Madison Square Cowboy
For Many Big Cities, It’s Their First Rodeo. ‘You Don’t Do That In Cowboy World’
Bull riding is becoming more popular in metro areas, and that poses hurdles—trucking dirt through traffic to the arena and teaching manners; no booing
For those who follow the burgeoning sport of bull riding, the stars are naturally the riders themselves—who train for years to master the art of staying atop a 1,700-pound bucking bull for a full eight seconds, while maintaining a certain control, if not graceful authority.
Then there’s Randy Spraggins, who’s charged with getting 750 tons of dirt–or 35 dump-truck loads—into New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Mr. Spraggins, an independent contractor who’s worked with the Professional Bull Riders organization—PBR, for short—since its inception 31 years ago, is the “soil savant” behind the sport, as one industry insider refers to him. He is responsible not just for trucking dirt in and out of the many arenas where PBR stages competitions, but for also making sure it is just right–soft enough for the riders to land on as safely as possible when they inevitably fall, but hard enough to give the bulls the right footing.
“When the ground is good, the bulls are bucking,” Mr. Spraggins, a 62-year-old North Dakota native, explains.
A Score of 1,000 Corpses
Rob Zombie’s ‘House of 1,000 Corpses’ Turns 20: An Oral History of a Bloody Cult Classic
As the cult classic turns 20, here’s the story of a hellraising director who was given a blank check to make his gory spectacular, scared off film execs, and inspired generations.
by AJ McDougall
It’s the year 2000, and you’re an unsuspecting tourist at Universal Studios.
You’re on the studio backlot tour, seated on one of those trams as it trundles up a peaceful residential-looking street. Your guide points out one of the houses. It’s seen better days (namely in 1982, when it served as a cheery brothel run by Dolly Parton) and looks decidedly sinister: ramshackle clapboards painted a sinister gray.
Suddenly, a man staggers out of the front door, covered in blood and wearing someone else’s skin. He leers and waves at your wide-eyed group.
More than 20 years later, the man, actor Bill Moseley, recalled to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed how the tour guide didn’t miss a beat, announcing, “‘And on your right, you’ll see Rob Zombie’s movie House of 1,000 Corpses in production.’”
This spring marks that movie’s 20th anniversary. A nasty little stink bomb of a grindhouse slasher, the “plot” of House of 1,000 Corpses, if it can be called that, concerns four kids (including a pre-Office Rainn Wilson) who get lost on the backroads of America while searching for a local legend named Dr. Satan. Instead of finding him, they’re captured by a psychotic family called the Fireflys, who—spoilers—brutally kill off the youngsters one by one.
After The End of Culture
Surviving Hyperculture
Does the term “culture” even mean anything, given humanity’s turn away from particularity and toward a more fluid world of never-ending change? Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, known for his treatise-like reflections on modern life, combining philosophical inquiry with cultural critique. Han objectively delineates and clarifies modern society’s existential ailments, while trying to discern where we may be going on the current trajectory. His book Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization is a look at the way the world is shifting due to globalization.
Who are we as human in this strange world? Are we mere tourists, to use Han’s metaphor, or are we searching for a deeper meaning? By definition, a tourist collects experiences that are often superficial, and the way we experience culture today seems to operate on the same level. Rootlessness to such an extreme can lead to a total existential breakdown. Any notion of boundaries, be they metaphysical or geographical, will quickly dissipate and with that the perennial question of what it means to be human. After all, it is our differences that maintain creativity as well as, unfortunately, destruction.
The worlds are shifting, and the question is whether a new world is emerging. “After the end of culture,” writes Han, “should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’? Or are we at long last living in a culture that affords us the freedom to spread into the wide open world? If we are, how might we describe this new culture?” Han is alluding to the “end of culture,” which is enough to make everyone quite depressed. Fast-moving technology has precipitated this change, and we cannot turn back the clock. Technology has tapped into human listlessness and spiritual torpor, taking many souls hostage.
