“Okay, Mr. Heart. You’re getting cut up and put with the quinoa.”

-Esther, chopping an artichoke

(Esther, after I told her I was making this post: “oh god, we’re so SWPL. We’re so, so SWPL”)

He explains that the “man in the sun is called the Core (voiced by William Shatner)” and spins a story how he is good and that his children “photons” are sent out to chase away the darkness, and bring life, warmth, and knowledge to Earth. He adds that the only being who does not like the Core is a creature called the “Void” (voiced by Mark Hamill) who is an ancient, malevolent, being who existed before the Big Bang, and who sits at the edge of the solar system, scheming to stop the Core.

With time, some employees grew less afraid of him and devised ways to manage him, as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and an even more limited attention span. Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Balwani off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than 500 words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Balwani simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails. Another strategy was to convene a biweekly meeting of his team and invite Balwani to attend. He might come to the first few, but he would eventually lose interest or forget to show up.

etirabys:

fuck-planets:

petefoxshend:

“Big Pharma” okay are we talking about how privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of medicine or are you talking about how you think chemicals in the water are making the frogs gay

look I like dunking on Alex Jones as much as the next guy, but it really should be more common knowledge that Dr. Tyrone B. Hayes at UC-Berkeley published papers in both PNAS and Nature in 2002 documenting the hermaphrodization of frogs due to exposure to atrazine, a widely used herbicide. The maker of atrazine spent the next decade trying to discredit him and ruin his career.

…I almost could not finish the New Yorker article because it was too upsetting

He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of residents finish high school. Until sixth grade, when he was accepted into a program for the gifted, in a different neighborhood, he had never had a conversation with a white person his age. He and his friends used to tell one another how “white people do this, and white people do that,” pretending that they knew. After he switched schools and took advanced courses, the black kids made fun of him, saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s white.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.”

this is some evil shit

A few days ago I finished reading Lanark by Alasdair Gray.  It’s a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time, since people kept recommending it to me, and I really like another book by the same author (Poor Things)

It was … well, it was really good, in a lot of different ways: structured in a cool and unique way, darkly and drily funny, emotionally involving (sometimes painfully so), often bizarre and dreamlike to the point of being profoundly unpredictable and yet without descending into mere randomness.

But it’s put me in this odd conflicted position, because it was also one of the most distinctively depressed novels I’ve ever read – not as in “dark” or “depressing” (although it is those things), but as in “expresses the worldview of (a certain kind of) depression, and evokes the characteristic thought patterns of (that kind of) depression.”

I’ve never been clinically depressed per se, but I’ve had bad periods that I identify as depressive because they share features with full-blown depression, just with less persistence and/or intensity.  There are some features of my bad periods that overlap with things I’ve heard from some friends and writers with depression, and it’s those features I see in Lanark – i.e., I don’t think all depression has all of those features, but there’s a definite thing there.

I have to leave the house pretty soon, so I may come back later and elaborate on this brief description, but like … there will be a voice, or a character, in my head.  Not a distinct persisting entity, more of a gestalt that will attach itself one day to some cynical blogger I’m reading, and then the next day will take the form of some vague nonspecific person I’m talking to in my internal monologue, etc.  The main characteristics of this voice are that it is

(1) very cynical and very critical of everything, with extremely high standards for all people / things, standards that are an apparently seamless mixture of ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic

(2) very impressive, in a way that makes me feel like it has the “right” to make each criticism it makes; when the voice makes intellectual criticisms it always seems frighteningly smart, when it makes aesthetic criticisms it seems to have impeccably refined taste, and so on

(3) specifically, it feels so perceptive and so synoptic in its understanding of things that its “insights” feel inescapable; it has already prepared for any objection I might make to it, and there is a feeling that it is “playing any game I play at a higher level,” that it thinks what I would think if I were more honest and perceptive, that it is a sort of mentor figure I would do well to learn from

And in short, Lanark feels like a novel written by that voice.  And it’s very good – of course!  The voice is a genius!  But I would feel strange recommending it, or even praising it at all without including this caveat that it is written by a devil that squats on my shoulders and the shoulders of many others (and maybe the shoulders of Alasdair Gray? does he hear the voice in all its particulars, or am I just reading my own experiences into his book?).