Author: Aaron Weber

Back in 2013, Karl Taro Greenfield wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the overwhelming weight of his teenage daughter’s homework. It seemed excessive, he felt:

Imagine if after putting in a full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work after work, how long would you last?

What can one say to this but laugh? Obviously, the 21st century job, the one that capital and management want us to have, requires evenings and weekends. I mean, you want a career, not just a job, right? If you’re not working til ten on a Friday night, how will the boss know you’re worth keeping around? If the big meeting doesn’t make you vomit with anxiety, are you really taking it seriously enough? This is an at-will economy, jagoff. You can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, so you better not give anyone an excuse. Perfect, every time, or else. (Recall, also, that Americans in general don’t have any savings. One bad break, and penury looms).

And of course you need your “lifelong learning.” Rachel Paige King’s recent essay on career guidance literature, “Is Your Job Lynchian, or More Kafkaesque?” notes that “Today, to be successful in the workplace, one must not simply find one’s vocation or ‘calling.’ One is expected to engage in a program of constant self-reinvention in accordance with the latest trends, contorting oneself to fit whatever job is trendy these days … while continuing to gather ever more degrees and professional certificates.”

It’s true: some employers will actively discount or invalidate your old-fashioned 20th century degrees these days, so you better keep those continuing education certificates coming. You may or may not learn anything, but it’s most important to have a piece of paper saying you’ve paid $3,000 for a course about it. And of course if you picked something to specialize in that turns out to be out of date a few years later, well, that’s your fault.

While you’re at it, you obviously need a side hustle. Maybe it’s sporadic, selling crafts and art on Etsy, or a sideline that you could ramp up in a pinch if you needed more work. Maybe it’s regular, like a weekend retail gig or dog walking or tutoring or stripping. I mean, you’re not going to pay off those masters degrees just working as a teacher or librarian.

King notes:

The perverse question that  [What Color Is Your Parachute? author] Bolles, who appeared to believe in the logic of the system and in the fundamental decency of most workplaces, never seems to consider is: What if today’s world of work is not incidentally or accidentally cruel, but in fact intentionally designed to ensure that workers’ self-esteem is crushed and their sense of self-worth eroded? In today’s professional climate, is the dream job Bolles urges us to look for available? Is finding even a bearable one likely?

If school means endless homework, staying up past midnight crying, stumbling through days like a zombie, certain that you’re falling behind in a lifelong struggle for adequacy, well, that sounds like great preparation for adulthood. Best to teach them young that pointless tasks trickle down from on high through layer after layer of management until they land on our desks with rubrics and worksheets. Best to teach them young that they better start grinding. As above, so below.

Campus political correctness is out of control
George Mason University has insisted for years that its Mercatus Center is a fully independent policy group. Surprise, the libertarian-leaning think-tank is basically controlled by the Koch Foundation. And yes, they’ll fire professors who aren’t libertarian enough.

Mike Pence watch
Mike Pence says Joe Arpaio defends “the rule of law.” (It’s easy to understand if you realize that “the law” for this crew means “white men.” 

He also headlined an event at a PAC headed by Carl Higbie, whom you may recall as someone who lost his job with the Trump administration for being so unambiguously racist even the GOP couldn’t stomach it. 

Quiz: Mike Pence or Jack D. Ripper?

Contrition watch
Former Obamacare opponent Tom Price admits that the individual mandate he helped kill was actually a good idea, now that it’s too late to do any good.

Marco Rubio admits that the Trump tax plan hasn’t helped regular people, now that it’s too late to do any good.

Welfare chauvinism
One of the principles of contemporary Republican politics is that Our People deserve help but Those People don’t. So it’s only natural that Michigan’s latest legislation would impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, but exempt people in counties with high unemployment. Not cities, though. So mostly white rural Michiganders can keep getting Medicaid even if they can’t find work, but not Those People in Detroit.