News Chaos
Drugged-up Stevie Nicks, feuds with Kurt Cobain: Inside MTV News’ glory days
Not a lot of news anchors would be suspected of helping to trash a pair of hotel rooms and still keep their jobs.
But such was the case when Kurt Loder, then the face of recently shut-down MTV News, aimed to settle a feud with Kurt Cobain in 1992.
It grew out of the the grunge star souring on Loder after he publicized a Vanity Fair article about Courtney Love doing drugs while pregnant.
Cobain and wife Love hated the article and suddenly hated Loder as well.
When the Nirvana frontman expressed an interest in making amends, Loder hopped a jet to Minneapolis and met the rocker mid-tour.
The Marauder
The Legend of the Florida Highway Patrol Mercury Marauder, the Fastest, Rarest Panther of Them All
Twenty years ago, the Florida Highway Patrol rolled out a fleet of souped-up Mercury Marauders for high-speed pursuits.
BY JESUS GARCIA
I spotted a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor on duty this week. It was a Laredo Police Department patrol car, and it gave me a touch of sentimentality seeing this decade-old workhorse. The odometers on these P71 Interceptors are rapidly reaching “I’m too old for this shit.” But seeing that old cop car reminded me of the legend of Florida’s fastest, rarest Panthers: the Florida Highway Patrol Mercury Marauders.
Twenty years ago, Florida’s highways were patrolled by a special group of unmarked 2004 Mercury Marauders thanks to an anonymous donor who gifted 27 cars to the Florida Highway Patrol, and a local tuner named named Dennis Reinhart who modified them for use in high-speed pursuits. The Marauder was already a hotted-up version of the standard Crown Vic, with a 302-hp V8 out of the Mustang Mach 1. But Reinhart took it further with a host of mods that made these the ultimate sleeper sedans.
Mavericks Drowning
The famed Mavericks surfing contest drowned in acrimony. Can it be saved?
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — The wave roars like a dozen cannons as it climbs four stories high, casting the few bold enough to surf its crest into a teeming pit of frigid, shark-filled ocean. It costs nothing to paddle the half-mile from Pillar Point through surging sea and up a liquid mountain that has slain two of the most gifted men to ride a surfboard. Daring death has no price tag, even if people keep trying to find one.
Juan de Fuc’d
A Disaster the Size of Multiple Katrinas Is Building Off Washington’s Coast
The Coast Guard is the first line of defense against a massive tsunami. Will it also be an early victim?
By ERIC SCIGLIANO
On the north shore of Washington’s wild Olympic Peninsula, a scimitar-shaped sandspit called Ediz Hook arcs for three miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. At its tip, between snowy mountains to the south and Vancouver Island to the north, sits what may be the nation’s most scenically sited military installation — and its most vulnerable.
U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Port Angeles is the very first of first responders when something goes wrong, as it often does, on the state’s tangled straits and inlets and stormy outer coast and, sometimes, on the peaks and bluffs overlooking them. The station’s three MH-65 Dolphin helicopters are the only aircraft the Coast Guard, America’s frontline coastal defense and search-and-rescue service, bases along Washington’s deeply crenulated 3,026-mile coastline. In 2021, they undertook 195 search-and-rescue missions. Ediz Hook is also home base for four seagoing cutters, 87 to 110 feet long, and one 210-foot medium-endurance cutter, which are often away patrolling for drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal fishing, oil spills and other security and environmental threats. Two 29-foot and two 45-foot short-range response boats deal with local emergencies; they joined the choppers on 16 rescue missions in 2021 and responded on their own in 23 others.
But those exploits are just a warm-up for the disaster to come. Someday — next week, next year, maybe next century — a sudden and deadly marine shock will strike the Northwest coast: what locals call the Big One, a circa 9.0-magnitude offshore earthquake generating tsunami surges reaching 60 feet high or more. Preparations for this threat have especially lagged in Washington, says state seismologist Harold Tobin, who chairs the University of Washington’s seismology and geohazards program and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network: “Oregon, California and British Columbia have all taken it more seriously.”
