Wikipedia: it’s the best trash fire on the internet. It’s sexist. There’s rampant trolling. You can lose hours of your life falling down a rabbit hole looking for information on that one guy from that movie. And you can learn about anything at all in recorded history, and it’ll probably be mostly true. At Wired, Richard Cooke penned a loving paean to the playground for pedants that’s the closest thing the internet has to a public square.
The site’s innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors’ passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David’s “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.
And because I know it’s the thing you seized on while reading, here is Khanzir’s entry, and here is Khanzir:
In this photograph taken on July 12, 2016, an Afghan veterinarian administers an injection to a pig inside an enclosure at Kabul Zoo in Kabul. (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
Another thing this languagehas in common with garbage is that we can’t stop generating it. Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day. A 1911 book by Frederick Winslow Taylor called The Principles of Scientific Management borrows its language from manufacturing; men, like machines, are useful for their output and productive capacity. The conglomeration of companies in the 1950s and ’60s required organizations to address alienated employees who felt faceless amid a sea of identical gray-suited toilers, and managers were encouraged to create a climate conducive to human growth and to focus on the self-actualization needs of their employees. In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up.
One of the most influential business books of the 1990s was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen is responsible for the popularity of the word disruptive. (The term has since been diluted and tortured, but his initial definition was narrow: Disruption happens when a small company, such as a start-up, targets a limited segment of an incumbent’s audience and then uses that foothold to attract a bigger segment, by which point it’s too late for the incumbent to catch up.) The metaphors in that book had a militaristic strain: Firms won or lost battles. Business units were killed. A disk drive was revolutionary. The market was a radar screen. The missilelike attack of the desktop computer wounded minicomputer-makers. Over the next decade and a half, the language fully migrated from combative to New Agey: “I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In, urging readers to seek their truth and find personal fulfillment. In Delivering Happiness, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh described making conscious choices and evolving organically. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries pitched his method as a movement to unlock a vast storehouse of human potential. You can always track the assimilation of garbage language by its shedding of scare quotes; in 1911, “initiative” and “incentive” were still cloaked in speculative punctuation.
Monitoring Type One diabetes is a full-time job — a constant juggling act of how much insulin to take when blood glucose goes too high, and how much sugar to consume when it goes too low. A misjudgment means feeling terrible, slipping into a coma, or even dying. Essentially, a diabetic has to manually do the job normally performed by a pancreas — but some ingenious coding has created a shortcut on the road to creatingan “artificial pancreas.”
“Artificial pancreas” isn’t a term I’d heard before. I ask Riddell to explain. “So, you have your insulin pump and your continuous glucose monitor,” he says. “Great technology. But these devices don’t talk to each other. You’re the one who’s still making the decisions. You have to interpret the numbers, analyze the trends, predict what you’ll be doing later in the day, and figure out how much insulin to take. What if a computer could do that for you?”
…a few years ago, a group of amateur coders, most of them type one themselves, were independently fiddling around with insulin pumps and CGM transmitters on their off hours, looking for ways to improve the devices. They eventually met, pooled their discoveries, and after a few more years of tinkering, created an iPhone program called Loop. It’s not available in the App Store or through any official channels—no doctors will prescribe it. Users need to find the instructions online and build the Loop app themselves. This bit of free code, Farnsworth tells me, paired with a hacked-together insulin pump and CGM, is an artificial pancreas.
“Is this legal?” I ask, imagining some dark alley where hooded hackers hand out instructions and tiny radios to desperate diabetics.
“Of course,” Farnsworth says, laughing. “It’s open-source software. It’s also a Facebook group. You can find everything you need online.”
I was born with strabismus, an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. Strabismus: from the Greek strabismós, meaning “to squint.” People sometimes call it cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or lazy-eyed.
I was still a toddler when my mother started taking me to doctors. They prescribed drops, eye exercises, and, eventually, glasses when I was 4. Mom chose blue and white striped cat eye frames for me. “These are adorable,” she said. If she said they were pretty, I assumed they must be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear them. But my mother wore glasses too, and I wanted to please her.
