James Frey's Blog, page 30
June 16, 2023
Shitplants
An effective treatment for a whole raft of diseases, from irritable bowel syndrome to arthritis and even Alzheimer’s, comes from the most unlikely of sources – human poo. James Kinross explains the role gut biomes play in our health
by James Kinross
As a nation, we British are obsessed with our gut function, largely because it has never been unhealthier. I spend large parts of my working day talking to patients about their bowel habits, and many of them want to talk about little else. There is also a deeper, more fundamental fascination with the digestive system; the colon is a national source of comedy that has kept us going through every crisis since the beginning of time.
“Shit” is a crucial and ubiquitous word that serves as a noun, a verb and an adjective, propping up the entire English language. This wondrous word is both a profanity and a term used to denote an item of high quality, and it is liberally sprinkled into the daily chatter of our lives.
The sense of revulsion we feel when we’re faced with human excrement (or even just the thought of it) is, in part, a response to the way it looks and smells. But that revulsion is also a psychological reflex, ingrained by potty training and social stigma. This aversion is an important safety mechanism: handwashing and sewer systems prevent the spread of diseases that have killed millions.
But what if I told you that faeces was not toxic waste and that it contained the secret to human health? Would you eat it, if your life depended on it? What if it was rebranded as a faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) or, more accurately, a faecal milkshake given through a tube that passes through the nose into the stomach? You could even take it in the form of a capsule – or “crapsule” – if you wanted.
June 15, 2023
Rusty Nails and Bakelite
London (AFP) – Some of the most notorious art forgeries form the centre-piece of a new London show, which reveals a cat-and-mouse world of intrigue, deception and painstaking detective work.
The show highlights the work of known forgers who have been unmasked © HENRY NICHOLLS / AFPThe exhibition, which opens at the Courtauld in Somerset House on Saturday, features around 25 drawings and seven paintings, as well as sculpture and decorative art from the renowned gallery’s collection.
Armed with magnifying glasses, visitors can scrutinise purported masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli, John Constable, and Auguste Rodin.
Visitors will learn how they were created, the methods of the most infamous forgers and the increasingly sophisticated methods used to detect them.
“Forgeries have always existed in the history of art and have a place in our study,” Rachel Hapoienu, drawings cataloguer at the gallery, told AFP.
June 14, 2023
Subtitle Society
It’s not just you.
By Devin Gordon
Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: HBO Max.The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.
“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”
“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”
Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?
June 13, 2023
Resurrect Glen Canyon Now
Record dryness has restored an ecosystem under Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir. Is it time to see it as ‘a national park rather than a storage tank’?
One night in May 2003, I found myself in search of a disappearing lake.
A friend and I had ventured to the Hite Marina on Lake Powell to see what America’s second-largest reservoir looked like after three years of record drought. In search of a camping spot, we drove down a boat ramp that just a few years earlier was bustling with boaters. Now it sat eerily on a dry lakebed.
Donning headlamps, we walked past marooned docks and stranded buoys, drawn toward a strange roaring sound I thought was wind or a boat motor. Instead, it was something I never thought I’d witness.
“It’s the Colorado River!” my friend shouted in disbelief at how far the reservoir had already withdrawn. “It’s flowing!”
This resurrection of a river that had been dammed to create the reservoir was a beautiful yet unsettling sight. The climate crisis was exposing flaws in a water system that – after years of denial – western states have finally been forced to confront. Over the following decade, I returned to Lake Powell many times to hike the slot canyons and tributaries emerging as drought shrunk the lake, watching a world long thought buried coming back to life.
June 8, 2023
The Iron Sheik Gone
By Greg Evans
The man born Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri but known to millions of pre wrestling fans as The Iron Sheik has died. He was 81.
His death was announced on his official Twitter page. “It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of The Iron Sheik,” the announcement reads, “but we also take solace unknowing that he departed this world peacefully, leaving behind a legacy that will endure for generations to come.”
A cause of death was not disclosed.
June 7, 2023
Fight For Your Rights
from The Los Angeles Times via MSN
Editorial: A Hollywood mess: Writers are striking, and actors may too, over the future of the industryOpinion by The Times Editorial Board
Screen Actors Guild members take part in a Writers Guild rally May 22 outside Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. ((Chris Pizzello / Associated Press))© (Chris Pizzello / Associated Press)After six weeks on the picket line, Hollywood writers could soon be joined by actors, whose union, SAG-AFTRA, voted to authorize a walkout if it can’t reach a deal with studios by the end of the month.
A work stoppage by two major Hollywood unions would be a serious blow to the industry — and to Los Angeles County, where film and television are an important economic engine.
To make matters worse, the strike — or strikes — could carry on for weeks or months, observers suggest, because the issues being hashed out are challenging and existential for the industry. The digital revolution has significantly changed the business model, particularly for television shows. The arrival of artificial intelligence could upend things again, if software takes over acting and writing work.
Writers and actors see their careers at stake and have been steadfast in demanding contract terms that protect their income and ensure that there are good jobs for the next generation of creators and performers. Media companies are also still learning to navigate the world of streaming. After going on a spending spree in recent years to launch services with prestige shows and movies, few companies have managed to turn a profit on streaming and are under pressure from shareholders to cut costs and figure out a business model that works.
