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Facebook Isn’t the Same as “The Internet” Except When It Is

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, second from left, poses for a selfie with the crowd following wreath-laying rites at the Heroes Cemetery to mark National Heroes Day Monday, Aug. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Davey Alba‘s BuzzFeed investigation into the ways Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s government uses Facebook to spread propaganda and destroy political opponents is a frightening look at what happens when a tool created by a bunch of developers in California becomes the go-to news source for a country 7,000 miles away.

Just how ubiquitous is Facebook in the Philippines?

In 2012, 29 million Filipinos used Facebook. Today, 69 million people — two-thirds of the population — are on Facebook. The remaining one-third does not have access to the internet. In other words, virtually every Filipino citizen with an internet connection has a Facebook account. For many in one of the most persistently poor nations in the world, Facebook is the only way to access the internet.

Which is pretty much how Facebook wants it. Maria Ressa, the CEO of the news website Rappler, told BuzzFeed News that during an April 2017 meeting with Facebook, she mentioned to Mark Zuckerberg that 97% of Filipinos who had access to the internet also had Facebook accounts (which was true at the time). Zuckerberg frowned, Ressa recalled. Then he asked: “What about the other 3%?”

Facebook’s Internet.org effort has floundered embarrassingly in more than half a dozen nations and territories. But in the Philippines, the social media capital of the world according to global media agency We Are Social, Facebook rushed into a culture that unquestioningly assimilated it.

“We were seduced, we were lured, we were hooked, and then, when we became captive audiences, we were manipulated to see what other people — people with vested interests and evil motives of power and domination — wanted us to see,” de Lima wrote to BuzzFeed News. “It was a slow takeover of our attention. We didn’t notice it until it was already too late.”

Neither did Facebook.

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A Mystery Shrouded in an Enigma Wrapped in a Snazzy Tie and Smothered in Inherited Wealth

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Perhaps your answer to the question “Would you like to read 7,000 words about Tucker Carlson?” is, like mine, “What did I ever to do you?” If that’s the case, we are both wrong: I refer to you the Columbia Journalism Review, where Lyz Lenz‘s interview-slash-profile-slash-philosophical inquiry into the “why” of Carlson is a rollicking good (and infuriating) time and a pointed look at how badly people who are manifestly winning — at politics, at finance, at life — still want to claim they’re underdogs.

Yet Carlson insists he, too, was motivated only by the needs of a growing family. He maintains that if someone handed him $5 million he wouldn’t have gotten out of bed. (And he’d be easy to believe, if he wasn’t, in fact, worth over $8 million, and hadn’t himself stood to inherit enough to keep him in a rotating series of beds until retirement.)

But it’s the story he’s sticking to. He had to do what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice. He has kids. DC has terrible public schools. His hands were tied. So, in addition to his staff positions, he took freelance jobs. He didn’t want to disappoint his family.

“I think this is true of almost everybody unless you happen to inherit a bunch of dough at a young age.” Carlson sounds cavalier as he says this, like the plight of sending kids to a private school in DC is the most relatable thing in history. I wonder about my own career in media. If providing for my kids was my only goal, I’d be back in my marketing job. Which reminds me, I need to check my bank account to make sure I can afford back-to-school shoes and after-school care.

I wonder which one of us is supposed to be the liberal elite media.

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Let Them Eat Pancakes

a stack of four pancakes. there is a pat of butter on the top and maple syrup dripping down the side.
Photo by Michelle W. (CC BY 2.0)

At the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli introduces us to busboy Othea Loggan. Othea Loggan started working as a busboy at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in 1964, and he works there as a busboy still — the most senior employee at a restaurant with an unusual number of long-term staff. In ’64, he made minimum wage; now he makes slightly more, with no benefits. Management is loyal to its bussers, but you can’t actually pay bills with job security.

Winston Brown, another busser (for the past 38 years), taps his chest and a red light glows through his white coat — “I’m on dialysis,” he says. “Medicare only. We make just enough to pay bills — sometimes. When I started here, there was one Walker Bros., this place, and now there are seven of them. And what do we get? We get to pay our rents.”

Any savings?

He laughs sardonically.

Loggan doesn’t complain.

Rumbult, similarly, says management “does a lot, but we could always use help.” In a sense, their major benefit is a feeling of job security. With new hires today increasingly less likely to stay at a pancake house long, Ray Walker says his loyalty to his aging bussing staff has only deepened. His father, Victor, who started Walker Bros. with his uncle Everett in 1960 (franchising the business from an Oregon pancake house chain), hired Loggan. He says he probably treats Loggan a little better than the rest of the staff, but hesitated to go into detail: “Others would want to know what they’re not getting.” For instance, the company took out life insurance on Loggan (payable to his wife); Ray says that for years he’s set aside about $50 a month for Loggan, as an informal retirement fund (subject to a 30 percent penalty for early withdrawal).

