Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Billionaires Shouldn't Live Forever (NY Times)
Evergarchs should grow old like the rest of us.
Daniel W. Drezner: What do Republicans stand for in 2019? (Washington Post)
The only plausible answer to this question is beyond depressing.
Andrew Tobias: What Democrats Stand For II
"… 4. Perversions of democracy. Progressives seek to end partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the concentration of money in politics. 5. Climate. Progressives embrace policies that restrict carbon emissions, invest in renewable energy, and incentivize research, development and business practices that contribute to reversing the warming of the planet." - Nathaniel Frank
Andrew Tobias: What Your Money Goes To Fund
For one thing, it goes to fund these 1,000 rising college seniors the DNC is training to be organizers in 7 key states. (We could win the popular vote by 20 million votes and still lose the Electoral College if we don't win key swing states.)
But here's a question: why 1,000 - why not 5,000? It's just a matter of money.
Andrew Tobias: Playing It Very, Very Smart
Most importantly, it's we who have to swallow hard, if our preferred candidate is not the nominee - harder still if it's someone we consider "the lesser of two evils" - and work like crazy to get everyone to the polls to vote for her or him . . . and for all our Senate and House and state legislative candidates, our governors, our attorneys general, our secretaries of state - all of them. … I can say with absolute certainty our nominee will - at very worst - be by far "the lesser of two evils," because none of our folks is a clinical sociopath or fascist who favors murderous dictators over democratic allies.
Steve Rose: Fear-good hit of the summer: how did horror become a year-long box office slayer? (The Guardian)
Once reserved for Halloween, films such as Midsommar and Gwen prove the genre's popularity. Let's hope ubiquity doesn't affect its scariness.
Jonathan Jones: The greatest photos ever? Why the moon landing shots are artistic masterpieces (The Guardian)
From a spacesuited everyman to a golden-legged invader, the lunar images were astonishingly poetic works of art that captured humanity evolving before our very eyes. Can they ever be surpassed?
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• The great black dancer Bill Robinson, aka Mr. Bojangles, fought prejudice. He and his wife were on a train going from Chicago to St. Louis when they went to the dining car to eat. To avoid trouble, they usually waited until all the white people had eaten, but this time they knew that the dining car was going to be dropped off early. There was one white man still in the dining car, so they asked if he would mind if they ate in the dining car. He didn't, so they began to seat themselves at a table. The steward said, "This table is reserved," and refused to let them be seated. Mr. Bojangles was furious and pulled out a gun. The train conductor telegraphed down the line that a madman with a gun was in the dining car. Fortunately, Mr. Bojangles was friends with the police in that town and so was not arrested - also, he had gotten rid of the gun before the police showed up. In St. Louis, he made a complaint against the steward to the railroad manager, who said he would fire the steward. However, Mr. Bojangles didn't want the man to lose his job, so he said, "I'm playing at the Orpheum Theater. If he wants to come down and apologize to me, I won't force this charge against him." The steward did apologize and saved his job.
• It pays to have a script supervisor on a television series. At a story conference for the episode "The Twizzle" on The Dick Van Dyke Show, the principals of the show were having a hard time figuring out what was wrong with a scene, so they met in the commissary later, came up with several ideas, and figured out how to fix it. Series creator Carl Reiner then asked, "My God, is anybody getting this down?" Fortunately, script supervisor Marge Mullen wrote the ideas down on a napkin, then typed them up later. Ms. Mullen also came up with the "SOS" notebook. Often, people would have good ideas for the series, but they wouldn't fit the particular episode being worked on. Ms. Mullen wrote down the ideas and kept them in her "SOS - Some Other Show" notebook. When people became stuck for ideas, she used the SOS notebook as a source of ideas.
• Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht found it hard to do his job because he kept being interrupted and forced to attend story conferences with Sam Goldwyn. To solve his problem, he convinced Mr. Goldwyn to hire a collaborator for him, and he picked out Charles Lederer to work with. Thereafter, when Mr. Goldwyn called Mr. Hecht to a story conference, Mr. Hecht told Mr. Lederer exactly what to do - Mr. Lederer was to stretch out on a sofa in the conference room and go to sleep. This unnerved Mr. Goldwyn, but Mr. Hecht pointed out that under union rules, his collaborator had to attend story conferences with him. Soon, Mr. Goldwyn stopped forcing Mr. Hecht to attend story conferences, and Mr. Hecht was able to get some writing done.
