Hasta La Gadget!

Serial is the hottest new podcast that’s working everybody up into a lather. It’s the number one podcast not only in the United States, but also Australia, and the United Kingdom. If you haven’t started listening to it, start listening to it.

Serial follows the conventions of sequential storytelling — conventions that came out of the Victorian era, when books were issued as installments. For instance, each chapter of Great Expectations arrived to the public simply as a link in an ongoing narrative — its own self-contained unit with elements of cliffhanger suspense built in. Only later were the bits collected and put together in book form (and this was simply to make money twice).

That’s how Serial is supposed to get you: The feeling of true waiting — something that is lost in our digital culture where all things are instantaneously present simultaneously — is a novel sensation. Pardon the pun.

I got to the show late, by then it had already been in its seventh episode and would soon release its eight. One of my old childhood friends, a successful screenwriter, had Facebook-ed that the seventh was the best (it is!). A rule breaker at heart, I leapt into that seventh episode just to see if it was worthwhile. I promptly got hooked, and proceeded to listen to every single episode in sequence. It was truly addictive.

There’s a reason why I did this that moves beyond entertainment: I was interested in craft. What makes this particular murder mystery so compelling that it has touched a nerve across the nation and around the English speaking world? Is it form? Is it craft? Is it technique? These were the questions on my mind as I listened. I wanted to take whatever I could purloin and see if I could make it my own.

Serial is basically a mystery with a murder of a young Korean American girl Hae Min Lee by her Pakistani American ex-boyfriend Adnan. The reporter is the voice that stands in as the detective figure — the creature of “ratiocination,” to borrow the term Edgar Alan Poe applied to his own stories of murder, mystery, intrigue… In other words, the narrator Sarah Koenig is the figure who thinks, ponders, puzzles, wonders.

And the story has many of the classic features of a mystery: It’s a whodunit that combines the pleasures of a police and courtroom procedural. The twist is that the crime supposedly has been solved and we get those events retold. We already know how it ends: Adnan, the ex-boyfriend, has been found guilty. He is talking to us from behind bars, where he has languished for well over a decade.

One of the big critiques that came out among my politically correct friends is that the story is racial — that it exploits certain tried and true racial stereotypes: Adnan is described in terms of Othello — a moor. In other words, he is a violent Muslim, someone who can be imagined as black. Then there’s all the exploitation of the model minority myth: the perfect Asian girl who is in every way an ideal daughter and student must die at the hands of the criminal darky. I won’t go into any other detail about this line of thinking, because it came out here.

I can only say that it annoyed me at the time, because it was an easy argument to make. In fact, it can be applied to just about any book dealing with racialized characters. In this sense, this line of thinking is extremely limited. It still doesn’t entirely address the popularity of the show. After all, there are tons of racist things out there that never gain traction, that never make it into the spotlight.

So I began to wonder if it was about the serialized form itself… if it was the fact of sequencing that made things interesting. That one, I threw out the window. After all, I enjoyed it even though I had started in the middle. In fact, though the show is designed to be sequential, it’s not rigidly sequential in the way that comic books move from panel to panel. You can pretty much jump into any episode and bounce around that way, and not get confused. In this sense, the pretense of form — that it is a serial — is simply a pretense. This is entirely different from the serializations that happened during the Victorian era, and certainly different from the radio dramas that are its immediate predecessors.

What I came to realize is that it is the narrator — the journalist stand-in for the detective voice — that is the true element that is addictive. And in fact, it is the way that Sarah Koenig keeps asking questions, finding dead ends, following up leads that are dry. One website dwelled on the numerous times that Sarah Koenig keeps resorting to the same language — the same stock phrases — to express her confusion.

This makes her, not Adnan, the most fully developed character of the show — the stroke of genius that keeps us compelled. Adnan is in other words, just the chump in the cage. He is a voice that arrives as simple snippets for her convenience. Sarah Koenig is the voice that curates him, that displays his interesting-ness for the world’s amusement.