Negotiations begin Wednesday between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which includes Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Discovery-Warner, NBC Universal and Sony. The Directors Guild of America reached a deal with the alliance over the weekend, with increased pay and streaming compensation.
The Writers Guild of America and the studios have not returned to the bargaining table since the strike started May 2, which is disappointing considering how much is at stake for the industry and the people who rely on it for their livelihood.
June 4, 2023
June 3, 2023
Vanishing Victor
by Maureen Dowd
By the time I took off my mortarboard two weeks ago, my degree in English literature was de trop. Instead of a Master of Arts, I should have gotten a Master of Algorithms.
As I was pushing the rock up a hill, mastering Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and Mary Shelley, I failed to notice that the humanities had fallen off the cliff.
t was as if the bottle of great wine I saved to celebrate my degree was bouchonné.
The New Yorker ran an obit declaring “The End of the English Major.” One English professor flatly told Nathan Heller, the writer of the 10,000-plus-word magazine piece, that “the Age of Anglophilia is over.”
The Harvard English department handed out tote bags with slogans like “Currently reading” and dropped its poetry requirement for an English degree. But it was too late for such pandering. Students were fleeing to the hotter fields of tech and science.
“Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip,” Heller wrote.
Trustees at Marymount University in Virginia voted unanimously in February to phase out majors such as English, history, art, philosophy and sociology.
June 2, 2023
Loopin’ Alive
Producers: The Bee Gees, Albhy Galuten, Karl Richardson • Engineer: Karl Richardson
By Richard Buskin
Disco was an American phenomenon, but its greatest hits were recorded in France by an English band who were trying to play R&B…
Years after the ’70s disco fad and subsequent backlash had subsided, Maurice Gibb told an interviewer that he’d like to dress up the Saturday Night Fever album in a white suit and gold medallion and set the whole thing on fire, such was the stigma that had been attached to him and his brothers Barry and Robin by press and public alike. One minute, they were the purveyors of ‘blue-eyed soul’, melding their pop roots, trademark harmonies and Barry’s newly discovered falsetto with their love of early ’70s Philadelphia funk, crafting heavily rhythmic dance music that was finding its way onto black American radio stations. The next, thanks to a soundtrack album that sold a then-record 25 million copies worldwide and topped the US charts for 24 weeks — where it spawned four number one singles, three of them their own — they were the Kings of Disco and all that encompassed, reaping the rewards and then the brickbats.
Still, as Barry later asserted, it did put food on the table, while the Saturday Night Fever album was a significant moment in the annals of pop culture; a moment when a trio of white Englishmen almost single-handely ignited a widespread mania for the disco music that had previously been the domain of the black and gay sub-cultures in America, and had been superseded by punk in Europe. In addition to the Bee Gees’ recordings of ‘Stayin’ Alive’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Night Fever’, ‘More Than A Woman’, ‘Jive Talkin’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’, the two-LP set contained their compositions being covered by the Tavares (‘More Than A Woman’) and Yvonne Elliman (‘If I Can’t Have You’), alongside lesser material by the likes of Walter Murphy, David Shire, Ralph MacDonald, MFSB, the Trammps, Kool & the Gang, and KC & the Sunshine Band. Yet it is ‘Stayin’ Alive’, which played over the movie’s opening credits while John Travolta’s Tony Manero strutted down the New York streets in his polyester suit, that best evokes the era and its promotion of sex, drugs and breathless boogying as some form of decadent compensation for a humdrum daily existence.
June 1, 2023
Return of the Ham
Ham radio users, from teenagers to eightysomethings, are ready to communicate in the next crisis – be it a wildfire, pandemic or ‘the big one’
by Amanda Ulrich in Palm Springs
Glenn Morrison, president of the Desert Radio Amateur Transmitting Society, a Palm Springs-based club dedicated to everything ham radio. Photograph: Adam Amengual/The GuardianThere’s an ancient fable that Glenn Morrison, a pony-tailed, 75-year-old who lives in the California desert, likes to tell to prove a point. As the lesson goes, one industrious ant readies for winter by stocking up on food and supplies, while an aimless grasshopper wastes time and doesn’t plan ahead. When the cold weather finally arrives, the ant is “fat and happy”, but the grasshopper starves.
In this telling, Morrison is the ant, and those who don’t brace themselves for future emergencies – they’re the grasshoppers.
Morrison is in the business of being prepared. He’s the president of the Desert Rats (or the Radio Amateur Transmitting Society), a club based in Palm Springs that’s dedicated to everything ham radio.
The old-school technology has been around for more than a century. In lieu of smartphones and laptops, ham radio operators use handheld or larger “base station” radios to communicate over radio frequencies. The retro devices can range from the size of a walkie-talkie to the heft of a boxy, 20th-century VCR.
Generations after its invention, one of ham radio’s biggest draws for hobbyists is its usefulness in an emergency – think wildfires, earthquakes or another pandemic. If disaster strikes and internet or cellular networks fail, radio operators could spring into action and help with emergency response communications, and be able to keep in contact with their own networks.
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