Spring Fever

★★★ White cumulus, all plump curves, shone above the West Side. The four-year-old’s hoodie had been mislaid in the changing weather and all that could be found was a hand-me-down windbreaker. Outside was just mild enough for him to refuse to wear it. When the LIRR surfaced in Queens, the clouds had come together in almost unbroken gray and white, the gaps between them so narrow they could only be seen near overhead. Light fell here and there on the shadowed city. Young women in last night’s bare-legged outfits groaned about the evening just concluded. Sudden red—a blaze of azalea?—went by in someone’s front yard. At the end of lunch, a few umbrellas were out on the streets of Flushing. Jets came in low, round and heavy, booming under the now-solid ceiling. Up on the train platform it was so cold the four-year-old gave up and accepted the windbreaker.  A man and two children scurried along the eastbound side, cringing in shorts and sweatshirts. Sun fell briefly onto the return train. More sun came down on the West 60s, but for the moment only there. By late afternoon the clouds had broken again, though, and the wind was shaking the bright leaves of the shrubbery in the rooftop planters across the avenue. A strange formless cloud hovered in the west, a dark but somehow luminous blur. The blur then revealed itself to be rain, glittering and blowing in the open window through the clear returning light. It passed and the west was fully clear, with the tiny silent speck of an airplane crossing it.

Over the weekend, the New York Times raised concerns over “dark patterns”: web interfaces carefully crafted to manipulate users. For example, there’s the “roach motel,” named after the brand of insect trap that provides a seamless sign-up, but a difficult cancellation process. More common, though, are the websites that either hide the option to unsubscribe from their newsletters or just obfuscate the option to opt-out.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience consultant, coined the term in 2010 and began logging various types on darkpatterns.org. Ryainair, Audible, and Skype have all been featured. Brignull said his goal was to draw attention to the issue and shame the websites who use them.

Let the Walk of Atonement begin:

“Many of us are sensitive to the case put forward by countries that have seen their treasures dispersed around the globe; but while playing Uncharted or Tomb Raider, we’ll spend hours of our free time engaged in the process of removing valuable cultural artefacts from their native homes. We’ll happily lose ourselves in the wonderful escapism – the exotic locations, the intriguing mythologies – with little thought as to what it means to inhabit these characters, and to be made complicit in their actions.”
—It really makes you think.#

Is it a coincidence that insect is an anagram of incest? Yes, but it’s a good one. As Nick Davies explained to me, high levels of breeding between siblings is not unusual in insect societies, especially haplodiploid ones (we’ll get to that). “It’s not just an anagram,” he told me, “It’s also a near-homophone.” This has led to a lot of confusion at parties, because Davies is a researcher in social evolution. Insect incest is kind of his thing.

In Davies’s field, they don’t call sex between siblings incest, they call it “sib-mating.” They use a different word because humans and insects are fundamentally different. An ant mating with its sibling means something for ant society in structural terms; a person sleeping with their sister means something totally different, because humans code behavior in cultural terms. Culture, Davies thinks, is more like a network of shareable information and thought. Societies are just “any semi-permanent aggregations of individuals through which at least some cooperation is enabled.”

I’m drawn to Davies’s research for the generosity of its approach: the most encompassing history of life on earth and minutely subtle community dynamics of wasps are part of the same object of study. Davies is a DPhil* candidate in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, although his day-to-day research takes place in the Department of Zoology. He’s handing in his thesis soon. It’s called ‘Cooperation and Conflict Across the Major Transitions,’ which he admits is very general: “It’s largely a bullshit title that I made up when I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“It is a frustrating practice, because one sentence will come out beautifully, and the next one will just be so difficult, and you might end up with something you’re not really happy with, but you can’t come up with anything better. A lot of people agree that translation is really about compromise; you can’t get the sense exactly unless you sacrifice the sound, and vice versa. The constraints you work with are challenging and exciting, but the other side of that is you may not come out with very good answers.”
—You might enjoy this interview on translation with the amazing Lydia Davis. If you are interested in another view on the difficulties of translation Tim Parks recently did a terrific series on the subject at the NYRB wesbite.#

Can we please decide on who is a millennial? @sarahlyall says 21 – 39. Most others say 16 – 34. Which is it? https://t.co/ZeCIQOGMEK

— Vivian Schiller (@vivian) May 16, 2016

Given that generational labels are at best approximate and especially mutable around the edges it is of course impossible to fix a time frame on what age range defines millennials—let’s not even get into the tricky subject of who exactly we are speaking of when we use the word—but I will propose a rough guide to the characteristics common to the generations in order to better help you establish your place in our advertising-friendly cosmology.

Maybe the future of media is stories about being on a break from Slack.#

“[CBS chief research officer David Poltrack said] two-thirds of viewers watch with a second screen either in their hands or on their lap. Yet those screens can be so distracting that their users forget to fast-forward past the ads in recorded shows. It turns out viewers are overwhelmingly absorbing the messages coming from the TV even as they stare at the other devices, Mr. Poltrack said.”
—If you are someone who believes that 90% of the work our professional classes do is nonsense; busy-work; work that is done for the sake of justifying a salary; work that is conducted for the perceived esteem it grants its performers; work that is rationalized as vital or important because being forced to confront the reality of its insignificance—or, more damningly, the quantifiable damage it causes to the mental and physical health of the members of society who are its victims—would make it impossible for those whose identity is wrapped up in it to face themselves in the mirror each morning; or basically a combination of misdirection, wishful thinking or appeals to faith in magic, you will never run short of material to bolster your belief.

I was walking across Henry Street last night a little after seven and there was a sunshower happening on the west side of the street. It was pretty remarkable; I could see it sprinkling down, there across the road, but the only time I actually felt it was when the wind gusts that swirled around the city yesterday blew it over to my side of the block. I didn’t even mind because I had a coat on, since it was blustery and cold outside. So there I was, in the middle of May, the sun still shining into the evening and the weather characteristics of three different seasons happening at the same time, and I thought to myself, wow, we’re pretty fucked, huh? Anyway, I know nothing about this act or the music but there is something adorable about this song that might help you forget everything else for a few minutes. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Elation floated on the warm morning air. Even the dull bike-share rack and the rim of a trash can were sending off flares of light. The heat and light sunk into the skin. Everything had a faint silvery glaze on it. Members of a religious sect in matching yellow shirts wandered the streets. The buildings on Fifth Avenue stood stolidly aglow, every joint and detail sharply cut, while below passed a stream of people striding free. The moon just off the blue zenith curved one way and drifting cirrus curved the other. The sun shot the gap between buildings so deftly it seemed as if it must have been reflecting off something. All the windows were open, and the night was loud.