MTV News Gone
MTV News, which chronicled the music and politics of the ’90s, shuts down
BY MEG JAMES
(MTV )
Perhaps it’s fitting that MTV News, a youth brand if there ever was one, never hit the big 4-0.
On Tuesday, Paramount Global pulled the plug on MTV News, a cable television staple from the late 1980s through the early aughts, and was particularly well-known — especially to Gen-Xers and older millennials — for chronicling the heady music culture of the ’90s.
The influential and crowd-pleasing telecast brought pop music culture, news and politics to young audiences, long before the internet and Napster changed the industries of media and music in fundamental ways.
Tolstoy 2023
Leo Tolstoy the Free Thinker: Yet Another ‘New’ Look at ‘War and Peace’
By John Tamny
For mountain climbers, one imagines that Mt. Everest looms as the ultimate climb to validate one’s ability. For runners, it would be the Boston Marathon, for triathletes the Iron Man?
For readers, it’s no reach to say that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the Mt. Everest, Boston Marathon, or Iron Man of reading. Coming in at 1358 pages comprised of tiny letters, just looking at the novel is to feel intimidated. Picking it up in no way reduces the internal discomfort. No one likes to give up (see deaths on Everest, etc.), but it’s safe to say that more people have quit reading War and Peace than have completed it, after which it’s even safer to say that exponentially more people have purchased War and Peace than have ever begun reading it. It’s easier on one’s psyche to not open the book at all than to open it only to close it for good after just a few pages. Better to not have ventured than to have ventured only to quit, or something like that. At least it gives you deniability.
SETI 2023
Will Powerful New Tools Finally Let Us Hear Alien Civilizations?
The most potent effort yet to find extraterrestrial life is searching for beings that may not want to be found
By Seth Shostak
What could motivate extraterrestrial civilizations to beam electromagnetic signals into space? They might be using them for navigation or entertainment, or as a way of pinging our solar system to see if anyone’s home. Whatever the case, detecting such transmissions would be the easiest way for humankind to prove that someone else is out there, and astronomers have made intermittent attempts to eavesdrop on alien broadcasts for six decades.
These initiatives are collectively known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Its history dates back to 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake aimed an 85-foot antenna at two relatively close star systems, hoping to pick up an alien signal. It was a simple, two-week experiment using already-existing equipment. Although Drake failed to discover any transmissions, his work excited the public and spawned further attempts.
Early this year, the SETI Institute (where I work) and the University of California, Berkeley, launched COSMIC, a new project that is about a thousand times more comprehensive than Drake’s pioneering effort. It will search for alien signals—both intentional and unintentional—from some 40 million star systems by analyzing massive amounts of data from the Very Large Array, an ensemble of 27 antennas dotting the scrub deserts of western New Mexico. The researchers have also deployed cameras designed to look for powerful flashing lasers that could be used by extraterrestrials to beam information between star systems, much like a ship semaphore.
Forever Follicles
The Secrets of Aging Are Hidden in Your Ovaries
The ovaries age faster than any other organ in the body. Figuring out how to slow down that process could have health benefits for women—and men.
by EMILY MULLIN
ILLUSTRATION: KATERYNA KON/GETTY IMAGES
THE OVARY IS a time machine. It travels to the future, reaching old age ahead of the rest of the body. At birth, each ovary contains around a million follicles—tiny, fluid-filled sacs that hold immature eggs. But the decline of these follicles is immediate and unceasing. By puberty, only about 300,000 remain. By age 40, the vast majority are gone. And by 51, the average age of menopause in the United States, virtually none are left.
