*This article is featured in [Gossamer Volume Seven: Touch](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch). Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

It’s a little known fact that a male octopus’s eighth leg is actually its penis. The very name—derived from the Greek word *októpus*, meaning “eight foot”—has led us down the garden path. I’ve lived my whole life believing an octagon has eight sides, my 83-year-old nanna is an octogenarian, and *an octopus has eight goddamn legs*—it’s basic linguistics.

But now, at the auspicious age of 33, I have to accept that I’ve been suckered. There’s nothing “octo” about the male octopus. They have seven tentacles and a specialized limb for transferring sperm. In other words, the eighth leg is a penis.

To put that in context, the name “octopus” is the species equivalent of referring to a human male as a triped. I simply refuse.

This deceptive appendage, called a hectocotylus, was first recorded by Aristotle around the year 347 BC in one of the earliest surviving scientific studies. The ancient Greek philosopher left Plato’s Academy following his mentor’s death, swapping the city of Athens for the island of Lesbos where he spent two years observing the marine life of a lagoon at the island’s center.

It was here that Aristotle, father of Western logic and apparent octopus voyeur, first surmised the use of the octopus’s eighth leg in the mysterious act of cephalopod sex. He was, of course, widely disbelieved. It wasn’t until 1827, some 2000-odd years later, that Aristotle was proven correct.

It’s not hard to see why it took so long for biologists to catch up. The hectocotylus looks and acts like a leg on a regular day. It can bend, it can stretch, it can exert suction. But at the sight of a slinky lady octopus, the hectocotylus can, in some species, stretch to twice its
regular size. If we’re talking ratio to body length, it’s a crime against octopus everywhere that we hold the donkey as the gold standard of gonopodia.

But alas, we must collect our minds from the gutter. As one of the most antisocial creatures on earth, size for the octopus is about survival. While sex for humans certainly has its own set of challenges, sex for the octopus comes with a very real threat of cannibalization.

The fear of being consumed—literally, not metaphorically—by the object of its affection is so great that some species of cephalopod have evolved a mating ritual so stealthy that they can avoid touching their partner at all.

The male argonaut octopus, for example, is so averse to physical intimacy that he instead tears off his penis-leg, sperm clenched tightly in his tentacled fist, and gives it to the object of his affection like some kind of macabre Valentine’s gift. In other words, an argonaut octopus would rather wrench off its own penis than touch another living creature. Is that not the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder—are these octopuses desperately lonely? Studies have long proven they have extraordinary minds, but it appears that evolution has dealt them a cruel hand: intelligence and vulnerability in equal measure.

Have their exposed, fleshy bodies made them so terrified of the world around them that they can’t, even for a fleeting second, indulge in the tender touch of their own kind? Do their suckered limbs and bulbous bodies long to be wrapped in the tentacles of another?

Unfortunately, we may never know the answer. More than two millennia after Aristotle’s observations in the lagoons of Lesbos, we still have so much to learn about this wildly intelligent, yet fiercely private creature.

For now, I choose an alternative narrative. One where octopuses are the ultimate romantics, sacrificing life, limb, and loneliness in the quest for love and lineage. In my 33 years of dating, I’ve yet to receive a Valentine’s gift as memorable.

[[1]]

V7 High Minded: Tentacles 2

High Minded: Tentacles

*This article originally appeared in [Volume Four: the Inside issue](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-four-inside). Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

Symmetrical stacks of shimmering, rectangular boxes. Holographic labels promising total, complete, maximum, sparkling, advanced, and optic whitening and cavity protection. This is the toothpaste aisle at the supermarket, a candy store of personal hygiene.

Scanning the rows upon rows of boxes puts me into a trance. It’s as satisfying as biting into a frosty ice cream bar. Maybe I’m just a sucker for good marketing. I think my favorite is Crest Complete Whitening Plus Scope, a double helix of mint mouthwash splitting the blue and green box down the middle.

When I was a kid, my mom bought Aquafresh, red and blue stripes of gel sandwiching one of white paste emblazoned across the front like a patriotic banner. That’s the box that probably began my obsession: the supernova graphic behind the friendly Aquafresh label promised to make the monotony of tooth brushing “EXTREME,” while clouds of soft, foaming bubbles scrubbing away at my teeth would burst into “ACTION.” Toothpaste is among life’s most banal necessities, and yet the packaging is pure magic: stare at the boxes for long enough and the goopy paste inside the soft, fat tube becomes a faded memory. Now it’s glamorous, now it’s bursting with freshness.

The packaging didn’t always look this way. In the early 1900s, it was called “dental powder” and came in squat metal tins decorated with ornate labels that pledged to “cleanse” your teeth, to make them “beautiful.” But even then, the labels conveyed a sense of urgency, reminding us to be hypervigilant over the health of the bones protruding from our faces, like tiny tombstones. In the 1950s, “dental powder” turned to “dental cream,” accompanied by “Colgate” printed in *TRON*-like letters on a solid red background. But the product itself remained in flat, one-dimensional boxes well into the eighties: Crest packages were dull, metallic grey, and the futuristic Colgate font of the fifties had been replaced by a more rounded, friendly mark—hardly the slanted, aggressive lettering we see now.

Today, the graphics glitter, and though the same primary colors are deployed across almost every brand (red, blue, white, and sometimes green), they are now more vivid, more blindingly cheerful, like a grin pulled too tight across an anxious mouth. Toothpaste advertising is both scary and reassuring, leaping off the shelf to scream—CLEANS! GUARDS!—at you while declaring that under its care you will be disease-free, you will achieve purity. Every brand—the Sensodynes, Aims, and Arm & Hammers, too—evoke feelings of cleanliness, vowing to repair (rejuvenate, strengthen, restore) what we didn’t even realize had been damaged. Almost every box across every brand features the word “fresh” or a graphic that resembles an exploding firework.

Sometimes there’s an extra flourish to make the toothpaste look professional. Take the Colgate Total box, another favorite: a white pinstripe background breaks up the red block reserved for the logo, and to the right, a shimmery multicolored oval surrounds “Total,” a little gold clock floating behind it. This one protects not just your teeth, but your cheeks and gums too, a police officer for your whole mouth.

Assurances of a clean mouth are one thing, but there’s more at work here: toothpaste packaging creates a deeply satisfying pattern of order. It’s symmetry. It’s organization. There is a simple geometry to the boxes—sharp rectangles, fluid ovals, and neat text bordered by a string of bubbles or a gold stripe. Maybe I have no control over the trajectory of my life. It’s possible that only fate or angels can decide what path I take. But toothpaste offers the illusion of agency. Here is my stubborn message to the universe: I will bring structure and order into my home with this juicy tube of toothpaste. I will scrub my teeth until they sparkle.

This is the strange spell cast by the toothpaste box. Toothpaste packaging isn’t selling toothpaste. It’s selling one of the most appealing and delusional ideas in the world: that what we buy can bring our troubled human brains any kind of peace. That perhaps we are all just one toothpaste tube away from joy.

[[1]]

gossamer philotheus nisch inside toothpaste 2019 copy

High Minded: White Lies

*This article is featured in Gossamer Volume Seven—the Touch issue— subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

“Wink” belongs to that particular category of words destined to lose their meaning once repeated. Say it twice and it’s no longer a verb but an absurd salad of hard consonants—the sort of syntax drummed up for the sake of a children’s book. It reads like a sound: onomatopoeia for the gesture itself. The actual practice is no less bizarre. Consider your use cases: it’s a mode of ocular flirting; a non-verbal alternative to “I’m kidding” or “I’m lying;” a disconcertingly tender, silent greeting. It can be romantic, sinister, snide, or playful—and a worthy accompaniment to “U up?”

The beloved half-blink is also an undeniable cousin to the twitch. When executed poorly, it appears less like a mode of silent communication and more like a brain malfunction. But miraculously enough, the wink maintains its cultural allure.

Speaking frankly, I am a subpar winker. Shutting one eye seems to require nearly all of my facial muscles—a spasm that appears more cartoonish than sly. Moreover, it would seem that I am left-eyed, in as much as my right winks translate more accurately as sour flinches of pain.

The type of winker I am most pointedly taken with, though, is the wily, subtle kind. The sort of person who folds a wink softly into grooves of dialogue, who makes you wonder if it actually happened in the first place. There’s a certain romance to subtext of all forms: bits of informational embroidery, scrap phrasing. And in New York, where exhibitionism reigns supreme and confrontation masquerades as commonplace rapport, that sort of small, conversational footnote—the wink—often feels all the more precious.

While there’s no definitive biological consensus on the fundamental appeal of the wink, there are some relevant findings. In the 1960s, a biopsychologist named Eckhard Hess discovered that our pupils dilate when we zero in on something to which we feel sexually attracted. Several years later, nonverbal studies researcher Dr. David Givens determined that rapid blinking (or Hugh Grant’s signature eye flutter) operates as a sign of arousal. More recently, in 2015, Match.com polled over 5,600 single people across the United States about their texting habits and a whopping 53 percent said they used the “winky face” reliably when flirting. This is, of course, not the same as the *actual* practice of winking, but illustrated or otherwise, the gesture has its salacious undertones.

The wink isn’t merely amorous in nature. It can be conspiratorial, too. According to body language expert Patti Woods, a wink often indicates shared knowledge. “It says, ‘You and I have a secret we both understand; others do not,’” she explains. And by that token, the gesture is an admission of a mutual, private history.