I think this is the clue to unlocking the mystery: It is the befuddlement that Koenig must return to over and over again. And she is invested in this befuddlement, for if she could really resolve that befuddlement, she would not have a show at all — or at least, she would only have a fragment of a show. Even if we get to touch the holy grail — a real conclusive moment in which she figures it all out and explains all the elements of the show — it is the befuddlement that is so crucial for the story to move.

Koenig is in some senses a better detective than the classic ones — Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes — precisely because those sleuths are self-assured. We know they will prevail. In contrast, Koenig seems genuinely baffled. This is the stroke of genius: It is the elaboration of the speaker who is herself elaborating a story that really is the whole point of the show. In other words, Serial is something more ancient than a mystery novel or a Victorian serial of only a hundred odd years ago… it is a dance of the seven veils. It is a story that must be told every night in a different way to stay the hand of the executioner. It is just good storytelling.

“The House [of Representatives] has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. … We are a sovereign nation, and we are not being treated as such. We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.”
–Cyril Scott, President of the Rosebud Lakota (“Sioux”) Nation

I was to have been one of 400,000 protestors gathered for the People’s Climate March in New York on Sept. 21. Alas, a knee injury sidelined me. As a consolation prize, a friend bought me Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. So wowed am I by Klein’s singular accomplishment that I dedicate this post to an unsolicited review.

For those who may be unfamiliar with Naomi Klein, she’s a brilliant, 44-year-old Canadian journalist and activist. Two of her previous books — No Logo (1999), a critique of globalization, and Shock Doctrine (2007), an exposé of “disaster capitalism,” neoliberalism’s dark underbelly — were international bestsellers.

This Changes Everything is similarly destined. The New York Times review hailed it as “the most momentous and contentious environmental book since [Rachel Carson’s] ‘Silent Spring.'” If you read only one nonfiction work this year, make it Klein’s. In this meticulously documented masterpiece, she lays out the origins and magnitude of the climate crisis, why it has been so difficult to confront, and what must be done to mitigate it.

In 2011, with no previous interest in economics, I began studying this dubious social science under the auspices of Occupy Harrisonburg’s Economics Working Group (EWG). Our motivations were twofold: to understand what caused the worldwide economic collapse of 2008 and to articulate “fixes” in language anyone could understand. After more than a year of study and discussion, the EWG arrived at many of the conclusions put forth explicitly or implicitly by Klein:

• That globalization is the modern guise of imperialism.
• That the 2008 economic collapse was unprecedented. Not simply a bursting economic bubble, it resulted from a train wreck between physical reality and economic fantasies at the core of neoliberalism: that the Earth’s resources are limitless, and that exponential growth of money and wealth can be sustained into perpetuity.
• That the fixes include reining in financial speculation, reclaiming the charter, measuring what matters, reviving the commons, thinking globally but living locally, and, above all, kicking fossil-fuel addiction.

But conclusions do not a story make. Klein’s unmatched gift lies in weaving together factual strands — from a multitude of perspectives and disciplines — into a coherent, compelling, and beautifully crafted narrative.

With a journalist’s eye, Klein does not shy from harsh reality. “This may be the first truly honest book ever written about climate change,” claims Time‘s senior environmental writer. Her first chapter is titled, surprisingly, “The Right Is Right” — not right to deny the overwhelming evidence that climate change is real and driven primarily by human activities, nor right that climate science is a conspiratorial hoax, nor right to hold the futures of our children and grandchildren hostage to ideology, but right about one thing that most “warmers” don’t want to admit: that if climate change really is real and driven primarily by human activities (and it is), then confronting it will upend “business as usual” in all facets of our lives, hence the book’s title.

Klein faults many quarters for our impotence in facing the civilized world’s greatest threat. For starters, there are the fossil-fuel-funded climate-denial mills — the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute — that collectively generate more than 70 percent of disinformation about the climate. But Klein levies ample criticism at Big Green, particularly the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy, both far too cozy with the carbon industry. And then there are degradations of soft denial by “warmers” themselves, such as the mistaken belief that changing light bulbs and driving Priuses will somehow make enough of a difference. It won’t. We are careening toward 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by century’s end. Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, told Klein that even 4 degrees Celsius of warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of … [a] civilized global community.”