Humans are an oddity in this regard. Most mammals remain fertile up to the end of their lives; the only species known to experience menopause naturally are humans and some whales. In humans, the loss of hormones during menopause sets off a cascade of negative health effects: Bones get brittle; metabolism slows; and the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia increases. Paradoxically, women live longer than men on average but spend more of their older years in poor health.
Final Thoughts
Scientists Record Increased Activity In Human Brain Moments Before Death
The researchers advised against making firm conclusions due to the limited sample size and the fact that the patients did not survive.
Edited by Nikhil Pandey
Research finds intriguing brain wave patterns in comatose patients.
For a very long time, mysteries surrounding death and experiences during and after a person’s death have challenged the minds of humans. The consequences of death on the human body and psyche have been the subject of numerous studies and trials.
Now a modest study has produced preliminary evidence of increased brain activity throughout the process of dying, which may be connected to consciousness.
Researchers from the University of Michigan in the US have discovered that two people’s brains experienced an increase in activity as they approached death. This phenomenon is similar to spikes in brain activity that have previously been observed in animals whose hearts had stopped beating.
Phreaking Aliens
Is THIS how aliens will contact Earth? Extraterrestrial civilisations could map our planet using signals from mobile towers, experts claim
By SAM TONKIN
Mobile towers emit most of their radio power parallel to the surface of the Earth, meaning a signal is strongest when it is rising or setting across the horizon, as seen from a prospective alien world
If there are aliens out there, it might not be that hard for them to find us.
That’s because experts say extraterrestrial civilisations could map our planet using signals from mobile phone masts – the number of which have grown exponentially over the past 30 years.
They are now the second most powerful source of Earth’s radio leakage – behind only military radar transmissions – having overtaken the commercial radio and television station powerhouses of the 20th century.
To put this into context, each mobile tower emits a radio signal with a power of 100-200 watts, equating to a peak total leakage of four gigawatts from our planet, according to researchers at the University of Mauritius and University of Manchester.
It means that if aliens had a radio telescope equivalent to the £1.7 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) being built across South Africa and Australia and due to be finished by 2028, then they should just about be able to detect our 4G activity.
Amsterdam Notes
See the Rare Keith Haring Drawing—Measuring a Massive 125 Feet—That Is Going on View in Amsterdam for the First Time in 30 Years
Stedelijk Museum’s director calls it a ‘contemporary Bayeux tapestry.’
Keith Haring drawing Amsterdam Notes in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1986. Photo: Rob Bogaerts. National Archives of the Netherlands / Anefo. Amsterdam Notes copyright © Keith Haring Foundation
By 1986, Keith Haring was at the peak of his powers. But when tasked with creating an exhibition for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Haring refused to remount old works, or even to lean on the celebrated visual motifs—the barking dogs, the glowing babies—with which his name had become synonymous. The New York artist wanted to create something completely new.
One of the results was Amsterdam Notes, a 125-foot black ink drawing that stands as one of the largest pieces Haring made for a museum. Nearly three decades on, Stedelijk is restaging the giant paperwork in its IMC Gallery, its so-called hall of honor, alongside two other works from the museum’s collection from May 26.
“For art lovers, Amsterdam Notes is a contemporary Bayeux tapestry, and a holy grail for Haring fans. Since works on paper are fragile, they cannot be exhibited for long,” the museum’s director Rein Wolfs said. “Moments such as this are unique, and happen rarely. But, this summer, the door to the Stedelijk’s treasury is ajar.”
TV Blues
Why Are TV Writers So Miserable?
On the cusp of a potential strike, writers explain why no one is having much fun making television anymore.
For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response. But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life. Photograph by David McNew / Getty
Possibly the most famous telegram in Hollywood history was sent in 1925, when Herman J. Mankiewicz, the future co-writer of “Citizen Kane,” urged his newsman friend Ben Hecht to move West and collect three hundred dollars a week from Paramount. “The three hundred is peanuts,” Mankiewicz assured him. “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The rise of the talkies, for which Hecht became a prolific scenarist, soon brought a wave of non-idiot writers to Los Angeles, to supply the snappy movie dialogue of the thirties—a decade that, not incidentally, saw the rise of the Screen Writers Guild.
