover to adapt successfully and turn basis uncertainty into basis risk. In the lingo, there is no “general closed-form solution” to the Three-Body Problem. (It’s also the title of the best science fiction book I’ve read in the past 20 years, by Cixin Liu. Truly a masterpiece. Life and perspective-changing, in fact, both in its depiction of China and its depiction of the game theory of civilization.)

What is the “problem”? Imagine three massive objects in space … stars, planets, something like that. They’re in the same system, meaning that they can’t entirely escape each other’s gravitational pull. You know the position, mass, speed, and direction of travel for each of the objects. You know how gravity works, so you know precisely how each object is acting on the other two objects. Now predict for me, using a formula, where the objects will be at some point in the future.

Answer: You can’t. In 1887, Henri Poincaré proved that the motion of the three objects, with the exception of a few special starting cases, is non-repeating. This is a chaotic system, meaning that the historical pattern of object positions has ZERO predictive power in figuring out where these objects will be in the future. There is no algorithm that a human can possibly discover to solve this problem. It does not exist.

And that of course is the basic problem we have in economics and investing. When we say that past performance is not indicative of future results, that aphorism is more than just legalese.

Such ideas can easily discourage us from even thinking about the future. However, the real answer is to think about the future differently.

With that prelude, let’s move on.

Anatole Kaletsky: Inflation and Bond Yields Will Accelerate

If I had to rank economic forecasting groups (as opposed to individuals) for consistent quality, Gavekal would be high on the list.

Here are just a few Gavekal snippets from the opening week of 2018. We’ll start with Anatole Kaletsky, who zooms in on inflation as this year’s key unknown factor.

Will inflation accelerate in the US, but not in other major economies? I think the answer is “Yes”, for the same reasons as above. However, I also expected inflation to accelerate and bond yields to increase last year. Instead, both inflation and growth ended the year exactly where they were.

The simple answer is that US unemployment is now 4.1% instead of 4.8%. I was wrong about 5% unemployment being a non-inflationary growth limit, and maybe 4% isn’t either. But whatever the exact number may be, the US is certainly closer to its non-inflationary growth limit now than it was a year ago. In addition, the Trump tax cuts, if they actually stimulate higher US consumption and/or investment (which they may not do by any meaningful amount) will add to US inflationary pressures, since new production capacity will take several years to boost non-inflationary trend growth.

If the prediction of higher US inflation turns out to be right, it will be a game-changer. It will produce much more volatile market conditions and even greater under-performance by US equities and bonds relative to assets in Europe and Japan, where inflation is not a risk.

The follow-on question, if Anatole is right about inflation, is how the Fed will respond to it. The ideal response would have been to start tightening about three years ago. That opportunity having past, the remaining choices are all varying degrees of bad.

Louis Gave: Financials and Energy Will Be Top Sectors This Year

Now let’s move on to Louis Gave, who gives us some stock market ideas at the end of a long, thoughtful essay on liquidity.

Putting it all together, 2018 does seem to be starting on a different note than 2017. While the bull market may not be in peril, it is a tough environment for a price/earnings ratio expansion to occur. Such an outcome usually relies on excess liquidity moving into equities. Yet in 2018, equity markets are more likely to be a source of liquid funds than a destination for them. It follows that if a multiple-expansion is off the table then equity gains will rely on earnings rising. The area where such an improved profit picture is likely is financials (higher rates and velocity) and energy (higher prices). The fact that both of these sectors presently trade on low multiples also helps.

If you want specific sector ideas, there are two good ones.

David Kotok: A Shift Upward Will Continue

My friend David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors had some New Year’s Day thoughts on the Republican tax bill’s impact.

Once the transitional shock of yearend is absorbed, we think the tax bill will raise the valuation of US stocks. Simply put, the tax bill will generate a permanent shift upward of somewhere between $10 and $14 in the threshold of S&P 500 earnings. Once you adjust for that permanent shift, you may continue to factor in the earnings growth rate that you expect from a US economy that is going to grow at 3% instead of 2%. We believe that growth rate is likely for a couple of years.

So, S&P 500 earnings should range up to and then above $150 by the decade’s end. They will do so while the Fed is still engaged in a gradualist restoration of interest rates to something more “normal,” whatever that word means. And those earnings will occur while a repatriation effect is unleashing $1 trillion of stagnant cash in some form of robust redistribution (dividends or stock buybacks) or as productivity-enhancing capex spending. Bottom line is no recession in sight for at least a few years; and low inflation remains, so interest-rate rises will not derail the economic recovery, nor will they alter rising stock market valuations.

Years ago we projected a 3000 level on the S&P 500 Index by 2020.

That is considerably more bullish than most 2018 forecasts I’ve seen. Rather than argue with David, I’ll say this: Be ready for anything this year. The future is no more uncertain than it always is, but the consequences of a mistake are growing as the bull market and economic expansion grow long in the tooth.

They will end at some point. That means you need a strategy that will let you both participate on the upside and defend yourself when the bear appears. I reiterate that you should be diversifying trading strategies, not just asset classes.

Paul Krugman: Rising Rates Spell Trouble

Next we turn to Paul Krugman, who is not generally one of my favorite economists. I quote him this time because he sounds a lot like, well, me.

So we’re living in an era of political turmoil and economic calm. Can it last?

My answer is that it probably can’t, because the return to normalcy is fragile. Sooner or later, something will go wrong, and we’re very poorly placed to respond when it does. But I can’t tell you what that something will be, or when it will happen.

The key point is that while the major advanced economies are currently doing more or less OK, they’re doing so thanks to very low interest rates by historical standards. That’s not a critique of central bankers. All indications are that for whatever reason — probably low population growth and weak productivity performance — our economies need those low, low rates to achieve anything like full employment. And this in turn means that it would be a terrible, recession-creating mistake to “normalize” rates by raising them to historical levels.

But given that rates are already so low when things are pretty good, it will be hard for central bankers to mount an effective response if and when something not so good happens. What if something goes wrong in China, or a second Iranian revolution disrupts oil supplies, or it turns out that tech stocks really are in a 1999ish bubble? Or what if Bitcoin actually starts to have some systemic importance before everyone realizes it’s nonsense?

That was from Krugman’s January 1 New York Times column, and his assessment is not far from my own view.

The difference between us is that Krugman has made a remarkable turnaround since the imminent doom he predicted right after the election. So I’m glad to welcome his Damascene conversion.

I hope it sticks this time.

David Rosenberg: We Are 90% Through This Cycle

I don’t know any economic forecaster more prolific than David Rosenberg. I don’t know how he even finds time to sleep, frankly. His Breakfast with Dave is often the same length as my weekly letters, and he writes it every working day.

Dave’s December 29 issue of Breakfast with Dave was a tour de force on world markets, which I can’t possibly summarize and do any justice to the original, so I’ll cut straight to his conclusion.

In other words, expect a year where volatility re-emerges as an investable theme, after spending much of 2017 so dormant that you have to go back to the mid-1960s to find the last annual period of such an eerie calm – look for some mean reversion on this file in the coming year. This actually would be a good thing in terms of opening up some buying opportunities, but taking advantage of these opportunities will require having some dry powder on hand.

In terms of our highest conviction calls, given that we are coming off the 101 month anniversary of this economic cycle, the third longest ever and almost double what is normal, it is safe to say that we are pretty late in the game. The question is just how late. We did some research looking at an array of market and macro variables and concluded that we are about 90% through, which means we are somewhere past the 7th inning stretch in baseball parlance but not yet at the bottom of the 9th. The high-conviction message here is that we have entered a phase of the cycle in which one should be very mindful of risk, bolstering the quality of the portfolio, and focusing on strong balance sheets, minimal refinancing risk and companies with high earnings visibility and predictability, and low correlations to U.S. GDP. In other words, the exact opposite of how to be positioned in the early innings of the cycle where it is perfectly appropriate to be extremely pro-cyclical.

So it’s either about investing around late-cycle thematics in North America or it is about heading to other geographies that are closer to mid-cycle — and that would include Europe, segments of the Emerging Market space where the fundamentals have really improved, and also Japan. These markets are not only mid-cycle, and as such have a longer runway for growth, but also trade relatively inexpensively in a world where value is scarce.

Dave gives us some geographic focus, and it’s mostly outside the US and Canada. He likes Europe, Japan, and some emerging market countries because they are earlier in the cycle.

He’s certainly right on that point, though I think we may differ on how long the cycle can persist. The past doesn’t predict the future.

For the record, in my own portfolio design, we are about 50% non-US equities. My managers are finding lots of opportunities outside of the US.

Byron Wien: “Ten Surprises” List

We’ll wrap up today with an annual tradition: Byron Wien’s annual “Ten Surprises” list.

It always causes me a little cognitive dissonance because by definition you can’t “expect” a surprise. That aside, Byron’s list is always a useful thought exercise. Here it is.

1. China finally decides that a nuclear capability in the hands of an unpredictable leader on its border is not tolerable even though North Korea is a communist buffer between itself and democratic South Korea. China cuts off all fuel and food shipments to North Korea, which agrees to suspend its nuclear development program but not give up its current weapons arsenal.

2. Populism, tribalism and anarchy spread around the world. In the United Kingdom Jeremy Corbyn becomes the next Prime Minister. In spite of repressive action by the Spanish government, Catalonia remains turbulent. Despite the adverse economic consequences of the Brexit vote, the unintended positive consequence is that it brings continental Europe closer together with more economic cooperation and faster growth.

3. The dollar finally comes to life. Real growth exceeds 3% in the United States, which, coupled with the implementation of some components of the Trump pro-business agenda, renews investor interest in owning dollar-denominated assets, and the euro drops to 1.10 and the yen to 120 against the dollar.  Repatriation of foreign profits held abroad by U.S. companies helps.  

4. The U.S. economy has a better year than 2017, but speculation reaches an extreme and ultimately the S&P 500 has a 10% correction. The index drops toward 2300, partly because of higher interest rates, but ends the year above 3000 since earnings continue to expand and economic growth heads toward 4%. 

5. The price of West Texas Intermediate Crude moves above $80. The price rises because of continued world growth and unexpected demand from developing markets, together with disappointing hydraulic fracking production, diminished inventories, OPEC discipline and only modest production increases from Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran.

6. Inflation becomes an issue of concern. Continued world GDP growth puts pressure on commodity prices. Tight labor markets in the industrialized countries create wage increases. In the United States, average hourly earnings gains approach 4% and the Consumer Price Index pushes above 3%.

7. With higher inflation, interest rates begin to rise. The Federal Reserve increases short-term rates four times in 2018 and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield moves toward 4%, but the Fed shrinks its balance sheet only modestly because of the potential impact on the financial markets. High yield spreads widen, causing concern in the equity market.

8. Both NAFTA and the Iran agreement endure in spite of Trump railing against them. Too many American jobs would be lost if NAFTA ended, and our allies universally support continuing the Iran agreement. Trump begins to think that not signing on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a mistake as he sees the rise of China’s influence around the world.  He presses for more bilateral trade deals in Asia.

9. The Republicans lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the November election. Voters feel disappointed that many promises made during Trump’s presidential campaign were not implemented in legislation and there is a growing negative reaction to his endless Tweets. The mid-term election turns out to be a referendum on the Trump Presidency.

10. Xi Jinping, having broadened his authority at the 19th Party Congress in October, focuses on China’s credit problems and decides to limit business borrowing even if it means slowing the economy down and creating fewer jobs. Real GDP growth drops to 5.5%, with only minor implications for world growth. Xi proclaims this move will ensure the sustainability of China’s growth over the long term.