Let’s pause to levy two minor criticisms. First, the book’s subtitle, a slight misnomer, leaves critics room to accuse Klein of advocating for some discredited Soviet-style, state-regulated economy. Not so. It’s unbridled capitalism — that is, neoliberalism, aka “free-market fundamentalism” — that she deftly takes to task. More accurately, the true culprit is extractivism (the subject of Chapter 5), an odious mindset (of which both capitalism and communism have been guilty) best articulated by U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas): “The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.” And second, while critical of using gross domestic product (GDP) as an indicator of the nation’s economic health, Klein misses the opportunity to advocate for more meaningful indicators, several of which have been floated by the New Economics Foundation.

Like Silent Spring, This Changes Everything is a deeply spiritual book. It’s about a collision of worldviews: “hierarchal and individualistic” vs. organic, “egalitarian and communitarian.” While the former may have been viable in the days of seemingly boundless frontiers, it’s destructive in a world of 7.5 billion people competing for dwindling natural resources.

The spiritual power of several chapters — “Blockadia” (Chapter 9), “Love Will Save This Place” (Chapter 10), and “The Right to Regenerate” (13) — brought me to tears. In Chapter 10 Klein writes:

The power of this ferocious love [of place] is what the resource companies and their advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it.

On the front lines of the blockades against the Keystone XL pipeline and tar sands extraction are Native Americans and First Nations peoples, whose DNA is intertwined with that of Mother Earth, peoples who never succumbed to the fallacy that a profit motive justifies the destruction of our very life-support systems.

If This Changes Everything is unblinkingly honest, it is also hopeful. Every crisis affords opportunity for regeneration. The exigencies of climate change could be “a catalyzing force” for global citizens “to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights — all of which would help to end the grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them.”

Klein calls for no less than a Marshall Plan for the Earth, an idea proposed to her in 2009 by Angelica Navarro Llanos, Bolivia’s young ambassador to the World Trade Organization. Such bold action — a rapid global transition from fossil fuels to renewables — would, of course, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, anathema to neoliberal proponents of austerity. But if the U.S. alone could muster $2 trillion to destroy Iraq, surely the world’s wealthy nations can collectively marshal financial resources sufficient to tackle humanity’s greatest crisis yet: climate destabilization.

This Changes Everything is part environmental manifesto, part Bible, and part field manual for effective activism. It’s a clarion call to action and a life raft of hope. If humans survive this crisis, future historians will note the synchronicity of the People’s Climate March and This Changes Everything as the turning point.

We have robots that can do annoying chores for us right now. You can buy robots that vacuum for you, gutter-cleaning robots, pool cleaning robots, mopping robots, lawn-mowing robots and I’m sure there are many more. Obviously, there are some things that don’t exist yet, on account of liability, like hedge trimming robots, but why don’t we have a snow shoveling, plowing, or blowing robot?

Well, it’s more of an R/C truck than a robot, but this Kickstarter campaign from SuperDroid Robots promises to fix that arse-freezingly cold problem. Rather than having a back spasm or a heart attack by exerting yourself when it’s -10 degrees outside, sit indoors in a robe and slippers holding a controller and direct this bot.

That luxury doesn’t come cheap though. A DIY plow kit will run you $5,700 and a DIY blower will cost $6,200. Fully assembled versions are $7,200 and $8,500, respectively. For $2,000 you can fly to South Carolina and shoot the owners of their company with a paintball robot they made, and under that there’s a variety of double entendre tees with phrases like “Get Blown Remotely.” You could wear that under your jacket while shoveling the driveway.

When you’re searching via Safari on your iPhone or iPad, Google is your default choice. You can change it to another search engine, obviously, but Google is the de facto option — and who’s complaining about that? Google’s results are top-notch. Starting next year, Google may be riding the search pine on the biggest platform around. A new report says … Continue reading

Joerg Sprave is our favorite kind of crazy, a YouTube star who builds lots and lots and lots (and lots ) of insane slingshot creations. This time he’s applied the art of rubberized weaponry to personal fitness machines.

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