Writers have always endured indignities in Hollywood. But, as long as there are millions to be grabbed, the trade-off has been bearable—except when it isn’t. The past month has brought the discontent of television writers to a boiling point. In mid-April, the Writers Guild of America (the modern successor to the Screen Writers Guild) voted to authorize a strike, with a decisive 97.85 per cent in favor. The guild’s current contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires on May 1st; if the negotiations break down, it will be the W.G.A.’s first strike since late 2007 and early 2008. At issue are minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production—but the over-all stakes, from the perspective of TV writers, feel seismic. “This is an existential fight for the future of the business of writing,” Laura Jacqmin, whose credits include Epix’s “Get Shorty” and Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole,” told me; like the other writers I spoke to, she had voted for the strike authorization. “If we do not dig in now, there will be nothing to fight for in three years.” TV writers seem, on the whole, miserable. “The word I would use,” Jacqmin said, “is ‘desperation.’ ”
Chappelle Springs
What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town
As Chappelle’s comedy made him a controversial figure nationally, some of his Ohio neighbors have been getting mad, too.
By Tyler J. Kelley
America’s most reclusive comedian isn’t hard to find. Dave Chappelle hangs around downtown, buys coffee and shops like any other resident of Yellow Springs, Ohio. He smokes cigarettes and chats with passersby. He knows people, and they know him.
Yellow Springs is a special place. “Growing up here, literally on any given Saturday or Sunday, in any house that you walked into, there was going to be someone who was Jewish, someone who was an atheist, someone from a different country, somebody who was a person of color,” says Carmen Brown, a Black village council member whose family has lived in the town for 150 years. “There was going to be a clown, an astrophysicist, a janitor and a doctor—all hanging out.” Chappelle is a product of this environment, this culture of “discourse without discord,” she says.
A sign at First Presbyterian Church sums up village politics: “10:30 a.m. Sunday, an eco-feminist interpretation of Genesis 1:3, in person, masks required.” Chappelle has called Yellow Springs, population 3,700, “a Bernie Sanders island in a Trump sea.” The town was a stop on the underground railroad and an early home for formerly enslaved people who’d bought or escaped with their freedom. Coretta Scott King was one of the first Black pupils at Antioch College, the famously liberal outpost where Chappelle’s father, Bill, taught in the music department and co-founded the civil rights organization Help Us Make a Nation, or H.U.M.A.N.
HBD Willie!
Willie Nelson 90th birthday two-day concert with Chris Stapleton to Snoop Dogg is ‘historic music event’
Willie Nelson’s Los Angeles 90th birthday celebration is destined for the concert history books.
“Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90,” the already power-packed two-night event at the Hollywood Bowl on April 29 (Nelson’s actual birthday) and April 30, has blown up to epic proportions with late-breaking additions.
“This is one of those weekends that people are going to be talking about forever,” musician Lyle Lovett told USA TODAY from the red carpet backstage at the Hollywood Bowl before the concert began Saturday. “I got the word, and I said, just tell me where. I was honored. I flew up from Austin on Southwest and everybody was going to the concert. It was a party.”
Problem Solved
Maya Calendar Mystery Solved? Scientists Say They’ve Cracked Its Ancient Code
by Space Chatter Wire
Among the most intriguing mysteries of our time is the 819-day calendar used by the ancient Maya civilization. A puzzle that baffled scientists near and far for many years, anthropologists from Tulane University may have finally cracked its secrets.
For a long time, researchers suspected that the Maya calendar followed astronomical events, specifically the movement of planets in the night sky as seen from Earth, known as the “synodic periods” of planets. The synodic period is the time it takes for a planet to appear in the same place in the night sky when observed from Earth.