The only good David Brooks take on Twitter:

So APPARENTLY my New York Times column “Something Like Shirley Jackson’s Lottery, But for Sex, and That’s Really The Only Reasonable Way to Keep Men From Doing Violence” wasn’t received well by the Wags on twitter dot com

michael f (@bunkosquad) May 2, 2018

Worthy causes
My friend Heather is doing a fundraiser for Bikes Not Bombs
Selections from the Smithsonian’s hip-hop photography collection

Cultivating joy
Hedgehog
Capybaras
Literate dog

There’s some irony in the fact that Ryan, who famously
called poverty a “culture problem” of “men not even thinking about working,” who said the social safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence,” and who extolled the virtues of children seeing their father working, will be quitting his job at 48 in order to do less work for more money.

Cultivating interest
The decline of regional accents and an increased focus on accents driven by segregation.

Multiple-exposure photos of sporting events look super cool.

A former compiler of the Forbes List of the super-wealthy goes back over
his tapes of “John Barron” talking up DJT’s wealth and is appalled at the degree of deception. Even by the standards of puff-piece wealth journalism the lies are astonishing.

Cultivating joy (or possibly hilarity)
A beauty expert seductively applies foundation… a series of imitators attempt the same with increasingly hilarious results.
This lamp is the dumbest most hilarious awful thing I have ever seen.
The New Yorker invites comedians to attempt New Yorker Cartoon Caption contests: Nick Offerman, Bill Hader, and Adam Scott give it a shot in recent videos. Nick Offerman is probably the best of the three.

As we all know, news is bad for you.  At least, constantly hearing about about terrible things happening in the world that you can’t do anything about is bad for you. 

So here’s some good stuff that’s going on. And yes, I’ve used this image before.

My friend Dora is swimming an absurdly long way to raise money for cancer research. You can find out about it here.

It has previously been reported that women in Texas were dying in childbirth at alarming rates, possibly due to legal restrictions on women’s healthcare. It looks like most of that anomaly was caused by poor user interface in the reporting tools. (Women’s health care in the US and in Texas especially still sucks… but at least it’s not getting any worse!)

These juvenile owls nesting on a window ledge are pretty adorable.

A little perspective on the dangers of social media:

The printing press destabilized western society and contributed to a century of sectarian warfare that lead to death and destruction on a previously unprecedented scale. https://t.co/nfGw3YpTsb

Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 11, 2018

A story about love, humility, modernism, and Las Vegas architecture.

The guys who run the show in pro sports aren’t generally known for doing the right thing, especially when it comes to race and social justice. But Patriots owners Robert Kraft is putting his considerable clout behind Meek Mill in his quest for freedom.

This is the kind of dick pic everyone can get behind: Vintage photos of men named Richard.

A Tumblr blog dedicated to submitting the wrong captions for New Yorker cartoons. Many of them are better than you’d find in the New Yorker. Or at least funnier.

What a shame it is that we must disagree so stridently. What a shame it is that we cannot accept each other’s ideas and discuss them calmly in an orderly fashion.

A candidate for lieutenant governor in Idaho can’t just take the position that 20-30% of American women should be executed, for example, without coming in for such uncivil criticism that he has to walk back his statements.

Quite honestly, advocating death by hanging for any woman who’s had an abortion shouldn’t even really be controversial. It’s just a totally normal pro-life position. Mainstream opinion leader Kevin Williamson, columnist in the mainstream thought-leadership magazine The Atlantic, endorses it.  (He now claims he didn’t really mean what he said that one time on Twitter, but other interviews indicate that yes, he really did). Even the president, despite the number of times he has surely handed a woman an envelope of cash and told her to “take care of it,” would like to see some kind of punishment for women so whorish as to get knocked up.

But goodness, we shouldn’t be disagreeable about this kind of disagreement. The New York Times reminds us to be civil to people who think our friends deserve to die.

We may not agree, says the Times, with Williamson’s statements that black children are best described as “primates” and “3/5 scale Snoop Doggs,” that Laverne Cox and Chelsea Manning are grotesque parodies of women, that anyone who’s had or performed an abortion ought to be hanged. But we should be polite to Williamson and people like him.

Come now. Be reasonable, say the reasonable voices:

He has not argued the punishment should be retroactive.