It’s that thing that happens at parties, in rooms humming with other people, all of them bobbing and weaving and telling secrets. That thing where you meet someone’s gaze—maybe your person, maybe not—from across a chasm of other upright bodies. There’s no particular sentiment being communicated here, no transmission of information. It’s just a quiet acknowledgment that someone else is keeping tabs. You’re seen, therefore you are.

On the subject of across-the-room eye contact, the titular character in Noah Baumbach’s *Frances Ha* puts it best: “It’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them.” That’s what’s in a wink.

Broadly speaking, as a writer by trade, nonverbal cues aren’t exactly my forte. But this past year, I meandered my way into a form of writer’s block so persistent it felt structurally sound—like I could live inside of it, shades down. I had everything and nothing to say, and for the first time, words seemed dull and flimsy held up against the harder-earned edge of real life. And therein lies the magic of the wink: language can be a game of diminishing returns. We need not have words for everything.

The wink has a special economy. It’s the giddy affirmation of communion, but without the untidy business of language mixed in. It’s romance devoid of clichés; friendship sans qualifiers; a joke that’s all punchline. Or perhaps it’s just a muscular tick.

*Reading this feature would be even better with the actual magazine. Order your copy [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch).*

[[1]]

Stoned thoughts on winking, and saying everything in the blink of an eye.

V7 High Minded: Winking 2

Saying everything in the blink of an eye.

High Minded: Winking

Open plan offices for new media companies, beautiful as they are, contain few physical pleasures.

There are no opaque phone rooms for naps or crying, just glass boxes with doors that don’t lock. No coffee pots, just a cumbersome robot that spits out diesel-scented “espresso,” and milk substitute. No room for a plant on your desk, which is more like designated space at a table.
 
The office I worked at in the summer of 2017, which was situated on two floors of the graveyard of Goldman Sachs, offered a few things worth having: narrow windows with views of the East River and the Stone Street meat restaurants, proximity to a neighbor’s helicopter pad, and an array of Fresh Direct-supplied snacks. La Croix in 10 flavors, single-serving discs of hummus and guacamole, pita chips of every stripe, slimey packages of hard-boiled eggs that came in pairs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, hundreds of dollars worth of cashews and almonds, apples and oranges and one or two rock-hard green pears, and, most importantly, Babybel cheese. I ate it every day.

I spent that summer thinking about a crush, and complaining about my job, which was to pay attention to Tumblr and *Game of Thrones*. I thank god that we are not all bloggers, and that we have not all spent time in Manhattan’s Financial District, but I imagine you still know what I am talking about: each day is the same. An iced coffee drips condensation next to your laptop, an idle conversation about going to the beach this weekend ends with no one making a plan, and a music video or two breaks up the hours by giving you something to tweet about. Mercifully, the day will end when the sun is still out, the way it doesn’t for three-fourths of the year. It’s not all bad.
 
Plus, Babybel cheese. After breakfast, but before lunch, the same little red wax guy. Originated in France, manufactured at a factory in South Dakota, one of an estimated 1.5 million wheels per day. Driven to a 30-story office building in lower Manhattan at five in the morning. You can pop them like pieces of gum while you stew in the the languid but fizzy energy of waiting for a day to end.

It’s the perfect snack. For staring into space and dreaming of never returning another email. For doing something, anything, with your hands, while you recite a fraught iMessage conversation from memory to whomever sits next to you. For swallowing a low-calorie placeholder in two bites and, synched with the crouch to the trash can, subtly dipping your chin to find out if you remembered to put on deodorant.

 
The red cellophane wrapper makes the whole package look like a Valentine. The Valentine weighs exactly 20 grams every time, which according to some reliable-enough internet resources, is the same as a mouse and twice as much as a human eye. The wax shell looks like something that’s been hatched out of and discarded in a weird place, as chilling as a cicada husk dropping into an open pitcher of sangria. You can warm it in your hand and make a tight, shiny ball. But it’ll leave a pink film on your skin, so why would you?

The experience is sensual, like the slow drag of a zipper that you’re opening mostly for effect. The wax resists. It’s basically alive. Then there’s a two-centimeter gasp of bright white, appearing like a not-yet-tan belly peeking out from the narrow, moving gap between jean shorts and crop top. It is pretty much as close as you will get to a strip tease in a work environment.

The experience is also a little bit gross. Like peeling anything is a little bit gross. Like the word “peeling,” which is gross. Depending on your mood: a little bit like in *Black Swan*, when Natalie Portman peels back a frayed strip of the skin around her cuticle until there’s a bright red bloody line all the way down her finger.

And then there’s the cheese itself, which, bitten into, looks like an orthodontist’s upper jaw mold, and tastes like nothing.

***

*Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer living in Brooklyn. She co-authors a [weekly newsletter](https://famouspeople.substack.com/) about terrible parties.  *

GreenBabybel

Babybel

The first time I fell in love, we bonded in the early stages through phone Scrabble. “Scrabble back,” he’d text me, if a few hours passed without my next move. This was pre-Tinder, and our matches got heated. We eventually spent enough years together to re-download the app for a burst of nostalgia in our long-distance monogamy.

As our relationship wore on, Newtoy’s then-wildly popular Words with Friends became available on my Android, like the Snapchat app we’d use to sext. Then came Scramble with Friends (renamed Word Streak), which really spiced things up.

To me, word games will always be kind of romantic: a throwback to simpler times. They’re nerdy, but nobody really cares that much if you underperform. There’s space to slack, to try too hard, or to embarrass yourself only in front of a bot.

On Wikipedia, a website predicated on people volunteering to write and edit words, “word games” [are categorized by type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_game). There’s letter arrangement (Scrabble), puzzle (crossword), structured (Mad Libs), or linguistic recreations (spelling bees).

These games predate artificial intelligence by eons, well before Siri had all the answers and Merriam-Webster Dictionary started dragging people [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster).

Words, one of the most basic forms of communication, can be primal. Like puzzles—or a budding relationship—they can leave us vulnerable or confused. Choosing the right word could win you millions of dollars, grant you acceptance to a prestigious school, or earn you 10 whole seconds of glory on a dimly lit stage before a crowd of boozing spectators.

We may be post-truth, but a word well-played still brings people together. On a recent Galentine’s Day, I watched a group of grown adults in a Manhattan speakeasy compete in a spelling bee. “French from Latin,” the moderator read. I sipped my beer. “Can you please define the word?” Plot twist! In line for the restroom, I learned one very good contestant spoke only English and Portuguese, the latter not much help here. More were eliminated. No mercy was spared. Only one speller—who asked to hear a word in a sentence—behaved as a “douche,” at least according to the moderators.

For the same reason I go to estate sales, word games have retro appeal. They’re a haven from the noise, and from a president who does not open books. They’re a cerebral flex in a society that keeps telling me how to fix my face, company for a “lonely generation.”

If we match in a Scrabble game, thanks to some algorithm that connects people all around the globe, your choices tell me something about you. Maybe you learned a word from reading The Hobbit as a kid, which totally changed your life. Maybe you’re really into Shakespeare, or you’re a jackass who keeps making two-letter combinations until one finally sticks.

People separated by time or distance or language can play word games. True to form, most Americans are unwittingly more limited: notorious for only speaking English, and often afraid to look silly. It’s a humbling thing to admit that you can’t make a halfway decent play in a word game.  

Maybe you’re like my younger brother, who at age 10 won a round of Scattergories, the 30-year-old board game that includes pencils and paper in a box. For the category of “medicine” and the letter of “M,” he chose Midol, much to our mom’s and aunts’ delight. Obvious victor.

Maybe work is boring and unchallenging and you’ve been entertaining fantasies of quitting, but there’s some temporary spontaneity in the daily crossword—or whatever the frequency, depending your source.

In a culture that thrives on superficial connections, when your next lay can be only a few swipes away, word games can be intimate. An opponent’s assemblage of letters is suggestive, tells me something different than the 280-character tweet you spent an hour crafting and retooling.

On a recent early-morning bus ride to Manhattan from Philadelphia, I passed time by redownloading the word game apps I deleted forever ago. Delirious from little sleep, I felt slightly self-conscious and rusty playing against random players or bots. I remembered that I preferred Scrabble, because the virtual instructor would tell me if I chose the best possible word based on the tiles given. Uncertainty can be thrilling, until it’s not.

I drag the tiles: “F-I-R-E.”  Best word! “R-I-D-S.” Best word! An analog-looking, starry popup appears on my screen, a form of congratulations.

Is this as hard as it gets? Maybe I’m taking the easy way out. Or maybe, I still got it.

***

*[Natalie Daher](http://www.nataliedaher.com/) is a writer and journalist based in New York. She co-authors a newsletter, [Clipped](https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=469667a58e33374cf748297f7&id=4e1050af80), about women's media.*

Finding common ground one letter at a time.

scrabble

Word Games

In 2016, I moved into an apartment outfitted with a panini press, a clunky appliance I used exactly once and which then served as an ersatz modern art installation for the remaining 364 days of my lease. Its worthlessness was solidified when, on a camping trip with nary a press in sight, my roommates and I placed hunks of cheese-stuffed baguette on a grill and flattened them with large rocks. Me, dependent on a single-use appliance? I scoffed as I bit into my panini. Please. I was practically Bear Grylls.


My ambitions — at least when it came to eating sandwiches — may not have been lofty enough to capitalize on a panini press, but its existence served as a gateway gadget, paving the way for what I now consider to be the holy grail of single-use appliances. It sits in my kitchen. It is small. It is sharp. It cuts without hurting and slices without contrition. Friends: meet the egg slicer.