However, according to a study published in Ancient Mesoamerica, the cycles in the Maya calendar cover a much larger timeframe than scholars previously thought. Anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker found that by increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819 days, a pattern emerges that matches the synodic periods of all visible planets, which include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Wiener Zeitung Gone
One of world’s oldest newspapers to end daily print run
The development marks the final step in a years-long dispute between the Austrian government and the newspaper about the future of the state-owned daily.
Founded in 1703 under the name Wiennerisches Diarium, and later renamed Wiener Zeitung in 1780, the formerly private bi-weekly paper was nationalised by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1857, becoming the country’s official gazette.
“It is adopted with a majority,” Norbert Hofer, the third president of the parliament, said of a new law to primarily move the publication online from July 1.
The paper will maintain a minimum of ten print publications per year, depending on the funds available.
Jerry Springer Gone
Legendary Talk Show Host Jerry Springer Dead at 79
Jerry Springer, the talk show host who helmed The Jerry Springer Show for 27 years, has died at the age of 79, his family’s spokesperson confirmed on April 27.
By JESS COHEN
The broadcasting world has lost a prominent figure.
Jerry Springer, who hosted The Jerry Springer Show for 27 years, died peacefully at his home in suburban Chicago on April 27 after a brief illness, his family confirmed. He was 79.
Prior to The Jerry Springer Show—which ran from 1991 to 2018—Springer was actually the mayor of Cincinnati from 1977 and 1978. He then switched up his career, working for WLWT as an anchor, a role that he’d never imagined for himself growing up.
Gold Rush 2.0
A New Rush to Find Gold in the Sierra Nevada Foothills
by Thomas Fuller
In their lust for riches, the miners of the gold rush moved a gargantuan amount of dirt. A prominent geologist, Grove Karl Gilbert, calculated in the early 1900s that miners in the Sierra Nevada had displaced eight times the amount of dirt and detritus that was moved to build the Panama Canal.
Most of what those miners displaced was broken loose from the landscape by spraying hillsides with powerful water cannons. The human-made mudslides that resulted were directed through troughs known as sluices, which had grooves to catch flakes and nuggets of gold.
This seminal chapter in California’s history came up a number of times during two trips I took to Gold Country in recent weeks. Fortune seekers, geologists and amateur prospectors compared the past winter’s deluges to the water cannons of yore.
The chain of atmospheric rivers that Californians endured had many consequences: It filled reservoirs, flooded valleys, spurred a super bloom of wildflowers, and extended the ski season into summer.
And, as it turns out, the rain brought a measure of gold fever back to the foothills of the Sierra. In an article published over the weekend, I explored the small but dedicated corps of fortune seekers who said they had seen conditions like this only a few other times in their lives.
Go SLUTTY VEGAN Go!
How Slutty Vegan Puts the Party in Plant-Based Food
Pinky Cole’s Atlanta-based burger chain is valued at a hundred million dollars. Can racy branding take vegan food mainstream?
Pinky Cole says most of her customers are meat-eaters and “we like it that way.” Photographs by Ross Landenberger for The New Yorker
On a recent Saturday evening at the flagship branch of Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based burger chain, a hulking former strip-club bouncer was working the door, under a bright sign that read “eat plants ya slut.” A dozen people were queued up outside. Another employee, wearing a T-shirt with the restaurant’s name in the style of Run DMC’s logo, shouted through a microphone as each customer stepped forward, “It’s Slutty Saturday!” If the person was a first-time patron, and admitted it, the employee added, “Virgin slut!”
Inside, a d.j. positioned near a rack of merch was playing Drake and Aaliyah at discothèque decibel levels. Three white guys in their late twenties—virgin sluts, all of them—peered up at the menu placard, which included such burgers as the Fussy Hussy (vegan cheese, caramelized onions; $13), the Super Slut (guacamole, jalapeños; $15), and the Ménage à Trois (vegan bacon, vegan shrimp; $19). All were made with plant-based patties from Impossible Foods and doused with a spicy orange “slut sauce.”