(https://www.blackstone.com/media/press-releases/byron-wien-announces-ten-surprises-for-2018)

Whatever your predisposition, there’s plenty to both like and dislike in there. On #7, I think 10-year Treasury bonds at 4% or more will look like the end of the world to younger folks.

It’s been more than a decade since we saw any such thing, and at that point they were falling, not rising. But if he’s correct that CPI pushes over 3%, then bond yields have to rise.

Personally, I think I would take the other side of that bet. I think the yield on the 10-year actually has a chance to fall.

On another note: If Byron is right that “speculation reaches an extreme,” the resulting correction will be a lot deeper than 10%. I don’t think we are there yet and probably won’t reach that point in 2018. But we will get there eventually.  

All right, my stack of New Year’s predictions is barely any smaller, but we’ll stop here and pick up next week in Thoughts from the Frontline.

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[an-evolved-dinosaur]

Alien Design - Munipulpa

So a few weeks ago I was going through some stuff by @titleknown and @bogleech and got inspired to make some good, realistic, reasonably inventive alien designs.  So I made some models and wrote up a report on all the stuff I can think off about a made up phylum of aliens I designed.

I wanted yall here to see these designs and I wanted to see what yall thought of them?

Also, since linking to the doc would make tumblr screw with seeing my art then prevent it from showing up in searches and stuf, I’m posting the full document under the cut (warning, this is very long, like 4500 words).

Munipulpa

Munimentum + Pulpa (Protected Flesh)

“Hundreds of millions of years ago, in a nondescript reef filled with millions of unique and wondrous creatures, an unsuspecting organism sifts through the dirt. A predator approaches above and so the small, rounded, hard-shelled creature darts back into hiding with a thrust of its jets. Safe from the danger the creature probes the surrounding water for any further signs of a predator. Thankfully the organism continues its life, completely unaware that this single encounter might of prevented the development of thousands upon thousands of unique and alien organisms that would come to dominate the modern-era world.”

The Munipulpa is a diverse clade of organisms which include some of the dominant megafauna on the planet. Originally a group of reef detritivores the Munipulpa have since diversified into thousands of unique species that cover at least one niche, with species present on every continent in every biome. The Munipulpa are known for their distinctive three-shelled anatomy in addition to their armed tentacles and jet-lungs.

The digestive tract of the Munipulpa, while obviously varying between various sub-groups within the clade, overall possess a similar structure to each other featuring the same basic organs. The true mouths of all Munipulpa (although some groups have developed a jaw-like structure derived from their arms) is a thick muscular tube lined with teeth-like protrusions made from the same hard material as their shells and skeleton. Following this the throat leads directly to the “stomach”. The stomach is a large tube. This tube is highly muscular, and can constrict in order to break down food with the aid of various biles and acids. Following this the mulch is pushed through a collection of intestine-like organs that, with the help of various biles, feed the dissolved food into a spongy organ surrounding the intestines that cleanses this nutritious sludge of toxins before a thick patch of blood vessels transport the nutrients to the rest of the body.

The circulatory system itself is a combination of very familiar and alien attributes and while as stated earlier each creature will have its own variation on this system the Munipulpa all feature this general circulatory/respiratory system layout. The characteristic “jet-lungs” of the Munipulpa functions, in essence, in a similar way to a vertebrate lung. The unique factor is that as the individual jets reach the limit of their contractions/expansions the respiratory system can switch and continue breathing in the opposite direction (bottom jets as intake, top as outtake) means that a Munipulpa is always bringing oxygen into its body.

The lungs, which has a similar branching system to earth vertebrates, connect directly to a thick spongy network of capillaries. This network of blood is oxygenated by a hemoglobin-based O2 carrier and then pumped in by a large undulating pump into a starfish-shaped organ. The blood is then pumped into one of four additional chambers which ungulate the blood throughout the body through arteries. Deoxygenated blood is then carried to a thick liver-like filtering organ which directs the cleaned blood into the capillary-network and the collected toxins into a waste-packet in the form of small “stones”. The main benefit of this circulatory system is that, similar to the Munipulpa lungs, the undulating chambers result in continual blood-pumping throughout the body rather than a stop-start system. This system does result in a slightly weaker push, resulting in several mini-hearts made of thick muscular arteries which further pump the blood.

The muscular system of the Munipulpa is a powerful and durable system of both muscle fibres and fluid-pumps that allow members of the Munipulpa clade to move with extreme speed. In the large majority of aquatic vertebrates the “fluid-pumps” are either atrophied or non-existent, so one paragraph will cover the fibres present in all species, while the second will deal with the fluid pumps which are not present in all subgroups. The fibrous muscles within the muscular system of Munipulpa are similar in structure to that of most Terran animals. However, a unique chemical structure within the cells means that these muscle fibres are much tougher and durable, more like a rubber in terms of stretchiness rather than vertebrate meat. These muscles are most commonly arranged in various thick rings, with a far more durable structure than secondary muscles cells, surrounded by strings of said secondary fibres which allow for fine motor control of the organisms limbs (best seen in the well-known tentacles of the Munipulpa).

The “fluid-pumps” system of muscles are present in many Munipulpa species as a simple buoyancy measure placed underneath the lungs. This pump will remove fluid from the body or add it in order to control buoyancy. In most land lineages and within some sea-faring species (such as the jawed jet-sharks) this simple pump has extended into a collection of significantly more powerful champers and tubes that serve as the main source of power in the movements of members of the Munipulpa clade when the jets aren’t used. These muscles pump fluid from pooling chambers, diverting this fluid to the many ends of these tubes. By employing many valves which can block off flow from one direction (derived from the valve which allowed fluid to fill the original buoyancy chamber) these tubes can become rigid. While these muscles are few and far between even when used by the land-dwelling clades to move their legs they provide huge amounts of power and help to further support the rings of muscle.

The shell is one of the unique characteristics of the Munipulpa clade, so significant it is that the name Munipulpa is from the latins words for Protection and Flesh: representing the protective three-piece shell surrounding these creatures. This shell features three distinctive sections. The back piece and two separate front pieces. Members of the Munipulpa clade grow their shell from the inside, with the shell growing thicker over time until the outside wears down due to deterioration and injury. This ensures that the shell is always tough and resilient from attack. The bones are only present in a few lineages, and are comprised of an internal tubular structure made of the same material as the outer shell.

In the Munipulpa clade the nervous system is remarkably typical of vertebrate life forms on Earth. The Munipulpa nervous system is made up of a large collection of wires comprised of cells that are capable of communicating with one another and sending signals throughout the body much in the same way as vertebrates do. The typical nervous system is comprised of a thin “web” with hundreds of inter-locking nerves that form a net throughout the body as well as a more powerful and tough system of thick strands that act as an “information highway” that distributes more important information throughout the body. The brains of these organisms are typically originating within the back of the shell, with this serving as a safe location for many vital organs, and contains additional “sub-brains” along the front of the head as fine motor control and a data-bank for sensory information.

The Munipulpa clade has a similar array of sensory systems as most terran lifeforms, albeit within different forms of terran life. The senses of these organisms have radiated rapidly so I will describe the basal senses of the ancestral species. Visual information was important, and they developed a ring of simplistic eyes around their arm-bases. These eyes were simplistic even in relation to other species at the time, but they developed a comparatively advanced visual input portion of their brain that game them an almost 360 degree view of the world. While the “arms” of the ancestral species was a sensitive organ that can be used to easily locate vibrations in the water the key sensory organ is the series of indent on the front of the ancestor. These dents connected to a highly sensitive piece of tissue that can register vibrations in the water with a high degree of accuracy as well as sense waterborne chemicals much in the same way as a nose can.

The munipulpa clade has, unlike Terran species, not evolved separate genders. While sexual reproduction has developed the separation of gamete production between genders has not. All members of the Munipulpa clade are capable of producing either the “large” or “small” gametes depending on various hormonal factors within the body. During intercourse one or more of the partners will produce the small gamete, which will inseminate the “large” gamete which will then fertilize to form a zygote. The ancestral species would reproduce in mass-spawnings where all members of the species would produce both “small” gametes and “large” egg-cased gametes. Several lineages have developed a form of morphological difference where one morph will specialise in producing one kind of gamete, but these groups are typically still capable of producing either gamete and this is not the case across all Munipulpa.

The Greater Clawed Torpedo

“The deep ocean, a sea of blue with the occasional haze of red phytoplankton, is a dangerous place to live. A shoal of radially-symmetrical tripedaliens, relics of an age old time of life, swim through the ocean catching plankton in their three-part mouths. Unbeknownst to the shoal a dark shape moves below. The shoal is not the desired prey for this ominous shape though, this blob waits patiently for its target. Slowly a larger creature appears from the shoal, mouth filled with dozens of the tripedaliens. Almost instantly this shape rises upwards in a jet of water, slamming into its prey with it’s arms agape: their teeth digging into the exposed flesh and drawing blood. In a matter of minutes the flesh is torn away and the creature is dead. Right on target, the Greater Clawed Torpedo feasts on its kill.”

Despite its alien appearance, the Torpedos fulfills a similar role to that of Terran sharks: great aquatic predators, and the Greater Clawed Torpedo fills the role taken by the earth’s greatest ocean predator the Great White Shark. Propelled by a series of powerful jets that allow them to move through the water with ease, especially in the open ocean where they’re unlikely to bump into objects.Using their derived arms as powerful jaws the Greater Clawed Torpedo is a fierce predator.

Characteristics

At the start of their life as eggs the GCT hatches among a pod of their brothers and sisters from the back of their parent. In a few moments they must jet away as fast as possible to avoid the waning instincts of their parent causing them to begin hunting the young. From here on it’s a simple matter of hunting food, growing bigger, and hunting bigger food until they grow large enough to eat a Terran sheep whole. When they reach sexual maturity  and wish to mate, the mature GCT will spawn eggs and use fine jetting to move them onto the back, where a sticky residue will let them encrust himself onto the shell. This gel also alerts other mature GCT that they are ready to mate, which will result in a mass of GCT excreting “small” gametes over the eggs of other GCT.

There are several defining characteristics of the Greater Clawed Torpedo, although their size and colouration and the only features exclusive to this particular species. The high-functioning jets of the GCT are the main mobility and hunting tool that is characteristic of their larger group of fish-analogues. The three-chambered lung that is used as a movement tool in most species is here adapted for a constant undulating stream of water in addition to the heaving breaths that result in the infamous launching that gives the Torpedo-fish their name. These jets are mobile and allow the creature to change direction and remain buoyant despite the lack of fins (which increase drag). Additionally the arms of the GCT have been adapted into a “jaw” of sorts. While this jaw is not directly connected to the digestive system of the GCT their muscular strength and the shell-derived “teeth” allow the GCT to hunt massive prey which are otherwise unable to be harmed by predators. These jaws are so successful they have evolved no less than 4 separate lineages of Munipulpa.

Role

The Greater Clawed Torpedo is, unsurprisingly, a top oceanic predator and an Iconic representative of the planet’s aquatic life. Living within the upper layers of the open ocean the GCT serves as a predator to the largest inhabitants of the ocean, preying upon all manner of organisms regardless of size but having the more success with the creatures that rely on their sheer size to survive. The GCT helps to manage these large organisms, many of which feed off of the plankton within the ocean, and in turn prevent the oceanic plankton from being hunted into too small numbers.

The behaviour of the greater Clawed Torpedo is very simple and without much subtlety to their thinking. GCT lack specific hunting grounds and instead simply wander the ocean using their intensely refined senses to search for the smell or sight of prey items. Stalking behaviour within the GCT shows the most advancement as they display knowledge of hiding from their prey’s vision as well as the ability to use clouding swarms of plankton to hide their bodies. Social behaviour is limited, with most interaction with adults being either fights over prey or the mass spawnings and parental care reaching only so far as to protect the encrusted eggs until hatching (GCT are known to eat some of their young once they begin hatching and they stop displaying parental care).