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Take Two $275 Herbal Supplements and Don’t Call Me in the Morning

An interior view of a goop pop-up shop in Newport Beach, CA, 2017. (Photo: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages via AP Images)

“Why do we all not feel well? And what can we do about it?” asks GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s much-mocked wellness empire. The answer might be “Visualize your aura and shove a rock into your vadge for good measure,” but it might also be “Get the medical community to realize how badly it’s failing women.” At The Baffler, Jessa Crispin wonders about the “curious feminist logic of GOOP” and how the internet is decentralizing and democratizing medicine, for better or worse.

This is, of course, the same internet that tells women their children’s autism is caused by vaccines and that Goop uses to distribute its theory that walking barefoot on the grass helps realign the electromagnetic fields of the body. It’s also the same internet I turned to when I was vomiting up the iron supplements the doctor prescribed for my chronic anemia. He refused to give me anything else, other than the suggestion to “eat more spinach,” but an online forum told me about the easily absorbed nettle tea, which I have been using effectively to control my anemia for years. It’s also the same internet that told me I had scabies or syphilis when really I had an allergic reaction to my soap, and the same internet that tells me my coffee beans carry a toxic mold and are slowly killing me…

Viewed against the sobering backdrop of Western medical history, the Goop turn in female self-treatment can be seen as more than just another jaded journalistic narrative about delusional women and their soft-headed disbelief in science. In important respects, it is also an attempt to wrest control and authority back from a medical community that has mistreated women for centuries. A male-dominated medical world is no longer the authority on the female body—I am, with the help of online message boards, Goop newsletters, and random Google searches for things like “why is my discharge like this” or “how do I get rid of wrinkles” or “can a person eat nightshades and not die.” We could be regressing, then, to something like the oral medical tradition of the medieval midwife, where knowledge is come across sporadically, where anecdote is given as much credence as experimentation, and the knowledge base is decentralized.

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Graduate School is Wonderful and We Are All Very, Very Happy

Image from the lecture "On writing a dissertation," available on the European Graduate School's YouTube Channel.

Andrea Long Chu, a doctoral student at NYU, was a teaching assistant for Avital Ronell — the German and comparative literature professor recently found responsible for sexually harassing one of her former students. Ronell’s suspension prompted a letter of support for her from other prominent academics, including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. (Butler has since walked back her support). Chu isn’t having it, and she says so in a brilliantly written, pointed piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.

Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is “the skunk.”

Process: Wild things live in this word. These stories come from sources who strongly wished to remain anonymous, fearing that to have their names attached would threaten their chances in an already desiccated job market. But even if this was just gossip, I would believe it. When it comes to the American academy, I trust raw, red rumor over public statements any day of the week.

Her scathing remarks are not just for Avital Ronell, though. They’re for the entire academy.

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”

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Style Ain’t Cheap, aka That Stuffed Coyote Costs Extra

Curated taxidermy lurks above the lobby at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, California. (Photo by Ann Larie Valentine via Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0).

Look out, here come the microhotels: painfully hip hotels with teeny tiny rooms, but curated lobbies and super-Instagrammable roof terraces. At The Outline, Daisy Alioto wonders when having a modicum of personal space in which to rest and relax went from being the whole point of hotel rooms to a luxury perk. Is a patio with a mid-century modern cornhole board a workable tradeoff for a full-sized bed and just enough room to leave your toiletries?

If you slash costs enough, you have to wonder whether guests are booking your hotel not for the design, but in spite of it. The irony is, there are plenty of staid hotel chains in midtown Manhattan of the same price range as the Freehand. When you strip out the social media cachet, many trendy hotels are a bum deal on par with the Kip’s Bay micro-apartment development, where tenants paid above market prices for less space.

I await the hotel equivalent of fashion’s normcore backlash, in which millennials are driven back to jewel-toned duvets and wicker kleenex holders reminiscent of Golden Girls. However, it’s just as likely that hotels will take feedback like Gongaware’s and rebrand a shaving shelf and extra-long bed as the Men’s Room™ — crafting a privilege out of standards that used to be the norm.

(What exactly is a “Curated Lobby”? I’m not sure, but Curated Lobby is totally the name of my new un-ironic post-pop all-bassoon zydeco band.)

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I Want to Say One Word to You. Just One Word.

An older white man in a black leather jacket and black hat sits on a chair in front of a purple wall. On the floor next to him is a white plastic bag that says "thank you" and has a smiley face on it.
Photo by Derriel Street Photography via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Plastic bags: they are our immediate past, our present, and thanks to how difficult it is to actually get rid of them, our future. At Topic, Rebecca Altman muses on the now-ubiquitous crinkly forms we see stuck in our trees and floating down our streets.