When the glasses didn’t help enough, the doctor instructed her to put a patch over one lens to force my weaker right eye to work better. That afternoon I went down the street to play with the neighborhood kids. There was a new girl with them. She asked, “Why are you wearing that patch?”
“I’m a pirate,” I said.
“That’s stupid,” she replied. “Girls can’t be pirates. You look ugly.”
I pushed her. She tumbled back onto the lawn and started to wail. A door flew open, and an enormous dog bounded at me, nipping and snapping. Frantic, I tried to get away, but a woman who must have been the girl’s mother grabbed me, her nails digging into my shoulder. She wrenched my arm behind my back and hissed in my ear, “Who’s your mother? You’re a very bad little girl.”
Sobbing and ashamed, I stumbled down the sidewalk, desperate for my mom. By the time I burst through the back door I was panting. Mom looked angry. The scary lady must have telephoned. “You know better than that,” Mom scolded. “I’m disappointed in your behavior.”
I was awash in incoherent misery. Why wasn’t she taking my side?
But I knew. It was because I was bad. An ugly, bad girl. Read more…
“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”
– Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”
I. Security
I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.
My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.
She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.
The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.
I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.
According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes. Read more…
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)
On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.
Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing thesame incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance,he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Actress Lynn Cohen attends the 2011 Lilly Awards at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. (Bruce Glikas / Getty Images)
Most fans first saw Lynn Cohen 20 years ago in Season 3 of Sex and the City, in an episode called “Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman.” After rearranging all of Miranda’s mugs, Magda’s first order of business as the new cleaning lady is to advise Miranda to make more pies. Her second is to replace Miranda’s vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Magda might have been introduced as a loveless scold on paper, but after ten years of playing her on television and in film, Lynn’s performance elevated Magda to an extension of Miranda’s family. Behind the scenes — on sets around the world, and especially at home in New York — Lynn frequently welcomed new friends into an extended family of her own.
I first met Lynn more than a decade ago in Poughkeepsie. I was interning for New York Stage and Film’s 2007 Powerhouse Season, which NYSAF produces every summer to incubate new work in development. I was assisting on a reading Lynn was doing with Sybille Pearson, Leigh Silverman, and Kathleen Chalfant.
Theater professionals almost always work together on one project and then never again, but you get to know each other fast. Lynn was the queen of that kind of at-will intimacy with new blood. She went straight for the youngest people in the room to get all the gossip, and immediately befriended me and my best friends from college. She called us “my guys.” Lynn would admit the next generation into this posse on a rolling basis. Jennifer Lawrence became one of her guys, too.
Lynn loved her husband Ron fiercely, a devotion she often expressed by teasing him relentlessly. In an interview after their collaboration on Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg’s play Eavesdropping On Dreams in 2012, Lynn describes meeting Ronny 150 years ago, before offering a second opinion on the length of their relationship: “We try to keep it very loose.”
Actress Lynn Cohen and her husband Ronald Cohen celebrate at a party for the premiere of “The Jimmy Show” on December 12, 2002 at Kanvas Bar & Lounge in New York City. (Myrna Suarez / Getty Images)
Ron and Lynn’s marriage lasted 56 years, which Lynn spent practicing her comedy routine as an incorrigible flirt. “You think you reach a certain age and you never have to worry about wearing a wetsuit,” she quipped on The Couch, winking conspiratorially at CBS New York’s John Elliott. Lynn thought most of her fellow actors were drop-dead gorgeous, and wasted no time saying so. (When her Hunger Games costar Stephanie Leigh Schlund tried to excuse Lynn’s flattery as Lynn just being sweet, Lynn didn’t miss a beat: “I am sweet, yes.”) She was always flirting with someone, and if you were in her crosshairs, it was you.
