The Post-Apocalypse Survival Machine Nerd Farm
A man with a doctorate in nuclear fusion physics builds a compound on 30 acres near Maysville, Mo. in an attempt to create a self-sufficient community where people can grow their own food and build their own tools:
“For a few years, Jakubowski lived mostly alone. First, he built the hut. That backbreaking work persuaded him to build a brick press. Next, he constructed a workshop to make more tools, including the tractor. He posted videos on the Web and gained a following of DIYers. Now and again, a couple people would show up during the summer to help out, and they made huts alongside Jakubowski’s. That changed in early 2011, when he was invited to give a lecture at a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
“In his TED Talk, Jakubowski took the stage in a khaki Mao suit and explained how he planted 100 trees in one day, pressed 500 bricks “from the dirt beneath my feet,” also in one day, and built a tractor in six. ‘If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing,’ he said calmly, ‘then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential.’ The goal, he said, is to create on one freely downloadable DVD a ‘civilization starter kit.’ He ended the talk and received TED’s customary rapturous applause.
“Since Jakubowski’s TED Talk was posted to YouTube in April 2011, it’s been viewed by more than 1 million people, around 500 of whom agreed to donate $10 or so a month to ‘subscribe’ to the farm. The foundation of Mark Shuttleworth, a billionaire South African technology entrepreneur, gave Jakubowski $360,000 to pursue the work. The TED video even inspired a handful of hardy idealists to make a pilgrimage to Missouri and help out on the Factor e Farm. Then a few more showed up, some staying a week or two, some for months. By August 2012, there were 14 to 20 people staying on the farm at any one time, though it looked less like a farm than an unhygienic encampment for overeducated misfits.”
This Land Is My Land
The story of a property-line feud between two families in North Georgia:
“The main bridge between the families was the fast friendship of Jewell Crane’s father and Lewis Dempsey’s father. The old men agreed that neighbors should talk and cooperate. Thus, when it came time in the early 1980s to fence off the southern part of Lot 784 to contain Dempsey’s cattle, all four men walked over the area as the posts were planted and the hog wire run.
“The first real friction between the two families had nothing to do with land. One day Dempsey spotted his father drinking a jar of whiskey. And since it was white mash in Lumpkin County, Dempsey didn’t have to ask where it had come from. Never much of a drinker himself, and worried that the alcohol would react with medication his father was taking for lung cancer, Dempsey threatened to turn Crane in if it ever happened again. Dempsey recalls that about two weeks later, he heard that Crane had gotten hassled by police for moonshining. Dempsey sought out his neighbor to assure Crane that he had not reported him (a denial Dempsey maintains to this day). But for weeks thereafter, when Dempsey met Crane on the road or drove past his house, the bootlegger refused to wave.”
A Convenient Excuse
[Not single-page] A former journalist calls out the media for the lack of urgency in news coverage about climate change:
“Look, unlike most of your critics, I know you. You’re not just names on a page or a screen to me: you’re living, breathing human beings, with lives and families. I’ve shared the stresses and anxieties of journalism in this era. I know how hard you work, and how relatively little (most of) you are paid. I know how insecure your jobs are. And I know that your work — even your very best work — is most often thankless. Believe me. I know.
“I also know that you take your responsibility as journalists, as public servants, seriously. Why is it, then, that you are so utterly failing on this all-important topic? I could be wrong, but I think I understand. I’m afraid it has to do with self-image and self-censorship.
“Nothing is more important to me as a journalist than my independence. Yes, I’m still a journalist. And I’m as independent as I’ve ever been — maybe, if you can imagine this, even more so. Because leaving behind my mainstream journalism career has freed me to speak and write about climate and politics in ways that were virtually impossible inside the MSM bubble, where I had to worry about perceptions, and about keeping my job, and whether I’d be seen by my peers and superiors as an advocate. God forbid.”
The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
The Eat, Pray, Love author talks to the Lucky Peach editor about how she became a writer, and the key to creativity:
“I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten note from Harper’s! And I would hang it on my wall, like, That’s such a great rejection letter! I don’t know why I felt like I had the right to do it. I don’t know. I’ve always been really surprised—and I really remain very surprised—at people who don’t think they have the right to do their work, or feel like they need a permission slip from the principal to do it, or who doubt their voice. I’m always like, What? What? Fucking do it! Just fucking do it! What’s the worst that could happen?! You fucking fail! Then you do it again and you wear them down and they get sick of rejecting you. And they get tired of seeing your letters and they just give up. They don’t have any choice. So part of it was real confidence, and part of it was fake confidence, and part of it was insecurity. It was a combination of all them.”
How Do You Raise a Prodigy?
On raising children with extraordinary talents:
“When Kit was 3, a supervisor of his play group told May that he let other children push him around. ‘I went in one day and saw another child snatch a toy away from him,’ May said. ‘I told him he should stand up for himself, and he said: “That kid will be bored in two minutes, and then I can play with it again. Why start a fight?” So he was mature already. What did I have to teach this kid? But he always seemed happy, and that was what I wanted most for him. He used to look in the mirror and burst out laughing.’ May enrolled him in school. ‘His teacher told me that she wanted her other kids to grow up in kindergarten,’ she said. ‘She wanted mine to grow down.’
