We Were Visited by Whales Many Times

It was the fall of 1989, 31 years ago. I was in my first semester of college, the night before my first big exam in a History of Western Civilization class. I needed to study. And I made a momentous decision.

On my way home I swung by the video store to rent a most excellent film that took a deep dive into history. It featured two protagonists facing their own academic issues who were presented with a magical device that allowed them to not only travel into previous times, but also to bring prominent historical figures along for their class presentation, which they aced. Those two brave adventurers were named Bill & Ted. Exhausted from watching their exploits, I headed to bed to rest up and properly digest what I had learned from them.

The next day, I aced the exam.

Why are flying pigs always depicted as small, round, cute little fur balls with tiny, feathered angel wings and never as huge, tusked, demonic wild boars with giant, scaly dragon wings?

"Mom, Dad, can you get us a snack?"

"Hmm. I don't know. You were supposed to be helping us clean, but you've just been playing while we've been working hard. . . . How about this: to thank us for washing, folding, and putting away all your laundry you make us a snack."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Okay, c'mon! . . . Okay it's almost ready."

"What are we getting?"

"Gummy salad!"

Do not drop your cigarette butts on the ground. The rabbits come out at night to smoke them. And we are trying to get them to quit.

Try to befriend the elderly when they are vandalizing. Shave your tongue when riding the subway. Be more like a handicapped person. Eat raw meat when given the opportunity. Don't envy a girlfriend. Envy a star. Lean to the right and straighten up your intestines. Avoid sugars before breakfast. Bend over with your testicles straight at work. Shave your elbows to get attention. Compare yourself with a star. Don't try to climb on the back of a psycho if you randomly run into one on the street. Don't be someone who has a meaningful life. Be an enemy of the state. Pretend you're someone else. Stand up straight with your hands on your scrotum after ingesting hard drugs. MAKE STUFF UP OR AT LEAST BE POLITE. Be inquisitive. Be sincere. Walk around and straighten up you nose. Don't ally yourself with a girlfriend. Be proud of your feet. Pet teenagers while they are at work. Support people with a job. Throw stuff at people who are alienating. Treat yourself like a dog. Strive for what's good, not what's expensive. Be polite and talk to other people like they're children. Ridicule individuals who are weird. Bow your head like a ballerina. Stick a finger at the back of your throat. Get distracted by an enemy. Stay hydrated. Eat dinner behind the bushes. Don't fall in love with a stranger. Fall in love with your best friends. Whip yourself where nobody can see you. Kiss someone's ass, or at least don't blabber. Try to be a mental patient, not a king. Sway forwards with your hands on your body. Wear diapers when meeting your in-laws. Invent your own truth. Ridicule people who are weird. Desire what's difficult, not what's ridiculous. Fool people. Disturb children while they're going through your trash. Compare your own level of success to that of a mental patient. Reveal your hips. Desire what is normal not what is ridiculous.

Make 2020 your year.

Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful

Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

“The pandemic has demonstrated both what we can do with surge capacity and the limits of surge capacity,” says Masten. When it’s depleted, it has to be renewed. But what happens when you struggle to renew it because the emergency phase has now become chronic? . . . 

That means reckoning with what’s called ambiguous loss: any loss that’s unclear and lacks a resolution. It can be physical, such as a missing person or the loss of a limb or organ, or psychological, such as a family member with dementia or a serious addiction.

“In this case, it is a loss of a way of life, of the ability to meet up with your friends and extended family,” Boss says. “It is perhaps a loss of trust in our government. It’s the loss of our freedom to move about in our daily life as we used to.” It’s also the loss of high-quality education, or the overall educational experience we’re used to, given school closures, modified openings and virtual schooling. It’s the loss of rituals, such weddings, graduations, and funerals, and even lesser “rituals,” such as going to gym.

