It’s a thing now. Money quote:
While doctors prefer head hair, on rare occasions patients who are balding might be able to use hair from the chest for the surgery, doctors said. “If they are balding, they might need that extra hair for their heads,” said Dr. Glenn Charles, who is based in Florida but said 30 percent of his clients are from the New York City area.
Could the victory of the hirsute be more definitive?
“Basic publishing ethics dictate that fake articles be printed in clearly different type fonts and column widths, be enclosed by borderlines and be identified prominently as advertising. By contrast, as native advertising is most often practiced – and as the Federal Trade Commission has very much noticed – publishers allow their advertisers to run content strikingly similar in look and style to the real editorial. The label “advertising” is almost never applied. Instead they use confusing wiggle words like “sponsored content” or, even more obscurely, “from around the web”. The result is not merely deceiving to readers, it bespeaks a conspiracy of deception among publishers, advertisers and their agencies,” – Bob Garfield, at the Guardian, the latest publication to embrace the unethical deception of “native advertizing.”
Garfield also has a good round-up of those outlets who have now embraced whoredom: The Economist. Forbes. The Atlantic. The Huffington Post. The Washington Post. Time Inc. The New York Times, and, most recently, Yahoo.
Here’s a good summary of the key point of John Judis’s new book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, And the Origins Of The Arab-Israeli Conflict: that some early American Zionists had a blind spot when it came to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. They just wanted them “transferred” from their homes and land. Their dignity and communities were to be erased, without much serious consideration, in favor of a great utopian scheme.
As if on cue, the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, has decided yet again to go public in lacerating a colleague for daring to write about Israel without his oversight and permission. An email to Ron Radosh has appeared on the right-wing site, The Washington Free Beacon. Brimming with the usual venom and invective, it’s yet another collegial bridge burned by the Zionist fanatic. Are there any editors of TNR that Leon Wieseltier hasn’t personally trashed, if they dare disagree with him? Again, much of the diatribe is ad hominem, and deploys the usual tropes of the far right in smearing critics:
I am no authority on Truman’s decision (though you are), but I know with certainty that Judis’ understanding of Jewish history, and of the history and nature of Zionism, is shallow, derivative, tendentious, imprecise, and sometimes risibly inaccurate—he is a tourist in this subject. Like most tourists, he sees what he came to see. There is more to be said also about the utter shabbiness of discovering a Jewish identity in—and for the purpose of—criticizing the Jews: it is not only ignorant but also insulting. The magnitude of Judis’ indifference to the fate of the Jews in the very years in which they were being massively slaughtered—the 1940s: now there was a decade of Jewish power!—is quite shocking.
Note the incoherence: Wieseltier does not know the history on Truman with any authority, while Judis has spent years researching it. And yet Wieseltier is still capable of knowing “with certainty” that Judis’ book is “risibly inaccurate.” You can read the highly critical Radosh review here – and, like most of Radosh’s work, has none of the ad hominem poison that is Wieseltier’s lazy hallmark. It does take issue with some factual details but on the critical period analyzed in the book, Radosh writes: “I’m afraid that we see the same facts somewhat differently.” That’s “risible” inaccuracy?
Then there’s an almost text-book case of the Goldberg variations in Wieseltier’s personal attack on Judis: the writer knows nothing; the writer is a phony Jew; the writer is indifferent to the Holocaust; the writer is therefore a self-hating Jew/anti-Semite. These are not arguments; they are insults. And they are as disgusting as they are entirely unsurprising.
A simple question: is there an editor at The New Republic capable of preventing this kind of vicious anti-collegial invective? Not when it comes to Wieseltier, it seems. Chris Hughes and Frank Foer seem to answer to him, and not the other way round.
As part of a symposium on the “best punctuation mark,” Kassia St. Clair makes the case that the ellipsis is especially well-suited to the social media era:
Its fortunes have risen with e-mails, texts and instant messages. Immediate, informal, midway between letters and conversation, these media have changed the way we write, and the ellipsis has done much of that work. With just three jabs of a digit you can elegantly express polite disagreement, thoughtfulness or expectation, or just let the other person know there’s more to come. A well-placed ellipsis cuts through swathes of verbosity, leaving quotes with the necessary punch to entertain or enlighten.
Julian Barnes differs, favoring the exclamation mark, while Claire Messud prefers the semi-colon. Johnny Grimond, the author of The Economist’s style guide, insists that the comma reigns supreme:
[T]he comma is an adaptable, protean multi-tasker. It started life long ago as a device to separate passages of text into smaller fragments, and thus to aid understanding. It has evolved ever since, amid changing fashions and disputed rules. In this, it is like the English language of which it is a part. Well used, it resolves ambiguities and makes communication easier. It also makes English more fun.
The full stop is perfect for jabbers and peckers. They’re the staccato exponents of the short sentence. The dash has an obvious appeal for those who relish a backhand sweep—and to hell with the words that precede or follow it. The colon is fine for those who like to declare and deliver: first comes the announcement, then the explanation. The semi-colon plays a useful role for the indecisive; or perhaps temperamentally undecided would be a better phrase. (Brackets are beloved by those who cannot bear to leave out some irrelevant fact they happen to know.) No punctuation mark, however, can match the comma.