Lynn was a commanding presence, a feminine powerhouse with a physical mastery of technique that she refined continuously. Her age contributed to her energy, granting her exclusive access to characters with decades of life experience. She was so youthful and sassy and probing and funny in person, it was sometimes easy to forget that she was also doing next-level work at a breakneck pace well into her 80s. Whether she was playing Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Spielberg’s Munich or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother in Synecdoche, New York, Lynn’s past work steadily earned her offers of future work. IMDB lists half a dozen of her projects that are still in post-production and haven’t been released yet. Right up until the end, she was booking gigs back-to-back-to-back.
Lynn was a born comedian, but her profound range was grounded in critical thinking about the human condition. She would acknowledge humor’s relationship with suffering on a dime. One of our mentors described Lynn as “holding court” whenever she’d join us for lunch, but she’d interrupt her own clowning to stress just how much an education in drama would help us anticipate life’s unforgiving surprises. She’d hug us three at a time, laughing to punctuate her opinions, but she was careful with her advice.
Lynn happened to be an actor’s actor and a director’s actor, but her fluency with language and nuance hinted that she was in it for the writing. She knew more about new work than most emerging playwrights and screenwriters, and dedicated the better part of her life to workshopping writers’ earliest drafts. She loved female-driven stories almost as much as she loved female-driven creative teams, and she devoted her career to honoring women who were determined to survive. “Women always have to fight for everything,” Lynn would say, hoping to encounter the same traits in scripted characters that she practiced for decades herself: “Intelligence, sexuality, strength, ‘til the day you die.”
I thought of Lynn as my role model for how to age, so I don’t fully know how to describe my first reaction to her death — there’s grief, clearly, but there’s no sadness. I only feel lucky. She lived a towering life, full of achievement and love and joie de vivre, and her legacy requires celebration.
A proper tribute to Lynn wouldn’t be complete without a nod to her impeccable timing. Of course she died on Valentine’s Day. Of course she died on an unforgettable day to lose someone you love.
This story was produced in collaboration with The Walrus.
As Peter Basil remembers it, the week leading up to Father’s Day, in June 2013, began like any other; he’s since replayed the events in his mind like a recurring bad dream. Peter recalls standing in the kitchen of his modest split-level home in Tache, a First Nations village that lies deep in the wilderness of northern interior British Columbia. His younger sister Mackie, then in her late 20s, followed him around as he made a pot of coffee.
“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie asked Peter, referring to her 5-year-old son.
“Yup,” he replied.
Mackie trailed Peter to the living room and sat next to him on the L-shaped couch, under high school graduation photos of herself and her sisters.
“Promise me you’ll take care of my baby,” Mackie repeated to Peter.
“Yeah, geez,” he responded. “Should I be worried? Are you coming back?”
Swedish businessman and inventor of encryption machines, Boris Hagelin (1892 - 1983) with one of his company's products, circa 1970. A tape attached to the front of the cipher machine bears the plaintext and encrypted versions of the text 'BORIS HAGELIN STOP BORN HADSHCIKENT RUSSIA STOP JULY EIGHTEEN NINETY TWO STOP'. (Photo by Tony Evans/Getty Images)
The CIA, in a secret partnership with West Germany, used Crypto AG to sell encryption services to gullible governments and then promptly read all their clandestine communications. As Greg Miller reports at The Washington Post, the CIA fed important information to their allies around the world and ignored assassination plots, ethnic cleansing campaigns, and other human rights abuses and atrocities, all in a bid to protect their covert communication channels from being exposed.
For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.
The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.
The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.
But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.
From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency, controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto’s operations — presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.
Then, the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened.
They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.
For years, BND officials had recoiled at their American counterpart’s refusal to distinguish adversaries from allies. The two partners often fought over which countries deserved to receive the secure versions of Crypto’s products, with U.S. officials frequently insisting that the rigged equipment be sent to almost anyone — ally or not — who could be deceived into buying it.
Proponents of light therapy technology claim that it can get people off of opioids, improve their sex lives, and make them smarter. Critics say it’s bunk.
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