Stuck In The Middle
Quentin Tarantino’s Tribute To Late EMI Music Exec Pat Lucas; She Took Chance On Him & OK’d Use Of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ Tune That Launched His Career
Pat Lucas, the former EMI Music executive who was a longtime friend to filmmakers she licensed songs to for their films, has died after a long battle with cancer. She passed away last Monday.
While I wait to get more details from her distraught family, Quentin Tarantino asked to memorialize Lucas and express his forever gratitude to her taking a chance on an unproven filmmaker and granting rights to the Stealers Wheel song “Stuck in the Middle with You“ for use in his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino suggests you cannot hear that song even now and not think of Michael Madsen dancing around a kidnapped police officer trussed to a chair, as Madsen dances around him in menacing fashion, cutting off his ear and planning to set him aflame. It was a shocking, career-launching moment for the filmmaker, who still sounds a bit surprised that fortune smiled on him when Daly said yes. After all, this was way before Pulp Fiction, when all Daly had to judge by was his script and the knowledge that Gerry Rafferty’s hit song might be indelibly linked to a brutal torture scene.
Agre’s Prophecy
He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?
by Reed Albergotti
In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.
That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.
“Genuinely worrisome developments can seem ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia,” wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.
Nearly 30 years later, Agre’s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to sway elections or, in at least one case, to out a gay priest. But Agre didn’t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.
Evan Sherman Rocks
How Jazz Healed a City
A young musician fought back against COVID lockdowns by taking music into the streets of Manhattan and saved us all
Last year, a few weeks before COVID-19 descended over the land, I bought tickets to the late show at New York’s temple of jazz, the Village Vanguard. I’d heard that the drummer, Evan Sherman, was a musician to watch. Though only 26, he’d already toured with such jazz greats as Roy Hargrove, Wynton Marsalis, Cyrus Chestnut, and Jimmy Heath. As a mere 19-year-old, he’d played a weeklong gig with the legendary bassist Ron Carter, a member of Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet.
That Saturday night at the Vanguard, Sherman was once again playing with Carter, along with Emmet Cohen, a celebrated young pianist. Carter’s sophisticated harmony and solo quips pushed his bandmates in unexpected directions. Cohen, a charismatic virtuoso, responded by reaching deep into his own musical vocabulary. And Sherman, with the swagger of a young Gene Krupa, hair falling over his eyes, steered the trio with a strong cymbal beat, detailing the story with military licks, Afro-Latin grooves, and bass-drum bombs.
The Etherian Channeler
The Late Artist and Psychic Paulina Peavy Communed With a UFO to Create Her Work. A New Show Revives Her Otherworldly Legacy
“The Etherian Channeler” at Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach reintroduces the West Coast to this singular artist.
by Katie White
Many artists throughout history have claimed some sort of otherworldly inspiration (the muses, for instance). But the visionary American artist Paulina Peavy (1901–1999) may be one of the only to attribute her talents to communications with a U.F.O.—specifically one named Lacamo.
During Peavy’s lifetime, she enjoyed many early successes, including showing with Los Angeles’s Stendahl Gallery, studying with Hans Hoffman, and exhibiting work at the opening of the San Francisco Museum of Art—all before falling into art world obscurity.
The new exhibition “Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler,” on view at the Beyond Baroque art center in Venice Beach, is hoping to reintroduce Peavy as a powerful and one-of-a-kind creative force in the nascent southern California art scene of a century ago.
Lithium Landscapes
How your phone battery creates striking alien landscapes
By Richard Fisher and Javier Hirschfeld
A wider view of Chile’s brine pools. It can take more than a year to maximise the lithium concentration by this evaporation method (Credit: Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)
Beneath the screen that you are reading this on, there could be the distilled essence of a salt plain.
Millions of years ago, volcanoes deposited minerals over vast tracts of South America. Later, water leached through the rock to form massive lakes. Cycles of evaporation and deposition followed, leaving vast plains of salt behind – infused with one of the world’s most sought-after minerals: lithium.
With the rapid rise in battery usage in electronic devices and electric cars, the demand for lithium and other constituent materials is accelerating. As BBC Future has previously reported, it is enabling mining companies to look in new places, such as the deep ocean or in previously exploited mines, and has prompted scientists to seek alternative battery technology. But our focus today is how lithium is changing the fortunes – and specifically, the landscapes – of those countries that have it in abundance.
