THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Over the past year or so, there have been lots of ads for home genetic testing kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe popping up on television and social media. For a quick primer on basic genetics -- but with a British narrator, so you know that shit is classy -- check this out:   BBC Knowledge Explainer DNA | Experience | Territory Studio from Territory on Vimeo . For Christmas, my mother got me one of those spit-and-send kits, so I decided to go for it. Now, I'm not really someone who organizes his identity primarily in terms of "race" or "ethnicity," as dubious as some of those categorizations can be, but I was a bit curious to see where I stood on the tree of life, that balance between blossom and pollination. I sent the findings in at the beginning of January, and I just got the results today, so it's clear that the business is booming. However, I wasn't quite surprised with my results: Europe West (53%); Great Britain (13%); Ireland/Scotland/...

Take a moment and look at this letter, which appears to be legitimate: What you have here is a lobbyist for the Legislative branch implicitly intimidating a candidate for the Judicial branch -- specifically, Wisconsin's Tim Burns -- on "Second Amendment-related issues." Tim Burns didn't move past the February 20th vote, but to know that this is how the NRA "gathers information" affirms every worst thought about the NRA, the lobbying process, and politics in general. My fear is that any movement reflecting my values  -- sadly, the standard and somewhat cliche values you would expect from a middle-class educator -- has already lost. Watching some of the youth-driven movements of late has offered mild encouragement, but they're fighting the weaponized machinery of division and dread, and I'm not sure that any social movement comes out intact in the long term against such a dehumanizing well-funded monolith of privilege. I wish I didn't feel...

If you want to get lost in an internet rabbit hole of technology v. perception v. socioeconomic class, try finding the "definitive" recording of a given artist or a given album. So it was when I had a spare moment's thought to somehow identify and acquire the best edition of "Heroes" by David Bowie. (To get an idea of how detailed this analysis can be, go here and prepare to be amazed.) First, as a preamble, it's important to remember that in the days of sheet music, a live performance was considered the definitive article. When Thomas Edison was promoting his wax cylinder recording technology a century ago, he tried to convince his audience that the recording was just as valid and engaging as the live performance, and to a great extent, he succeeded. Somewhere along the winding roads of history -- most likely when "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys and "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles captured the public imagination -- the reco...

A few months ago, I read an article called Six Features of the Disinformation Age , and it was like getting yet another kick in the gut w/r/t the current global and political nightmare we find ourselves in. It pinged quite a lot of my social psych brain -- desiccated and deleterious as it is these days -- so I wanted to plagiarize the gist and add my own sprinkles of flavor here and there. But be warned that it's not a journey where a happy ending is in sight any time soon. 1) Democratization Once again, we see the promise of democracy subverted by heretofore unknown unknowns, to quote a early 21st Century philosopher. Without traditional institutional media gatekeepers -- for the oldies, think Walter Cronkite from CBS -- political discourse is no longer based on a common set of facts. If you can persuade a good chunk of the right people in the right places to change their attitudes about what does and does not constitute a fact, you can create your own reality that everyone el...