Blue-Belled Gnome Honker

“Today the beach is as calm as ever. This small little island far off the coast of the mainland has been isolated for millions of years and contains as wondrous a collection of life as the rest of the world. On this day the sun is shining bright as it has for many weeks and it is an age of plenty for the denizens of the island. On the shore a pile of blooming Sand-Balloons bob peacefully in the wind as a four legged creature wanders over to them, honking quietly. Wading into the water on their long limbs the creature takes a bite out of the balloon, causing the gases inside to rush outwards. Honking happily the creature continues to eat as its family appear from the rest of the water to enjoy this treat with them.”

The Blue-Belled Gnome Honker (also known as the Blue Gnome) is a species of Munipulpa that originates from a small collection of islands largely free of big predators. Free from the dangers of their ancestors mainland home the Blue Gnome has evolved to be a permanently content creature, happily enjoying their days which are largely free from predators, disasters, or even the risk of starvation. Rather than the skittish prey-animal of their mainland relatives which honked as communication the Blue Gnome is known for their constant honking in an almost sing-song pattern.

Characteristics

The Blue Gnome begins its life not inside of an egg, but inside their parent’s specialised false-womb. In Blue Gnome mating not all members of the species will get pregnant, but instead a small few who are the healthiest will be impregnated by the others. The parent will then grow the fertilised shell-less eggs within a faux-womb as they grow protected by the mother and connected to a collection of nutritious veins. After a few weeks the young will be born live and then continue to live with their family group. Sometime during their maturity the young will have the chance of mingling with another family troop: becoming a new member of the group in a prevention of inbreeding. The fully mature Blue Gnome will then likely have to wait a few mating seasons as providers of “small” gametes before eventually becoming the “mother” when at the ideal pregnancy age.

The Blue Gnomes, along with their relatives, are most notable for a few distinct characteristics. Firstly is that they are a member of a rarer group of terrestrial Munipulpa that evolved separately to the second more common lineage. This group developed the ability to walk upon land with their tentacles, and are typically quadrupedal in nature. These tentacle-limbs are not as strong as the jet-derived legs of their sister lineage but are significantly more flexible and allow for more dexterous mobility than the often “stiff” legs of their relatives. By using their tentacles for walking they’ve freed up their jets for adapting to serve as other organs. Notably the Blue Gnomes posses very large and chamber-like lungs which grant them the ability to make very loud honks. While other species can make such honks the Glue Gnomes are noted for their ability to change the tune of these honks at will thanks to various muscles contractions which allow them to “sing”. This singing is used to communicate to their family as well as, quite notably, for “fun” as the Blue Gnomes have been known to sing without any noted purpose.

Role

Thanks to the safety offered by their island location the Blue Gnomes have grown larger than their mainland counterparts who had to be small enough to easily escape and run from predators. Now they serve as one of the largest herbivores on their little island (although Blue Gnomes eating washed up carcasses isn’t unknown). These aliens aid in the reproduction of many native plant species thanks to their wandering nature allowing plants with seeds eaten by the Blue Gnomes to be distributed somewhere potentially far away from their parent plant.

The behaviour of the Blue Gnome is best described as aloof and friendly. Blue Gnomes lives in closely-knit family troops that live together in general peace. The nature of mating, in which many members are impregnated by many others results in almost no conflicts for mating rights to females as their are no “females” so to speak. While living in close family groups the Blue Gnomes don’t show aggression to other troops: with troop meetings often resulting in happy honking and the occasional introduction of a new member. Childcare is highly developed in Blue Gnomes, with the children being raised from birth to maturity and many members of the troop remaining within their home tribe for their entire lives.

Savanna Whippet

“It was as normal a day as one can get on the alien world, and up in the north in the great “savanna” great plains of thin grass-like plants covered the landscape as they soaked up the sun: storing it all for when they retracts their leaves and wait out the permanent night underground. For now, though, the sun still shines for half the day and life continues as normal. Rustling through the plains a small group of curious, waddling beasts walk through the undergrowth. As this small group walked on, occasionally reaching out at the juicy leaves for a quick bite, a pack of vicious tripedal predators walked up from in front. However, their angle of approach meant that they lacked the element of surprise and a rain of strikes came down upon the predators in an instant: ending the small moment of action on this quiet day.”

The Savanna Whippet is a small, dog sized, species of herd-living herbivores that hide among the ocean of grasses that make up what could best be considered the alien equivalent of a savanna. Living on the largest continent on the planet means that competition is fierce and those without the means to defend themselves will quickly end up dead. Filling a role similar to the ungulates of Earth the Savanna Whippets are a testament to the competitive nature of this ancient world.

Characteristics

The life of a Savanna Whippet begins in a similar way to many species: coming out of a leathery egg. Savanna Whippets are born among many of their siblings of all ages from thick leathery eggs. These eggs are typically carried within the mouths of their family adults as they travel, with the teeth aiding in the breaking of the egg. After birth the Savanna Whippet can walk within a few minutes, and despite their small size they are generally able to keep up with the slower pace of their family herd. Over time they will grow and mature until they reach sexual maturity. Savanna Whippets lack a distinct mating period and instead mate whenever the opportunity arises. They each produce a single “large” gamete at regular intervals once they reach sexual maturity: which results in a steady stream of eggs being laid into the herd as each member can produce roughly five eggs a year (as during a third of the year they don't lay).

There are a few defining characteristics of the general Whippet group: although the savanna variety is only defined by colouration and minor morphological tweaks. The most notable characteristic of the Whippet group, by which they are defined, is the thick tendons and powerful vertical-fluid-pumps that reside within their arms that serve as their primary defense and offense. These fluid-pumps provide a powerful hitting force to their arms in shorts bursts while the tendon ensures that this will result in a “whip” action that can be used to hurt predators and protect themselves and their herd.

Role

The Savanna Whippet serves a similar role to many earth ungulates such as deer or zebras. While many of their Whippet cousins are smaller species of a size ranging from a rabbit to a dog the Savanna Whippet is one of the larger species and in their large herds are a large part of the food source for the larger predators in their region.  Grasses are the most common variety of food for the Savanna Whippet and they help in curbing the taller grasses (which are almost exactly the adult height) which allows younger grasses to grow higher. Their plentiful numbers also mean they can support the many predators quite effectively, and are considered the “generic” food source for most savanna carnivores.

The behaviour of the Savanna Whippet does not stray too far from the typical Terran expectation of a (relatively) small herding prey animal, however it does posses the unique charm of life on this alien world. The group dynamics of Savanna Whippets are, while still involving a great deal of emotional connection, quite simplistic. Herds of Whippets are made up of various members both related and those who have entered the herd later in life (a method or preventing incest common among Munipulpa) and all share a deep emotional connection. While these social behaviours are simplistic and do not involve complex actions these actions that are done result in an intense bond between herd-mates where in members of the same herd are on occasion willing to risk their lives for each other.

Drum-Skulled Hung Cow

“It’s wet, so very wet, and the four moons have pulled back bringing with them the deep-reaching tides. The forest, its alien plants a sickeningly bloodied red, is silent for the moment as the sun just barely filters through the trees as it sets for the last time until several months from now. Through the trees the sound of crashing can be heard. Just beyond the misty haze that shrouds the forest’s life the footsteps of almost a hundred beasts can be heard carrying with them a great weight. Slowly dozens of figures emerge, their many eyes shining in the dim twilight of their home, along with a continuous droning. Small creatures scatter as the herd emerges from the darkness with their haunting calls: beating the ground with over a tonne of weight until they reach the recently submerged mudflats. The hard reaches towards the ground and, with their powerful lips, tear up the earth to expose the roots of the trees around them. Here begins the final feast of these beasts before they will have to face months of endless dark, and the ever-present risk of starvation.”

Quite similar in looks to the Terran cow, the Drum-Skulled Hung Cow fills a vaguely similar role as one of the larger beasts of burden present on the planet in addition to the role of herd-living massive herbivore. Also known as the Drummer Cow this species resides in the massive mudflats that make up a fairly large portion of the planet thanks to the massive tides of the four moons and use their specialised tentacles to support their massive hulking mouth (which can chew through and grind most foods).

Characteristics

The lifecycle of the Drummer Cow begins when they hatch from one of the hundreds of eggs laid after the end of the dark season on the edges of the mudflats. These eggs are lied after a mass spawning due to the masses of blooming plants creating a plentiful food source for their parents. Receiving no prenatal care these young Drummer cow must survive in creches with their fellow young until they reach sexual maturity. Once mature these Drummer Cows will begin to wander on their own until the come across another herd of Drummer Cow which they will join, if lucky enough, soon before the dark season.

There are a few defining features of the Drummer Cow that separate it from most of their lineage of terrestrial Munipulpa. Notably the large mouth, which allows the Drummer Cow to consume vast quantities of food and digest every possible scrap of nutrition, is supported by four legs instead of the typical two. This is due to the tentacle-arms characteristic of Munipulpa being adapted into a slightly more flexible rendition of their back legs: making this group of herbivores the very few lineages of Munipulpa to walk on four legs. Additionally the “ears” of the Drummer Cow (which are derived noses characteristic of the lung-derived terrestrial lineage) are thick and capable of being beat-down upon a hollowed section of their shell rapidly in order to make a very loud and far-reaching droning noise to communicate with herd-members.

Role

The Drummer Cow, unsurprisingly, serves as a large herbivore that feeds upon the largest tree-analogues on the planet. Living in humungous herds the high-infant mortality rate is the only reason the Drummer Cows haven’t taken down the forests in their entirely: with the young of Drummer Cows being a huge food source for the predators after the dark season ends in these forests. While plants close up and store their energy to wait out the months-long darkness the Drummer Cow feed upon the roots they dig up which exposes the plant material to the smaller herbivores and adds energy to the ecosystem for the carnivores. The large herds also pave away forest area, giving more room for other plants to grow without competing with the “trees” for the precious sunlight.

Drummer Cows are very simplistic in their behaviour thanks in part to their large size and safety in herds. During their youth they are a fast and skittish species, prone to darting away if they sense any possible threat, but as they increase in size and the sheer amount of Drummer Cow a predator has to face if they want to take down a single Cow increases they grow sluggish and stupid. The social behaviours of Drummer Cows are simplistic, with no parental care to speak of their social interactions are limited to communication in regards to food or predators and attempting to find a herd should they be left without one. Their social bonds are weak and aside from their desire to be close together due to the safety it brings they have no connection to fellow members of their herd.

[earthstory]

Turkey's underground cities

Once upon a time, some few million years ago, there was a lake in the region of Turkey now known as Cappadocia. As Africa collided with Europe, the resulting volcanoes spewed ash, lava and obsidian, and the lake filled with fine settling ash, culminating a couple of million years ago with a thin capping layer of basalt over the once watery lake. The ash consolidated into a 10,000 square km expanse of tuff with unusual properties. The tuff is soft when first dug into, but hardens to a concrete like consistency when exposed to air, and once humans appeared on the scene they started burrowing.

We have already covered the famous surface fairy towers (http://tinyurl.com/kl6c9kw), but less well known is an ancient set of underground cities excavated deep into the rock at an unknown time around the dawn of civilisation. Extended by every community since, from the bronze age Hittites to early Christians, some of them have up to 18 explored levels, and large tracts of their extent remain unknown and unexcavated. The oldest galleries are rough hewn, and get more sophisticated the deeper one goes. Turkish archaeologists suspect their beginnings date from the Neolithic era, when early towns such as Catal Huyuk were centres of the obsidian trade around 8000 BCE. The earliest mention of them in literature was by Xenophon around 500 BCE.