• After Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West from the Soviet Union, he began to dance with Margot Fonteyn. At first, Ms. Fonteyn resisted the idea. She was much older than Mr. Nureyev and felt, "It would be like mutton dancing with lamb." However, she and her husband discussed the idea of the dance partnership. They decided that Mr. Nureyev would be the next great sensation in ballet and for the benefit of her career, Ms. Fonteyn decided to dance with him. Despite the practical nature of her decision, it was a wise one, and the two dancers blossomed artistically together.
• The St. Louis Cardinals, aka the Gas House Gang, once faced a poor-pitching team whose starting pitcher walked four Cardinals in a row before being yanked. The next pitcher also fared poorly, walking two Cardinals and hitting two more Cardinals with balls. Batting ninth for the Cardinals was pitcher Dizzy Dean, who hit a weak grounder back to the pitcher, who misfielded the ball, allowing Dizzy to reach first safely. At first base, Dizzy complained, "A fine team I'm playing on. It isn't enough that I do the pitching, I have to do the hitting, too."
• Robert Benchley's first secretary was Charles MacGregor, one of whose jobs was to get Mr. Benchley out of bed. This he did in various ways, such as walking into Mr. Benchley's bedroom and saying, "The men are here for the trunks." This news awoke Mr. Benchley immediately, and by the time he realized that no men had come for the trunks, it was impossible for him to go back to sleep. On another occasion, Mr. MacGregor woke Mr. Benchley by saying, "There are some men here to flood the bed for skating."
• Pope John XXIII, the son of impoverished farmers, once gave an audience to Italian peasants and farmers. He told them, "I know how unrewarding work on the land can be. I speak to you as the son of Roncalli the winegrower. And yet, if the good Lord had not made me a pope, I would rather be a farmer than anything else."
• Gioacchino Rossini wrote and produced his opera buffa masterpiece, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, very quickly. In fact, it was composed - and rehearsed and staged - in less than a month. When Gaetano Donizetti, another fast worker, learned this, he said of Rossini, "Well, he always was lazy."
• Pitcher Left Gomez retired from major league baseball, then sought employment elsewhere. A job application form asked for the reason why he had left his previous job, so Lefty wrote, "I couldn't get the side out."
• "Body piercing. A powerful, compelling visual statement that says 'Gee … in today's competitive job market, what can I do to make myself even more unemployable?'" - Dennis Miller, Ranting Again.
• "To test the worth of a man's religion, do business with him." - Bishop John Lancaster Spaulding.
• "Nothing is really work unless you'd rather be doing something else." - James Barrie.
***
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Bond Over Watching Films
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees who watch films together bond in a way previously thought unique to humans, research has found.
Pairs of chimps who sat together and watched the same video spent more time together and showed more signs of social bonding, such as grooming each other.
Another study found the animals also approached humans faster if they had watched the movie together.
During the two experiments, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, eye-trackers were used to check the apes were watching the film and they were given fruit juice to encourage them to stay relatively still.
"Our results suggest that one of the most basic mechanisms of human social bonding - feeling closer to those with whom we act or attend together - is present in both humans and great apes, and thus has deeper evolutionary roots than previously suspected," the authors said.
Chimpanzees
Reboot Gets Series Order
'Gossip Girl'
Gossip Girl is making another comeback. WarnerMedia's soon-to-launch streaming service HBO Max has ordered 10 hourlong episodes of a reimagined version of the pop culture phenomenon that made household names of stars such as Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick.
The project hails from the original series writer and executive producer, Quantico creator Joshua Safran, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage's Fake Empire, Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. TV and CBS Television Studios.
Like the original series, the new iteration of Gossip Girl, written by Safran, is based on the book by Cecily von Ziegesar. The logline: Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The prestige series will address just how much social media - and the landscape of New York itself - has changed in the intervening years.
Gossip Girl ran for six seasons from 2007-2012 on the CW across 121 episodes and aired at a time when social media was taking off.
'Gossip Girl'
Janet Jackson, Chris Brown, 50 Cent To Perform
Saudi
Janet Jackson, Chris Brown, 50 Cent, Future and Tyga have been added to the lineup for the Jeddah World Fest, the concert in Saudi Arabia that Nicki Minaj pulled out of because of human rights concerns.
The website for the event, to take place Thursday at the King Abdullah Sports Stadium, posted photos of the newly added acts alongside previously announced performers Liam Payne and Steve Aoki.
The Human Rights Foundation and other organizations have asked artists not to perform in Saudi Arabia, where gender segregation between single men and women is enforced in many restaurants, coffee shops, public schools and universities. Other rules have loosened in the kingdom with women now allowed to drive and attend events at sports stadiums.
Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, criticized the entertainers in a statement Thursday to The Associated Press, saying it was "profoundly distressing that they have chosen money over morals."
He added: "These individuals constantly make public statements of support for LGBT rights and women's rights, except, apparently, when a seven-figure check is attached. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Principal apparently matters to them far more than principles."
Saudi
Share 1979 "Highway to Hell" Performance
AC/DC
With rumors swirling regarding the future of AC/DC, the legendary band is looking to the past as it returns to social media for the first time in nearly two years.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame act hadn't posted on Facebook since announcing the death of beloved rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young in November 2017.
However, yesterday, the band announced via Facebook and Twitter that it would be celebrating the 40th anniversary of their classic album Highway To Hell all month long, and today they shared a full 1979 performance of the classic LP's title track on the Dutch TV show Countdown.
Highway to Hell was released on July 27th, 1979, and marked the band's final album with singer Bon Scott, who would tragically die in February 1980. He would be replaced by Brian Johnson, who went on to record the classic 1980 album Back in Black.
AC/DC
Biological Warfare?
Ticks
The House of Representatives added an unusual amendment to the 2020 U.S. defense budget: a requirement that the Department of Defense reveal details of any biological warfare research it did involving ticks during the Cold War. The requirement stems from allegations that Lyme disease was actually a biowarfare experiment accidentally released into the wild.
The amendment, Roll Call reports, was added to the defense budget by New Jersey Congressman Christopher Smith. It calls on the U.S. government to "conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975."
If there was any sort of research the Pentagon Inspector General "must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments' scope and 'whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.'"
The call for information comes after the publication of the book Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. A major allegation in the book is that Willy Burgdorfer, the discoverer of the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease, claimed that the disease was the result of a biological weapons program that went awry. Burgdorfer himself was involved in biological warfare programs that involved using blood-sucking insects, including fleas, ticks, and mosquitoes, as vectors for the transmission of human diseases.
According to the book, there were plans to drop weaponized bugs from the air to incapacitate enemies. This is similar to attempts by Imperial Japan to weaponize insects, typically fleas infected with plague and cholera, where they were used against the civilian population in China. The Japanese military organization responsible for the research, Unit 731, was later rounded up by the U.S. military after the war.
Ticks
What's Killing London's Iconic Birds
House Sparrows
Once a common sight around London, house sparrow (Passer domesticus) populations have been declining for decades; they're down 71% since 1995. Now, researchers believe they know why: a mosquito-borne disease called avian malaria.
Scientists collected 3 years of data from 11 sparrow colonies around London where the birds breed. They counted raw numbers of birds each year, and collected blood and excrement from a number of individuals.
Seven out of the 11 colonies were losing birds, and roughly 74% of the sparrows carried avian malaria (Plasmodium relictum). That's the highest rate of infection with this parasite seen in any wild bird population in Northern Europe, the researchers report today in Royal Society Open Science. Avian malaria may be causing declines in Western Europe, North America, and India as well, the team says.
Similar to other forms of malaria, avian malaria is spread when mosquitoes bite birds and feed on their blood. The disease can lead to infections that can be fatal to the birds, and they can pass the infection on to their offspring. Most sparrows carried the parasite, but the quantity of parasites found in each bird's system was significantly higher in declining populations, especially in younger birds, the team found.
The scientists don't know why avian malaria is particularly prevalent in house sparrows, but they say further research may provide clues.
House Sparrows
Save Stricken Antarctic Ice Sheet?
'Artificial Snow'
Governments could stop the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from sliding into the ocean and submerging coastal cities by launching a last-ditch engineering project to blanket its surface with "artificial snow", according to a study released on Wednesday.
Scientists believe that global warming has already caused so much melting at the south pole that the giant ice sheet is now on course to disintegrate, which would trigger an eventual global sea level rise of at least three metres (10 feet) over centuries.
The authors of the new study envisaged using 12,000 wind turbines to pump seawater 1,500 metres (4,900 feet) up to the surface, where it would be frozen into "snow" to try to weigh the sheet down enough to stop it collapsing any further.
"We have already awoken the giant at the southern pole," said Anders Levermann, a professor at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, referring to the ice sheet.
"We are already at a point of no return if we don't do anything," Levermann, who co-authored the study published in Science Advances, told Reuters. "We can bring it back to the stable point by a small interference now - or by larger and larger interference later."
'Artificial Snow'
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