Getting connected could be a big problem in North America in the 1890s, especially in the vast open spaces of the rural west. You could buy a telephone set from a mail-order catalogue, but what about the phone line itself? The Bell Telephone system was putting all its effort into connecting urban areas and had little interest in stringing wires to remote communities.
It didn’t take long for a few enterprising ranchers to notice, though, that the west was already covered with wire – the barbed-wire fences that divided the range to keep each rancher’s stock separate. At its peak, more than a million kilometers of the stuff was being laid each year. Why not just let it do double duty as a phone line? After all, they figured, wire is wire, and the ranchers were eager to communicate with their cowpokes working at outlying camps.
A reader sends the above photo – “not great quality but it’s the best I could get from my vantage point”:
I couldn’t help but think of you when I saw this scene a few minutes ago: a line stretching all the way down the block at a medical marijuana dispensary about a half mile from my house in Denver. Sales of recreational marijuana started at licensed shops [yesterday] morning at 8 am (many of the existing medical dispensaries got recreational licenses, such as the one people are lined up for in the picture). I don’t smoke marijuana, but I voted to end prohibition in my state in 2012, and I love your coverage of the issue.
Another reader on New Year’s day:
Predictions are hard to get right, and I’m not particularly good at them. But I think today is the beginning of the end of the drug war as we know and loathe it. Once legal marijuana gets established in Colorado, other states will probably follow their example very quickly. I imagine it will legal almost everywhere in the US in 10 years, and that other countries in the Americas will legalize production to help fill the demand.
It’s hard to think about any really big changes in society without coming back to marriage rights. Those changes have happened so quickly, and it’s been so profound, that it seems like you have to compare or contrast everything else to it. I believe that the collapse of prohibition will be swift, as the expansion of marriage rights has been, for the same sort of reason. The opposition is irrational, and once the thing is tested in the real world, the argument will be over.
The drug war is an obscenity. It ruins lives, decimates communities, and functions as the main practical foundation of racial inequality in our country. The drug war is the main engine behind the creation of a criminal class in the US. It’s a profoundly destructive and immoral set of policies. The drug war is one of the worst things about America. And today, the drug war has been dealt a death blow.
Our galaxy is set to merge with its closet neighbor four billion years from now, give or take:
Recent observations confirm that Andromeda is heading straight toward us at about 60 miles per second, and will traverse the 2.5 million light-year distance currently separating our galaxies in about four billion years. While the collision of two galaxies might conjure up images of mass devastation, the event will be largely imperceptible to our descendants, if any are still around. (They will have had to find another home: By that time, the increasing luminosity of our sun will have rendered Earth uninhabitable.) Galaxies are mostly empty space, so almost no stars or planets will actually collide.
Nonetheless, the Milky Way as we know it will cease to exist. Initially, the two galaxies will slide past each other and draw apart until gravity hits the brakes and pulls them back together. As Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, both will lose their disk-like structure, forming a single elliptical galaxy that some astronomers have dubbed “Milkomeda.”
(Photo: A stunning view of the Milky Way from Assekrem (meaning “the end of the world” in old local language) in the Hoggar Mountains, Sahara, southern Algeria. By Babek Tafreshi/SSPL/Getty Images)
Tyler Williams of Blanchester, Ohio selects marijuana strains to purchase at the 3-D Denver Discrete Dispensary in Denver, Colorado on January 1, 2014. Legalization of recreational marijuana sales in the state went into effect at 8am this morning. By Theo Stroomer/Getty Images.
John Banville reviews Isaiah Berlin’s third collection of letters, praising the philosopher as a man “unshakable in his commitment to his version of liberalism and what is called value-pluralism, ‘the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other'”:
IB was one of the great affirmers of our time, a man to be admired not only for his intellectual achievements but for his loyalty, his humor, his modesty, his delight in the world and the people in it. He was neither a temporizer nor a meliorist, yet all his thought was directed toward a humane estimation of life and its possibilities. Here he is, writing in 1969 to his friend Dorothea Head:
Nothing is less popular today than to say that there is no millennium, that values collide, that there is no final solution, that one can only gain one value at the expense of another, that whatever one chooses entails the sacrifice of something else—or that it is at any rate often so. This is regarded as either false or cynical or both, but the opposite belief is what, it seems to me, has cost us so much frightful suffering and blood in the past.
It was certainly unpopular—it still is—to say such things, but IB never faltered in his determination that they should be said, and said again.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the [1964 World’s] fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the ‘brains’ of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World’s Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid – large, clumsy, slow-moving, but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning, and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into ‘throw away’ and ‘set aside.’ ”
Disgruntled by news of a forthcoming David Foster Wallace biopic starring Jason Segel, John Gallagher worries that popular perception is corrupting DFW’s influence:
Maybe things started to change when Wallace went viral. His commencement address to a Kenyon College graduating class in 2005 was a massive hit online. Published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, it’s a pitch-perfect exhortation to mindfulness in everyday life, and a challenge to practice “simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time”. And it’s beautiful.
But Wallace isn’t an aphorist. For me, what makes his fiction so good is that it’s hard – not “difficult” in an elitist sense, but just in that it wants you to work with him, to dig towards something half-remembered and hard to grasp and maybe, just maybe, true. The Wallace of This Is Water – and the Wallace of popular culture – is a fortune-cookie merchant: the artist as life coach.
