Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week I reset my caffeine tolerance, and the first two days of headaches were abysmal, but the results were absolutely worth it. I might do it again soon - hopefully without the headaches - to get an even more pronounced effect. Withdrawal symptoms last a median of two to nine days, but getting back on caffeine afterwards feels absolutely incredible. Did you ever watch that movie Limitless? The premise is wrong - of course humans already use 100% of our brains on a daily basis - but the feeling of your first caffeine hit after a reset is basically exactly like that.
Anyway last night was the first Deep Woods preview party of the season, and today is Deth Day.1 I tasted all three release beers last night so I can focus on the draft-only variants at the release today, and I’m happy to report that it’s yet another banger stout season for the good folks at Revolution Brewing. Interestingly, Josh Noel said that he doesn’t think Deth by Raspberries will be anyone’s favorite, but I think it actually might be mine! The classic Deth’s Tar and Cafe Deth are both tremendous, as usual, but Raspberries feels special. It’s reminiscent of Mixed Berry Ryeway, the excellent and adventurous experimental summer beer from two years ago - which was also a favorite of mine, and which I only have one more can of.
I did learn, though, that some beers I expected to be more resilient to age might be… better to drink sooner rather than later. And I still have quite a lot of beer from last year, given that I wasn’t able to share or gift it quite as much as anticipated. Because, you know, pandemic. Not a bad problem to have, of course - it just means my evenings are about to be significantly more filled with barrel-aged flavors. This is good news for you if you signed up for this newsletter on the premise that I might actually regularly write about beer! I am setting a goal for myself of both writing about this year’s Deep Woods releases as I acquire them and to go back on an adventure through last year’s offerings. I’m hoping that a swifter pace at the front will encourage me to keep the habit going forward. You’ll have to hold me to it. Finally, in this vein, I have some pending plans for a special feature on a flight of multiple years of Deth’s Tar that I managed to hold on to essentially by accident. It should be fun.
Pulling the thread
As is seemingly always the case, very shortly after I shared the Bad Art Friend story with you, a number of thinkpieces and efforts to untangle the narrative appeared online. This one, in particular, is very good:
The most consequential decision Robert Kolker made in “Bad Art Friend” was telling it out of order.
Kolker’s version appears to be chronological, but he withholds crucial information until the third act. As a result, the internet has spent days debating who the titular B.A.F. of the story is.
Because I have a big project due this week, I spent those days in a procrastinatory frenzy, reading as many Dorland v. Larson legal documents as I could get my hands on. From my perspective, telling the story in linear time makes it far easier to take sides.
And then there is also the KidneyGate Twitter account, which is dedicated to even more untangling, and the more I read about this situation the more convinced I am that this is essentially entirely Sonya’s fault and that she is a bad person. And she is not the only one! It turns out that there are layers of bad choices by multiple people.
Use your noodle
May the odds be ever in our favor:
"Good morning everyone, and welcome back to yet another round of 'No Bones,' the game where we find out if my 13-year-old pug woke up with bones," 30-year-old social media manager Jonathan Graziano says at the beginning of a TikTok video published Wednesday morning.
He pets Noodle, his internet-famous 13-year-old pug, before gently scooping him up from his dog bed, bringing him into a standing position. The minute he removes his hands, Noodle flops back down into the bed.
"OK, it's a no-bones day, it's a no-bones day, but I don't think that's a bad thing," Graziano then says in a voiceover.
Noodle is the best thing to happen to the internet in a while. Today is a bones day, btw.
Reading comprehension
Viewing the source code for a webpage isn’t hacking, despite claims to the contrary by terribly misinformed governors:
The Social Security numbers of school teachers, administrators and counselors across Missouri were vulnerable to public exposure due to flaws on a website maintained by the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The Post-Dispatch discovered the vulnerability in a web application that allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. The department removed the affected pages from its website Tuesday after being notified of the problem by the Post-Dispatch.
Based on state pay records and other data, more than 100,000 Social Security numbers were vulnerable.
So this is a very bad security flaw, but the response is abysmal:
But in the press release, DESE called the person who discovered the vulnerability a “hacker” and said that individual “took the records of at least three educators” — instead of acknowledging that more than 100,000 numbers had been at risk, and that they had been available to anyone through DESE’s own search engine.
This person is not a hacker. They are a responsible reporter of a flaw that they did not create or exploit. There is a difference.
Frankly there is nothing I can say
Today in news that should be surprising to no one at all:
You’ve probably heard of ivermectin, a drug best known for getting rid of parasites in animals and humans. Like other pandemic-related topics, this once-obscure drug has catapulted into the global discussion because…well, people are desperate for treatments that work against COVID.
While some research in 2020 suggested ivermectin might be useful against COVID, those results haven’t stood up under scientific scrutiny, said Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
Early studies were conducted in laboratory culture dishes when scientists were testing pretty much anything and everything against the COVID-causing virus, SARS-CoV-2. However, just because a drug can kill a virus in a lab dish doesn’t make it a safe or effective treatment in humans, he said.