The cities are well defended, with narrow low corridors and stairs between levels, that could be sealed off using tuff doors while boiling oil was poured down ventilation shafts onto prospective invaders below. The towns had all the necessary facilities, from schools and churches to breweries, wineries, bakeries and stables with fodder bins dug into the floor. Chimneys and ventilation shafts opened some way away in order to keep the location hidden. Communication shafts through which one could shout linked the levels.

Derinkuyu, found in 1965, is the largest of the 40 discovered so far, and housed an estimated 30,000 people. It is linked by a 10 km tunnel large enough for three to walk abreast to another underground city nearby. Many smaller villages have also been found, and who knows how many more remain to be discovered. The reason for dwelling underground are unknown, but could include danger from invaders and the harsh weather of the region.

Loz

Image credit: Easteighth on flikr.

http://www.cappadociantour.com/derinkuyu-ciudad-bajo-tierra/ http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/go/CentralAnatolia/Cappadocia/yeralti/ http://www.cappadociaturkey.net/derinkuyu_underground_city.htm http://www.cappadociaturkey.net/undergroundcities.htm

[gracieyvonnehunter]

The battle for voting rights in the age of mass incarceration

Norris Henderson, an activist for criminal justice reform including voting rights for former prisoners, in New Orleans, on November 7, 2019. | Akasha Rabut for Vox

Ex-prisoners are getting their voting rights back. But the backlash has already started.

Shauntelle Mitchell waited in her local polling station in Slidell, Louisiana, and contemplated leaving. The October primary election would be her first time voting in years — her criminal record had prevented her from casting a ballot since 2011. This year, re-registered and finally free to vote, she felt nervous.

“All eyes was on me,” Mitchell, 43, recalled. “I started to walk out, because I felt people was looking at me, and I was like, ‘Why go through the whole process to walk away? You came here to vote, to try to make a difference, even if the candidate you picked does not win.’” She stopped herself and turned around. “I stood my ground and voted.”

Mitchell’s vote came at a historic moment: the first state-wide election held after Louisiana restored voting rights to some 36,000 people convicted of felonies, as Mitchell had been. It was a significant win for criminal justice reform activists in a state that had the highest incarceration rate in the nation until last year.

Louisiana activist Norris Henderson has been in the fight for so long, he’s been dubbed “St. Norris” by other organizers. On a recent fall day, Henderson took the stage in a round room in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary for the first presidential town hall hosted by formerly incarcerated people. Invitations had been extended to the entire field, and three Democratic candidates for president — Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and businessman Tom Steyer — showed up.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Sen. Cory Booker attended a presidential town hall to discuss voting in the age of mass incarceration at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2019.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Billionaire Tom Steyer speaks during the town hall.

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Sen. Kamala Harris at the town hall.

“This has been a journey for us to get here,” he said. The room’s rough stone walls and Gothic, arching doorways surrounded him, leading to America’s original cellblocks. “Some people question why would we do something inside a prison, particularly this prison. This was where America first experienced mass incarceration. This was the first prison built in America.”

Today, some 200 years since Eastern State opened, an estimated 2.3 million people are held across the nation’s criminal justice system in prisons, juvenile facilities, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Nearly 60 percent of this population are people of color.

The town hall’s setting spoke directly to an inherent contradiction in the democratic ideal of “one person, one vote” presented by the age of mass incarceration: For people drawn into the system, one conviction often equals no vote — sometimes for life. Even when voting rights gains are made, they can be precarious.

Laws banning former prisoners from voting in America date back to the colonial era and remain the norm in much of the nation. Only 16 states and DC automatically re-enfranchise people convicted of felonies when they’re released, and two states — Maine and Vermont — allow people to vote from prisons. During the 2016 presidential elections, more than 6 million people were prevented from casting ballots through the criminal justice system, according to the Sentencing Project.

In tandem with the growing movement to end mass incarceration, there is a building consensus that these laws disenfranchise huge swaths of the population from participating in representative politics. Between 1996 and 2008, seven states repealed lifetime disenfranchisement laws for at least some ex-offenders.

Nevada, California, New York, and Arizona have all expanded voting rights for ex-felons this year. In Wisconsin, activists and politicians pushed a bill in October to immediately return the vote to those leaving prison. When Democrat Andy Beshear won Kentucky’s gubernatorial race in early November, it was viewed in part as a win for ex-felon re-enfranchisement — Beshear had campaigned on restoring voting rights to an estimated 100,000 people.

Nowhere has this fight been more consequential than in Louisiana and Florida, where activists scored two enormous victories. Last year, voting rights were restored to an estimated 36,000 people convicted of felonies in Louisiana through bipartisan legislation and 1.5 million in Florida during state elections through the Amendment 4 ballot initiative. That such expansions took place in these Southern states has both practical and symbolic significance: Florida’s high incarceration rate meant that extending the vote to former felons is considered the largest voting rights advancement since the 1970s.

John Raoux/AP

Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (left) arrives with family members to register to vote in Orlando, Florida, on January 8, 2019. Meade has a felony on his record.

But the gains have not gone uncontested. Across the nation, voting rights wins have been undercut by laws requiring fines and fees in order to vote, relinquishing voting restoration for felons of certain crimes, and otherwise placing former prisoners in webs of bureaucracy with little clarity over how to regain their rights. It’s a lesson in the fragility of even momentous political gains, and the likelihood of setbacks.

“The right to vote is a marker of our citizenship, a marker of who counts, of who matters, a marker of who is part of our community and who is excluded,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. It is, he added, “essential to protecting all other rights and freedoms we care about.”

Norris Henderson sports a thin mustache, a smooth bald head and dark-rimmed glasses that he keeps in the pouch of his collared shirt. He has a calm presence and a subtly scrutinizing gaze. Henderson began organizing for prisoner’s rights while incarcerated himself 40 years ago. He’s considered a national authority in the movement — in addition to leading Voters Organized to Educate, a network of the nation’s leading formerly incarcerated activists from 35 states, which hosted the town hall, he’s also the head of Voice of the Experienced (dubbed VOTE), a similar group tackling mass incarceration and helping imprisoned people and their families in Louisiana.

A few weeks before the town hall, Henderson, 65, sat in his beige office in a converted school attached to an African American Catholic church in New Orleans, the city where Henderson was born and raised. It’s the city he returned to in 2003 when he was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary after serving nearly 28 years for a second-degree murder that he maintains he didn’t commit. Decades later, his organizing was instrumental in expanding voting rights in the state. “You almost don’t exist in this country if you don’t have your right to vote,” he said in an interview with the nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice.

Akasha Rabut for Vox

Norris Henderson in his office in New Orleans, Louisiana. Henderson is an activist focusing on criminal justice reform — the passage of voting rights restoration in Louisiana was a major win for him.

Laws banning felons from voting have colonial origins, but they became entrenched after the Civil War as a tool to protect white supremacy. As states expanded their criminal codes to make felonies of crimes associated with African Americans, they also stripped those convicted of felonies of the right to vote, creating what Voters Organized to Educate describes as a class of “political refugees” that spans generations.

Virginia lawmakers, for example, made petty theft a felony and Mississippi politicians singled out forgery, burglary, arson, and perjury — laws considered more likely for African Americans to commit or be convicted of. In her excoriation of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander began the book with the story of a man in 2010 who can’t vote because of a conviction, whose father couldn’t vote because of poll taxes, whose grandfather or great-grandfather couldn’t because of the Ku Klux Klan, nor his great-great-grandfather, who was enslaved.

For Henderson, voting rights are just one more path to undoing the racist origins of mass incarceration. That October morning, his office walls were, like his desk, covered with papers, and he’d been miserable. Louisiana’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, had failed to win reelection outright, sparking a run-off with a construction mogul named Eddie Rispone who ran a campaign big on Trump and short on policy specifics. If Rispone wins on November 16, Henderson will lose an ally and gain an unknown quantity a mere nine months after a law passed restoring the vote to tens of thousands of Louisiana’s formerly incarcerated population.

Henderson pointed to a printed spreadsheet outlining voter turnout in the heavily Democratic Crescent City, which hadn’t broken 40 percent (it was 46 percent statewide). “Our people didn’t show up,” he said. He scoffed at the idea that President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, or Donald Trump Jr. had made the difference — all three of whom descended up in the state in a glitzy trifecta to galvanize Republicans ahead of the election. Instead, political analysts concluded Democratic and black voter turnout was down, despite statewide get-out-the-vote efforts.

Of the potential 36,000 re-enfranchised felons, only 581 had registered to vote by early September. “Voter apathy is so real in our state,” Ashley Shelton, the executive director of a network of progressive groups called the Power Coalition, told me on election night. “We don’t have a lot of voter suppression laws because they don’t have to.”

Henderson had expected Edwards’s win to “send a message” to the nation, which was beginning to view the race as a bellwether for 2020, about the kinds of progressive policies even Deep South voters want. Instead, Louisiana’s runoff election and the legal battle in Florida underline the potential fragility of voting rights gains.

Akasha Rabut for Vox

Posters in Henderson’s office. Henderson served nearly 28 years before his release. “You almost don’t exist in this country if you don’t have your right to vote,” he said in an interview with the nonpartisan law and policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice.

They’re not the only examples. In Massachusetts, people in prisons could cast ballots until 2000, when voters made it illegal. Both Tennessee and South Dakota have expanded felon disenfranchisement over the last 10 years. And in Tennessee, the requirement to repay fines and fees before being allowed to vote has reportedly placed some in an unnavigable maze of bureaucracy with no clear way to regain their rights. Today, 32 states require various levels of completion of parole, probation, and/or repaying fines, fees and restitution, if voting rights are returned at all, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

One year after Florida voters passed Amendment 4, the state’s legislature is fighting a lawsuit attempting to curtail the amendment’s historic expansion of voting rights. Amendment 4 stated that those convicted of felonies, with the exception those convicted of murder or felony sex offenses, can vote after they’ve completed “all terms of sentence.” The amendment’s proponents, including its creator Desmond Meade, had argued it could take immediate effect without the need of any new legislation. The state’s Republican politicians disagreed.

This summer, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law passed along party lines stating that former felons can only vote once they’ve paid back all fines and fees ordered by a court during sentencing or as a condition of probation, parole or community service, for any felony conviction in the country. In Florida, such fees begin the moment of an arrest and extend until freedom: There is a fee for requesting a public defender, and fees for ankle bracelets and other monitoring during probation or parole.

One analysis by Florida political scientist Dan Smith found an estimated 82 percent of the 1.5 million people re-enfranchised by Amendment 4 would be denied the right to vote under the new law because they owe the state money, including a rate twice as high for those who are black compared to those who are white.

Smith found even small fees within $500 could present an insurmountable barrier, and noted that anyone working with a newly freed voter to help them to determine whether they have paid back all fines or fees “will have great difficulty” figuring that out in Florida’s “highly decentralized” system, let alone making that determination for crimes sentenced by another state or federal court. The move has been slammed by some critics, including the ACLU of Florida, as a poll tax.

“I think what the legislature did and what Ron DeSantis did is require people to pay in order to vote,” said Kubic, the ACLU of Florida’s executive director, which sued the state over the law along with the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups.

In October, a federal judge partly blocked the law, rejecting the poll tax claim but concluding that the state could not “deny the right to vote to a felon who would be allowed to vote but for the failure to pay amounts the felon has been genuinely unable to pay.”

Josh Ritchie/Washington Post/Getty Images

Erica Racz at the bar where she bartends in Fort Myers, Florida, June 26, 2019. She has a felony on her record and is being asked to pay off court fees and fines before she can have her voting rights restored.