This is why the idea of a Wallace movie makes me so uneasy. Not just because it’s insensitive, and not just because there’s no way it won’t get twisted into some awful, jarring morality tale about genius and suicide. It’s because a Hollywood DFW feels like the final step in the canonisation – or maybe the Cobainification – of David Foster Wallace.
Ze Frank’s commentary on the natural world wins silver for Mental Health Break:
Paul Krugman was close second for the Dick Morris Award. He was nominated for his remarkably incorrect 1998 prediction about the Internet:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other…. By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
The Chart Of The Year runner up shows the damage global warming is doing:
Joe Romm looks ahead to the future implied by Andy Haveland-Robinson’s “death spiral” chart of Arctic Ocean ice coverage over time:
Ian Bogost’s thoughts on McRib nearly won the Dish’s award for bad writing:
The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew. … The McRib’s stochastic return mcdonalds-mcribmakes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained.
Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,” namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. … Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’s—eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’s—connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power.
This comment by Richard Cohen almost earned him the Malkin Award:
People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)
Earlier this year, Copyranter wondered the Cool Ad Of The Year runner-up was “the best gun control commercial ever produced”:
This ugly comment made North Carolina State Representative Larry Pittman runner-up for the Hewitt Award:
Someone had posted something with a picture of Barack Obama and across it said ‘traitor.’ And, you know, I don’t always agree with the guy, I certainly didn’t vote for him but I gotta defend him on this one. I just don’t think it’s right at all to call Barack Obama a traitor. There’s a lot of things he’s done wrong but he is not a traitor. Not as far as I can tell. I haven’t come across any evidence yet that he has done one thing to harm Kenya.
Ramesh Ponnuru was the Yglesias Award runner-up for this admission:
[Republicans] have no real health-care agenda. Voters don’t trust them to look out for middle-class economic interests. Republicans are confused and divided about how to solve the party’s problems. What they can do is unite in opposition to the Obama administration’s scandals and mistakes. So that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to win news cycles when they need votes.
And second place for the Moore Award goes to Mike Malloy for this rant against Limbaugh:
This guy, this Limbaugh, this is one of the most vile human beings ever to live! If Limbaugh had the power, he would open gas chambers! If Limbaugh had the power, he would line people up against the wall and execute them! If Limbaugh had the power, he would destroy children because he can’t have any! The only thing he sees in children is sex partners! This is a sick, degenerate, evil man!
Each January 1, thousands of works are released into the public domain. This year, the Public Domain Review honors the “Class of 2014” (seen above):
As usual it’s an eclectic bunch who have assembled for our graduation photo – including two very different geniuses of the piano, a French mystic, the creator of Peter Rabbit, one of the 20th century’s most important inventors, a poet who penned the Olympic Hymn, and a man known as the “Black Leonardo” who pretty much single-handedly created the peanut industry. The unifying factor bringing them all together is that all died in the year of 1943, and so their works, in many places, will be given a new lease of life as they pass into the public domain.
But instead of celebrating, some are mourning what would have entered the public domain today, had we retained copyright laws from 1976. Duke University has assembled a list of such works, including Keroauc’s On the Road, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Dr. Suess’s The Cat in the Hat. Citing Duke’s list, Adi Robertson zooms out:
The arguably bigger problem … involves books, films, and music that most people have never heard of, and that copyright holders aren’t going to bother preserving or reissuing — without a meaningful public domain, they can’t be archived in a way that makes them available to more than a privileged few.
(Image from The Public Domain Review. Top Row (left to right): George Washington Carver; Sergei Rachmaninoff; Shaul Tchernichovsky; Middle Row (left to right): Sophie Taeuber-Arp; Nikola Tesla; Kostis Palamas; Max Wertheimer; Bottom Row (left to right): Simone Weil; Chaim Soutine; Fats Waller; Beatrix Potter.)
Long-time New York restaurant critic finally reveals to readers his identity: Adam Platt. He calls the pretense of anonymity a “dated charade” since restaurants typically know who the “anonymous” food critics are:
Why do I (with the prodding and endorsement of my editors) choose this particular moment to come lumbering into public view? A better question might be “What took you so goddamned long?” Dining critics in London began running their photos above their columns some time ago, and several of New York City’s most reputable critics have been out of the proverbial closet for years. Craig Claiborne, who helped invent the myth of the discreetly “anonymous” critic at the Times, used to have promising chefs, like Daniel Boulud, come and cook for him outside of their restaurants. During my lunch with [former New York magazine critic] Gael [Greene], Alain Ducasse emerged from his kitchen to give her a warm greeting, a dramatic gesture that did not prevent her from gleefully slamming his restaurant in a blistering cover-story review.
Over the years, this myth of anonymity has served many useful purposes. It’s worked, in practice, for the mysterious Michelin inspectors, who return to dining establishments year after year to take away or bestow their stars. It can work, also, for local critics whose publications attempt to cultivate a similar illusion of omniscience, although it’s been my experience that the handful of grand restaurants that actually have stars to lose will make it their business to spot you. Mostly, though, anonymity has been a powerful marketing tool. It’s lent a sense of impartiality and Oz-like mystery to the dark art of restaurant criticism, and if members of the clubby fine-dining world didn’t always believe it, then at least the public sometimes did.
Even though Platt has gone public, he will “continue to book restaurant tables at odd hours, under a string of ridiculously random made-up names, because more than a wig or a set of false whiskers, the art of surprise has always been the critic’s most useful tool.”