“We love meat,” one of the guys said. “We were debating going to a barbecue, but he”—he gestured at his friend—“really wanted to be called a slut today.”
In recent years, proponents of plant-based eating have gone to creative lengths to counter veganism’s reputation as preachy and abstemious. Michelin-starred restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park, in New York, have tried to sell customers on the idea that even all-veggie tasting menus can be worth the price of a month’s rent. At the other end of the scale, substitute-meat brands have made inroads into the fast-food industry: there are now Impossible Whoppers at Burger King and Beyond Meat sausage links in supermarket freezer aisles. But perhaps no establishment has done as much as Slutty Vegan to challenge the perception that a vegan diet is by and for pleasureless people.
The company’s founder and C.E.O., Pinky Cole, is thirty-five years old, with waist-length pink ombré dreadlocks. She wears a necklace with the word “vegan” and a marijuana leaf encrusted in diamonds. Her entrepreneurial streak dates back to her youth in Baltimore, when she and a high-school friend would buy McChickens for a dollar and sell them to their classmates for two. Cole estimates that three-quarters of Slutty Vegan’s customers are meat-eaters. “We like it that way,” she told me recently. “It’s not a vegan concept where we’re this glorified group that’s better than everybody else.” Though plant-based, a Slutty Vegan burger is not exactly health food. Cole declined to share nutritional information with me, but said, “I won’t sit here and tell you to eat Slutty Vegan every single day, all day. But I do want you to understand that veganism can be healthier, even if it starts with burgers and fries.”
God Love SRA
A BOX OF NOSTALGIA: THE SRA READING LABORATORY
I’m the type of nerd who spent a good amount of my energy trying to will my teacher into giving us silent reading time. I’m the type of nerd who shot my hand up the instant the teacher called for someone to read aloud so fast I swear my rotator cuff is still jacked. And I’m the type of nerd who had my sights set on that well-worn box in the corner of my 4th grade classroom like it contained all the wisdom of man and womankind.
Ahhhh… the SRA Reading Laboratory. It resided deep in the hearts of all bookish elementary school students in the ’80s and ’90s… second only to that Holy Grail of Book Nerds, The Scholastic Book Fair. And the goal? To make your way through the rainbow and to prove that you’re the ultimate reader (I don’t remember having lots of friends in elementary school, now that I think about it).
The premise? This giant box of gloriousness was full of stories, each one assigned a particular color based on developmental milestones. Students initially took a brief test to determine what color (reading) level they should start at and then were given a story on card stock labeled with that color. After reading the story, you answered a series of reading comprehension questions related to what you just read. Successfully make your way through enough of these stories and you got to move on to the next color in the box. Educators used this as a way to both teach reading comprehension and to get a better understanding of the reading levels of their students. And let’s be honest, the air of competition helped some of us lazier students.
Jan Terri
God Love SPY
4/20 Etymology
Dude, you ever wonder, like, why people celebrate pot on 4/20?
Any self-respecting stoner knows what to do on 4/20. But few seem to know how the otherwise innocuous date became an international celebration of cannabis culture.
The rumors about the origins of 4/20 tend to drift around like so much smoke from a tightly rolled joint: Is 420 the police radio code for smoking marijuana in public? Was it the day Adolf Hitler died? Or Jim Morrison of “The Doors”? Did it mark the day of death of someone else famous or infamous?
Nope. Negative. Try again. None of the names commonly associated with the origin of 4/20 actually died on April 20 (although Hitler was born on that day in 1889). In California, Section 420 of the penal code refers to the crime of barring someone from lawfully entering public land — so that is not marijuana related either.
Wow. Bravo,MIT – keep going.
MIT scientists discover ‘remarkable’ way to reverse Alzheimer’s disease
Scientists at MIT have unlocked a major breakthrough in the battle to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease — one that shows “dramatic reductions” in neurodegeneration, a report stated.
