A miscellany

On a Saturday in 1953, just a few minutes after midnight, Sheriff Lummie and his officers entered an African American–owned café in the nearby town of Alberta, to enforce a law that no music be played on Sundays. The place was bustling, and when Lummie and his deputies stormed in, most people fled or took cover. But not the owner’s wife, Della McDuffie; she was paralyzed and used a wheelchair. Multiple witnesses reported that Lummie ordered her to get up and go to bed, and when she couldn’t, he beat her with a rubber hose. Despite her husband, William McDuffie’s, frantic care and the arrival of a doctor, she was dead within an hour. William would later recall seeing a trickle of blood running out of his wife’s ear and down her face.

An in-depth look at Alabama during the sixties. “Lummie Jenkins” was a name I’d never heard before. This was not that long ago.

Spiders are more complicated than you might expect.

When I asked Ms. Dyer if she could tell me which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market, her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.”

I was taken aback. “But you know what it is?”

“Oh, God, yes,” she said, and laughed. “And you would never guess it. Let’s just leave it at that.” I asked if she could tell me why she couldn’t tell me. “Because they don’t want anyone to know that it’s glitter.”

“If I looked at it, I wouldn’t know it was glitter?”

“No, not really.”

“Would I be able to see the glitter?”

“Oh, you’d be able to see something. But it’s — yeah, I can’t.”

I asked if she would tell me off the record. She would not. I asked if she would tell me off the record after this piece was published. She would not. I told her I couldn’t die without knowing. She guided me to the automotive grade pigments.

Now I’m worried I’ll die without knowing which industry uses the most glitter.

All of the stories in this episode of the Moth podcast were excellent, but I particularly enjoyed this tale from Tim FitzHigham. He decided to sail the English channel in a bathtub – and got backing from the Royal Navy.

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

This is an article that is kind of about a programme aimed at reducing newborn deaths, but also has a lot of great behavioural insights. 

This country is failing, in action and in imagination, over and over again already. Our public conversation misses the fundamental point. The warnings and the rebuttals to the warnings have revolved around the drastic, epochal historical questions: Is this what it was like with the Nazis? Are we becoming the Third Reich? Is that where we’re headed?

What that line of debate overlooks is that going only halfway Nazi would be more than bad enough. Going a quarter of the way Nazi would be. What’s dangerous about authoritarian demagoguery, or ethno-nationalism with fascist overtones, or whatever you might call this brutish and corrupt government, isn’t merely teleological—that eventually, it could arrive at the most terrible endpoint, where the president grows a tiny mustache and they change the flag and the people who go into the camps are not just bureaucratic nonpersons but actually dead. The danger is also that right now, already, what’s happening is degrading and violent and evil. And it is getting worse.

It’s completely coincidental that I’m sharing another Tom Scocca column so hot on the heels of the last one. This is a thoughtful, measured post about current US policy.

A few years ago, I interviewed Primal Scream and received a crash course in full-blown musical obsession. It culminated in a moment where frontman Bobby Gillespie took a deep gulp of air and hurtled through the tracklisting of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers LP, pointing out every influence, lyrical steal, arrangement and piece of trivia that went with it, while I sat there trying to find space in my brain to take it all in.

I mention this because food author Niki Segnit seems to be Gillespie’s culinary equivalent. Get her started on the humble flatbread and she will soon start explaining the way it links up with other breads – the Sri Lankan pol roti, say, or Irish soda bread – and before you know it, we are off. Did you know that Irish soda bread is basically the same thing as a scone, and also the cobbler topping of a pie or a stew? And that a few tweaks somewhere along the way can turn this into pizza dough? Or that pizza dough cooked in a slightly different way will make bagels? And actually, if you change the flour for that original flatbread, then you can make Japanese buckwheat noodles – just boil them in green tea and serve with sesame seeds and soy.

By this point, Segnit will have gathered so much speed that she can’t stop: she will tumble through matzo crackers and oatcakes and croissants, explaining how each one links to the other on what she calls the “bread continuum”, until your brain will feel like it has absorbed its annual intake of food knowledge in the space of five minutes.

I want to read this cookbook.

This is a wonderful first-person account of one man’s journey from carjacking a stranger at 16 to becoming a lawyer at 36. Don’t expect a feel-good story, though, because you’re not going to get one. “Uphill battle” doesn’t begin to describe it. 

This paragraph isn’t representative of the article – it’s far more first-person – but it was the one that most surprised me:

When I despaired, I thought about Benjamin Franklin Rayborn. J. Edgar Hoover, the former director of the F.B.I., said that Rayborn was “the most notorious bank robber since World War II.” Upon his arrest, his local paper… called Rayborn “the trigger-happy fellow with the cold, blue eyes.” Before Rayborn turned 30, he had been sentenced to life in Kentucky for a string of bank robberies; sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for being caught in a hotel room full of machine guns; led a riot against prison conditions in Kentucky; and been transferred to Alcatraz, then one of the most violent prisons in America, as punishment for his role in the riot. But by 1956, Rayborn had fashioned himself into a legal mind astute enough to successfully challenge several federal convictions and get 10 years knocked off his federal prison sentence. His next legal feat was more astonishing. Once he seemed primed for an early release, Kentucky sought to have him extradited back to state prison to serve the rest of his life sentence. Rayborn again filed suit, arguing that Kentucky, by voluntarily transferring him to Alcatraz, had relinquished any jurisdictional claims it had to his body. A judge agreed. Finally free, Rayborn, according to an acquaintance, sought a job as an accountant at General Electric. After achieving a perfect score on an exam given by the company, he was asked where he had studied accounting. Alcatraz, he told them. That disqualified him. He went on to rob another bank and returned to federal prison.

You brought up this other question of why is it so important for people to leave [Facebook and other social media], and the thing I want to say is that, because of addiction and because of network effects, I realize that only a small minority of people can do it, and I don’t know how many I have influenced to get off of there. I don’t have a means of measuring that. But here’s what I would say: there have been times before, recently and even in America, when society had to confront mass addiction that had a commercial component.

I’m thinking of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. And I’m thinking of the public smoking of cigarettes. In both of those cases, there were industries that relied on mass addiction, but somehow or other, a rational conversation gradually created a change. In neither case was the substance totally outlawed, but its role in society was vastly changed. And I just want to point out that this process of having a rational conversation about how things can change is only possible when at least somebody isn’t addicted. If the MADD Mothers were themselves alcoholics, it would have been harder for them to organize. A space for conversation where some people aren’t addicted facilitates thinking different thoughts and being able to envision different outcomes. And what I do believe is that we can get at least enough people to quit this stuff to create such a space.

There’s a lot of interesting ground covered in this chat with Jaron Lanier. It definitely made me want to read his book. There’s a great part about how social media’s enabled social justice campaigns (like Black Lives Matter or #metoo), but the same qualities that made them viral makes them vulnerable to counter-movements.