‘Some of them dug for answers in the mess, but the rest were looking for trouble.’

It being 9/11 and all, I’ve seen the requisite “Never Forget”’s and calls for the blessing of a certain country from capital-G God and the linking to of new think pieces written to—commemorate, I guess?

I don’t know. I thought it would be more useful, and maybe even more helpful, to link to a couple of things that were created in the moment:

“Tuesday, and After,” compiled by The New Yorker:

In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, New Yorker staff writers and contributors reflect on the tragedy and its consequences. This week’s Talk of the Town is devoted entirely to the incident, and includes contributions from John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim.

“Fear & Loathing in America,” by Hunter S. Thompson:

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

And finally, (lyrics here) Sage Francis’ “Makeshift Patriot”:

How Staten Island Is Fighting a Raging Heroin and Prescription Pill Epidemic →

Ian Frazier:

Staten Island has a lot of tattoo parlors, Italian delicatessens, two-story office buildings with empty spaces to rent, massage therapists, car services, Italian restaurants, places that give rock-music lessons and host children’s birthday parties, laundromats, liquor stores, tire shops, nail parlors, foot spas, pet-grooming salons, hair salons, barbershops (“buzz cuts, fades, tape-ups”). A small-business miscellany, sprung from the borough’s abundant middle-class life, lines the bigger roads like Hylan Boulevard from one end of the island to the other.

Most Staten Island enterprises are as their signs describe them. Occasionally, one or two storefronts that look no different from the rest also do a steady, word-of-mouth business in the illegal sale of OxyContin, oxycodone, Percocet, and other prescription painkillers. A neighborhood ice-cream truck playing its jingle might also be selling pills, according to police, who keep an eye on ice-cream trucks. A window-blinds and drapery store sold oxycodone pills until the N.Y.P.D. arrested one of the owners and the store closed. At a barbershop called Beyond Styles, on Giffords Lane, in the Great Kills neighborhood, police arrested the owner and two accomplices in October of 2013 for selling oxycodone and other drugs—two thousand pills a week, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The silent sniper fire of overdoses from pills and heroin that has been picking people off one at a time in increasing numbers all over the country for almost twenty years has hit Staten Island harder than anyplace else in the city. For a number of reasons, this borough of four hundred and seventy thousand-plus people offers unusually good entry routes for the opioid epidemic. In 2012, thirty-six people on Staten Island overdosed on heroin and thirty-seven on prescription opioid pills, for an average of almost exactly one overdose death every five days. Many of the dead have been young people in their late teens to early thirties. In this self-contained place, everybody seems to know everybody, and the grief as the deaths accumulate has been frantic and terrified.

Why 'Nano-Degrees' Can Never Replace Liberal Arts Colleges →

Michael Roth:

As the president of Wesleyan University, and somebody who has been teaching college students for 30 years, I’m very skeptical about the current re-fashioning of vocational education under the banner of Silicon Valley sophistication. We do need experiments integrating technology and pedagogy. That’s why I’ve been teaching online courses with my Wesleyan colleagues over the last two years. We’ve reached almost a million students in that time and continue to learn from working together. But we teach students online in the same way we do on campus: with the goal of broadening their thinking while sharpening their skills.

There are many, many problems currently plaguing higher education. But trying to change the definition to include the training of people in only one skill set is an obvious mistake.

Seeing Discolored Lawns, California Businesses Apply Dab of Green →

Jennifer Medina:

There are few people who see an upside to the record-setting drought in California, but Drew McClellan sees a path to business. Earlier this summer, when a friend began complaining about his browning front lawn, Mr. McClellan thought back to his childhood in Florida, where he often spotted golf courses using sprays to dye their greens. When a brief Internet search failed to show any local business offering a similar service, Mr. McClellan decided it was a prime opportunity.

And since he opened up shop in July, Mr. McClellan has been taking requests faster than he can keep up.

Stories like this, they’re a mirror. They reflect back the mindset that you bring to it.

Havana Bikes

Hauri Multimedia:

Cuba underwent a bicycle revolution in the 1990s during its five year ‘Special Period’. Oil was scarce as a result of tough economic constraints, and throughout those years of austerity, bicycles where introduced as an alternative mode of transport. Thousands of Cubans used bicycles on a regular basis, as pedalling became the norm on the island.