 
Invented in the early 1900s by a German man named Willy, the egg slicer was created for the sole purpose of — this isn’t hard, folks — cutting eggs. The device itself is composed of two parts: a slotted base and a hinged frame strung with taut metal wires. To wield this contraption, all one has to do is place a peeled, hard boiled egg on the base and lower the top, allowing the wires to cut through the membrane and separate the orb into equal segments. As Willy was clearly aware, no one wants to accidentally coat their egg with fingerprints or deal with buckled whites, two common hazards of holding an egg and cleaving it with a knife. Best yet, these slicers transform the yolk (which I’ve always found slightly repellant) into manageable, aesthetically appealing ribbons of chalky yellow fat.

 
There is something pleasingly democratic about an apparatus that elevates an egg from an inexpensive, ubiquitous form of protein to a delicacy with one quick sever. The devices are also widely accessible, with myriad brands, styles, and price points from which to choose. While I prefer the bare bones, 100% aluminum version that sells for [$2.81 online](https://www.tigerchef.com/tigerchef-round-aluminum-egg-slicer.html), egg-eaters with upscale taste can purchase fancier instruments. Williams Sonoma offers a [$14.95 BPA-free "Egg Slicer and Wedger](https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/williams-sonoma-egg-slicer/),” which one online reviewer bought "on a lark" and then loved so much that she ordered another for the kitchen in her lake house.

 
The egg slicer may be my favorite, but a brief tour of my pint-sized Brooklyn apartment reveals that I now own a small army of single-use appliances, all honed to execute one task perfectly: there is a [milk frother](https://www.amazon.com/Bellemain-Stainless-Steel-Frother-capacity/dp/B010E1ZQVC/ref=sr_1_20?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576025&sr=1-20&keywords=milk+frother), which I use every morning and a [rice cooker](https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SR-G06FGL-1-Step-Automatic-Cooker/dp/B01DGQVX46/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575340&sr=8-3&keywords=panasonic+rice+cookers), whose services I employ on occasion; on the table sits a [small wedge](https://www.amazon.com/Bobino-LATOFTQ-Laptop-Foot-Turquoise/dp/B0758161RQ/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575443&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=bobino+laptop+foot&psc=1) that serves no purpose other than propping up my roommate’s laptop and which she claims stands between her and a lifetime of carpal tunnel; and in the back of my closet is a [sweater razor](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015RN9JN8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), which I drunk-ordered last winter after reading that it would slice the fuzz off all my sweaters and, thus, “change my life.” I still believe this although I have yet to prove it true — in my aforementioned state I forgot that I own only one sweater and zero of the batteries the device requires.

 
The beauty of single-use appliances is that, unlike Pokémon or sexual harassers, it doesn’t behoove anyone to catch ‘em all. Unless you happen to inhabit a mansion of Versailles-style proportions, collecting these contraptions forces one to prioritize. Would you rather be greeted every day with the dead-eyed stare of a [hot dog steamer](https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-HDS248RD-Extra-Large-Steamer/dp/B01LVWIIVR/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576752&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=hot+dog+cooker&psc=1) or a [strawberry huller](https://www.amazon.com/Chefn-27466-StemGem-Strawberry-Huller/dp/B002XOHZWC/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529575061&sr=1-4&keywords=strawberry+huller)? Are you the sort of person who values flawlessly [spiralized zucchini](https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Handheld-Spiralizer-Green/dp/B013KAW5IQ/ref=sr_1_8?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529682126&sr=1-8&keywords=zuchinni+spiral+noodle+maker) over a properly [scraped coconut](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D59NVXH/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07D59NVXH&pd_rd_wg=iz3Tv&pd_rd_r=SGF4GQ8K4JYKWNKRHBV0&pd_rd_w=PPENA)? At some point, the questions become nearly existential: in the vast scheme of things, do the rewards of a [banana bunker](https://www.vat19.com/item/banana-bunker-protects-bananas?adid=gshopping&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&adpos=1o2&scid=scplpbanana-bunker&sc_intid=banana-bunker&gclid=CjwKCAjwma3ZBRBwEiwA-CsblIot5ie4bOdhlrGp7z1XY6XwEvJyHjmvyPgJiWZMXMWQXpNZe5JBShoCsrcQAvD_BwE) trump the spoils of a [hamburger press](https://www.amazon.com/Weston-Express-Hamburger-Ejector-07-0310-W/dp/B000XB45DO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529576579&sr=8-3&keywords=hamburger+press)?

 
I was speaking with a friend recently who admitted that she has a rule against owning single-use kitchen appliances, her reasoning being that in most instances you could probably use a knife to accomplish the same task. Does she have a point? Sure.


But sometimes “good enough” just isn’t good enough. And if anyone needs me, I'll be in my own (slightly more crowded) kitchen, with my slicer, basking in that rare flavor of joy that accompanies placing a perfectly mathematically bisected egg atop an otherwise mundane salad.


***


*[Luna Adler](http://www.lunaadler.com/) likes to think of herself as an agreeable Scorpio. She lives in Brooklyn.*

Boiling appliances down to their essence.

Egg Slicer

Egg Slicers

I hadn’t seen him in more than 30 years. A fleeting reminder here and there, some old pics, a few videos. But not his jockish bravado, not his swagger nor unearned confidence, and certainly nothing of his maturity and personal growth.
 
He was perhaps the closest thing I had to a schoolyard bully, a villainous staple of my childhood. And then he vanished, as if he’d fallen down Baby Jessica’s well and never yelled for help.   
 
But just like that, William Zabka popped back in my life. Our lives.
 
*[Cobra Kai](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe9DTWmhhxeKyYHL4mldGcA)*, a new(ish) 10-part YouTube Red series, is one of the better reboots unleashed into our nostalgia-fueled streaming economy. The premise and its execution are genuinely clever: *The Karate Kid* imagined 34 years later, it plays with our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, pairing up decent kids with aging heels, younger miscreants with our former heroes. But more than anything, what it’s accomplished is a resurrection—the series has raised the dead, crossing over ghosts back into the mortal realm.

*The Karate Kid*’s [Johnny Lawrence](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/characters/nm0951420?ref_=tt_cl_t6). *Just One of the Guys*’ [Greg Tolan](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089393/characters/nm0951420). *Back to School*’s [Chas Osborne](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090685/characters/nm0951420?ref_=tt_cl_t10). You could scrub IMDb for days and still not come up with a better three-year run of cinema villainy than Billy Zabka’s 1984-86.

 
Other rich blond preppy assholes came before him, but Zabka managed to perfect the archetype: Tormenter of Geeks, Persecutor of Dorks. His hyper-masculine, muscled characters defined and targeted otherness before woke society even knew what that meant. He was a one-man wrecking crew, with a snarl and demeanor that would inspire a justifiable revenge of the nerds.

His characters were always in service of the underdog delivering rightful comeuppance. And goddamn did Zabka play his part. In pro wrestling parlance, he sold the faces. His was a time before true cinematic nuance, before complicated origin stories. This was before we started rooting for anti-heroes like Tony Soprano and Walter White, and well before we started hearing out Erik Killmonger and the anti-anti-heroes.
 
Zabka was simply the Bad Guy. His characters were mainlined evil, plain and simple, with very few shades of gray (save for his own unexplored bullying by Sensei Kreese). We were never asked to appreciate what he brought to those roles, because back then we earnestly rooted for the LaRussos and Terris and Ricks and Melons of the world without a second thought.

Zabka was, essentially, too good at playing the asshole, a first-class jerk without any source material telling us to believe otherwise. He proudly accepted his place in the stories and sold his villains as best he could to make kids believe that good conquers all.
 
And he was never really rewarded for it. Sure, he acted in independent movies, and, sure, you can [look him up on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Zabka) and see that a short film called *[Most](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQf2mXqYM7E)* he wrote and produced won festival awards and was nominated for an Oscar in 2004. But the level of success to which he’s entitled? We owe him.
 
Zabka was a teenager when he played Johnny Lawrence, and he played him so well that he put Ralph Macchio over the top. Zabka made Macchio a star for a decade, and in doing so relegated himself to the annals of ‘80s history as “that blond dick from *Karate Kid*.”

But Zabka *was* the ‘80s. He was one of the best of an entire era. Full stop. What Michael Douglas symbolized with Wall Street greed and Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver epitomized as working girls and Tom Cruise as fighter pilots and cocktail bartenders, this is what Zabka meant to zinc-nosed bullying. He’s a Hall of Famer, and admiration for his oeuvre should be handed down from generation to generation.

And now, finally, thanks to *Cobra Kai* and the modern wonders of Google, my man here’s getting some much-needed respect. No mercy. 

***
*Slade Sohmer will sweep the leg. Find him [@slade](https://twitter.com/slade).*

Did we put the ’80s greatest villain in a body bag?

Zabka

Billy Zabka

The Tower Records in my small hometown was heaven to me. Centered right downtown, by my adolescent estimation of things it was a massive space with tall ceilings that had to be supported by columns, rows and rows of display cases glinting with plastic-wrapped mysteries waiting to be tomorrow’s obsessions. The back wall was lined with listening stations where you could peruse a collection of some dozen new releases. Another wall was filled with magazines that offered the first glimpses of soon-to-be-favorite bands and splashy ads announcing release dates for highly anticipated albums. Like I said: heaven.

Spending my high school lunch hour there was a favorite pastime—and spending my lunch money, too. It was ground zero for the most important thing in my teen life: my music collection, which required so much time, effort, money, and intention to amass. And while back then record stores like Tower were simply how we all created our prized collections, in hindsight, that one brick-and-mortar represents something deeper about how we used to listen to music, something that perhaps the majority of us have lost. 