In Bolivia and Chile, the high tonnage of lithium embedded in the salt plains has given rise to massive facilities. From the air, the evaporation pools associated with the mineral’s extraction dot the landscape like colours in a painter’s palette. In this edition of our photography series Anthropo-Scene, we explore these places, whose striking features have inspired various artists, writers and architects.
Hidden Eden Exposed
The Lost Canyon Under Lake Powell
Drought is shrinking one of the country’s largest reservoirs, revealing a hidden Eden.
The morning after I arrived in Bullfrog, I went back to the marina to meet up with Eric Balken, the executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute. The institute, whose goal is to return the canyon to its natural state, was founded in 1996. A decade later, while Balken was still a student at the University of Utah, he signed on as an intern at the group’s office, in Salt Lake City. He’s worked there ever since. Now thirty-four, he has probably seen more of Glen Canyon than anyone else under the age of ninety. The first time I spoke to him, over the phone, he offered to show me some “incredible” sights. “It’ll be hot,” he added.
Again the dock was crowded with families heading out onto Powell in houseboats. For our trip, Balken had rented a pontoon boat. His wife, Sandrine Yang, had decided to come along. So had my husband and two photographers. Once we’d loaded the boat with all our camping gear and supplies, there was only a narrow alley of floor space left.
Balken slipped on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and steered the boat out of the marina, into an arm of the lake known as Bullfrog Bay. From the mouth of the bay, we headed south, into what used to be the main channel of the Colorado. Red cliffs four, five, six hundred feet tall lined the lake on both sides.
As we sped on, the cliffs grew taller and redder. The Colorado used to carry vast amounts of sediment—hence its name, meaning “red-colored.” The river, it was said, was “too thick to drink, too thin to plow.” Now, though, when the Colorado hits the reservoir’s northern edge—a border that keeps creeping south—most of the sediment drops out, leaving the water clear. Lake Powell is an almost tropical shade of turquoise. It sparkled under the cerulean sky. Somewhere deep beneath us, the river was still flowing. But at the surface the water was slack. Yang declared the scene “stupid beautiful.”
Viewing The Earth’s Innards
from National Geographic
Rare chunks of Earth’s mantle found exposed in Maryland
The set of rocks strewn throughout Baltimore likely represent a slice of prehistoric seafloor from a now-vanished ocean.
BY MAYA WEI-HAAS
Standing among patches of muddy snow on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, I bent down to pick up a piece of the planet that should have been hidden miles below my feet.
On that chilly February day, I was out with a pair of geologists to see an exposed section of Earth’s mantle. While this layer of rock is usually found between the planet’s crust and core, a segment peeks out of the scrubby Maryland forest, offering scientists a rare chance to study Earth’s innards up close.
Even more intriguing, the rock’s unusual chemical makeup suggests that this piece of mantle, along with chunks of lower crust scattered around Baltimore, was once part of the seafloor of a now-vanished ocean.
Over the roughly 490 million years since their formation, these hunks of Earth were smashed by shifting tectonic plates and broiled by searing hot fluids rushing through cracks, altering both their composition and sheen. Mantle rock is generally full of sparkly green crystals of the mineral olivine, but the rock in my hand was surprisingly unremarkable to look at: mottled yellow-brown stone occasionally flecked with black.
Spelling Infidelity Explained
What Misspellings Reveal About Cultural Evolution
BY HELENA MITON
Something about me must remind people of a blind 17th-century poet. My last name, Miton, is French, yet people outside of France invariably misspell it as “Milton”—as in the famed English author, John Milton, of the epic poem Paradise Lost.
It is not uncommon for people to misspell an unfamiliar name—yet 99 times out of 100 people misspell mine as “Milton.” That is the name that shows up on everything from my university gym card to emails from colleagues.
It might seem trivial, yet this misspelling actually illustrates a key feature of how cultural practices emerge and stabilize.
When studying culture, one of the key questions scientists ask is about continuity: Why do people do the same things, in roughly similar ways, over long periods of time? Consider how traditional food recipes, say tamales, have maintained a stable core definition over generations—corn-based dough cooked in corn husks.
Musical Vocabularies
The Musicians With the Biggest (And Smallest) Vocabularies
A new study determined which artists use the most unique words in their songs
We all know that when it comes to song lyrics, some artists are more verbose than others. Some like to keep it simple, while others use a slew of SAT words to paint a vivid picture and get their point across. Some artists even go as far as making up their own words (“MMMBop,” anyone?). But which artists have really gone above and beyond when it comes to their catalog’s lexicon?