State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a Republican from Pinellas County who helped shape the new legislation, says he believes “being a felon shouldn’t be a scarlet letter that you carry around the rest of your life,” but that the new law follows “spirit and the letter” of Amendment 4. He added that it keeps with the testimony of John Mills, a lawyer who represented the proponents of Amendment 4 and told Florida’s Supreme Court that some fees were implied in the phrase “all terms of sentence.”

Meanwhile, Meade and his organization, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, haven’t waited on the legal battle. This summer, they began fundraising hundreds of thousands of dollars to repay people’s fines and fees and launched an initiative to help them register to vote.

The group’s get-out-the-vote and Amendment 4 education bus tour was scheduled to hit more than a dozen cities in November, and FRRC says it identified 100,000 former felons still eligible to vote under the new law in Miami-Dade County alone. Numerous deadlines loomed: There were multiple November local elections, including Orlando’s mayoral election, where Meade himself had hoped to vote for the first time since the 1980s, when he was convicted on drug and firearms charges.

Amendment 4’s final interpretation — and its ability to expand voting rights — will likely lie with the Florida Supreme Court, which is expected to issue a non-binding opinion on whether fines and fees are rightly implied by the amendment’s language. In the meantime, Florida lawmakers face the challenge of creating an avenue for those who can’t afford to pay their fees to still vote, as ordered by the judge.

“It’s an open question what that looks like,” Kubic said, but he expects such a process to be in place before the 2020 presidential elections. If he’s right, the nation will be scrutinizing Florida’s election with more than the usual intensity, looking for signs that a new voting block could change the political fate of the state, and the White House.

Myrna Perez, who leads the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, said this new phase of Florida’s Amendment 4 battle can’t undo what she’s called “the greatest civil rights advancement any of us will see in our lifetime.” But it is replete with lessons for activists. “We’re going to be doing calculations about how much you want to anticipate the backlash in the fight for these kinds of amendments,” she said.

The amendment proved that ballot initiatives can do in a single election what politicians can take decades to achieve. But she noted that ballot language itself is tricky. Floridian activists opted for the general phrase “all terms of sentence,” rather than using more specific, but perhaps also more complicated language, that could have avoided the entire debate on fines and fees.

“This is a data point about what can happen when you try for a policy that is easy for the average Floridian to understand,” Perez said. One needs to write a short statement that’s clear enough to be understood by average voters, but one that is also “detailed enough to forestall attempts to thwart it.”

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Supporters for Amendment 4 rallied for votes in Miami, Florida, on October 22, 2018.

It is also, despite ongoing litigation, another example of the bipartisan appeal of criminal justice reform among voters — the same appeal that has made the need to tackle mass incarceration an unlikely unifying issue of the Trump era. In order for Amendment 4 to have passed in the first place, a significant chunk of Florida’s Republican voters had to approve it, even if many of the state’s Republican politicians were less enthusiastic.

In Louisiana, seven of the original 10 criminal justice reform bills passed as a package in 2017 were carried by Republicans. Donald Trump recently received a controversial award for signing the bipartisan First Step Act, which allows thousands of federal prisoners to earn an early release, and Democratic presidential hopefuls have each tried to own an animating issue for the left with detailed and sometimes ambitious criminal justice policy proposals.

Even so, most of the 2020 Democratic field candidates who were absent from Henderson’s criminal justice forum won’t easily be able to shake such a slight to a group with little historical reason to trust either party. Henderson had warned a few weeks earlier: “If you don’t show up for us in October 2019, don’t look for us in November 2020.” He nevertheless characterized the event as a success as he took the stage again to wrap the event. “We’re not begging nobody for anything,” he said. “Today is the beginning of us making demands.”

Among the Louisiana reforms, restoring voting rights has been one of Henderson and his fellow activists’ greatest achievements — the other being ending Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era practice of allowing convictions even when juries were split 10-2, created expressly to “establish the supremacy of the white race” in 1898.

The law, which re-enfranchised those who’ve been out of prisons or jails for five years beginning March of this year, passed the Republican-dominated house by just two votes last year. Now, its future depends upon the ongoing support of enough of the state’s politicians, some of whom have already moved to reduce its impact. In the last session, one lawmaker attempted to block those convicted of sex crimes against minors from voting, a bill that failed.

Jason E. Miczek/AP Images for Voters Organized to Educate

Sen. Cory Booker, left, greets moderators Daryl Atkinson of Voters Organized to Educate, Rev. Vivian Nixon, second from left, and DeAnna Hoskins, during the presidential town hall at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

“It was little things like that, just the idea before these things even get implemented correctly,” Henderson said. “It was like, ‘It ain’t gonna work.’ Well, how do you know it ain’t gonna work? You gotta give it a chance to work.”

If Edwards loses, “it’s gonna be a whole bunch of ifa-woulda-shouldas,” Henderson said. “But that don’t get us nowhere, that just gets us into rolling back four years of progressive accomplishments. As opposed to fighting for new things, it’s kind of like trying to fight to hold onto things.”

What that means for elections in hotly contested states like Florida remains to be seen. Common speculation is that these newly enfranchised voters could have handed Hillary Clinton the Oval Office if they’d been able to vote in 2016, but that’s assuming a strong partisan lean among people convicted of crimes that some political scientists argue is likely false. One analysis of the impact of Florida’s Amendment 4 found that while black voters who’ve been imprisoned do tend to register as Democrats, their non-black counterparts —who are the majority — lean Republican. It could be that expanding voting rights to former felons won’t fit neatly into a partisan narrative — that it really will, simply put, expand democracy for democracy’s sake.

For millions of formerly incarcerated people, it’s a right that could matter immensely. Shauntelle Mitchell described it as a moment of power. “I’ve had a lot of people saying you know, you’ve been to jail before so your voting is not gonna count,” Mitchell said. “The thing I have to do is to not let no one put me down and tell me my voice doesn’t count. That’s what made me register and go vote. Even if the people I choose don’t win, I still made a difference.”

On November 16, when Louisianians decide whether they want four more years of John Bel Edwards — and criminal justice reforms — Mitchell will be one of them.

Rosemary Westwood is a writer in New Orleans and the publisher of the weekly newsletter on reproductive rights, the Roe Report. In past lives, she’s produced and reported radio news, created a podcast, and worked as a newspaper columnist.

Akasha Rabut is is a photographer and educator based in New Orleans. Her work explores multicultural phenomena and traditions rooted in the American South.

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[youremarvelous]

Y’aaaaall Yuuri Week 2017 is so soon (July 23-29)!! and it’s the first fan event I’ve ever participated in which is honestly nerve-wracking? But also fun. (And really, celebrating the amazing, talented babe that is Yuuri is great motivation to overcome my fear.)

Anyway, here’s a little snippet of my fic for day 3: gold. I knew I wanted to do a Halloween fic for one of the days (bc who am I) but this started out in an entirely different direction until I had the realization that there definitely needs to exist a universe in which Yuuri and Viktor meet while both dressed as slave Princess Leia.

fic snippet is under the cut and I can’t wait to see/read what everyone else is working on!!! (Yuuri deserves all the love in the world, honestly).

“Yuuri, c’mon,” Phichit cocks his head, watching as Yuuri trudges across the campus green with his hands tucked into his armpits. “I’d like to get there sometime before midnight.”

“I j-just don’t understand why I c-couldn’t bring a coat.” Yuuri gripes through chattering teeth. October in Detroit is reasonably mild, but 50 degrees feels closer to 40 when wandering around outside in nothing but a fake gold bikini.

“Who brings a coat to a house party?” Phichit takes Yuuri’s hand and starts pulling him towards the row. “Anyway, it’d be a total crime to let you cover that beautiful body.”

Yuuri shivers in a way that has nothing to do with the cold. He tries not to think about the vision of himself in their dorm’s full-length mirror: his exposed stomach—soft from a university diet of energy drinks, Hot Pockets, and weekend concoctions of peanut butter and canned pasta, his plentiful love handles, and the small scrap of burgundy fabric that doesn’t come close to covering the full expanse of his butt. Looking like that, all bulbous and round, he can’t help but feel he’d be a better fit for Jabba the Hutt than Princess Leia.  

“Hey,” Phichit warns, squeezing Yuuri’s hand, “don’t you think about my best friend that way.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I know you.”

“But—”

“Your butt is amazing and I’m basically jealous.” Phichit pets his cheek, careful not to smear his eye makeup. “I mean I’d totally tap that if not for the fact that I’m Luke and that’d be kinda incestual.”

Yuuri blushes and shakes his head at the sky. The stars are just barely visible through the city’s light pollution: pale and sparkling on a backdrop of hazy purple. “You’re awful.”

“You love me,” Phichit says with a confidence that Yuuri envies.

“I do,” Yuuri concedes with a sigh. It’s the truth, anyway.

“Great.” Phichit smiles, throwing an arm around Yuuri’s shoulders. “Now let’s go get so smashed we forget who we are.”

“Phichit,” Yuuri’s tone is heavy with unspoken warnings about the next morning’s 8 am class. He already knows they won’t be attending, but it feels important to at least try and maintain the facade of being the responsible adult in their friendship.

“Kidding.” Phichit waves him off. Yuuri has a strong feeling he isn’t, but he also has the (disjointed, not at all vivid) memory of Phichit restraining him in a bathtub three weekends ago to prevent Yuuri from streaking across campus and/or vomiting Franzia all over his bed, so, he makes a silent resolution to be the one to reign it in tonight and lets the matter drop.  

By the time they reach the frat house, the front lawn is comprised of more parts red solo cup and wasted freshman than Kentucky bluegrass. A girl in what appears to be a sexy Frida Kahlo costume grabs Yuuri by the ankle when he steps over her on his way to the front door. “What happened to your hair?” She slurs, rubbing at her drawn on unibrow.

Yuuri pats at his head, looking to Phichit for reassurance.

“It’s fine,” Phichit placates, encouraging Yuuri forward. “They must’ve made the punch extra strong this year.”

“Yooo!” A red-faced Jesus raises the hand not currently occupied by a bottle of Barefoot Sweet Red for a high five when Yuuri squeezes past a group of grinding Crayola crayons in the entranceway. “Twin Leias!”  

“Uh?” Yuuri meets his hand hesitantly. “No, he’s—” Yuuri glances at Phichit—“Luke?”

“Yeah, man! ‘I am yo’ fah-tha,’” the guy recites in what might pass for a decent Darth Vader impression if Darth was raised in Southern California and sloshed off cheap wine and jungle juice. Valley girl Darth-Jesus raises his hand to Phichit for a much firmer, more enthusiastic high five.  

Yuuri watches with knit brows as Darth-Jesus leaves to work his way towards the epicenter of the party, dark wine sloshing down the front of his robes as he expertly weaves around the sweaty deathtrap otherwise known as drunk and dancing college students. He doesn’t have time to work out whether or not “twin” is some kind of obscure American slang before Phichit is grabbing him by the elbow and pulling him in Jesus’ wake.

“C’mon,” Phichit yells. His voice is barely audible over Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ pulsing through the overcrowded house at ear-splitting decibels.  

Yuuri tries to stay close to Phichit’s side, but the current of swaying bodies is too strong to resist, and in a blur of movement he couldn’t recount even if placed under police interrogation, Yuuri finds himself outside flanking a bonfire, a PBR in one hand and a solo cup of some questionable Halloween themed mixed drink in the other.  

He takes a generous gulp of both: it’s the only way he can survive the pulsing music and swarming drunken crowds without Phichit nearby for moral support.

“So you’re the culprit,” an accented voice (Russian, Yuuri thinks) sounds near his ear. Yuuri only nearly avoids dribbling witch’s brew down his fake gold bikini top from the shock.  