My adolescent memories of music are physical ones. I don't just mean in the way music made me feel, though certainly a teen in love with a song is home to all kinds of feelings. What I mean is the physicality of a record store, a magazine, a CD. Obtaining music required moving my entire body through space. Listening to it meant handling some kind of material disc. Absorbing it fully involved flipping through the liner notes in my hands, reading its secrets and decoding its lyrics. The touch of that slippery square of pages, the scratch of carpet on my elbows as I sprawled on my stomach to listen and read—these physical sensations heighten the memory of my favorite albums spilling from my boombox, which had to be turned up loud enough to mask the hiss of spinning CDs. 

Now, of course, things are different. Seemingly every piece of music ever created is available to us at the press of a button, and my epic Tower Records (R.I.P.) pales in comparison. Now, we tap our keyboards and go about our days. Album art has been reduced to inch-by-inch squares that shrink when you scroll past, liner notes have become Wikipedia, and instant downloads have done away with the inkling of effort once required to get your hands on a new album. And while there’s an element of magic to this mass of musical matter to which we now have constant access, we’ve also lost something in the turn towards convenience and ease: those physical touches that trigger our deeper connections to music.

I stream music now, of course, and what few dozen CDs I have left are currently getting scratched up in the dirty pockets of my car doors. But the memories of those albums are stored elsewhere. They’re in CD towers, jewel cases, and colored sharpies for marking burned discs. In those special razors for splitting the impossible-to-open shrink-wrapped plastic. Those big booklets for storing and transporting collections, the crack of the spine and satisfying *thwack* of the disc-stuffed leaflet as the pages turned. It’s cleaning the delicate blue back of a CD, a hot breath and soft t-shirt wiping away fingerprints and dust, the material minutiae that gathers on physical things. It’s pressing the buttons on players until their little icons are rubbed off, the plastic shiny beneath the muscle memory of *play* and *next* and *repeat*, *repeat*, *repeat*. 

***

*[Tessa Love](http://www.tessalove.com/) is a freelance writer in Oakland.*

Green CDs

I love parties. Crowded, sweaty, floor-sticky-with-beer ragers. Intimate early dinner parties that swerve pleasantly off the rails and last long into the night. I love throwing them. Going to them. Reliving them the next morning. And yet, I would argue that the best part of any party is leaving it.

My friends and I have a fairly regular upstate weekend tradition. Every few months or so we descend in a steady stream upon a Hudson Valley home on a Friday evening, having ducked out a little bit early from work to beat the traffic or catch a quieter train. We swarm into the kitchen, pour white wine, light menthol cigarettes (I know, I *know*), and play catch up while the volume of the music increases slowly over the course of the night. We switch to bourbon, sometimes tequila, start talking less and dancing more, interrupting only to shout about how much we love a particular song, taking turns “deejaying”—so to speak—singing louder and swaying harder.
 
There’s a moment at every party in which you realize you’re done, that continuing on—to drink, to dance, to talk—is an investment of diminishing returns. I almost always make sure to duck out before then, even if every fiber of my being is screaming with FOMO and the acute awareness that I’m only getting older, knowing the chances to make these late night memories are fewer and further between. On my upstate nights, that means sneaking upstairs and getting in bed, usually with a 99-cent microwaveable snack of some sort, a little bit of weed, and the dregs of my last drink.
 
The standard inclination in this situation—when you’re the first to bed and the party is still very, very much going—is to close the door and cover your head with your pillow. Toss and turn and fume silently until you trudge downstairs and ask your friends to turn the music down, please, just a touch?
 
But I live for the noise: the small shouts and voices floating above the muffled melody of whatever song is playing. I leave the party early not because I want it to end but because I want it to keep going—just without me.
 
People who live in New York often say they love the city because it encourages a certain public solitude: you’re on your own but never alone. Removing yourself ever so slightly from a party—by going to bed, or leaving a few minutes early to wait for your Lyft in the hallway, or even just standing outside on a balcony, beyond the glow of light through the window, watching mouths move—is an even more intimate (and voyeuristic) way of recreating that experience.

It’s freeing. It allows you to be present in a way that’s often hindered by actual participation. By taking away the minute calculations of interpersonal interactions, my mind is free to sink into the music and the comfort of knowing that people I care about are just downstairs, or inside, and having the time of their lives.

In some ways, listening to life at a remove is not unlike a memory itself: muted and fuzzy, rich with texture but a little bit soft. (This is probably why those recently [popularized](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j35K_3KTP1o) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLmlxySOiM) [recordings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8-6zbYi0dY) [of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHiLFl6V1JY) [music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKu_nIA_-GY) [playing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovNO3ILIsQ) [in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL0frYOQ-uM) [another](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PINsjbcOsQ) [room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O2leeLgfwE), or an [empty mall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPZDSJ1l6a8), are so soothing: they sound like our memory of the way a song feels.) The stifled soundtrack of parties I’ve just left gives me a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, though it’s not quite a longing for the past—or, in my case, the party—so much as it is a way of experiencing the future in the present.
 
Upstairs, and in bed, surrounded by the sounds of my friends and their music, I look forward to the feeling of remembering that moment.

***

*Verena von Pfetten is the co-founder of Gossamer. You should definitely invite her to your next party.*

GreenParty

Ending Early

When Nintendo of America hired its new Vice President of Sales in mid-2015, the company knew its press release had to acknowledge the—well, let’s just call it coincidence for now.
 
Stepping into the role was a man who had just spent the previous eight years at Electronic Arts, so it would seem he’d be a natural fit at Nintendo. It was also fitting because his name was Bowser.

Bowser! Mario’s princess-kidnapping nemesis. Leader of the Koopa. Fucking Bowser. How perfect could that be?

So there it was, as it had to be, the subhead Nintendo affixed to the [press release](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150520005475/en/Nintendo-America-Hires-Bowser-VP-Sales#.VVyWDvlVhBc): “Doug Bowser Brings Decades of Experience, Not Fire Breath, to New Role.”

For many years I’ve been obsessed with this kismetic phenomenon—this flirtation with providence—of someone either fulfilling their destiny or stumbling by chance into the sort of coincidence that makes you a believer in higher powers. Is causation or correlation ultimately at work here?

This is called an aptonym, or an aptronym with the ‘r’ in there if you really want to consult the OED about it. (My preference is the less verbose “aptonym,” so let’s stick with that.)  Surely there’s a listicle or two out there full of People Who Were Born For Their Jobs, like Les McBurney, a firefighter who ended up on Jimmy Kimmel Live! because of his name, or Usain Bolt, who you may know is quite fast, or Paddy Driver, the legendary South African racer, or Emily Wines, master sommelier.

But stretch the definition of the word, and often the best aptonyms extend beyond occupation—to misdeed, to accomplishment, to task fulfilled, to true crime. This is the good shit.

There’s a *Final Destination* quality to a distinct name. Say, if your surname is Popadick, how likely is it, statistically and metaphysically, that you can make it your whole life without an indecent exposure allegation? One [Canadian man](https://globalnews.ca/news/1300067/ottawa-police-arrest-donald-popadick-for-indecent-exposure-in-public-park/) made it 63 years before being picked up by police for jogging naked. Six decades on and he couldn’t outrun his fate, clothed or otherwise.

Take Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who rose to the role atop the family business when his father died in 1992. It’s hard to escape a father’s pressure; it may have been harder still to escape becoming a drug lord when your last name is Coke.

I’ve spent much of my adult life as a newshound searching for aptonyms, collecting and tweeting headlines that may finally provide some clarity as to whether this is truly a cosmic wink. There are famous villains, like Bernie Madoff, who did exactly that with billions of dollars, until he didn’t. There are legal precedents, like the 1990 case about the expectation of privacy for a man named [Limberhand](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4139025729341654755&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr) masturbating in a public toilet stall. Heck, there’s even a racehorse called [Party Till Dawn](https://twitter.com/Slade/status/809785997361905664) that tested positive for meth after coming in second.
 
Perhaps my favorite form is what I like to call the Assigned Aptonym, because it really messes with the notion of what were designed to do. This is when a member of the media tackles a subject they were seemingly born to cover. When the Wall Street Journal published “Google Sued by Job Candidate for Age Discrimination,” the editors wisely tapped [Jeff Elder](https://twitter.com/Slade/status/591594548746395649). Reuters may or may not have a sperm beat: “French men not producing as much sperm” and “Few lifestyle factors influence sperm shape and size: study” were both written by [Andrew M. Seaman](https://twitter.com/Slade/status/482607833578741760). When Vanity Fair offered up “Donald Trump’s Short Fingers: A Historical Analysis,” who better to go mano a mano than [Bruce Handy](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/photos/2016/02/donald-trumps-short-fingers-a-historical-analysis)? And, of course, there are the marijuana pieces authored by [Mary Jane Weedman](http://nymag.com/guides/everything/grandmothers-guide-pot/), [Julie Weed](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/smallbusiness/california-marijuana-start-ups.html) and [Andy Cush](http://drugs.gawker.com/tag/cannabis).
 
Then there are judges’ decisions and total stretches. Does it count when U2’s The Edge gets a little too close and falls off the stage, as he did around the time of Bowser’s hiring? Was it an aptonym when BBC presenter Greg Foot filmed himself [eating his own leg](https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bbc-presenter-greg-foot-films-himself-eating-his-own-leg_uk_56f10de9e4b0fbd4fe086d9e)? Is Alan Cumming, whose personality and sex-positivity screams perpetual orgasm, the ultimate aptonym?
 