As Digg points out, word search tool Wordtips sought to answer that question by combing through the lyrics of Spotify’s “most listened-to singers” as well as the artists named on Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” list to determine which ones used the most unique words per 1,000 words. (They excluded songs on which the singers did not have writing credits.)
They pored through 17,667 songs performed by 156 artists and found that Patti Smith has the best vocabulary of them all, with 217 unique words per 1,000 words in her lyrics. (That shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone familiar with Smith’s work.) Joni Mitchell and Björk came in second and third place, with 199 and 197 unique words per 1,000 words respectively, while Jim Morrison and Billie Eilish round out the top five.
River Dave Burned Out
Fire destroys cabin of New Hampshire man forced out of woods
By KATHY McCORMACK
CANTERBURY, N.H. (AP) — For almost three decades, 81-year-old David Lidstone has lived in the woods of New Hampshire along the Merrimack River in a small cabin adorned with solar panels. He has grown his own food, cut his own firewood, and tended to his pets and chickens.
But his off-the-grid existence has been challenged in court by a property owner who says he’s been squatting for all those years. And to make Lidstone’s matters worse, his cabin was burned to the ground Wednesday afternoon in a blaze that is being investigated by local authorities.
Lidstone, or “River Dave” as he’s known by boaters and kayakers, was jailed July 15 on a civil contempt sanction. He was told he’d be released if he agreed to leave the cabin, but he has stayed put.
“You came with your guns, you arrested me, brought me in here, you’ve got all my possessions. You keep ’em,” Lidstone told a judge in a court appearance Wednesday morning. “I’ll sit here with your uniform on until I rot, sir.”
Playing To The Gallery Gone
How artists lost their courage
Keeping silent is the price of a successful career
BY JESS DE WAHLS
In 2013, Grayson Perry became the first crossdresser to give the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures. I loved them. Wearing his usual colourful attire, Perry explained why he titled his series “Playing to the gallery”, rather than “Sucking up to an academic elite”.
Art, he warned, is in its final throes, largely thanks to its obsession with cliches. He went on to describe a group of children who were asked what they thought artists did. One child responded: “They notice things.”
Much has changed in the art world, as well as the world at large, since those lectures were recorded. Perry’s crossdressing is no longer seen as unusual. It would not raise a single eyebrow amidst all the gender identities, “preferred pronouns” and codes of conduct that have rapidly taken hold of Britain’s institutions.
Masturbation Going Viral
Can masturbating REALLY boost your immune system and fight Covid?
by Vanessa Chalmers
WITH a deadly virus circulating the past year and a half, many people have been wondering how they can boost their immunity.
Masturbating is sometimes touted as a way to give the immune system a kickstart.
When Covid first started causing chaos in the Western world in March 2020, Google searches for “can masurbation boost immunity” went wild as people searched for ways to protect themselves.
Unfortunately, touching oneself will not be the difference between catching Covid and not, as there are many factors that influence a person’s risk of getting the disease.
But Dr Jennifer Landa, a specialist in hormone therapy, suggests that indulging in some self-love might be able to strengthen your body’s natural defence forces.
“Masturbation can produce the right environment for a strengthened immune system,” she said, according to Men’s Health.
Burn J.D. Burn
Woman with only known recording of J.D. Salinger’s voice to have tape burned
by Brendan Morrow
The potentially last chance to hear J.D. Salinger’s voice on tape is set to go up in smoke, according to the woman who recorded him.
Betty Eppes is in possession of the “only known recording” of author J.D. Salinger’s voice, but she is promising to never release it and has even updated her will to say it will “be placed, along with her body, in the crematorium,” Bloomberg reports.
Eppes was a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1980 when she managed to land an interview with the famously reclusive Catcher in the Rye author, who at that point hadn’t given one in nearly three decades. But as Bloomberg explains, Eppes described herself to him as a novelist, not a journalist, and she didn’t tell him she would be taping their conversation using a recorder she had hidden in her sleeve.
Nuggetopia
We Live in a Golden Age of Dinosaur Chicken Nuggets
The ‘fun nugget’ boomlet taught makers to use fewer spikes, leave room for breading; now, perfecting Baby Yoda’s ears
By Ellen Byron
If Mark Tolbert could redesign his company’s Tyrannosaurus rex chicken nugget, he would make the neck slightly slimmer and the head a bit bigger.
“The head slopes down a little too much,” says Mr. Tolbert, a senior manager of the innovation center at Perdue Farms in Salisbury, Md. “But put some ketchup on it and you can’t see it.”