The exciting achievement came about after researchers were able to interfere with an enzyme typically found to be overactive in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.
The hyperactive enzyme, CDK5, was treated with an unnamed peptide, or string of amino acids.
Early tests conducted on mice revealed significant — and promising — results.
“This peptide has the ability to enter the brain and in a couple of different models, the peptide shows protective effects against loss of neurons and also appears to be able to rescue some of the behavior deficits,” study author Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, told The Post.
Haute Compost
The New Gardening Status Symbol: Upscale Compost
‘Compost has become a staple of cocktail-party conversations.’ You can get manure from eucalyptus-eating goats and even a blend from Princess Diana’s childhood home
There are wait lists for high-end compost. PHOTO: HUGO YU FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE
Miranda Michaelis, a 56-year-old flower farmer in Oxfordshire, England, says she grows some of the healthiest tulips around. Her secret is simple, she says: compost harvested from Princess Diana’s childhood home.
She buys it from the Land Gardeners, a company in London that recently began to produce compost at Althorp Estate, the 500-year-old Spencer family property where Diana grew up. The mix, called Climate Compost Inoculum, includes waste from the Spencer family’s horses and cows, as well as ingredients such as weeds, young wood chips and buckwheat. A small, coffee-size bag goes for £20, or about $25 a pop.
Humble compost—a staple of agriculture for thousands of years—has become a luxury item. Amid a burst of pandemic interest in gardening and a growing focus on sustainability, shoppers are increasingly willing to pay top dollar for a bumper crop of artisanal fertilizer. Compost makers are giving their products, essentially manure and decomposed plant matter, a level of scrutiny that is typically seen in fine dining.
“It’s a craft, making compost like we do,” says Bridget Elworthy, one of the co-founders of Land Gardeners. “It’s like making wine, although making wine seems very glamorous, and making compost is very unglamorous. So maybe it’s like making yogurt.”
Al Jaffee Gone
Al Jaffee, iconoclastic cartooning legend of Mad Magazine fame, dies at 102
BY JESSICA GELT
LAMBIEK Comiclopedia
Al Jaffee, the iconoclastic cartoonist who created Mad Magazine’s most enduring feature — the Fold-In — and served as the publication’s longest-running contributor, died at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 102.
The cause was multiple-organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson told the New York Times.
Jaffee’s illustrations first appeared in the legendary satiric magazine in 1955, shortly after it transitioned from a comic book to a magazine. In 1964, he created the “Fold-In,” a back-of-book feature that became an instant classic at a time when other magazines were championing the ubiquitous fold-out.
Jaffee’s idea involved folding a picture vertically inward to reveal a completely new image and caption. A fold-in from 1969 resulted in an image of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Linus folded in from a piece of abstract art. The caption read: “Modern Art has taken some pretty wild turns in recent years. But no matter which direction it takes, it seems to be headed more and more toward total incomprehensibility.”
Babe’s Lumber
Babe Ruth’s Baseball Bat Is Worth $1.85 Million
A Babe Ruth baseball bat initially purchased in 2018 for $400,000 has more than quadrupled in value.
By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
Babe Ruth at Polo Grounds in 1921. Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
A baseball bat formerly used by Babe Ruth sold for $1.85 million in a private sale, breaking auction records to become the world’s most valuable bat.
The historic piece of sports memorabilia received the highest possible grading score from authentication company PSA, according to Hunt Auctions, an auction house based in Exton, Pennsylvania, which announced the sale yesterday.
Used by Babe Ruth circa 1920 to 1921, the baseball bat is known as the “Polo Grounds bat,” taking its name from the Polo Grounds stadium used by the New York Yankees until 1922. Its sale surpasses the previous record for a baseball bat sold at auction, which was set in August when another game-used Ruth bat sold for $1.68 million in a sale from Dallas-based auction house Heritage Auctions.