I’ll leave you with one last story for your case files—that of a scorned lover. In March 2014, a woman tried to set fire to her ex-boyfriend’s home. The inebriated, jilted woman put a pound of bacon on a baking sheet and turned the stove up to high. A police officer intervened before a grease fire burned the place down, and the woman was eventually charged and handed a suspended sentence and 18 months probation.
 
The bacon arsonist’s last name? Crispi. Ya burnt.

***
 
*Slade Sohmer wishes he were a cool aptonym. Maybe when he is brutally murdered? Follow him [@slade](https://twitter.com/slade).*

721a464c-88d1-43de-a54d-44f8fa6fc650

Aptonyms

At some point in 2014, I downloaded an iPhone game called *[Retry](https://www.rovio.com/channel/retry)*, released by the game publisher Rovio, of *Angry Birds* fame (and fortune). I was probably first drawn in by its retro two-dimensional 16-bit aesthetic, straight from the Super Nintendo of my youth. The game has you pilot a brightly colored, pixelated airplane through brightly colored, pixelated levels, like a flying Super Mario. The only move you can make is accelerating by tapping and holding the screen.

*Retry* was simple. It was brilliant. I became intensely addicted and finished the game several times over, a matter of a dozen hours each. But one day last  year, I deleted the game to clear space on my phone. Fine, I thought, I can just re-download it. Turns out I’ll never play the game again. 

For reasons unknown to me, it’s been removed from both the iPhone and Android app stores. I’ve tried substitutes, like *Downwell*, *Reigns*, and *Cat Bird*. They’re all fine; it’s just that *Retry* was perfect. 

The thing I look for most in an iPhone game is that elusive quality that programmers call “flow.” It means total immersion in an activity: your entire brain taken up by the act of writing important code, or flying a meaningless digital airplane. This immersion is so desirable because I mostly play iPhone games to distract myself, whether from the incipient terror of possible subway catastrophes or the more abstract adult anxieties of work deadlines and making rent. 

*Retry* induced this flow state by requiring equal parts problem-solving and action. Piloting the plane depended on learned reflexes. You had to tap and hold the screen at just the right time to float through a gap or reach a high peak through open air. On some levels, wind gusts and waterfalls presented acceleration boosts. The real poetry of the game came when you could master gravity and pull everything off without struggling. 

The game was a worthy successor to Mario at a time when Nintendo has all but abandoned 2D platformers. And in *Retry*, unlike *Mario* (save for Nintendo’s own iPhone version), you’re either moving or dead. This made achieving flow easy: you can’t think about anything else while playing except survival.

Like the more popular *Flappy Bird*, *Retry* made me nostalgic for the era of shitty online flash games I found on dial-up AOL: the days when playing virtual ping-pong with your mouse or loading Neopets seemed like a revolutionary thing to do online, instead of the likes-and-retweets contest we all play now on Twitter and Instagram. These simple games aren’t “open worlds.” They don’t tell epic stories. They present just one problem to solve and one activity to do. Refreshing, isn’t it?   

Technological nostalgia is a thriving marketplace. I recently bought a SNES Classic, the tiny Nintendo device that comes loaded with 30 vintage games playable on HD TVs. The first time I loaded *Mario Kart*, the title screen soundtrack was Proustian, throwing me back to afternoons in the basement of my childhood home with my younger brother, when we spent hours terrorizing each other with red shells. No wonder the devices are so popular the only easy place to get them is eBay. They don’t load Netflix. You can’t share anything. All you do is play.

Which leaves me with just one question: Rovio, why did you kill it? I think it’s time for a ... *Retry*. I’m begging here.

***

*[Kyle Chayka](http://kylechayka.com/) is a writer in Brooklyn. His first book, on minimalism, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2019.*

Retry iPhone Game

Tapping

They seem like a nice enough family, with matching smiles and outfits and eyes that won’t leave my face no matter where I sit in the waiting room. “We’re here for you,” they seem to say. “It’ll be okay—you’re not dying of anything.” 

I nod. 

“Sure, we’re all dying all the time, but not right now, not today.” I nod again, in awe of how much this wholesome, multi-generational gringo family’s collective voice sounds like my own.

I’m not sure how a doctor’s office goes about picking stock photos, but they had picked the right one here. 

Doctors’ offices are liminal spaces, each an in-between that’s unfamiliar and often not particularly comfortable, in which we’re nonetheless meant to take off our clothes, reveal the softest and most intimate parts of ourselves, and sit alongside a total stranger to look at images of the mysterious gears hidden and failing underneath our skin. 

I’ve seen a lot of doctor’s office art over the years. I remember the boat I focused on while tears ran down my face during a root canal. The dozens of different-and-yet-somehow-identical waiting rooms with scenes of hunting dogs and pheasants, old English countrysides at odds with a carpet pattern better suited to a cruise ship or an airport Marriott. I think often about the comic strip in my gynecologist’s bathroom, a special kind of bad art in itself: It shows a nude man standing in front of a mammography unit.

Then there’s the abstract painting in my therapist’s office. Cornflower blue and turquoise and cerulean swirls kissed by gold flecks. “What color is your fear?” my therapist asks. I never know where to look, so I stare at the wall, but not for so long that she thinks I’m avoiding eye contact. I’ve killed every succulent I’ve bought since moving to Los Angeles and I don’t know how to change a tire or how to calm the voice that tells me the world is going to split apart at the seams and that I’m going to die in a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a nuclear blast, at the mall, the movie theater, in line at 7-Eleven while buying a Diet Coke that is undoubtedly also going to kill me. But I don’t tell her that. Instead I say “blue” and immediately wonder if this is because of the painting. Cornflower blue, specifically. With gold flecks.

It’s important that office art go beyond the bland, low-key badness of those massive Ikea posters of taxicabs and the Eiffel Tower. Anyone can buy those. There’s no art to that bad art. Those are for dorm rooms; for people who’ve yet to decide what a place should be. But doctors’ offices know what they are—a vacuum, a void, a shadow-place where you’re a name on a clipboard—and their art reflects that. It’s never literal, like the lovingly-rendered bread art at Panera. (Can you imagine waiting rooms covered in watercolor drawings of dental tools, or paint-by-numbers posters of gauze strips and rubbing alcohol?) Doctors' office art takes us beyond the literal and observable; they’re the only places where a framed picture of a boat belonging to no one is really at home—and the farther from the ocean, the better. 

Doctor’s offices, and the art within them, exist on a plane separate from the other mundane, too-real spaces we know and occupy: the places where we worry about expenses and insurance premiums, of family members’ concerned looks, of medications on bedside tables, where we cannot help but dwell on the “what if” instead of what is—the very thing I’m unlearning in that room with the supportive blue swirls. 

But at least I have those swirls. And you have your context-less boat or your “live love laugh” decal above the receptionist’s sliding window, the stock photo of a smiling family across a wall.

And so we sit on paper-covered examination tables, quietly among those taxicabs and toothy white people and whorls of color, soothed into a place of stillness and nothingness, a state of being where we can smile at the majestic horse above a water cooler and think, “Right now, at least, I am okay.”

***

*Alex Alvarez is an L.A.-based writer who needs to make another doctor's appointment soon because WebMD told her she's already dead.*


ban-produits

Doctor's Office Art

Last year, I found a time portal. I pressed a button and a wormhole opened up. On the other side was no particular year or era. On the other side was a way I used to be, a way I used to feel.

You can try it too: just turn your radio dial to your local college station, settle in, and wait.

At first, I thought I’d started listening to college radio again just because I enjoyed the offbeat music or the unpredictable variety. Then I thought I was seeking relief from the infinite choices of on-demand streaming, with its always-present sense that, no matter what you’re listening to, you could be listening to something better. Something more *exactly right* for that exact moment.
 
These theories were true, but they weren’t the whole truth. Neither seemed to fully account for the particular way college radio stirred me, the way it made me come pleasantly unstuck in time.

It took a while, but I figured it out.
 
Like a steadily growing number of Americans, I work in the gig economy, life-rafting from freelance contract to freelance contract. I don’t hate it: I work as a writer, like I dreamed of as a child. But, as so many before me have realized, making your dream your job is complicated. Especially when you’re freelance.
 
These days, I reflexively judge chunks of time for their earning potential, and automatically sort my ideas based on how likely I think they are to sell. That makes sense: that’s business. But it makes dreaming hard. Dreams aren’t inherently sellable. Dreams don’t have obviously forecastable earning potential.

College radio—my time portal, my wormhole—reconnects me to a different mode of relating to my hours and days. College DJs aren’t getting paid. Very few are pursuing careers in the industry. There are no ads, which means no advertisers. No pressure to keep listeners from turning the dial. No pressure to give them concentrated doses of something they already know they want. No pressure to shut up and play the hits.
 
College DJs have their own motives. Some want to show off what they know: the deepest, dustiest vinyl cuts; the freshest, hottest downloads; the most oddly compelling transitions from A to B to C, song to song, genre to genre. Some just want to share. Many, I imagine, like the peculiar blend of privacy and intimacy that comes from connecting with a live but faceless audience of who-knows-how-few-or-many people scattered in cars and kitchens and dorm rooms.

Whatever they’re up to, these DJs are having fun. Playing around. Trying things out. *I like this*, they say with each song. *Maybe you like this too?* *Can you hear what I hear?* These questions—the whole spirit of the enterprise—get squeezed into radio waves, invisible as air. When those waves are vibrating just right, the wormhole opens up. Sometimes, especially if it’s raining or snowing, I convince myself that I can feel them out there—all my co-listeners, all my co-seekers, coming unstuck from our attachments to time, together and apart. Finding out a little more about who we are. What we’re dreaming. What we want to do about it.