Clifton Fels (@cbfels) April 5, 2018

But goodness, how could we be so uncouth as to proceed from thinking someone says “that common medical procedure is a crime worthy of death” to thinking they’re in favor of the wholesale slaughter of our friends? And to go from there to making ad hominem attacks on the person who advocates that slaughter? Uncivil discourse is a far greater threat to America than sober policy proposals to execute millions of women.

Worse still, how dare we criticize the judgement of an editor who chooses to employ and broadcast such a voice? How gauche. The very idea that people should might hold Jeffrey Goldberg accountable for anything his magazine publishes!

Williamson is an excellent prose stylist, you guys. He worked at the National Review. It’s not like he’s shitposting “Amerimutt” memes on 4chan to show that immigration means that America is already a nonwhite country of mongrel degenerates. He’s not using internet shorthand like “incel” and blaming “feminazis” for his inability to attract “females.” He’s saying these sorts of things with complete paragraphs, which makes it respectable. So treat him with respect.

Etymology

If my calculations are correct, biscuits and Triscuits hint towards a mysterious third food called “monoscuits.”

ᴬ ᵀᶦᶰʸ ᴮᵉᵉᶠˢᵗᵉᵃᵏ (@TenderBeefsteak) April 3, 2018

Cultivating joy
A word of advice: when you are bringing a suitcase full of pepperoni to your friends on the coast, don’t leave it next to an open window in your hotel room. The hotel may ban you for life when your room becomes infested with sausage-crazed seagulls.

This poor sad adorable avocado.

Dog brings tissues to crying girl. 

Disclaimer: My reply to the dog-comforting-crying-person post was my most-viral-ever Twitter moment:

If I was crying my dog would run to the window and bark at squirrels and then beg for food.

Aaron S. Weber (@Short_epics) March 30, 2018

It was more experimental, more political, and far less popular than
“Dancing on my own,” or for that matter any of her other singles, but my
favorite track from Robyn’s album Body Talk is still “Don’t fucking tell me what to do.”

Not many artists can do something so thoughtful with such a minimal beat and repetitive lyrics, but the epistrophe builds and builds over the course of the song:

My drinking’s killing me
My smoking’s killing me
My diet’s killing me
My heels are killing me
My email’s killing me
My manager’s killing me
My ego’s killing me
Can’t sleep it’s killing me
Ease up you’re killing me
Let go you’re killing me

And so we come to the basis for the pop music reference:
Your boss is killing you.

Our jobs are making us sick, to the tune of 120,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. alone — making workplace-related illness the fifth highest cause of death.

The gig economy is killing you.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.

The Superclap is killing you.
Your clutter is killing you.
Wilmington, Delaware is killing you.
A bucket of rocks won’t stop anyone from killing you.

Worst-case scenario
The ad-supported business model for the internet is terrible. What if it infects the self-driving car business?

It used to be boasted of every new innovation that it would make some old legacy system “more like the internet.” That boast carries a somewhat more ominous tone these days. Maybe there are some features of the internet we don’t want to export.

Apparent inevitability of the worst-case scenario
In 1962, the city of Artesia, NM completed its state-of-the-art elementary school, built entirely underground, so that students would be prepared for the inevitability of atomic holocaust. Ed Burmila makes the connection to today’s delirium of active shooter drills, armed schoolteachers, and bulletproof backpacks. (There are 58 of you– how many of you have done active shooter drills at your workplace or school?)

Campus political correctness is out of hand
Texas teacher suspended after telling her students she’s married to a woman.

The Atlantic, in its search for “provocative” and “challenging” ideas, has hired Kevin Williamson, formerly of the National Review. Williamson, perhaps best known for advocating the hanging of women who have abortions and caricaturing black children as “primates,” joins Ross Douthat and David Brooks in the pantheon of living insults to every unemployed writer who actually has talent or an opinion worth considering.

You can still post an apartment rental ad on Facebook and make sure that black people and families with children don’t see it.

Cultivating LOLs
I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.
Ned Flanders x Tupac.