“The Plastic Grocery Sack Council says plastic bags can be reused in more than 17 different ways, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1986, “including as a wrap for frozen foods, a jogger’s wind breaker or a beach bag.” By 1988, about 40 percent of US grocery bags were plastic. By 2003, the American Plastics Council estimated plastic’s market share was close to 80 percent. Estimates made over a decade ago suggest somewhere between 500 billion and 1.5 trillion plastic bags are consumed globally each year at a rate of more than a million a minute.

Though the bags are created to be thrown away, the combination of the bags’ long-lasting plastic and our inability to dispose of them properly makes them even hardier than they already are.

Technically, plastic bags don’t need to be tossed. They are recyclable, though few are recycled. They’re collected separately from other recyclables, typically at supermarkets, and are incompatible with comingled, curbside recycling, which rely on automated sorting machines. Bags are in fact the bane of the sorting process. They jam and clog the works. And so wish-cycled bags—those tossed into the recycling in hopes they’ll be recovered—often wind up in the waste stream, and in trucks bound for transfer stations and landfills. All it takes is a swift breeze to lift and liberate bags from dumpsters and dumps. In this way, they dodge all human designs for their discard.

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This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

The seashore is covered by green algae in Shandong province, China. Researchers have attributed the phenomenon in part to climate change. (Imaginechina via AP Images)

The Nathaniel Rich New York Times Magazine story on climate change research and policy — and how close we came to actually doing something in the 1980s to try and mitigate the looming disaster — clocks in at 30,000 words. All 30,000 of them are worth reading, although at the end of the day, the denouement requires just over 100.

The meeting began in the morning and continued into the night, much longer than expected; most of the delegates had come to the conference ready to sign the Dutch proposal. Each time the doors opened and a minister headed to the bathroom at the other end of the hall, the activists leapt up, asking for an update. The ministers maintained a studied silence, but as the negotiations went past midnight, their aggravation was recorded in their stricken faces and opened collars.

“What’s happening?” Becker shouted, for the hundredth time, as the Swedish minister surfaced.

“Your government,” the minister said, “is fucking this thing up!”

The decade-long lead in to the final fuckup is equal parts fascinating and infuriating, and makes the ongoing “debate” about whether climate change is really happening all the more ludicrous.

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The Life-Changing Magic of Getting In Line at 5AM

Photo by Yoshikazu Takada via Flickr (CC -BY-2.0)

Helen Rosner traveled to Tokyo on short notice and with no dinner reservations — and that means the best food requires waiting in lines. A lot of lines. Long ones. In an essay for AFAR, the die-hard line-avoider describes her gradual acclimatization to a country whose language includes the phrase gyouretsu no dekiru mise: “restaurants that have very long lines.” In the end, she found herself calmly waiting for more than a great bowl of ramen.

I was in Tokyo for the very end of actual sakura season, when the city’s abundant cherry trees bedeck the streets with a riot of pink. In anticipation, I’d packed a Canon A-1, a petite brick of a camera from the late ’70s that shoots 35mm film and runs about 50 bucks at a used camera store. I hadn’t photographed that way in years, and as I committed myself ever more deeply to my new practice of patience, shooting on film became a pleasing part of it. A 40-year-old camera has no LCD screen with instant preview—I couldn’t know which vignettes of Tokyo I was successfully capturing, and which would be preserved only in memory. Unlike enjoying the seemingly infinite capacity of a DSLR with a 128-gigabyte memory card, when you shoot film, you can only shoot so much. Each frame is precious, which means you need to make it worth it. You need to wait for the shot.

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Sh*t or Get Off the Composter

A small wooden shed sits in the middle of a grassy field. A sign over the door says "outhouse."
Everything old is new again! (Photo by Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0.)

We all poop, every day (hopefully!). That’s a lot of poop to deal with, and more and more people are asking whether there’s something useful we can do with it, or, at the very least, if we can dispose of it in a more sensible way. At Wired UK, Phoebe Braithwaite talks with some of the folks trying to figure out how to teach the world saner ways to deal with poop — or as they’d prefer to call it, shit.

“Defecating in drinking water is a kind of insane thing that the Romans taught us,” Klehm says. George agrees: “I don’t think that the fundamental principle of mixing shit with drinking water and then paying a lot of money and using a lot of energy to remove the shit from drinking water is necessarily the best idea,” says George. “But it’s too late, it’s not going to be retrofitted.”

The UK is, George says, a faecalphobic culture: we don’t like talking or thinking about faeces and the flaws in our sewage system go broadly unacknowledged. “We have an aversion to coming into close contact with faeces, we want it to be flushed away and we want it to not smell and we want to not think about it,” she says. One of the measures of our failure to get to grips with it is in the language we use. None of our tools, she says, quite work: poop and poo are pretty childish; faeces and excrement are too medical; waste is wrong. The only appropriately direct term, thinks Rose George, is shit.

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