***

*[Peter C. Baker](https://petercbaker.tumblr.com/) is a freelance writer in Chicago. He has written for the* Guardian*, the* New Yorker*, the* New York Times Magazine*, and* Pacific Standard*, where he is a contributing editor.*

College Radio

At any given moment, my computer desktop is littered with dozens of screenshots that reflect, more accurately than any social media presence or journal, what I’m thinking and doing and seeking to communicate on a given day. It's like a parallel version of my brain that’s less ephemeral and more specific than a browser history. 

I recently conducted a very informal survey to ask people how they use screenshots, and a few dominant themes emerged. 

We use screenshots to save things:

- “A shot of a NextDoor thread where someone was complaining about yelling at 5am and someone else saying basically welcome to the Lower Haight, idiot.” — Laura Z

- “A Spotify glitch and a Medium glitch.” — Chris B.

- “My flight information (I’m on vacation and going home tomorrow).” — Angela H.

- “1) Some cute dog at Christmas pic I couldn't just save; <br></br> 2) Instructions for tablet-based fire code inspections.” — Jim P.

- “My wife pretty regularly keeps ‘receipts’ of conversations, especially group text threads with her family.” — Jake T.

- “As a researcher, I use screenshots to prove that things existed contrary to what someone might say. I recently used a screenshot of a tweet in an arbitration hearing to prove that a governor was making statements that undercut a state's position in the arbitration.” — James L.

To share things (and sometimes fail to):

- “I screenshotted my STD test results to share with potential partners—which people appreciated.” — Sean K.

- “My sister's protected Instagram post of her new boyfriend and the gun she bought him for Christmas to send to a co-worker with whom I have an ongoing ‘I'm a bigger redneck than you’ challenge going on.” — Christina M.

- “On my work laptop I saved a funny thing someone drew that they were showing in a Hangout so I could share it in Slack, but then never got around to it.” — James H.

But maybe, above all, we use screenshots to make jokes:

- “A Twitter message asking if I wanted to upload my contacts to Twitter. I wanted to make a joke about it. Summary of joke: No fucking way.” — Terry B.

- “I have a recent series of all the times the word ‘analytics’ gets truncated to ‘anal’ in my tab bar and elsewhere.” — Virginia M.  

As with any technological advancement that makes life easier, you have to take a cynical moment to wonder how all this is fucking up our brains. 

If we use screenshots to make memories, to convey feelings, to remember where to find that one coffee shop in the cow paths of downtown Manhattan, what kind of cognitive ability are we leaving to wither? I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time I drew a diagram to convey the way something looked, for example, or gave my memory and sense of direction a workout to find a location I was unsure of. 

Maybe giving over some of the work of human brains to screenshots will reveal itself in time to be a rich premise for a medium-dark *Black Mirror* episode. Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all. Having taken some time to think about it, though, I’ve realized that having a computer graveyard of screenshots with file names marked only by their date stamps is a super-inefficient way of saving stuff I care about. Possibly it’s time to just start writing some things down again. 

By the way, if you’re curious, I asked people if the past tense is "screenshot" or "screenshotted" or something else:


![Screen Shot 2018-01-04 at 2.57.26 PM](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/1iBD852m7U4K8wk2s4ieyU/a1ee74b83656146532573c493502cb4f/Screen_Shot_2018-01-04_at_2.57.26_PM.png)
***

*[Laura Olin](https://www.lauraolin.com/) is a digital strategist who lives in Brooklyn with her dog.*

Screenshots

In our now-perpetual era of Self-Serious Rock Stars, Ryan Adams stands alone. Because he's funny. And he knows it. That isn't to say other bands and solo acts don't occasionally enjoy some charming banter. But Adams has never been able to help himself from being a bit of a class clown.
 
In 2015, Adams released what may be the funniest live album by a musician—or best live music album by a burgeoning comic—ever recorded: the double-disc *Live at Carnegie Hall*. It's made up of two back-to-back November 2014 shows Adams played solo and acoustic at Carnegie Hall. The album kicks off with Adams taking the stage to thunderous applause, tuning his guitar, and before he even starts playing:
 
*“It's nice to see you. Nobody panic, there's no pressure, everything's fine.”* 

(Pause.)

*“Uh, tonight's concert is dedicated to the Death Star level of Angry Birds: Star Wars Edition.”*
 
(Pause.)
 
*“I just want to say, without trying, I finally finished it on the subway coming here today. I was just like, whatever, what happens if I just sort of blow up this stack of debris at the bottom of this thing? And it did the job. So: thank you.”*
 
He then proceeds to take his slangy, Tom Petty-esque sweeping first track from his self-titled *Ryan Adams*, and turn it into a dark, yearning, rainy-day epic. It's a weird, stunning turnaround of tone, on a dime. And much of the double-disc is like this: Adams vacillating between weirdo-with-a-captive-crowd and playing the absolute best-of-the-best songs from his absurdly wide-ranging catalog. The nearly 3,000 people in the building notwithstanding, the record is deeply intimate. Sometimes, it sounds like he's playing to an audience of exactly two people, both dead: Mitch Hedberg and Leonard Cohen. And you.
 
The phenomenon of Ryan Adams is difficult to explain. He's a high school dropout whose first solo album is called *Heartbreaker*, as inspired by a photo of Mariah Carey wearing a shirt that read, yes, “Heartbreaker.” It’s generally viewed as the most important alt-country record ever made and handily one of the best rock releases of the last few decades. It also featured Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch on backup vocals, and was credited by Elton John for his artistic rejuvenation. (John later sang backup on Adams' sophomore record.) And it's an album that famously opens with an argument about Morrissey and a dumb joke about a mouthful of cookies.
 
Other funny things about Adams? He's prolific to a comic extent—in one year, Adams put out three full LPs, one of which was a double-disc. He once released an album recorded in two weeks, full of dumb, big, arena anthems called *Rock and Roll* (a not-at-all-subtle version of the cover featured Adams [with a knife in his side](https://images.eil.com/large_image/RYAN_ADAMS_ROCK%2BN%2BROLL-272101.jpg?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID])). His side-projects are equally absurd. In 2015, he covered the entirety of Taylor Swift's *1989*, and released it on his label. He once recorded as a punk band called The Finger (album title: *We Are Fuck You*), featuring a lineup of Warren Peace (Adams) and Irving Plaza ([D Generation's](http://www.dgeneration.us/?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) Jesse Malin). Sample track: “Punk's Dead, Let's Fuck.” All of that ephemera by itself is just absurd, not funny.
 
What's funny is that Adams takes all of this so deeply seriously that, for example, one of the Swift covers (“Bad Blood”) ended up becoming a small modern rock radio hit single, and Swift later admitted to being influenced by his take on her. At early concerts, when fans would request songs like, say, “Sylvia Plath,” he would sing them [in the key of Cookie Monster](https://archive.org/details/radams2002-10-24.sbd/ryanadams2002-10-24d2t07.flac?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]).  And that's to say nothing of his cover of Oasis' “Wonderwall,” which, before he recorded and put it on a record, was mostly just another quirky thing about Ryan Adams (and a reason for him to roll out his Noel Gallagher impression). And yet Gallagher started playing “Wonderwall” in the style of Ryan Adams. It was that good.
 
Between all of that, he's gotten into feuds in the press with Julian Casablancas (“strung out on lasagna”), Father John Misty (“sounds like shit Elton John but if he was just sitting in a corner staring at his hands on LSD”), Jack White (“fucking ponce”), and Sean Hannity (a “little chicken man” with a soul “controlled by fear and hate”). He's since apologized for everyone but Hannity. He put Elvira (yep, [that one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_Peterson?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID])) in one of his [music videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=802vbfZe9io&utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]), wrote a song and video game reviews for New York-based literati blog *[The Awl](https://www.vulture.com/2009/08/ryan_adams_awl_columnist.html?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID])*, and once put on a dress and opened for himself playing as “Natalie Sass” when Natalie Prass (his actual opener) had her flight to the show canceled. There's so much more where that came from.
 
There's also something to the way other funny people love Ryan Adams. David Letterman, a huge fan, had him play [an entire concert](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T2MOoFL1rg&list=PLBC6C17CB73B5688B&utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Adams was also his [second-to-last musical guest](https://consequenceofsound.net/2015/05/ryan-adams-dazzles-david-letterman-for-one-last-time-watch/?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]), and the very first musical guest of the rebooted The Daily Show. John Mayer, who’s actually [tried his own hand](http://people.com/celebrity/john-mayer-performs-raunchy-stand-up/?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) at standup on occasion (and has a huge fan in Dave Chappelle), will randomly invite Adams to [upstage him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=46&v=VTpyQvK5d7U&utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) at concerts.

As for the rest of *Live at Carnegie Hall*, other topics covered by Adams include:
 
- Wondering what Billy Ocean and the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald would text each other, in a song played in the style of Billy Ocean, but sung in the stylings of Michael McDonald, that started with Adams singing about how he could “drive the shit out of a car.”

- Banter between Adams and the Carnegie Hall ushers about what they're doing with their “lightsabers.”

- Telling his audience that he knows most of them are on Paxil, given that they’re at a Ryan Adams concert.
 
And so on.