Cultivating joy
Blep. (Yes, this is my dog. No, I’m not sorry.)
Black dogs are hard to photograph. This shot took a lot of practice.
Box-O-Huskies.
Salt water may cause your dog to malfunction.

The other day I passed along some speculation to the effect that the New York Times keeps publishing irrelevant opinion pieces by the likes of Brooks and Douthat because they can’t admit that the American right has gone full Nazi, but still want a “conservative” voice to prove they’re “balanced.”

This weekend they are going ahead and printing an article about genetics and race science. 

Let’s all have a round of applause for the return of respectable racism everyone!

When the temple of the cat god Busbastis was uncovered in Egypt it included 350,000 mummified cats. The Empire-era Brits couldn’t leave it alone, which is how 350,000 cat mummies ended up THROWN INTO LOCOMOTIVE BOILERS AS FUEL.

Cat-powered train travel was a thing. Good night.

— Ed Burmila (NATO Reporting Name: Gin and Tacos) (@gin_and_tacos) March 23, 2018

WTF
Isopod phone case.

Cultivating joy
Ooonf.
“Not sick, just very, very dumb.”

While the “campus liberals are fascist” debates rage on, a Wisconsin high school is now banning discussion of privilege because a student-led workshop on Martin Luther King Day made certain white families uncomfortable. The principal has apparently been forced to resign.

The timing of the board’s edict, just weeks before the February resignation of Principal Joseph Moylan, has fueled speculation that Moylan was pushed out in part for allowing the student-led exercise during the assembly Jan. 15.

Moderators, please stand up
The New Yorker investigated social media moderation and toxicity, but found that Facebook and Twitter really didn’t want to show their inner workings. Only Reddit was willing to really open up. The resulting article is perhaps the funniest thing you will ever read about death threats, revenge porn, Nazis, and conspiracy theories. Describing a new rule banning revenge porn: “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” u/penisfuckermcgee commented.  

Reddit is not known for being the best part of the internet, but in many cases it’s one of the best. If you remember Usenet from the pre-browser Internet, you’ll recognize Reddit: Self-organizing, self-moderating messageboards and comments, sometimes horrific and often absolutely brilliant.

Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos that are, you know, mildly interesting”).

Can you get excellent information and find a community willing to share your interest in labor law, plumbing, Filipino cooking, photography, gardening, nail polish, high-quality shoes, personal finance, your town’s local events, model trains, mental illness, endometriosis, gender transition or life after leaving your church? Absolutely. Can you also find a hive of scum and villany? Oh hell yes. 

In addition to funny, the article is truly insightful and shows us how tech giants are struggling to deal with human nature that can’t really be broken down into universal rules and clear bright lines.  

“Does free speech mean literally anyone can say anything at any time?” Tidwell continued. “Or is it actually more conducive to the free exchange of ideas if we create a platform where women and people of color can say what they want without thousands of people screaming, ‘Fuck you, light yourself on fire, I know where you live’? If your entire answer to that very difficult question is ‘Free speech,’ then, I’m sorry, that tells me that you’re not really paying attention.”

You’re not helping, traditional media
Vox has an in-depth rundown of the failures of the NYT opinion section: They think they’re aiming for “diversity of opinion” but have failed to represent any Asian or Latinx voices, or any actual leftists. Just as bad, their “conservative” voices don’t convey the racist dumpster fire that is the actual reality of the Republican party. You’d get a better idea of the reality of conservatism over at /r/The_Donald (The previous article warned you not to click on that…)

ACAB, Philly Edition
The original charge was brought by a police squad widely known for faking arrests (and robbing drug dealers with falsified warrants, and the blatant armed robbery of a string of bodegas). The arresting officer is on a leaked list of cops that prosecutors will not trust to testify under oath. Thousands of the squad’s convictions have been reversed, but not this one. The suspect served a few years for it, and was released on probation.

Every time it’s almost done, he winds up somehow locked up again, thanks to a judge who seems to have taken a particular interest in his case. Every time he releases an album she bars him from traveling to support it.  At one point she asked him and his girlfriend to sing an R&B song for her in her chambers, and got angry when he refused. She has repeatedly criticized his decision to fire an exploitative mobbed-up manager with local ties and switch to a national management company that seems less corrupt. 