Mr. Tolbert speaks wistfully of the Triceratops, which consistently ranks as one of the most popular dinosaurs but so far eludes nugget-makers. “We’d never be able to make a chicken nugget with three horns coming out of its head,” Mr. Tolbert says. “That’s a three-dimensional shape.”
Major food companies can see a dinosaur-nugget boomlet. Parents buy them to motivate picky youngsters to clean their plates. Young adults eat them to spark childhood nostalgia.
And rising sales during the pandemic have prompted companies to consider what other nugget shapes might catch on—beyond the Tyrannosaurus rex, Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus.
Jet Pack Is Back!
LAX ‘Jet Pack guy’ spotted AGAIN flying 15 miles from Los Angeles airport at 5,000 feet as FAA and FBI investigates
A MAN on a possible jet pack was spotted flying 15 miles from Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday – nearly a year since a spate of previous sightings sparked panic.
The man – who has been dubbed “jet pack guy” – was seen by a Boeing 747 pilot looking similar to Marvel action star Iron Man as he soared at 5,000ft.
“A Boeing 747 pilot reported seeing an object that might have resembled a jet pack 15 miles east of LAX at 5,000ft altitude,” the Federal Aviation Administration told CBS.
“Out of an abundance of caution, air traffic controllers alerted other pilots in the vicinity.”
Ron Popeil Gone
Infomercial king Ron Popeil dies at 86
Ronco’s Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, and Popeil’s late-night infomercials pitching it, helped inscribe the phrase “set it and forget it” into the American lexicon.
Ron Popeil, the inventor and infomercial icon whose kitchen and direct-to-consumer products generated billions of dollars in U.S. sales, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Popeil “lived his life to the fullest and passed in the loving arms of his family,” a statement from his spokesperson said.
No cause of death was provided.
Popeil first appeared on television in 1959 in an infomercial for the Chop-o-Matic, and his company, Ronco, founded by his father, eventually went on to produce products including Hair in a Can and Pocket Fisherman.
Bourdain and a Boner
Bourdain, My Camera, and Me
The photographer behind one of the most indelible images taken of the late chef remembers their friendship—and the way it evolved over time.
The bone kept sliding out of my hand. I had picked it up at Ottomanelli & Sons on Bleecker Street, overloaded and teetering at the counter, balancing my cameras, my tripod bag, while I explained to the guy what I needed.
“The biggest you’ve got,” I said.
He wrapped it up in paper and I was on my way.
The moment I walked out of the butcher shop I realized how slippery and wide the bone was. I could have splurged for a taxi, or asked for an assistant to meet me, but I was still in the business of proving myself to the world by trying to do it all myself. Besides, I was so close, not far at all to the photo studio in the West Village, and look, all I had to do was place a thumb under the masking tape on the butcher paper and I could hold it all together.
This day, I knew I had to be early. Tony Bourdain might have been known as a badass and truth speaker but he was always early. I was shooting for My Last Supper, my first solo book. Tony’s would be one of 50 images in a project meant to mark a moment in history. All around me, chefs were coming out of the kitchen and becoming hot-shit celebs. I would ask each of them the same six questions and then photograph them. I had imposed no rules upon myself for this project, no must-dos. This was a relief from executing clients’ and art directors’ visions. I only wanted to push myself creatively. My wish was that each photograph reflected who the chef was at the moment they stood in front of me.
Celebrating Sublime
‘Sublime’ at 25: Remembering Bradley Nowell and the SoCal band’s massive hit album
The album sold over 18 million copies worldwide and spawned hit singles including “What I Got,” “Santeria” and “Wrong Way.”
On July 30, 1996, Sublime released its self-titled mainstream debut on MCA Records.
Although the Long Beach band had already put out two independent albums prior to this one, “Sublime” was different. It went on to sell over 18 million copies worldwide, spawning several singles including “What I Got,” “Santeria,” “Wrong Way” and “Doin’ Time.” The album was popular on both radio and MTV, thanks to an eclectic sound that intertwined elements of punk, ska, reggae, funk and hip-hop, as well as samples from artists like Bob Marley, George Gershwin, The Specials and The Who.
“I vividly remember sitting with my co-workers at the radio station [KFMA 102.1/FM] in Tuscon, Arizona when we first heard ‘What I Got,’ and we were like, ‘Wow, this is going to be huge,’” former KROQ DJ Ted Stryker said during a recent phone interview. “What did we know? We were a bunch of young idiots, but it was obvious that this band was going to be something great. That band, that album cover, these songs … they are stronger than ever and they still, 25 years later, feel so fresh. It sounds like summer. It sounds like we should be going to the beach. I don’t know if at the time they knew how timeless these songs were going to be.”