Someone reviewing the album once [wrote](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20495-live-at-carnegie-hall/?utm_source=This+Is+Our+Testing+List&utm_campaign=19a3efc2ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_648e53847d-19a3efc2ff-&mc_cid=19a3efc2ff&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) that the subject for all of these jokes is always Ryan Adams. That may be true to an extent, but the core of his comedy is the ever-present punchline, which is Adams' ability to write and perform his songs: this ostensibly sad, grueling, desperate music plucked out by an utter stoner goofball who's definitely seen some shit.

Rather than use the venerated stage of Carnegie Hall to make a grand statement on his career, as so many have done before him, he instead opts to dedicate the end of one Carnegie performance to “cussin’.” And maybe that, in fact, is Adams' grand statement: That the other side of deep, dark, profound sadness is dumb, surface-level, profound hilarity.
 
Though I’d listened to it before, it wasn’t until I spent two weeks driving around the mountains of North Carolina last year as a relative was sick—and then, after they passed away—that I fell in love with this album. And it's hard to say what helped more: Adams's sad-sack songs, or the inane banter between them. I'd wager some of both.

At the end of the first night, Adams closes the show with “Come Pick Me Up,” which might be his most comically-depressing song, and then, by screaming at his audience: “THAT'S IT, YOU'RE SAAAAAAD! EVERYBODY'S SAD NOWWWWW!!!! YEAHHHH!!!!!”

Which, among other reasons, is funny because it’s true.

***

*[Foster Kamer](http://fosterkamer.com/Interviews-Profiles) probably owes you an email, and apologizes in advance. He lives in New York.*

Ryan Adams is rock and roll’s most prolific comedian.

Ryan Adamas

Rock and roll’s most prolific class clown.



Ryan Adams

I first met her in 2007, when I was crashing in one of those New York City apartments where you can wash your face while sitting on the toilet. 

I’d just graduated college and was lost in my own skin, in love with a guy who’d written me into a play in which my character left his to die alone of a brain tumor. I was barely eating, but I bought a croissant on the walk to the Met and let it melt on my tongue in thin, dizzying strips. 

[Mäda Primavesi](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gustav-klimt-portrait-of-mada-primavesi_us_57f567d0e4b002a731209c31 "Mada Primavesi by Gustav Klimt") lives in Gallery 829. Gustav Klimt painted the 9-year-old in 1912. The canvas spent some time with the Nazis during the war, where I can imagine she gave them hell. I was unprepared. I rounded a corner and there she was against a riotous outbreak of flowers, all youthful challenge, arched brow, one fist clenched behind her hip. It’s a beautiful painting, yes, but more than that: It made me livid and terrified, how she owned her one life. 

Since then, I’ve adopted the habit of one-stop museum tours. We think of these places as a thing to be done, a page in a guidebook. They’re daunting and overwhelming and honestly a little boring, and so we shuffle through like a chore, cameras against our faces.

I get it though, I do. I get the same feeling in museums as I do in libraries or bookstores, a kind of prickling in my gut. There’s something intimidating about the massing of knowledge, I think, how everything you need to understand the world and your place in it is so tantalizingly close. So we get tired, or disengage, or turn back to our phones, or just head to the gift shop. I read somewhere that the human brain can only focus on one thing for eight seconds before it splinters off again. It’s impossible to process all that awe at once.

But if you can get away from that, that very human compulsion to put another check mark on the list of “Important Things I Have Seen,” one-stop museum tours can be a meditation, an exercise in singular focus, a reprieve. The closeness of the recycled air, the precision of the light, the hum and jostle, the steady thrum of conversation. In a quiet room of sculpture in the basement of D.C.’s National Gallery (free!), I’d visit with the soft, Miracle-Whip flesh of [Rodin’s “The Sphinx,”](https://www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.50753.html "The Sphinx") learning over and over how the body tries to make peace with itself. 

And when I moved to New York, five years after that first meeting, I bought a membership to the Met. I’d scatter through for 20 minutes, less, the museum now a lunch break, a time-killer, a commute. And I’d visit Mäda. Every time that same ice water to the face, every time that reminder: “You must change your life.” 

***

*[Meghan Nesmith](https://twitter.com/megjnesmith) is a writer and editor living in Boston.*

Why art is best experienced one work at a time.

Mäda Primavesi Klimt

Museums

I never really liked "serious" films; two hours without levity is not how I want to spend my time. Sure, my attention span was gutted in adolescence by cartoons and toy commercials, but the fact remains I've always found revisionist period pieces or political dramas go down like medicine.
 
Thus I was the asshole sitting alone in the theater for *[The Hottie & the Nottie](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hottie_and_the_nottie/)* (starring Paris Hilton) or making my friends watch *[Orca](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/orca_the_killer_whale)*, a film about a killer whale intent on killing the sea captain who murdered his whale-wife and unborn calf. You'd think a whale bent on revenge is an easy problem to solve (avoid the ocean); you'd also think [Ennio Morricone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9uMeQoDf5Y) wouldn't compose a [haunting score](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDTFvg1ijZc) for an absurd Jaws knockoff featuring whale miscarriage, but you'd be wrong. Twice. 
 
Over the years I've gotten in a lot of arguments about preferring “bad” movies to “good” ones. Luckily, going to bat for *[Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/anacondas_the_hunt_for_the_blood_orchid/)* led me to conclude that "good" and "bad" are moving targets. And "good" often just means "fashionable." This is why great films—those that best express a creator's vision—tend to be less commercially successful but age better than whatever wins awards.  Instead, I realized, the most reliable way to judge a film's merits is to try and measure them against its own ambitions. 
 
And this is when bad movies really started to sing for me. 
 
1993's *[Body of Evidence](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/body-of-evidence-1993)* concerns a lawyer (Willem Dafoe) who gets involved with his client, a houseboat-dwelling femme fatale (Madonna!) whose former lover died by "erotic asphyxiation" mid-coitus. Yes, as one character has the audacity to explain: Madonna is the murder weapon—her body is the body of evidence. This is either bad or "bad", but mostly it's illuminating in that someone thought we actually needed the explanation.
 
Consider the amount of decisions on display in any given shot of a movie: every second is the culmination of efforts by a small army working 12+ hour days for months. That's when you appreciate that bad movies are not necessarily just byproducts of ineptitude, but that they, too, reflect a specific filmmaker's vision and values. Though good art can still succeed if inscrutable, bad art is often more compelling because it's so the opposite: a painfully intimate glimpse into its creator's weird little soul. 
 
*[The Room](http://www.theroommovie.com/)*, of course, is a preposterously good example of this. Forgettable indie chamber dramas get churned out every year and, in many ways, it's indistinguishable: bogged down by narrative inconsistencies and full of abandoned plot points and scenes that don't intuitively follow from anywhere. But what The Room has over your average unremarkable indie is, of course, Tommy Wiseau. It endures not because it's straightforwardly bad but because its badness reflects what Wiseau sincerely believes to be good. Since Wiseau is genuinely bizarre, the film captivates. 
 
For this reason we might distinguish between "bad" as in "sublime catastrophe" and "bad" as merely "hacky," "rote," or "unoriginal" (i.e., most movies worth ignoring). Hacks conform to market demands and make little effort to surpass them; their fourth installments in horror franchises seldom reflect a specific point of view. 
 
But, then again, there's room for magic even in the rote. That Anaconda sequel, for one, is impossibly lifted by its absurd premise: pharmaceutical researchers looking for an immortality flower in the jungle get impeded by snake orgies. 
 
With ridiculous like that, who needs sublime?
 
***

*Ashley Cardiff is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. Her first essay collection,* [Night Terrors](https://www.amazon.com/Night-Terrors-Dating-Puberty-Alarming-ebook/dp/B009RYS4QW)*, was published by Penguin.*

tommy-wiseau-green

Bad Movies

*Welcome to [High Minded](https://gossamer.co/high-minded): a series of essays in which we look at everyday things, ideas, and experiences from a different perspective—like stoned epiphanies, but put to paper.*
 
When it was time to divvy up percussion parts in high school orchestra, I usually got stuck with the marimba. Officially, this was because I had a piano background and could read the notes; unofficially, it was because I was a girl.
 
Unlike the commanding snare drum—a part that always went to a kid named Peter who was literally an Eagle Scout—the marimba was soft and feminine. With its cloth mallets and wooden bars, it was even the girliest of the mallet instruments. At least the vibraphone had a cool pedal that made it feel like you were playing electric guitar; at least the bells were piercingly loud. On marimba, you could barely hear yourself over the rest of the orchestra—or so it seemed to my 16-year-old ears.
 
After high school, when I no longer needed to play in an orchestra to avoid gym class, I didn't expect to ever think about marimba again. But then, 13 years later, a song came on the radio while I was grocery shopping.
 
The first thing that stood out was the vocalist, an older, newly contrite Justin Bieber. But the real surprise: after the drop, the vocals gave way to a driving, syncopated marimba. The song? ["Where Are Ü Now."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=webUeq_Qzeg) After that, I started hearing marimba (or at least digital marimba) everywhere. Major Lazer and DJ Snake's ["Lean On,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqeW9_5kURI) which came out a few months later, opened with quiet marimba chords that built up to an earworm of a hook. Matoma's Notorious B.I.G. remix ["Old Thing Back,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb3XfrCtjVU) a summer jam if ever there was one, got its bouncy energy from a marimba part. ["Sorry,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRh_vgS2dFE) which you couldn’t leave your house without hearing that fall, wove marimba into its wall of sound.
 