“By age 9, he had graduated from high school and started college in Utah. ‘The other students often thought it was strange that he was there,’ May says, ‘but Kit never did.’ His piano skills, meanwhile, had advanced enough so that by the time he was 10, he appeared on David Letterman. Shortly after, Kit toured the physics research facility at Los Alamos. A physicist said that, unlike the postdoctoral physicists who usually visited, Kit was so bright that no one could ‘find the bottom of this boy’s knowledge.’ A few years later, Kit attended a summer program at M.I.T., where he helped edit papers in physics, chemistry and mathematics. ‘He just understands things,’ May said to me, almost resigned. ‘Someday, I want to work with parents of disabled children, because I know their bewilderment is like mine. I had no idea how to be a mother to Kit, and there was no place to find out.'”
Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies
Internal memos and documents show how the sugar industry worked to cover up evidence of its dangerous health effects:
“In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a ‘hazard to the public.’ The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as ‘circumstantial’ and called the connection to cardiovascular disease ‘less than clear,’ with fat playing a greater role. The only cautionary note, besides cavities, was that all bets were off if sugar consumption were to increase significantly. The committee then thanked the Sugar Association for contributing ‘information and data.’ (Tatem would later remark that while he was ‘proud of the credit line…we would probably be better off without it.’)
The committee’s perspective was shared by many researchers, but certainly not all. For a public hearing on the draft review, scientists from the USDA’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory submitted what they considered ‘abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.’ As they later explained in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, some portion of the public—perhaps 15 million Americans at that time—clearly could not tolerate a diet rich in sugar and other carbohydrates. Sugar consumption, they said, should come down by ‘a minimum of 60 percent,’ and the government should launch a national campaign ‘to inform the populace of the hazards of excessive sugar consumption.’ But the committee stood by its conclusions in the final version of its report presented to the FDA in October 1976.”
Hollywood and Vietnam
A look back at how filmmakers handled the Vietnam War, and how they worked with the military—or ignored their recommendations—to get them made:
“In coming to the Pentagon with his plans in May, 1975, Coppola told Public Affairs officials that his initial script would need considerable work, especially the end, which he considered ‘surrealistic.’ While recognizing that the screenplay had considerable problems, the officials forwarded it to the Army with the recommendation that the service should work with the director so that the completed film ‘will be an honest presentation.’
“The Army found little basis to even talk to Coppola, responding that the script was ‘simply a series of some of the worst things, real or imagined, that happened or could have happened during the Vietnam War.’ According to the service, it had little reason to consider extending cooperation ‘in view of the sick humor or satirical philosophy of the film.’ Army officers pointed to several ‘particularly objectionable episodes’ which presented its actions ‘in an unrealistic and unacceptable bad light.’ These included scenes of U.S. soldiers scalping the enemy, a surfing display in the midst of combat, an officer obtaining sexual favors for his men, and later smoking marijuana with them.”
Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012
A eulogy for the visionary architect, who died this week:
“Like many people, I was—and remain—devastated to have learned that architect Lebbeus Woods passed away last night, just as the hurricane was moving out of New York City and as his very neighborhood, Lower Manhattan, had temporarily become part of the Atlantic seabed, floodwaters pouring into nearby subway tunnels and knocking out power to nearly every building south of 23rd Street, an event seemingly predicted, or forewarned, by Lebbeus’s own work.
“I can’t pretend to have been a confidant of his, let alone a professional colleague, but Lebbeus’s influence over my own interest in architecture is impossible to exaggerate and his kindness and generosity as a friend to me here in New York City was an emotionally and professionally reassuring thing to receive—to a degree that I am perhaps only now fully realizing.”
The Bloody Patent Battle Over a Healing Machine
A patent for a simple medical device has made its inventors, its marketers, and a university rich—which is why everyone wants a piece of it:
“For Wake Forest University, which licensed the VAC patents to KCI, the device has meant about $500 million in royalties. Based almost entirely on the VAC deal, the university was ranked fifth by the Association of University Technology Managers in its most recent survey of licensing income, trailing only Columbia, New York University, Northwestern, and the University of California system. In recent years the KCI payments have propped up the bottom line of the university’s medical center, and the VAC money has paid for research, recruiting, and construction that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
“As you might imagine, all that success gave KCI and Wake Forest a powerful incentive to build a fence, to protect the patents at all cost. And it gave everybody else an equally powerful incentive to find a way through the fence.
“This is the story of what happens when there are billions of dollars wrapped up in a prosaic piece of technology that at its core is closer to your kid’s science-fair entry than the Human Genome Project, one that despite all the commercial success and some 4 million or so patients still has its share of doubters in the medical community. It’s a story about luck and timing and the squeezing of the health care dollar. It is about betrayal and wrangling over patents. And mostly it is about invention, the tenuous and uncertain act of breathing life into an idea that may or may not have been yours all along.”
The Man Who Made Star Wars
A 1979 look inside the making of George Lucas’s blockbuster franchise—now owned by Disney:
“Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys (‘I love them, I’m really into that’), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.
“From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. ‘Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,’ he says, ‘but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million-just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.’ Lucasfilm Ltd.,. the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, ‘already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.'”
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