For the band and those close to it, Sublime’s breakthrough success also came at a time of great tragedy. Two months before the album was released, 28-year-old vocalist-guitarist Bradley Nowell died of a drug overdose while on tour in San Francisco, leaving behind the band, his wife Troy Dendekker and their 11-month old son, Jakob.
The Maestro of San Francisco
The curious life of the Bay Area’s 84-year-old bodybuilding rhinestone cowboy artist
Stills of Maestro Gaxiola from the Criterion Collection. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection
In his 84 years, Gerald “The Maestro” Gaxiola has been an artist, a bodybuilder, a philosopher, a writer, a singer/songwriter, a leather worker, a salesman and an aircraft mechanic.
Above all, he is a Bay Area legend. Gaxiola has lived in Albany for decades, where he became a visible figure thanks to his handmade rhinestone cowboy outfits and “Maestro Day,” a short-lived celebration of art, life and cowboys.
Gaxiola has not held a day job for nearly five decades. He’s painted an estimated 11,000 works of art, but refuses to sell them. He lives, indubitably, the artist’s life.
Interior People
LouvreHub
The Louvre Is Cracking Down on Pornhub for Turning Classic Art Into Explicit Content
By Helen Holmes
Pornhub, one of the most highly visited adult websites in the United States, is reportedly facing legal action from the Louvre museum in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence after debuting a new interactive website and app, “Show Me the Nudes,” that features porn actors re-envisioning classic works of art as jumping off points for sexually explicit content. Pornography is famously difficult to describe, but it could certainly be argued that a clear continuum exists between unclothed Titian muses and 21st century graphic imagery. However, the aforementioned museums are initiating legal action against Pornhub for rights infringements and pushing for the website to take down the content.
“No one has granted authorizations for the operation or use of the art” a spokesperson for the Uffizi told The Daily Beast. “In Italy, the cultural heritage code provides that in order to use images of a museum, compressed works for commercial purposes, it is necessary to have the permission, which regulates the methods and sets the relative fee to be paid. All this obviously if the museum grants the authorization which, for example, would hardly have been issued in this case.” Some of the works featured on the Pornhub website from the Uffizi Gallery include Bacchus by Caravaggio, Spring by Botticelli and Angelica hides from Ruggiero by Giovanni Bilivert.
The Genius of Earl
It Still Stings: My Name Is Earl‘s Incomplete Journey Towards Forgiveness
By Kristen Reid
When My Name is Earl was canceled by NBC in 2009 after its fourth season, fans were heartbroken that our final glimpse into Earl Hickey’s life was a simple title card promising “to be continued…” After four years of watching Earl transform his life—and so many others’—it felt like a punch in the gut to see his story end this way.
Starring Jason Lee, My Name is Earl was a show about asking forgiveness and doing what’s right to make up for your past mistakes, no matter how long it’s been. Lee played Hickey, a two-bit criminal with no ambition, no drive, and no motivation to do anything except troll around the fictional Camden County in his El Camino with his equally burned-out brother, leaving a wake of destruction and pissed-off people in their path. But all of this changed when Earl had a particularly brutal wake-up call in the form of a little old lady running him over. Earl, never one to see a win in any way, shape, or form, had just scratched a lotto ticket revealing a $100,000 jackpot. What started as an innocent celebratory dance in the middle of the street led to an extended hospital stay, and while recovering, Earl discovered exactly how he was going to turn his life around.
Not A Good Year
US life expectancy in 2020 saw biggest drop since WWII
By MIKE STOBBE
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said Wednesday. The decrease for both Black Americans and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years.
The drop spelled out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths.
Black life expectancy has not fallen so much in one year since the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression. Health officials have not tracked Hispanic life expectancy for nearly as long, but the 2020 decline was the largest recorded one-year drop.
The abrupt fall is “basically catastrophic,” said Mark Hayward, a University of Texas sociology professor who studies changes in U.S. mortality.
Taco No
Taco Bell’s menu hit by nationwide shortages of ingredients
BY KATE GIBSON
The menu at Taco Bell may be a bit limited these days, with the quick-service restaurant chain warning customers that it might not be able to fulfill their current appetite hankerings.
In an apology offered in an orange banner atop its website, Taco Bell declared: “Sorry if we can’t feed your current crave. Due to national ingredient shortages and delivery delays, we may be out of some items.”