Alexis Madrigal thoroughly examines California’s water politics, which the state’s drought has inflamed. He covers a lot of ground, including the mechanics of the water operation:
Moving so much H20 from north to south requires tremendous amounts of energy: the two projects [the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project] alone consume nearly five percent of all the state’s electricity. The San Joaquin River, which naturally flows north and west, flows backward during irrigation season. Water released from the Oroville Dam in the Sierra mountains takes 10 days to travel the whole State Water Project, branching across to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, then down the Central Valley and over the Tehachapi mountains, and then into a pipe along the edge of Los Angeles to the Inland Empire, where eventually, after everyone’s taken the water they’ve paid for, what’s left fills a small lake on the edge of what was once known as the Great American Desert.
For a long time, the system has worked. But the infrastructure is getting old, the political arrangements that underpinned it are breaking apart, and climate change is threatening droughts and sea level rise—all of which terrifies powerful farmers and big-city water managers south of the Delta.
Some relatively good news:
Even with the worst conceivable climate change, the kind of global warming that brings 70-year droughts to California, the state might do okay.
That seems counterintuitive, but that’s what Jay Lund, who heads the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, loves about his model of the state water system, CALVIN. He and his colleagues ran a range of climate scenarios through CALVIN, asking for a look at what very dry, very warm scenarios might do to the state’s water system out to the year 2100. The results were shocking.
Basically, in CALVIN’s rendering of the future, the state’s economy is fine. “It was amazing how little the damage was to the state’s economy,” Lund said. That’s because the state’s cities sail through. First, they can afford to pay for water at quite high prices, so the economic gravity built into the model sends it their way. But it’s not just buying water from agricultural interests or through the State Water Project that saves them: a whole portfolio of nascent water ideas bloom.
Agriculture does not fare quite as well, but the state’s agricultural production only falls 6 percent. That’s despite increasing urbanization of agricultural land and, in the driest scenario, a 40 percent reduction in water deliveries to the Central Valley. “The farmers are all smart people and they’ll cut back the least profitable stuff,” Lund said. They’ll also fallow land, according to CALVIN—roughly 15 percent of the irrigated parcels currently farmed today, or 1.35 million acres.
Earlier Dish on the drought here and here.
(Photo: A car sits in dried and cracked earth of what was the bottom of the Almaden Reservoir on January 28, 2014 in San Jose, California. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
How much more direct can you get than a hero’s welcome at the Vatican for Gustavo Gutierrez, the key proponent of liberation theology?
Bloomberg’s departure as mayor hasn’t made New York nannyism any less lame:
Essentially, according to the [NYC Hospitality] Alliance, restauranteurs are prohibited from “selling, serving, delivering or offering to patrons an unlimited number of drinks during any set period of time for a fixed price.” And yes, this law also includes your favorite club’s ladies night where the drink specials let you party off all those TPS reports you filed so someone else could throw them away. Club drink specials are breaking the law too, and I’m guessing this will ruin all New Year’s Eve party planning. How else will restaurants entice us to hunker down with them for four hours? Boo.
Apparently the only drink specials that are legal are two-for-ones and discounts that aren’t more than half price. So, bring your flask to brunch ladies, because Eater thinks a crackdown is on the horizon and shit’s about to get real.
Update from a reader:
That post is totally misleading. First of all, this isn’t a new law, it is in the news because a NYC hospitality industry group has brought attention to an existing law that isn’t being enforced, but could possibly be enforced if the city/state wanted to.
Second of all, it’s astate law through the NYS Liquor Authority (SLA), not something done at the city-level like Bloomberg’s bans on large sodas. Finally, even if enforced, this puts New York State at about the middle of the pack in terms of state-level happy hour laws. According to this summary of happy hour laws (which may be somewhat dated), over half of U.S. states have some kind of ban on happy hour promotions. Of those that do, New York is among the most permissive states, with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia as some of the most restrictive states.
Don’t get me wrong; enforcing the ban on unlimited drinks in NYC would totally ruin my favorite way to waste a weekend afternoon, but let’s be clear about who is really responsible for these rules and hope that they go on unenforced.
In an interview, Adam Minter, who grew up working in a scrapyard, describes “a couple of messages that I really wanted to get across” in Junkyard Planet:
Number one, that the recycling business is not a niche, and not just responsible for “green products”. In the US you get greeting cards made from 50% recycled content, and I think those kinds of products tend to make people think it’s a niche, specialised industry. But it’s much bigger than that. Pretty much anything you can buy is affected in its pricing by scrap, and it quite likely has scrap in it. Every automobile, for example, is to some degree made from scrap materials, such as the engine block, if it’s made from aluminium, or the plastic of the bumpers. So I wanted people to realise that recycling is more than just a blue and green bin in their pantry.