“S-sorry,” Yuuri mumbles, wiping his wrist across his wet mouth. He glances up—distantly wishing Phichit hadn’t slicked his hair to the side so he still had his long bangs to hide behind—and is met with the sight of easily the most handsome man he has ever encountered. He has long silver hair pulled into a braid, hooded blue eyes, the most sweetly charming smile, and Yuuri is so, so gay.

He’s also royally screwed because this living model of human perfection is also dressed as slave era Princess Leia.

[aliceviceroy]

There’s a moment I keep returning to, from the first episode of the new season of Fargo. There’s a triple homicide at a 24-hour diner, and Minnesota state trooper Lou Solverson responds to the crime. A truck driver meets him in the parking lot, and they walk toward one of the victims: a waitress who tried to flee the scene only to be gunned down in the cold expanse of a Minnesota night.

“I left my rig there, I hope that’s OK,” the truck driver says, motioning to the 18-wheeler behind him, at the edge of the lot.

Solverson says nothing, but keeps eyeing the victim in the snow.

“I’m the one that called it in, see?” the driver continues. “Stopped for waffles. With the blueberries -- they come frozen this time of year, I know, but…”

Solverson pinches the corner of a large jacket draped over the waitress, picks it up and peeks underneath.

“I put my coat on her. It seemed only right.”

I love this scene because even though it’s meant to drive the narrative ahead, its obsessive attention to the just-right details also works outside the episode, revealing, in just a few words, the very essence of my people: the corn-eating flatlanders of The Great Middle. There’s the deferential greeting (“I left my rig there, I hope that’s OK.”); the need to fill all moments, even grisly ones, with small talk (“Stopped for waffles...”); and at last the embarrassment and shame over anything unseemly and the compulsion to cloak it (“I put my coat on her. It seemed only right.”).

What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world. As a good son of the Upper Plains, I’ll tell you what I mean.  

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What is Midwestern Nice?

We should start with what it isn’t. It isn’t the feigned kindness of the South, where people sipping bourbons at cocktail hour reserve the right to boot-heel you when you turn your back. It’s not the abrasive honesty of the Northeast, where everyone speaks, as Don DeLillo once put it, in the same nasally, knowing cynicism. It is genuine, Midwestern Nice.

I grew up in Iowa but I’ve heard the same line repeated of people from Minnesota or Wisconsin or Nebraska, and always with the unfussy grammar of the plain-spoken: “The Midwest is a great place to be from.” It is nurturing and civic-minded, maybe due to the Scandinavian and German Protestants who settled the land, living by the Golden Rule, and its history is a continuity of compassion: the territory of Iowa in the Antebellum Era refusing to segregate schools, an idea that even Ulysses S. Grant called radical; a president from Illinois who ended slavery; Wisconsin laborers, in the early 20th century, receiving workers' compensation and unemployment insurance decades ahead of the New Deal; Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, in the modern age, allowing gay marriage years before the progressive movements in New York and California could do the same. The Midwest takes pride in all this; it would just rather not talk about it, you see, because that would be boasting, and boasting is not nice.  

That humility permeates everything, helping to create the most remarkable facet of Midwestern Nice: the restraint from speaking ill of others, even if others should probably be ill-spoken of. I remember sitting at my grandmother’s table, in the hour before supper on a summer afternoon, watching her read the newspaper. I must have been 10 or so, in the last years before I learned to fully appreciate her -- a woman who grew up in the Depression, survived TB, raised six daughters alongside her farming husband, collected eggs from the chicken coop every morning, and read voraciously each night. She was always cheerful, which isn’t remarkable in the Midwest, but it is worth mentioning because reading one article that afternoon, I remember her eyes narrowing and her lips pursing themselves into an ugly knot that I never saw. She was upset, so upset that she soon read aloud that there had been, if memory serves, a murder in a nearby town. Police had arrested a suspect. She walked over to a dining room window and seemed to almost shake; she occasionally shopped in the town. Staring out at the bright afternoon, she looked in a trance, and even I could see the thoughts racing through her mind. But she just turned back to the dining room, and the one thing she said she half-muttered to the floor, in that flattened-vowel lilt of hers:

“And on a day like this.”

I scoffed, and for a while the afternoon stayed with me, as one more example of Grandma’s earnest, almost Old World simplicity. But as I got older I began to see it differently. Her reaction was about mastering fear, about stoicism and restraint, about not saying something caustic simply because you can, even if it’s about a person who has literally just murdered someone. Grandma’s six words, I discovered, were an anthem of sorts for Midwestern Nice.

And yet...

Of course, the duty to be nice and consider the feelings of others has a downside: the whole universe of things we have to repress. As a kid, there was an almost tactile pressure hovering around the Christmases, Thanksgivings, and birthday parties at Grandma’s house -- so much stuff we maybe wanted to say but couldn’t, even though we were family. The tension beneath the vanilla chitchat exhausted me, and I often left her home relieved that I could relax and be myself.

Here again, though, I was wrong, or at least only half right, and as an adult I discovered the fun of old-fashioned Midwestern innuendo: the way my aunts, say, could achieve the perfect degree of half-smile when extending their barely dead-toned goodbyes to my sister’s boyfriend, which told her how very much they disliked him. In fact, people from outside the Plains think they can mimic us by elongating some O's, but in truth we communicate far more in what we half-say, or fail to say entirely. To live in the Midwest is to experience two realities: the first, all sunshine and bland pleasantries among other potluck-suppering churchgoers; the other, a red-lit underworld where people relay vulgarities through the learned second language of euphemism, eye rolls and loaded silence.

We are the alpha and omega of passive-aggressiveness. It is, like the corn we plant, our contribution to society, and our art. In his hilarious book, The Midwest: God’s Gift to Planet Earth!, Mike Draper, a Des Moines-based retailer who writes under his company’s pseudonym, Raygun, shows how no form of passive-aggression is as finely honed as our own:

"The Northeast Jewish mother takes the most direct approach to her passive aggressiveness: 'Oh, you’re going out tonight, even though you’re only home three nights from school? No, I understand, you’re Mr. Popular. So if you want to leave your poor mother, that’s fine…'"

"The Southern Baptist mother brings Jesus in for backup: 'Going out tonight with those boys? Do you really think that’s what an upstanding young Christian man should be seen doing?...'”

"A Midwestern mom plays it very passive: 'Going out? You sure?'”

Every Midwestern mother is like this. During my junior year of college I decided to grow my hair out. When I called my mom with the news, she said, simply, “Oh.” But the word carried a lot of tones, a note of surprise and then a second beat, which sustained the first while she parsed the news, followed at last by a slight dip and then a leveling out in a lower register, so the "Oh" ended in more a statement than a question: Ooouuwwaah. That one word showed how she both processed my decision and rendered her verdict on it. She was not pleased with me. And she didn’t say anything else.

Two things explain that kind of subtlety. The first is a guilt over our lame attempts at bluntness; even our passivity pains us. Midwesterners never want to be malicious, and so we swallow our great loogies of venom, until the whole viscous thing gags us and forces from our lips, like a reflex, tiny spittles of displeasure, whose trajectory we struggle to control. I saw this most recently when Jonathan Franzen, a product of St. Louis’ suburbs, was asked how Midwestern virtues shape his life and writing. Skip ahead to roughly 3:15 and watch till the end:

The dramatic silences, false starts, and in particular the “Midwestern values” repetition: oh my God does Franzen despise these questions. But the good Missouri boy never says that -- can’t bring himself to, even 30 years after he left St. Louis. Instead he sputters through a state of near verbal paralysis until he finally lands on something that seems bland, but is actually loaded: “It’s no different than anywhere else,” he says. “And yet we all feel that there is something there.” And then, mercifully, the video ends.

Which leads us to the terrible beauty of Midwestern Rage

The thoughts about how our thoughts will be perceived lead me to the second point about our repressed anger: the refinement of its eventual expression. Not for us, the gauche heavy-handedness of Long Island mothers. No, our patois is about saying only what is necessary, and actually even less than that. The Midwestern dialect is so subtle that people not immersed in it for decades can’t hear it. I’ve lived outside Iowa for 12 years now, and two weeks ago, though I felt guilty as I said it, I insulted one of my Connecticut neighbors. I got tired of her preening about her oh-so unique life and job, and I told her -- again, against my better judgment -- that not everyone can make it as a snowflake. She thanked me for the kind words.

This happens a lot, which is ironic because the people who miss the subtlety often consider themselves far sharper than big, dull, flown-over pig-eaters like me. In his book, Draper describes how the Midwestern phone etiquette of, “Well, I better let you go,” a euphemism for “Leave me alone now,” is consistently misread by people outside the region as a way to beg more time out of the conversation. David Letterman, a gap-toothed kid from Indiana, dined out for years on a post-modern comedy that mocked comedy itself, but only became famous when East Coasters picked up on the joke.

Hollywood, it almost goes without saying, almost always misses the duplicity built into our pleasantries and the guilt we feel over our ever-so-slight slights. The one movie that captures it all, of course, is Fargo -- and a single scene in particular, with an emotional range so full and yet so very understated that even the late, great Chicagoans Siskel and Ebert questioned why the Coen brothers included it, though they loved it anyway.

I just never get tired of it. The nervous earnestness of “Ya, you know it's a Radisson so it's pretty good.” How Sheriff Gunderson’s brief moment of displeasure -- “Why don’t you sit over there? I'd prefer that” -- is apologized for in code: “Just so I can see ya, ya know. Don't have to turn my neck.” And then as Mike Yanagita begins to atone explicitly, her “Nooo, noo, that’s fine,” shows that it is anything but.

I could go on -- the way Gunderson reveals her shock over Linda’s death and then immediately masks it because the waitress is there; or the breakdown of Mike Yanagita itself, a gross violation of the tenets of Midwestern Nice, which makes the scene both hilarious and mortifyingly hard to watch. But the point is, with that scene, the Coen brothers, products of the Twin Cities, give away the Midwest’s secret -- something President Obama, of Kansas and Chicago, knows, too, and something that Johnny Carson, of Norfolk, Nebraska, knew every night the stage lights shone on him, and what David Foster Wallace, of Urbana, Illinois, knew in each of his “maximalist” stories, capturing all the conflicting truths of any moment, and then the infinite iterations beyond that: we may seem slow, or at least intellectually sated, but we live on a heightened plane of consciousness that few of you can comprehend. To be from here is, quite simply, to read a room better than fucking anyone.  

And also, yes, to be nice.

[theinquisitivej]

Late to the Party - ‘Metropolis’ (1927)

This review is based on the 2010 cut of the film which incorporates missing footage gathered from the cut found in Argentina.

‘Metropolis’ is an astonishing film with groundbreaking imagery that not only showed the world 90 years ago the kind of imaginative, expansive worlds that could be created in film, but has also gone on to inspire numerous other influential works with their own iconic settings. I admire its achievements, as well as what it represents. It is, however, a bit difficult to get through today.

          For the uninitiated, ‘Metropolis’ is a film from 1927 by Fritz Lang, an influential director known for his artistic style being one of the most prominent examples of German Expressionism, as well as for such films as ‘M’ and ‘The Big Heat’. While the film isn’t quite the earliest example of science-fiction in cinema, it’s undoubtedly one of the most critically acclaimed science-fiction films from this early period of cinema. It tells the story of the fictional city Metropolis (no, not the one Superman lives in, though I suspect his city has gone on to resemble this one more and more as the years go by). Metropolis has a significant division between two classes on opposite sides of the spectrum. The upper class live in towering skyscrapers that seem to climb endlessly into the sky, interweaving and overlapping in a complex maze of amazing architecture. While the rich live consequence-free hedonistic lives, the city is maintained by poor workers who live a miserable existence maintaining the foreboding, looming machines underground. We know that the machines power Metropolis, and when they fail later on in the film it results in disastrous floods, but one of my favourite aspects of ‘Metropolis’ is that people never say what the machines actually do. Workers do arbitrary tasks for gigantic, incomprehensible machinery, making them cogs in a system with no meaning or greater significance beyond the fact that it simply must keep going.