The latest twist: a misdemeanor ticket, later dropped, for riding an off-road dirt bike on a city street. The District Attorney and his parole officer both said the infraction didn’t merit jail time, but the judge overruled them. He’s locked up for another 2-4 years.

Rapper Meek Mill has been in and out of prison since 2009, and it’s not clear he’s actually guilty of anything at all.

(Soundtrack: Amen, the song that got him a public scolding from his neighborhood minister for using church music in a decidedly profane manner).

Pithy
Gin & Tacos:  “Remember the final years of the USSR, when everyone in charge was 75, politics became sclerotic and incapable of action, and the government was little more than an unsustainably expensive army and a pension plan? Thank god we’re not like that.”

Tell the writers that this thriller is not at all realistic
White nationalist mosque-bombing suspect is contractor with bid on border wall.
White nationalist party collapses in love triangle and fist-fight among leadership.
White nationalist mass murderer’s kid sister arrested after bringing drugs and weapons to an anti-gun protest at her school, making racist statements about it on Snapchat.

I refuse to joke about Vanessa Trump bc it’s NEVER funny when a couple files for an uncontested quick divorce, one where assets can be swiftly transferred, on the same day an independent special counsel subpoenas their family business. People, this could happen to you someday.

John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) March 16, 2018

Cultivating joy 
A dude dressed as Disney’s Elsa helped get a police truck out of a snowbank. (Or do we get angry because why’s Queen Elsa selling us out to the cops?)
Dog trained as office courier.
Literal cat in literal hat.
This cat is not pleased by his guest.

Finally, an explanation
Why the Times and so forth keep regurgitating the “campus liberals are fascists” argument: all the other pseudo-intellectual conservative talking points are lost in the tsunami of filth that is Trump’s ascendance. They need, or think they need, a “respectable conservative” voice. And all that’s available in the “respectable” field is people complaining about how a handful of students at a handful of elite colleges are rude to conservatives. So, they’ll keep running that column, again and again, even though it’s obviously wrong and irrelevant and dumb. 

If they actually wanted to run a diversity of viewpoints, they’d bring in some actual diversity of viewpoints, like maybe some actual socialists. But no, they think Paul Krugman is as left as they can go, and David Brooks somehow represents mainstream moderates instead of a weird outlier in a party full of white nationalist zealots and gun fetishists. 

Lexicon of conservative language
Ann Coulter makes clear what she means by (((Globalist))).

Economics of subservience
Tipping considered harmful: “A significant portion of my income is how men feel about me that day,” says a waitress interviewed on the custom of tipping. 

A haunting photographic series of low-income America.

Meanwhile, in the province of wealth
Betsy DeVos did a predictably terrible interview in which she revealed that she doesn’t know how to do her job.

Betsy DeVos perfectly represents the modern American Dream, where all you need to make it is vast inherited wealth and no fucking clue what you’re doing.

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) March 12, 2018

Adjustments

SPRING FORWARD

FALL BACK INTO A TIME IN WHICH LIFE WAS SIMPLER AND THE WORLD CARRIED A FAINT GLOW THAT YOU’VE LOST AND MAY NEVER RETRIEVE

NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) March 11, 2018

Cultivating joy
Cream, The Cult, …. this guy, Danzig, Darkness… 

I’m helping! I’m helping! (he’s not helping)

These puppies are also not helping.

Just as I was sending last week’s newsletter about how absurd it is for
commentators to only now pretend to notice the racism and violence
inherent in the conservative movement, Joseph Epstein published, in the
Weekly Standard, an appallingly vile piece of garbage titled “Chicago, Then and Now.” 

It’s about how blacks are going to have to bootstrap themselves up out
of this bad spot they’re in, just like the Jews and Italians and Irish
did back in the day, bwah bwah bwah you’ve heard this one before. 

This is a mainstream Republican “intellectual.” An icon of the movement. A respected scholar.