2015 wasn’t the first time that marimba had appeared on pop radio. Mallet instruments have featured into Afrobeat and dancehall for decades. They’ve also occasionally shown up in rock (turn on your local classic rock station for an hour, and you’ll probably hear them in the opening riff of ["Under My Thumb"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJp350jtmY)). And shortly before Bieber’s *Purpose*, marimba—along with pan flute, steel drums, and dolphin noises—had started infiltrating electronic music. There’s plenty to dislike about that genre, which came to be known as "Tropical House": for one, it was the latest instance of [white producers getting credit for sounds taken from black and brown artists in the West Indies](https://www.spin.com/2016/01/rihanna-tropical-house-dancehall-kygo-charlie-puth-justin-bieber-selena-gomez/). It also earned the nickname ["Instagram House"](https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/5gj5w8/how-kygo-became-the-king-of-instagram-house-clive-martin-724) for its association with pleasure-seeking millennials and their Valencia-filtered lives.
 
When done lazily, this injection of Caribbean sounds into club-friendly hits can feel saccharine. ([As one critic put it](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/mixpaks-dancehall-revival), "Here is a song that is designed to make you feel happy. Take twice a day with sun.") But the best artists riding the Marimba Wave lend unexpected depth to summery sounds. They’ve made something new from their blending of dancehall, R&B, and electropop influences.

Since 2015, mallet instruments have played starring roles on Drake’s ["One Dance,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL7zrWcv6XY) Sia’s ["Cheap Thrills,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31crA53Dgu0) Rihanna’s ["Work,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL1UzIK-flA) DJ Snake and Bieber’s ["Let Me Love You,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euCqAq6BRa4) and on more experimental tracks like Maleek Berry's ["Kontrol."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si0ZHJdlu9M) It's not only marimba that makes these songs great, and it’s hard to separate their greatness from Drake's drawl or Rihanna's rasp or Bieber's vocal flourishes. But alongside them, the marimba can conjure up deep, strange emotions. As an instrument, it's a paradox: mellow and percussive, hollow and deep, weary and carefree. Unlike its showier relatives in the mallet family, it can change the entire feel of a song without drawing attention to itself. You notice it without really noticing it.
 
Despite its recent Top 40 success, I suspect the marimba still doesn’t get much love from high school percussionists, many of whom play drums because they like loud things. But I’m glad I learned to appreciate, 15 years later, the understated allure of the marimba. If I could send a message to my high school self, I would tell her to invent Facebook, and also to play the marimba with pride.

***

*Liz Maynes-Aminzade is the senior web manager at [The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/) and an editor at [Public Books](http://www.publicbooks.org/). You can find her on Instagram at [@lizzymaynes](https://www.instagram.com/lizzymaynes/).*

Not as soft an instrument as you'd think.

the-marimba

the-marimba-green

The Marimba

*Welcome to [High Minded](https://gossamer.co/high-minded): a series of essays in which we look at everyday things, ideas, and experiences from a different perspective—like stoned epiphanies, but put to paper.*

The internet’s alright. iPhones are fine. The TV has had its moments. The Moog synthesizer sounds good. Air Maxes are comfortable. Denim is durable. Kevlar saves lives. Those machines that pour 12 beers at once save precious time. Admirable inventions, the lot of them.
 
And, yes, their inventors will all go on about determination and overcoming the odds and Eureka moments and such, but there is absolutely no way that any of these things would have been invented, manufactured, marketed, and made into modern success stories without one thing: the alarm clock. 
 
Think about it: the lie-ins; the missed meetings; the hours of inspiration lost to deep uninterrupted slumber—who knows how much those bedside irritants have sped up progress. 
 
Once, all it took was a well-developed circadian rhythm, a couple of cockerels, and a general lack of curtains to have us up and at it with the sun. Then came some water-powered striking town clocks in China, and Venice got its bronze-statue-beaten [St. Mark’s Clock](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/torre-dell-orologio-venice-clock-tower). But throw in an industrial revolution and suddenly the need to be places on time is somewhat increased. 
 
In 19th-century Britain, for example, door-banging “knocker-uppers” were a common means of waking up workers (of course Britain had knocker-uppers), though how they were up in time to do the waking is unexplained. 
 
The first notable mechanical alarm clock was invented—entirely for himself—by New Hampshire clockmaker Levi Hutchins in 1787. It was an unwieldy pine cabinet containing a large brass clock which would trigger a bell to ring specifically at 4 a.m., the time he liked to rise for work (the lunatic). 
 
It wasn’t until Frenchman Antoine Redier patented an adjustable version in 1847 that waking up got easier en masse. And here’s a list of some of the inventions that followed in the next few decades: elevators, batteries, plastic, stainless steel, the telephone, the lightbulb, x-rays and the ballpoint pen. Coincidence? Not a chance. 
 
Invention is a creative job, by rights, but anyone who claims their creativity strikes early in the morning is lying. It’s these ringing/bleeping/radio-playing taskmasters that have laid the path for pioneers—humankind’s productivity entrusted to machines. 
 
Hell, animals sleep through entire seasons because they know they’re not going to get anything done; we’d probably do the same, given half the chance. 
 
Of course, inspiration often strikes during moments of pressureless relaxation, but it’s that early morning alert that forces an idea into a reality. “Get up,” it says. “Go create,” it says. “Don’t be late for that marketing brainstorm,” it says. 
 
“Shh,” you reply. “Snooze,” you command. But eventually you give in to its incessant demands to be awake, alert, alive. 
 
And that’s why, when people ponder landmark inventions, design milestones, and the like, these rest interrupters deserve their place—we’d have slept our way through far too much without them. 
 
So here’s to the humble alarm clock, and all they’ve bullied out of bed to go do something meaningful. Your time is now. And again in ten minutes, probably. And ten minutes after that…

***

*Richard MacKichan is Editor at boutique hotel specialists [Mr. & Mrs. Smith](https://www.mrandmrssmith.com/) and a reluctant fan of early morning wake-up calls so he doesn't miss breakfast. He's written on pop music for The Independent, gadgets for The Huffington Post, is a regular guest on [The Rest Is Noise](https://www.therestisnoise.org/) podcast, and has consulted for a number of brands. Follow him on Instagram at [@richeymack](https://www.instagram.com/richeymack/).*

We've been snoozing on them for too long.

alarm-clocks

alarm-clocks-green

*Welcome to [High Minded](https://gossamer.co/high-minded): a series of essays in which we look at everyday things, ideas, and experiences from a different perspective—like stoned epiphanies, but put to paper.*

Pizza Hut is big in Brazil. I used to live around the corner from one in São Paulo. It was manned by a team of valets in black vests, and on Saturday nights they could barely handle the heavy flow of well-washed cars. Customers emerging in button-ups and dresses smelled richly of perfumes; in booths by the front windows I'd see couples bringing glasses of red wine to their lips. It was not an obvious place for a romantic evening. Hungover and nostalgic, I once went inside to find bright lights, formica tables, and walls hung with posters advertising the very food you were already there to eat. You were exhorted to order the Cheesy Pop, whose crust blossoms into stubby rolls filled with cream cheese. I liked the Corn e Bacon—the name was just like that, in English except for the Portuguese conjunction.
 
Brazilian Pizza Hut is a curious translation, at once deeply American and not-quite-American. In its native country, of course, we tend to see the chain as second-rate at best, even though it looks pretty much the same as in Brazil (at least, when not conjoined to a Taco Bell). Despite having spent most of my life in America, I can't remember ever going out of my way to eat at one—which may explain why the CEO of its parent company, Yum! Brands, [says](http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2015/12/14/pizza-hut-ceo-skip-quality-and-focus-on-convenience.html) convenience and speed matter far more than actual quality. It's a place for families on a budget, in a hurry.
 
Brazilian Pizza Hut, by contrast, is a destination. It means something more there.
 
To understand why, first you have to know that a $15 pizza costs a day's labor at Brazil's minimum wage. São Paulo has more people of Italian descent than New York, so you can find decent pizza for pretty cheap, and with cream cheese on it, if that's what you want (or tuna, or beans, or raisins, or a whole roasted chicken topped with a fried egg—all popular on pizzas in Brazil). But for those who can afford it, the higher price is well worth paying. The thing that they're actually buying something is larger, something intangible: a piece of America transplanted into the developing world. Pizza Hut is standardized, predictable, with a franchise sheen of packaged goodness, and in this way it represents a common idea of the U.S.A., where all is said to be clean and orderly and always properly functioning—all things that Brazil is not, in the minds of many Brazilians.
 
Pizza Hut (pronounced "Pizza Hutchie" in Brazilian Portuguese) isn't the only place where this dynamic plays out. Outback ("Outchiebackie") is popular, too. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to Brazil. Whatever damage Donald Trump has done to the prestige of American government abroad, the soft power of our culinary franchises remains strong as ever. In much of the developing world, Pizza Hut is still a symbol of something worth aspiring to.
 
It's easy to poke fun at this elevation of lowbrow U.S. brands by people from poor countries. But they're actually just endorsing our own outdated self-image: as a nation at the center of power, superior, worth imitating simply for our Americanness. Just like we invented the brands they're importing, we invented the delusion. The big difference is that we’re close enough to the reality behind the image to know better.
 
***

*[Alex Cuadros](http://alexcuadros.com/) is the author of [Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016GRO8M6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). He has also written for The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Lapham's Quarterly, among others. Find him on Twitter at [@alexcuadros](https://twitter.com/alexcuadros).*

pizza-hut

pizza-hut-green2

Pizza Hut

Alarm Clocks

A series of essays in which we look at everyday things, ideas, and experiences from a different perspective—like stoned epiphanies, but put to paper.