          All of this stuff is where the real meat of the film lies. The set design and special effects are still impressive and gorgeous to look at, even after almost a century has passed, and it’s all conducive to a grand aesthetic that lends itself to interpretation and analysis when paired with its themes of social division and biblical connotations. The Tower of Babel sequence in the middle is not only brilliantly represented through grand sets and effective visual storytelling, but invites us to view the rest of the film’s narrative as a relevant parable for the modern world. The fact that it remains relevant after all this time is both a sad truth, as well as a testament to how well it implements special effects to tell its story, as they haven’t dated badly at all.

          Where the film falls short for me is in the details and technical executions of its plot, rather than its broader themes. There’s a fine distinction between ‘plot’ and ‘story’, and to tell the truth, I suspect I don’t always properly adhere to it as much as I ought to. In this context, when I say that I appreciate the story that ‘Metropolis’ tells, I’m talking about how it works as a fable, something that encompasses big ideas and delivers them to us in a manner that allows us to better understand what it is about. The final shot shows two men, each one representing two completely different worlds. Yet the two share common ground in that they have both been shown to be vulnerable and human, caring deeply for their children. The film’s final moments, in which they are gently led to shake each other’s hands by a man who has shared each of their perspectives, is a wonderful visual that encourages us to make this best possible conception of humanity into a reality. It’s a sweeping story that makes each character representative of something much bigger, and telling the tale of how they can reconcile is not only a message I can get behind, but a theme I think ‘Metropolis’ does a commendable job delivering.

          Conversely, when I say that ‘Metropolis’ has a slow, meandering plot, I mean to say that its pacing, and the actual experience of watching it is less engaging than the film is thought-provoking. It lasts two and a half hours, and is divided into three acts, respectively titled ‘Prelude’, ‘Intermission’, and ‘Furioso’. The beginning is really gripping, because it’s when you’re being introduced to this world and its characters. As ‘Metropolis’ is named after the place where the story takes place, any segment of the narrative that spends time painting this setting is going to be enthralling for me. The finale also pulls out the stocks as the city starts to boil over in a climactic way. The middle is where the film takes things a bit slowly, and starts to show its age. We spend just a bit too long on certain sequences where we already got the point a beat or two ahead of where the scene decides to end. I understand that Freder is embarking on a hero’s journey, and that you want that journey to feel grand and epic so that it feels like he’s thoroughly explored this fictional world you’ve developed, as well as the perspective of the people he has been separated from for so long. However, at times the slow pacing makes the time we spend exploring the various parts of this world and its side characters feel like detours that prolong the experience, rather than a natural exploration of this environment.

          Finally, the acting of everyone involved is well suited to their parts, but there are two or three moments where Brigitte Helm’s character Maria is reduced to an egregious damsel in distress. Okay, that’s hardly surprising for the time, granted, but when she’s being chased by the Mad Doctor, she contorts and flails about with manic exuberance. She looks demented, but never fearful, taking away any tension from the scene and replacing it with unintentional comedy. As timeless as its imagery and themes may be, it seems there are only so many signs of the era it came from that ‘Metropolis’ can avoid.

          It feels petty to say that a piece of classic cinema like this is a bit boring by today’s standards, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that other stories have taken the themes, aesthetics, and techniques of ‘Metropolis’ and adapted them into new ways that can cater to new interests and tastes. As such, while it may be a bit slow at times, ‘Metropolis’ sits very well with me for not only giving us splendid visuals, but for being the progenitor of many pieces of iconography that are dear to me. C-3PO from ‘Star Wars’, Gotham City from ‘Batman: The Animated Series’, and Rapture from ‘Bioshock’, along with countless other fictional creations, all take inspiration from this creative achievement. It may not be entirely engaging from start to finish, but ‘Metropolis’ is a movie I am deeply thankful for.

This is one of the most difficult grades I’ve had to decide. For its time, it may as well be a 10/10. Same goes for its far-reaching influence. Still, we are judging the film itself, not its heritage. So, I will give it a…

7/10.

Beautiful like a painting, but stiff in areas, ‘Metropolis’ is a film I’d recommend for cinema fanatics, but would hesitate before encouraging the average viewer to watch it.

[carpethefanfics]

Passwords.

Hello little peanuts. I have returned with a gift for you.

What if everyone knew about Draco’s crush on Harry (and Harry’s crush on Draco) and Pansy decides, with the help of one Hermione Granger, to come up with passwords each week that will torture one of them into admitting it.

Inspired by this post

Enjoy.

The beginning of eighth year was weary for everyone

Back from a war, back from a summer of healing

But it seemed as though the atmosphere at Hogwarts had never shifted

Sure it was a battleground newly refurbished

A site of memories many didn’t want to be having

But it took no more than one large crate of firewhiskey graciously donated

And an unknown number of hours with every single eighth year student sprawled out, drunk and slobbering on their common room floor to bring them into a hazy yet comfortable year

It wasn’t all tear stained cheeks

Many more lip locks, many new friendships, even more laughter

It seemed ... it felt much better than the year they had prepared for

Relationships had mended

Tormentors and the tormented on equal footing

The world shifting them, nothing ever seeming worth the ridiculous childish antics that had separated them in the first place

The fumbled, full-hearted apologies of their drunken escapades as a year barely needed to be uttered again

No fidgeting and itching fingers, much calmer anxieties

They disappeared into a new era

Into a school that was no longer the sight of a war

It was just a school and they were just kids

And it was okay to laugh again, to make jokes again

To say the name of someone who had been gone for nearly a year and not feel so utterly broken

The houses had band together in the eighth year dorms

People like Pansy didn’t find Gryffindor's like Hermione quite so irritating anymore or Ravenclaw’s like Luna quite so lame

Even Blaise turned to Neville when he realized just how talented he was in Herbology, when he learned just how kind his soul could be

But some things, some things too familiar to let go of stayed

‘Always so scared Potter.’

‘You’re still wishing for that Malfoy?’

All the times these houses intermingled Draco Malfoy couldn’t seem to keep that smirk off his lips

And Harry Potter wasn’t nearly as inept to put it there as Draco thought

And everyone would see them

And everyone would watch them

Talking much too closely claiming the loudness of the room made them hard of hearing

Claiming the quiet nature of the library made their close proximity a necessity more than a luxury

The fights weren’t even fights anymore

And the teasing was so much more than that

Especially when they were the last ones in the common room at night

And their knees were grazing each other

And everyone could see that the glow on Harry’s face wasn’t from the fire

Could hear that Draco actually had a laugh

Their sarcastic quips and witty repartee

But it was just teasing, Harry would say

Hermione taking notice of the way he bit his cheek

Just falling back into the old rhythm, Draco scolded

Pansy watching him chew his lower lip

It was exactly what led Pansy Parkinson to silently eye Hermione Granger from across the common room

‘I’ll actually curse him into the next century if he doesn’t make a move’

‘I cannot he listen to one more sentence that starts with you’ll never guess what Harry did today’

‘Do they even know what flirting is?’

‘Bloody prats they are ... But the question is, what are we going to do about it?’

And so it began

The idea sliding into Pansy’s devilishly clever mind because of a rosy cheeked, eyes glazed over Blaise rambling drunk and careless into the fireplace

She could distinctly hear him laughing about the painstaking number of hours they had spent listening to a certain silver-haired boy ramble on about ridiculous emerald green eyes and untamable brown locks

And it made Pansy think

Why hadn’t they seen it already?

That all that time yelling across the Great Hall

Wresting on the muddy Quidditch grounds as rain coated their skin

The way their foreheads practically rested together, neither backing down, both stepping forward

The arguing and the fighting was what brought them together sure

But they needed more this time, they needed a push this time

And although she would never understand how the two of them misconstrued heavy handed flirting for no more than friendly tension

Clearly they needed some prodding

And with Hermione’s expansive knowledge of Hogwarts she was more than ready to hatch her plot

The first time it seemed to work just fine

 A simple ‘Harry Potter’ as he tried to pry his way into the eighth year dorms

One that had Draco rolling his eyes in Potter’s direction

Mercilessly teasing him the entire week

Harry’s cheeks dusted with pink with every new joke Draco seemed to conjure up

And Pansy was constantly biting her lip to hide her smile

And Hermione’s eyes were catching hers from across the room again

A small nod, an assurance that the plan to get them in each-other’s faces for an entirely new reason was starting

But the next week Pansy made sure it was worse

The week following even less subtle than before

But it wasn't nearly as bad as what Draco found himself saying on week three

‘Forgot my damn textbook, can I borrow yours?’

‘Not a chance in the world love.’

‘You’re going to make me go all the way back to the dorms for it really?’

‘Off with you darling.’

Draco slammed his bag on the table, the irritation of Pansy’s ridiculous behaviour scratching at his skin

He figured she had something to do with the passwords

She didn’t get that self-righteous glint in her eye for nothing

And unfortunately when he arrived none other than the Golden Boy himself was standing before the door arguing incessantly with the figure in the portrait

‘Well I don’t bloody well know what it is!’

‘Sorry Mr. Potter I cannot let you in.’

‘But you know who I am!’

Harry’s hands were in tight fists

This conversation with the portrait had obviously gone on much longer than he would have liked

‘Stuck are we?’

Harry turned at the sound of Draco’s voice

His eyes going wide, his lips curving up

‘Oh thank merlin. Do you know this week’s password?”

Draco felt a lump form in his throat at the sight

Harry Potter was frustratingly gorgeous

And his hand tightened around the strap of his bag at the thought of what it would feel like to run his fingers through those curls

The portrait spoke softly as he arrived

And he could have sworn it smirked

‘Password?’

Draco sighed heavily

Of course he would have to say this in front of Harry

His karmic retributions had yet to be fully paid

‘Harry Potter has the prettiest eyes.’

And the door swung open at the same time that Harry’s melodic laughter met his ears

‘Why in merlin’s beard is that the password?’

‘I’ve been asking myself that for the last three days.’

‘What? You disagree?’

Draco could feel his cheeks flush with heat as Harry nudged his arm

That ever perfect smile on his face

‘Couldn’t say. What colour are they again? Never actually looked myself. Maybe some other time Potter.’

‘Oh it’s Potter again is it?’

‘When you’re being an utter git and paying that portrait to make me say nice things about you then it is absolutely back to Potter for you.’

‘You think I’m doing this!?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. I always imagined you to be a cocky bastard’

‘Spend a lot of time imaging me Malfoy?’

And he rushed up the stairs leaving no more than his voice in his wake

Because if he had turned back after Harry had winked at him he was sure all those things he had imagined about Harry would come rushing

‘You wish Potter!’

It only seemed to escalate from there

Days floated by and every so often Draco would find something missing from his bag, something he could have sworn he shoved in no more than ten minutes ago

‘Pansy enough of this-’

She smirked at the redness of his cheeks, the unruly state of his hair

The plan already seemed to be going swimmingly

‘You’ll be late to class if you don’t rush love. Remember the password this week?’

Draco groaned as he slipped from the benches at breakfast that morning

‘You’re going to regret this Parkinson.’

And he meant it ... sort of

He rushed back to the dorms

Praying that someone would be standing there too

Trapped outside the portrait hole just to hear the next nine words fall from his lips

‘Password?’