Some research was “very flawed or even fraudulent,” Khabbaza noted. “Those have been debunked; all the really good studies have not shown a benefit.” (Here’s an in-depth look at one prominent ivermectin study with serious flaws and inconsistencies.)
The verdict so far is clear: Ivermectin, although it’s still being studied, “has not been found to be effective for the prevention of COVID-19 or the treatment of acute infection once it has developed,” Khabbaza said.
The article goes on to describe what does happen to your body if you take the drug. Reader beware, etc.
Banging on a trash can
Justice Alito sucks, we all know this. But what you may not know is that he went out of his way at a recent public speaking engagement to trash Adam Serwer, and the vitriol he spat was not even an accurate characterization of Serwer’s arguments or criticism. Serwer, of course, is all over it:
Last month, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Supreme Court’s critics are wrong. The Court is not “a dangerous cabal” that is “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” he said. Reading aloud from a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Court’s recent ruling on an abortion law, Alito insisted that it was “false and inflammatory” to say that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision had been nullified in Texas.
Alito’s speech perfectly encapsulated the new imperious attitude of the Court’s right-wing majority, which wants to act politically without being seen as political, and expects the public to silently acquiesce to its every directive without scrutiny, criticism, or protest. (As if oblivious to the irony, Alito’s office set ground rules barring media outlets from transcribing or broadcasting in full the speech at the University of Notre Dame, in which he delivered his complaint.)
Last month, that conservative majority allowed Texas’s most recent restrictions on abortion to go into effect. Without exceptions for rape and incest, the Texas law bars abortions after six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, and deputizes citizens to sue those who “enable” abortions after that period for a $10,000 bounty. At midnight on the day after the law took effect, the Republican appointees on the Court, except for Chief Justice John Roberts, insisted that a procedural scheme adopted by anti-abortion activists for the precise purpose of avoiding judicial review had tied their hands.
Chief Justice Roberts likes to say that he’s just calling balls and strikes, and even that is an obvious farce. Alito seems to prefer the tactics of the Houston Asterisks.2
I am going to become the joker
This is just maddening:
IN JANUARY 2019, Jim Yong Kim threw the global financial development sector into a state of disarray: The former academic and health official announced he would be stepping down the following month from his role as president of the World Bank, opting instead for a cushier gig at a Wall Street private equity firm. For an institution that was already struggling with heightened competition from China and private capital, Kim’s departure — which came as a total surprise — was seen as a setback, as it handed an opportunity to choose a new leader to President Donald Trump, creating worries that the America First champion would pick somebody ill suited for the global role.
And the actual replacement is somehow worse:
David Robert Malpass (born March 8, 1956) is an American economic analyst and former government official serving as President of the World Bank Group since 2019. Malpass previously served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under Donald Trump, Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under George H. W. Bush. He served as Chief Economist at Bear Stearns for the six years preceding its collapse.
What is law, really
It’s important to remember that our “justice system” relies on people in positions of power making decisions that actually lead to justice. Of course, on a daily basis, that is simply not what happens:
Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.
A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.
Economies of scale, dating edition
There is an invite-only dating app called Raya that is essentially Tinder For Rich And Famous People. Although, sort of by necessity, the pool of users has been growing. Here is a story about what happens when those competing forces collide:
In late 2019, Nivine Jay, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles, was perusing Raya, a private social app, when she matched with someone claiming to be Ben Affleck. He messaged her first, and they chatted for a bit. But then Jay grew skeptical. “He was writing, like, a lot, and I thought, There’s no way that’s really him,” she told me recently. She sent a message accusing the person of being a fake, then unmatched with the account, cutting off contact. Soon enough, though, she received a message from Affleck’s verified Instagram account, which has more than five million followers. “Nivine, why did you unmatch me? It’s me,” Affleck said, in a plaintive phone video shot in closeup. This past spring, Jay turned a clip from that message into a TikTok meme about embarrassing personal moments. “I didn’t put out our whole conversation—there are many more videos from him,” she said. The clip immediately made headlines in Page Six and the Daily Mail, with Jay dubbed “the woman who rejected Ben Affleck.”
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Oh, so everyone’s a supply chain expert now. How Celebrity Gossip Site Crazy Days And Nights Went QAnon. Neoliberalism Died of COVID. Long Live Neoliberalism!3 Behind SmartNews, the $2 billion unicorn trying to fix the news algorithm. Democrats Are Ready to Send Steve Bannon to Jail. Why You Should Test Your Vintage or Imported Dishes for Lead ASAP. Appointing Google Health's D.C. Strategist Would Bring Risk To FDA's Credibility. The Park Bench Is an Endangered Species. The Great Resignation Is Accelerating.
Apologies to Houston fans, but this is too good of an analogy and a joke to pass up.
Actually it would be great if neoliberalism could fuck off, thanks.