Sure, you may write off his statement that “homosexuality is a curse”
because he said that years ago, right? But what of his claim this month
that “with the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution, nice girls
have all but put prostitutes out of business?” That, tossed off as an
aside on the way to his real point, that “few people are likely to note
any valuable advances in [black] culture over the past 60 years.”

The Weekly Standard brands itself as an upstanding, respectable sort of
conservative journal, but they feel no qualms whatsoever publishing an
article to the effect that “negroes haven’t improved themselves enough
to merit my respect.” 

And of course, that’s just one facet. The rot is pervasive. EPA chief Scott Pruitt, of “I can’t fly coach because average Americans hate me so much” fame, has recently told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he thinks coal-burning is part of Jesus’ plan for America.  (If this were a network TV drama, we’d complain that the writers are repeating the 1980 James Watt storyline.)

Good news, everyone
Headline: The 99 Best Things That Happened in 2017.
A lot of good things got overshadowed by disaster. But we’re making
some important progress: Public health, carbon emissions,
conservation… There’s some good stuff in here.

“We tried to tell y’all.”

– Ancient African-American proverb

— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) December 3, 2016

Cultivating joy
Bucket o’ Panda
This dog seems to have lied on its resume
Also this cat
PLOS has a scholarly study on the competitive advantage conferred by athletes grunting.

Jeff Bezos is creating a planned economy, with algorithms instead of a politburo. Amazon seeks efficiency and growth more than profit, and the result is this juggernaut. It’s optimizing something… but it’s optimizing away humanity.

(See also articles previously mentioned: AI has already taken over; it’s called the corporation, and Dude, You Broke the Future. See also classic Slate contrarianism in which Reihan Salam thinks Amazon is awesome.)

I am not making this up
China wages war on funeral strippers.

Mainstream media
Noted Republican intellectual, National Review contributor, convicted electoral-finance felon, and AOL subscriber Dinesh D’Souza is going whole-hog on insulting the survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting. 

Everyone is focused right now on the fact that Dinesh D’Souza is a horrible person, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that he’s also not very bright.

Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 21, 2018

Bari Weiss, the New York Times opinion journalist who first came to fame after being outraged that Twitter would be rude to her over a minor gaffe, is shocked, shocked, at how quickly conservative intellectuals have fallen to the level of Dinesh D’Souza: 

I know I should be over it, but the speed at which the organized conservative movement became the ideological home of Marion Le Pen, Seb Gorka, Nigel Farage, Dinesh D’Souza and their ilk remains shocking to me.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 22, 2018

Of course, this has been their swamp for a very long time. As Jeet Heer and many others point out (again and again and again and again, to no avail) D’Souza is and has been a mainstream conservative intellectual since he was an undergrad at Dartmouth in the 1980s writing appallingly racist articles about affirmative action and outing gay students. Fascist sympathies? Here? In the … wait, the National Review endorsed Franco, didn’t they? Yes, they did. 

“Mainstream media,” although that term has been smeared to meaninglessness by the right, confuses neutrality with objectivity. And in trying to remain neutral they forget that there are, in fact, evils in this world. And that the Republican party has sided with them again and again for decades. Why are random teens better at asking questions of Marco Rubio? Because they’re not afraid to sound biased when they ask Marco Rubio what he plans to do to keep them from getting shot to death.

Meanwhile, Rebel Media, a right-wing outlet, have started their own investment fund, because of course they have. And Milo, his “feminism is cancer” t-shirt sales flagging, is now hawking supplements on Infowars. As Jeet Heer notes (again and again and again, to no avail), “Much of North American right-wing politics is best seen as a grift rather than an ideology.”

Wait, what now?
No, “vagility” isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. Still important, though.

A fascinating study of religious belief and its impact on WAIT YOU DID A RANDOMIZED HUMAN TRIAL OF WHAT?

DIY gene modification a bad idea, says DIY gene modification pioneer.

New York Fashion Week, but with WAY better captions.

Steadily growing influence of left-wing criticism
Another review of Kids These Days… 

Cultivating joy
Chinese pupper appears to be flying.
This is kind of gross but also wonderful: there is a rare species of pink slug.