Draco huffed when he arrived as, thankfully,  Harry was no where to be found

But little did he know as the words left his lips someone was rounding the corridor behind him

‘Draco Malfoy loves Harry Potter with all his heart’

It was like someone had shot Harry

And he wasn’t sure he heard it right

But his whole body froze anyway as the words rang out in his ears

And a weight that had been sitting on his chest since the start of term had practically disappeared

The door swung open, a glint in the eyes of the portrait that had asked and the distinctly silver hair of Draco Malfoy disappeared behind it

Does he?

Was all Harry could think for the rest of the day

Because they had been spending an awful lot of time together since the beginning of the year

And it had started when Harry gave him his wand back

When he had found him in the common room trying to warm his frozen fingers

When he had described being trapped in that house, when Harry had described being trapped in that tent

After that, it felt easy, felt normal

And eventually he froze up whenever Draco brushed against him

Thigh against thigh, should against shoulder

And he found himself wanting to brush Draco’s hair back to see his silver eyes

And he hadn’t been entirely sure what was happening with the swirling going on in the pit of his stomach

But then he’d heard the word love from Draco’s lips and it felt right

He just needed to know if it was real ...

By the time Draco had rhymed off several new passwords he was starting to get frustrated

The snickering and jeering and casual glances from people he barely knew was much more than he had ever wanted

Sure whatever had been going on with Harry ... had been going on

But airing his laundry to the school was something Pansy knew better than to do

But it wasn’t until one of the final passwords that Draco completely lost it

He was standing in the common room waiting for her

Afraid to ask what he’d asked nearly every Monday this month

Afraid to see the glint in her eyes as it rolled off her tongue

But none the less she sauntered down the stairs with a smirk already present

‘Okay Parkinson’

His eyes rolled at the nuisances that had become his best friend

‘What’s the new password?’

Pansy looked at him with a soft smile, her eyelashes fluttering against her cheek as she feigned her innocence

Blaise practically choking from his spot on the couch as the words fell off her lips

‘I wish Harry would blow me’

Draco saw red

Because how was he supposed to say that aloud?

How was he supposed to stand next to Harry with those words coming out of his mouth and not want to immediately disappear?

How was he supposed to admit that when he could barely admit it to himself?

‘I DRAW THE LINE HERE!’

Pansy couldn’t stop the laughter

And Draco couldn’t stop the heat spreading over his face

‘CHANGE IT OR I’LL LOCK YOU IN A BROOM CUPBOARD WITH FILCH FOR A MONTH ‘

Pansy could barely breathe as Draco railed in on her

‘I SWEAR TO MERLIN PANSY I’LL SLIP YOU A BALDING POTION’

That was of course until the commotion had done just as she hoped it would

‘What’s going on?’

Draco whipped his head around at the ridiculously sexy voice of a very sleepy Harry Potter

Harry’s hand rubbing against the back of his neck, his tie a disheveled mess, his shirt barely tucked in

Draco’s tongue was tied, his hands in fists

And he was absolutely ready to throw Pansy off the Astronomy Tower

‘I’m leaving’

But before he could storm by Harry, Pansy shouted

‘Tell Potter the password first darling, wouldn’t want to leave him out in the cold’

Draco shook his head and surged forward in an attempt to get away

But the tightening of a hand on his forearm pulled him right back

‘Why what’s the password this week? Something about my bedroom eyes again? How about my Quidditch body?’

Draco caught sight of the smirk on Harry’s face and his stomach knotted

‘Oh I’m so glad to see you’re having fun with this Potter’

Harry let soft laughter escape his lips

‘It’s just a joke Draco’

‘Well it’s not bloody funny anymore’

‘Why? What did they make it this week?’

Pansy’s voice chimed before he could even think to speak

‘Yeah Draco what did we make it this week?’

But it just made him all the more embarrassed

‘Pansy I swear if you don’t change it you’ll never see the light of day again’

‘Always so dramatic Draco darling. I’ll see you in Charms love.’

She spoke softly as she sauntered by them

’Oh and Harry dear - do tell him the real password?’

Draco whirled his eyes from where they had glued to Harry’s face

‘Real password? What do mean real?’

Draco was shouting as he watched Pansy disappear round the corridor  

Her shit-eating grin much more than he could bear

He spun back

The warmth from where Harry’s hand was still latched to his wrist spreading up his arm

There was a pink tinge to Harry’s cheeks

And they were standing awfully close again

‘Real password have you tongue-tied Potter?’

And Harry stepped forward

Making Draco swallow his words

‘Not exactly’

His words were hushed, his hot breath against Draco’s face

‘What is it then?’

He swallowed harshly again

Harry’s hand sliding down his wrist into his open palm

‘I heard you say it last week you know.’

‘Heard me last-?’

And then his stomach plummeted

And his heart sped up

‘Is she right? Is the password she picked right?’

And Draco found himself chewing on his lip again

Found himself ducking his head

‘Draco ... the new password is Harry Potter loves Draco Malfoy by the way ... if you were still wondering’

And his eyes flung up

Catching that emerald green that he so adored

And losing all feeling in his limbs as Harry leaned forward

And his eyes fluttered shut

As his soft lips captured Dracos

It was much more slow than he had anticipated

Harry’s other hand moving to rest against his neck, to pull him closer

Their lips were gliding together, the knots in Draco’s stomach winding even more tightly

He didn’t realize how breathless he was until Harry pulled away

‘Going to tell me what Pansy said now?’

He was breathing heavily, they both were

Clutching Harry’s hand with a new found fervor

His other grasped tightly into Harry’s shirt

‘About the password?’

His mind was spinning as Harry nodded

And all he wanted was to lean back in

‘I wish Harry would blow me’

He could feel Harry’s hand tense against his

His own breathing hitched

‘Oh?’

Draco felt himself catch his lower lip as he always did when Harry was around, when Harry was this close

Harry leaned in again

Their lips grazing one another

‘Well let me buy you dinner first at least’

And Draco couldn’t stop himself from surging forward

Connecting his lips to Harry again just at the thought

[livioacerbo]

Antibiotics Made Cheap Chicken Possible. They Also Made Superbugs

These days, the only thing more American than apple pie is eating an animal raised on antibiotics. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the US go not to human patients, but to the nation’s plate-bound pigs, cows, turkeys, and chickens. As these wonder drugs became a mainstay of modern agriculture, factory farms began churning out another, far less welcome commodity—antibiotic resistant bacteria. These deadly new microbial threats are expected to claim the lives of 10 million people by 2050. How did this happen? And where does it end?

Those are the kinds of questions that superbug sleuth Maryn McKenna asks in her newest book Big Chicken, due out September 12th. Through stories told in carefully researched detail, the veteran science journalist (and one-time WIRED bacteria beat blogger) tracks down the origins of antibiotics in America’s food system, and follows their rapid expansion throughout the agricultural industry with devastating downstream consequences. It is at once a classic tale of runaway science gone wrong and the singular history of America’s favorite food. Though, after reading it, you may never want to eat chicken again.

National Geographic Partners, LLC

WIRED: You’ve been writing about the rise of antibiotic resistance for more than a decade. When did you realize that it was really a story about the poultry industry?

McKenna: It started when I was working on my last book, Superbug, which came out seven years ago. I went into that project thinking there were two epidemics of MRSA. One was in hospitals dating back to pretty early in the antibiotic era. The second was a much larger, more mysterious, community epidemic that was killing kids and ending the careers of professional athletes in the 90s, that we were completely unequipped to deal with as a society. But I realized pretty late in my reporting there weren’t two epidemics, there were actually three. The third one was MRSA on farms. When I realized that at the same time people were blaming medicine for antibiotic resistance, farmers were feeding literal tons—like 63,000 tons a year—of antibiotics to livestock, that fundamentally did not make sense to me. The more I dug into it the more I discovered that for everything medicine says about how we should be conservative and careful, agriculture is undercutting that everyday. And moments of cognitive dissonance like that make for great stories.

WIRED: Uh, like the story of America’s brief infatuation with acronization? That was a real doozy.

Oh my gosh, I still can’t believe that one. When I realized just how widespread acronization was during the 50s and early 60s, I remember saying to myself, “They dipped all the chicken in the US in a bath of antibiotics and sealed it up in packages and thought it would last for a month on the shelf and people could eat it and be fine? Were they crazy?” To me that story was really the purest distillation of this uncomplicated belief that science was going to make our lives better. It’s not in any of the history books, I tripped across it while reading the footnotes on some other footnotes.

WIRED: Reading that now, we clearly know that yes, they were crazy, or at least crazy naive. But were there signs back then that pumping antibiotics into farm animals was going to lead to to some bad outcomes?

That was actually one of the really surprising things about piecing together this whole history. I had the impression that concerns over casually using antibiotics in agriculture were a pretty new thing. So I was shocked to learn that warnings about its unintended consequences go back to the very start of these practices. Over and over again, in every decade since 1948, somebody stepped up and said, “We are making a mistake. This is going to undermine the action of antibiotics, this is going to make people sick.” And whoever that person was they were dismissed and that warning wasn’t heard. Some of the scientists in the company that started this—did the first experiments, sold the first growth promoters to chicken farmers—those veterinarians said, “Hey, we shouldn’t do this,” and their bosses overruled them.

But for the most part, the scientists and producers who started this story rolling in the 1940s really thought they were doing an unqualified good thing. They wanted to make meat affordable, they wanted to feed the world, they wanted to repair the damage of World War II. And it’s not like they were sloppy. They just didn’t push their interrogations of what they were doing far enough, partly because they didn’t have the molecular tools at the time, but partly because they just suffered from a lack of imagination.

WIRED: Where were the government regulators during all this?

As part of all the reforms sought by Jimmy Carter’s administration, in 1976, the FDA’s new commissioner, Donald Kennedy, starts gathering all the data rolling out since the 1940s about what this routine use of antibiotics in animals has been creating. And a year later, after compiling all the scientific evidence, all of which says unequivocally, “This is a bad thing to do,” the FDA tries to act, by banning antibiotic growth promoters from American agriculture. And it gets defeated, not by another scientific viewpoint, but by economics and politics. And they continue to defeat science through several more administrations until Obama comes in and decides to change the terms of the debate.

More on Superbugs

Michael T. Osterholm

Peer Into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance

Maryn McKenna

Antibiotic Use in Chickens: Responsible for Hundreds of Human Deaths?

Nick Stockton

The US Is Finally Taking Action on Antibiotic Resistance

WIRED: So where does that leave us now? Are you optimistic about the future or is animal agriculture going to doom us all to a slow, painful, antibiotic resistant death?

Well, it’s Magic 8 Ball, “Answer murky, ask again later.” On the one hand what’s happened in poultry in the US is actually really encouraging. Because what happened was while science and agriculture were locked in this decades-long stalemate, a consumer movement happened, in advance of any federal action. By 2013 people were making it clear by voting with their dollars that they did not support meat raised with routine use of antibiotics. And that shows that a couple of big complicated machines—the machinery of scientific belief and machinery of regulation, and machinery of how a market moves—can all turn around.

But we don’t know what’s going to happen with pigs and cows in the West or with animal agriculture in the Global South. Right now the movement to antibiotic-free meat is largely an industrialized nation concern. It’s the climate change paradigm all over again. Except instead of saying you can’t have gas guzzlers or air conditioners because that’s bad for the planet we’re saying you can’t have those big juicy steaks because we realized we made a mistake. And they’re saying, “We’re growing, our people want to eat meat, this is most efficient way to produce meat, and who are you to tell us our citizens can’t have what you had?” And they’ve got a point. So, there’s still a lot of work left to do.

social experiment by Livio Acerbo #greengroundit from https://www.wired.com/story/antibiotic-brined-chicken-and-other-bad-ideas-from-us-farming