The second message, and it’s a very personal message for me, is that there’s dignity in this kind of work. The images that we see of scrap workers, on television for instance, are often of exploited masses in China, Africa, India. There’s more to it than that. These are real, three dimensional people, and there is dignity and entrepreneurship in the work that they do. It’s often an opportunity to lift themselves up from a lower standing.
Previous Dish on Minter’s book here.
(Hat tip: The Browser)
A reader defends those critical of casting an African-American actor as a “white” superhero:
While there are no doubt some genuine racists incensed by this just because Fox has cast a black man as Johnny Storm, I suspect most of the pushback really comes down to two closely related phenomena in comics fandom. First – and this you see in pretty much all fandoms – is a major concern with things staying the way they were. Fans get attached to things and worry that minor changes are going to mean more drastic changes in the future. I would compare this, for instance, for the concern raised last year about whether the next Doctor would be black or a woman. It wasn’t so much that people were opposed to a black Doctor or woman Doctor, as that they (especially original series fans) feared that it was a sign that too much had changed since “the good old days.”
Second, comic fans have adopted something of a “once bitten, twice shy” approach to most adaptations.
With one notable exception, the movie studios tend to treat comics adaptations as mindless franchises, good only for making money off of young men and teenage boys who don’t really know any better. Even series that start out strong have quickly devolved into self-parody and incoherent silliness. While the poster boy of this trend is probably the ’90s Batman franchise (especially the execrable Batman and Robin), Fox – the studio that currently owns the rights to the Fantastic Four – has gotten a huge amount of flack from fans for its treatment of the X-Men (the third X-Men film, Last Stand, is loathed by X-Men fans, and the less said about X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the better) and for its atrocious adaptation of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Fox’s earlier Fantastic Four films were completely underwhelming.
When you combine these two factors – conservatism of fandom and distrust of adaptations – it’s easy to see why comic fans are suspicious over what they see as significant changes to the characters they love. It’s telling that so much of the criticism has focused on the Johnny Storm/Sue Storm Richardson relationship. It isn’t that fans don’t understand that interracial adoption is a thing; it’s that they are seriously worried (and, honestly, have every reason to worry) that the film’s producers simply don’t care that the two are siblings, and are going to write the relationship out of the film. Or, worse, that an idiot writer will just look at the last names and think Sue and husband Reed Richards are siblings.
Other reader responses seem to bear that analysis out:
My problem isn’t with a black actor playing Johnny Storm. My problem is with Johnny Storm having a full-blooded sister who is white, which stretches credulity even for a made-up comic book world.
Another:
I wouldn’t want a white actor playing Luke Cage, just like I think George Clooney would be ill-suited to play Martin Luther King, Jr.
Another reader directs us to an essay by Hashim R. Hathaway, who identifies himself as a man of color as well as a fanboy. He writes:
Here’s why I can’t get behind Jordan as Johnny Storm: it’s not enough. In fact, it’s so “not enough” because what some, like Louis [Falcetti], would argue as a positive step only serves to highlight just how far away we are. Kate Mara was cast as Sue Storm. Are they stepbrother and sister? Are they adopted siblings? Does it matter? In one way, it shouldn’t matter at all, but in another way, the fact that it even has to be explained shows how diversity can be forced, because suddenly we have a token black guy on a team of white superheroes. … Johnny Storm being black means there’s some hitherto-unnecessary explaining to do in various other parts of the story.
The reader adds:
Hathaway basically argues for more black characters being brought to the screen, rather than changing the race of existing characters then calling it a win for diversity. Thankfully, we will be seeing The Falcon in the new Captain America movie, and Luke Cage will be getting a Netflix series soon. As a whole, Marvel has a great record on diversity, recently introducing a team of superheroes in Young Avengers who are almost all queer (but you don’t find that out until the final issue). We just need to see some of that diversity make its way to the silver screen.
Amy Merrick considers the ironies of Cabela’s, the big-box chain for outdoorsmen:
Today, Cabela’s has $3.5 billion in annual revenue. Its 50 stores look like enormous log cabins, and
inside of them hundreds of taxidermied animals grapple in lifelike poses—grizzlies rear up, rams stand atop plaster mountains like figures on a wedding cake. Cabela’s exhibits have been described as “natural-history museums,” and its stores are billed as tourist destinations. When a Cabela’s opened this past October, in Waco, Texas, people lined up outside for hours in the rain, starting at 8:00 A.M. on the previous day.
The growth of Cabela’s reflects Americans’ odd relationship with the outdoors: we mythologize it even as we pave it over. To accommodate their bulk and the crowds that they attract, Cabela’s stores are often built next to interstates and surrounded by giant parking lots. Generally, the only wildlife in sight are the crows picking over the litter. Some of the newest branches are on the edges of cities—Denver, Austin—that epitomize sprawl. In Greenville, South Carolina, where Cabela’s plans to open on a congested retail strip in April, other retailers are worried that traffic jams will scare away their customers.
(Photo of a Cabela’s display in Reno, Nevada, by Flickr user RenoTahoe)
The Dish 