Those who frequent Taco Bell turned to social media to share their culinary disappointment.
“Taco Bell has a ‘district-wide shortage of hot sauce…times are tough,” tweeted one patron. “For anyone craving Taco Bell tonight, I’ll save you the drive, they don’t have chicken or beef, national shortage or something. I just ate black beans in a hard shell,” complained another in a separate tweet.
Vidiots Lives in Eagle Rock!
Beloved video store Vidiots is set to reopen. How Rian Johnson and others are helping
By MARK OLSEN
Vidiots, the long-running L.A. video store, is reopening in Eagle Rock with a restored movie theater. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
When Vidiots, the long-running video store in Santa Monica that had become a cultural cornerstone for the city, closed in 2017, it seemed the end of an era.
Now, on a corner in northeast Los Angeles, Vidiots is on the verge of a new beginning.
Construction is underway at the Eagle Theatre in Eagle Rock for it to become a combination 250-seat movie theater and video store, home to Vidiots’ collection of more than 50,000 titles on DVD, Blu-ray and VHS along with new programming. The project is expected to be completed and the new Vidiots is anticipated to open its doors in spring 2022.
“Even before the pandemic and lockdowns, I think that it is abundantly clear that the need for human interaction around the arts and particularly around film is really paramount to our culture and our sense of health and well-being,” said Maggie Mackay, executive director of the nonprofit Vidiots Foundation.
‘Big Ass Steamroller’ Cool
Police Destroy 1,069 Bitcoin Miners With Big Ass Steamroller In Malaysia
Malaysian authorities did not mess around when they broke up a cryptocurrency mining farm and charged the operators with stealing electricity.
As Bitcoin’s price surged this spring to a new all-time high, the spotlight shining on its controversial mining process only got brighter. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many other cryptocurrencies use an energy-intensive “proof-of-work” process that makes computers on its decentralized network compete to solve complex mathematical equations to verify a batch of transactions; this makes the network less susceptible to certain attacks, and earns miners crypto rewards.
Given the competitive element in the quest for valuable cryptocurrency, powerful mining rigs—essentially, PCs purpose-built to maximize mining rewards—are the preferred tool of serious crypto miners. They are expensive, and persistent demand and manufacturing delays can mean months-long waits for rigs to be delivered. This week, police in Malaysia crushed 1,069 of them with a steamroller.
Eels
It’s coming…
MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.
A 1972 MIT study predicted that rapid economic growth would lead to societal collapse in the mid 21st century. A new paper shows we’re unfortunately right on schedule.
By Nafeez Ahmed
A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.
As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic ‘normal.’
In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.
The controversial MIT analysis generated heated debate, and was widely derided at the time by pundits who misrepresented its findings and methods. But the analysis has now received stunning vindication from a study written by a senior director at professional services giant KPMG, one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms as measured by global revenue.
Casino Twitch
Twitch Streamers Rake in Millions With a Shady Crypto Gambling Boom
The company says it is “closely monitoring gambling content,” but legal experts told WIRED that some promotions may be illegal.
One attorney who specializes in online gambling law says he has recently been fielding lots of questions from US-based Twitch streamers about crypto gambling sites. ILLUSTRATION: SAM WHITNEY; GETTY IMAGES
TYLER NIKNAM WAS getting out of Texas. Niknam, 30, is a top streamer on Twitch, where he’s better known as Trainwrecks to his 1.5 million followers. For hours on end, Niknam was hitting the slots on Stake.com, an online cryptocurrency casino and his most prominent Twitch sponsor, to live audiences of 25,000. He’d been winning big, sometimes as much as $400,000 in crypto in one fell swoop, and he never seemed to go broke. The problem? It wasn’t allowed.
If you visit Stake on a US-based browser, a message will quickly pop up on the site: “Due to our gaming license, we cannot accept players from the United States.” Though Stake doesn’t possess a gambling license in any state, Niknam and other US gamblers easily circumvent this by using VPNs. Promoting gambling sites that cannot operate in the US and making money by referring US residents to them may constitute promoting illegal gambling, legal experts told WIRED.
“Canada needs to happen asap,” Niknam wrote in a private Discord DM to Felix “xQc” Lengyel, 25, Twitch’s number two streamer. Lengyel briefly streamed slots but stopped in June. “You cannot show you’re on Stake at all.” A few days later, Niknam arrived in Canada, where he settled into a routine—gambling in a mostly empty apartment, sometimes more than a dozen hours a day. (Niknam and Lengyel did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)