Years later, the transportation crisis subsided and motorised vehicles returned, and the country’s bicycle culture took a hit. Now, new bikes are difficult to come by and parts are not readily available, yet many Cubans still use bicycles daily and, despite the limited resources, a handful of mechanics provide a service to those who rely on their bikes in their everyday lives.

Stuff like this always make me nauseous about how little I actually know. It reminds me of a section in White Noise (transcribed here):

“It’s like we've been flung back in time," he said. "Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name one thing you could make. Could you make a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big Deal.’ Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events in the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles."
“We’re doing all right.”
“We’re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s like we’re flung back.”
“We have heat, we have light.”
“These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints together? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?”
“‘Boil your water,’ I’d tell them.”
“Sure. What about ‘Wash behind your ears.’ That’s about as good.”
“I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.”
“What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.”
“There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.”
“They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

/via Devour

Grover Norquist Went to Burning Man →

Grover Norquist:

A community that comes together with a minimum of “rules” demands self-reliance – that everyone clean up after themselves and help thy neighbor. Some day, I want to live 52 weeks a year in a state or city that acts like this. I want to attend a national political convention that advocates the wisdom of Burning Man.

What a joke. You can’t buy anything at Burning Man other than coffee or ice. Tickets (yes, there are tickets, which Norquist conveniently leaves out) cost $650 or $380, depending on when you buy them. And speaking of things he left out, here and here you can find the quite explicit, lengthy rules (not “rules” as he puts it) for coming to/surviving at Burning Man. Norquist did more than drink absinthe and smoke Cuban cigars if he thinks that the social mores of a week-long art festival for 70,000 people could even possibly apply to a nation of 314,000,000 that exists, you know, 365 days a year. But then again, that’s exactly the kind of in-a-vacuum philosophy that Libertarians like Norquist babble on about.

‘Fear was our main reason for living.’

Roma, a documentary by Sam Davis, “brings to light a community that has been somewhat forgotten.”

Hey, maybe TLC will include these stories in their next season of My Big Fat Gypsy Bullshit Reality TV Freak Fest Wedding. Yeah, probably not.

Scott Carrier’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ →

Rob Rosenthal:

I’m often asked “How can I get into radio?”  Typically, I respond with things like “Just start making stories. Take some classes then get an internship.”

What I don’t say is “Interview a lot of people then show up at a radio station and ask ‘Can you help me produce a radio story?’” That seems unlikely to work.

But, maybe I should give that advice because that’s how Scott Carrier got his start in radio back in 1983. Only instead of knocking on the door of a radio station recordings in hand, he went directly to the mothership — NPR.

Scott Carrier is my absolute favorite NPR voice, maybe even my favorite non-fiction storyteller/writer. I was so excited to see him get the HowSound treatment (a podcast that is most definitely worth your time) and to have it be his infamous first story ever produced was an added bonus.

And once you’re hooked, I’d recommend just about everything he’s ever done. You can get all of his contributions to This American Life here.

Oh, and since I’m all frothy at the mouth about this, in the piece, Scott Carrier mentions “The Kitchen Sisters.” Once you’re done with Scott Carrier, prepare to be bowled over by their work. You can start with their new Radiotopia show “Fugitive Waves.”

Holdout: The Story of Edith Macefield →

Roman Mars:

Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all over the community which had once been mostly single family homes and small businesses. Around this time, developers offered a woman named Edith Macefield $750,000 dollars for her small house, which was appraised at around $120,000. They wanted to build a shopping mall on the block where Macefield had lived for the last 50 years.

Macefield turned down the money. Developers went forward with the shopping mall anyway. The mall enveloped her house on three sides.

Really cool episode of 99% Invisible—in a lot of ways, it felt reminiscent of the “smaller” shows that they started off doing. This video, about the tattoo that Roman Mars mentions, is also pretty great:

The “Liberal, Freckle-Faced Slut” Behind ‘I Fucking Love Science’ →

Alexis Sobel Fitts:

Since it launched in March 2012, IFLS has attracted more than 17.9 million Facebook followers—more than Popular Science (2.7 million), Discover (2.7 million), Scientific American (1.9 million), and The New York Times (8 million) combined. Its following is larger than those of the world’s two most prominent science communicators: Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson (1.8 million) and Bill Nye The Science Guy (3.2 million), both of whom are fans of Andrew’s page. Her empire has since expanded to include a website, IFLscience.com, which has a staff and publishes news stories, and a television show slated to start on the Science Channel this fall.

The only thing “new” about journalism these days is the insistence on making the story about the individual responsible for the story. Good for her.