Everything Is Unprecedented. Welcome To Your Hotter Earth

The upshot of climate change is that everyone alive is destined to experience unprecedented disasters. The most powerful hurricanes, the most intense wildfires, the most prolonged heat waves and the most frequent outbreaks of new diseases are all in our future. Records will be broken, again and again.

But the predicted destruction is still shocking when it unfolds all at the same time.

This week, Americans are living through concurrent disasters. In California, more than 200,000 people were under evacuation orders due to wildfires, and millions are breathing smoky air. On the Gulf Coast, people weathered a tropical storm at the beginning of the week. Two days later, about half a million were ordered to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Laura. We're six months into a global pandemic, and the Earth is on track to have one of its hottest years on record.

Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.

"There is not a single ending that is good," he says. "There's not going to be a happy ending to this movie."

Interracial Couple’s Home Receives Higher Appraisal After Removing All Signs of Blackness From the House—Including the Wife

They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. . . . 

The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage.

“We took down all pictures of African-American greats that we display to inspire our son,” Abena wrote in a July Facebook post. “Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison came down from the bookshelves; Shakespeare went up. My son and I took a convenient shopping trip during the appraisal, leaving my white male husband to show the appraiser around, alone.” . . . 

With Alex left home alone to guide the new appraiser through the walk-through of the couple’s house, the value of their home was put at $465,000.

The Conscience of Silicon Valley

Lanier is used to being consulted as an oracle, though not under our present circumstances. In fact, he said, he'd hardly seen anyone in person for months, prior to this. “It just feels ridiculous,” he said, gesturing at the two of us, sweating in the sun, gazing at each other over our masks. But he warmed up quickly. Lanier's been lecturing on one topic or another for decades, and his arguments have gradually become less abstract and more pointed as time has gone on and certain platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, and YouTube, have annexed more and more of our lives. His thoughts on this subject have been influential enough that they may sound familiar to you by now: That anytime you are provided with a service, like Facebook, for free, you are in fact the product being sold. That social media companies are basically giant behavior-modification systems that use algorithms to relentlessly increase “engagement,” largely by evoking bad feelings in the people who use them. That these companies in turn sell the ability to modify your behavior to “advertisers,” who sometimes come in the old form of people who want to persuade you to buy soap but who now just as often come in the form of malevolent actors who want to use their influence over you to, say, depress voter turnout or radicalize white supremacists. That in exchange for likes and retweets and public photos of your kids, you are basically signing up to be a data serf for companies that can make money only by addicting and then manipulating you. That because of all this, and for the good of society, you should do everything in your power to quit.

When he first advanced these ideas, they seemed controversial, far-fetched, even bizarre. But the past two years in America have brought more and more critics and even just regular citizens who haven't even heard of Jaron Lanier around to his way of thinking. For instance, I said to him in his driveway, since the pandemic had begun, many people I knew seemed to be hitting a wall with Twitter in particular, myself included—that most days it felt like attaching my mouth to an exhaust pipe and then inhaling. That by 5 p.m. on any given day…I did not feel good.

He diagnosed me right away. “Well, so this is a delicate topic, and it's often been difficult to talk about, but there's some kinds of people who particularly get Twitter addictions and they're often journalists—”

I laughed sadly. “And people who are addicted to Twitter are like all addicts—on the one hand miserable, and on the other hand very defensive about it and unwilling to blame Twitter.” (Shortly after this conversation, I quit Twitter for about three weeks. It was soothing. Actually, it was life-changing. As of this writing, for reasons I don't understand—but also do, all too well, because of Lanier—I'm back on the platform. Please kill me.)

I asked him: Had he noticed a change in his own relationship to technology since the pandemic started? He said that he had. “I think people are spending more time in a self-directed way by connecting with others on video chat or things like that than they are passively receiving a feed,” he said. “And so I actually think things have gotten a little better.” The fact that people were using computers not to pass time in algorithm-driven loops but to talk to one another, and then perhaps go outside, was a source of optimism for him. So, he said, were the protests then sweeping the country in response to the death of George Floyd.