★★★★Even the five-year-old, who’d been the last to abandon shorts at the previous change of seasons, asked for a sweater. The ongoing shuffle of coats made it necessary to hunt in the pockets for the pack of gum. Thin clouds muted the color of the sky, but the sun was bright and reverberant in midday. A driver buffed his Escalade across from the Tavern on the Green, catching the light. Two clapping flights of pigeons curved over the walkway. The Park was quiet enough and empty enough to hear conversations between cyclists going by, or the slightly offset CLAP-clap CLAP-clap of the carriage horses. Sitting out on a bench was pleasant for long enough to drink a cup of coffee, if it was a small one.

Maybe words don’t mean what they used to anymore.

It’s going to be a long four years, and what we currently consider excessive will come to seem commonplace, if not understated. Consider what we thought was extreme during the campaign and how each apparently exorbitant event was swiftly subsumed into the section of our brain which accepts things as unremarkable, only to be superseded by something even more outrageous that was just as quickly processed into acceptance. Now imagine how the standards and criteria we use today to define the boundaries in our world will be shattered by all the craziness to come once things really get started in earnest, with the full force of the law behind them. We are going to need completely new nomenclature to convey the meaning of everyday experiences, particularly as those experiences expand in ways we cannot quite comprehend right now. Many of these revisions will need to be negotiated in the moment, but I would like to suggest an alteration at the outset to help circumvent the confusion that is sure to occur as baselines evolve. I propose that we just refer to it as “drinking” from now on. Binge drinking is going to mean something very different very soon.

By funny tweets, of course.

A friend recently retweeted the following tweet:

who the FUCK brings a bag of CHOPPED RED ONIONS to school just to throw them in the TOILET i fuckin HATE my school

 — @lyxopk

Funny, right? It’s been shared a lot of times, and for good reason. What a ridiculous scenario!

What tickled me more than the onions in the toilet, though, was “i HATE my school” in the caption. What an evocative set of words. I probably haven’t heard, “I hate my school,” since a cabin-mate was uttering it to me at summer camp at age thirteen, but as soon as I read it in this tweet, I remembered. It’s like a pre-meme meme. Everybody “hates their school” in some regard—catching up with your cousins at Thanksgiving? Someone hates their school. Making a new friend at the pool? They hate their school. It’s the teen’s conversational equivalent of “Mondays!” or “Don’t get me started about my mother-in-law!” Always there. Usually relatable.

If you search the phrase on Twitter, there’s a gentle amount of memelovers who seem to understand this is a teens-only problem (even though experts like KnowYourMeme and memecenter haven’t deemed it a full-blown trend). There’s definitely more than one photo of someone naming their Kahoot team something like “Harambe4Ever” with the caption “I hate my school.” But the majority of the tweets you see are still regular teens doing regular tweets, and guess what, guys? School still blows.

So without any further ado, here are some of my picks for America’s worst schools, as selected by the Twitter search results for “i hate my school”:

5. Potato Junior High

i hate my school so much

 — @maexlyn

4. STHS

i hate my school (3/?)

 — @logaaaaann

3. Our Lord And Savior K-12

I hate my school

 — @michellebellosi

2. Home Of The Panthers

east is our rival school and this is up in the cafeteria i hate my school

 — @ilovewonho

1. Rhinitis Heights High

I HATE MY SCHOOL...

 — @Dare_Low

Soundscan Surprises, Week Ending 12/8

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

What’s this about a War on Christmas? You won’t see a sign of it anywhere on the back catalog, which has shoved Metallica down to spot number 28. Will it ever recover? What happens when Christmas is over? Do people just stop buying old records? Yes, that is pretty much exactly what will happen.

Since I started tracking the back catalog sales, these are easily the highest weekly sales numbers I’ve seen by a long shot. Pentatonix sold 39,568 copies of That’s Christmas To Me, and Michael Bublé sold 26,185 copies of Christmas. That’s more copies sold than the average top fifteen of all back catalog record sales in regular non-Christmas months. In a more normal month, like April or May, you’d see Metallica and Adele selling 3-5,000 a pop. Those Pentatonix guys must be soooooo rich, but then again they have to split it among five of them so maybe not. JK! Anyway I found something that will really annoy Balk:

Anyway there aren’t really any big surprises because of all the Christmas noise (did you know that Lady Antebellum has a Christmas album?), but Pink Floyd’s Animals got a boost from some Trump protests in Chicago—a “visual relief” installation nodded to the floating pigs from the cover of the 1977 album. Beck released some vinyl re-issues, including one of Sea Change, and Trivium, a Florida band described as “Thrash metal” and “Melodic metalcore” debuted on the back catalog with their first album, Ember to Inferno. This press release on the band’s website describes the album as having been “out of print” and “hard to find,” so you’re welcome, metalcore fans. BURN ALIIIIIIIIVE!

4. GROBAN*JOSH NOEL 12,537 copies

20. CLARKSON*KELLY WRAPPED IN RED 6,283 copies

33. ADELE 21 5,095 copies

69. LADY ANTEBELLUM ON THIS WINTER’S NIGHT 3,334 copies

72. PINK FLOYD ANIMALS 3,242 copies

108. TRIVIUM EMBER TO INFERNO 2,514 copies

115. BECK SEA CHANGE 2,372 copies

Gary Duncan deftly maneuvers a small pile of crinkle cut truffle fries to form a swastika on his crescent-shaped plate.

“Heh, look what I did,” he says, sunny-day blue eyes alight beneath a fetching pair of Burberry glasses. “I made a swastika. Because I’m an actual Nazi.”

The conservative wavemaker is refreshingly candid, musing about eugenics in our booth at the achingly hip Washington hot spot, Mavericks. One senses no filter; Duncan refuses to mince words, police his language, or talk directly with Jews. When discussing racial purity, he is unencumbered by the burden of political correctness, and he makes no apologies for it. Then he proceeds to eat the rest of his fries and tuck into a three-bean salad. (“No black beans — I’m ride-or-die garbanzo.”)

Duncan wears a hand-stitched heather grey jacket with an inside pattern trim of tessellated skulls. With mesmerizing Nordic good looks and a “Pogrompadour” haircut (like Macklemore, only more so), Duncan is fast becoming the clean-cut face of an exciting new voice in American politics. But he’s not without a playful sense of humor about himself. When a dollop of aioli lands on his compact mustache, which looks as though the rocket ship of his nose has left a permanent trail of exhaust immediately beneath his nostrils, he rolls his eyes and lets out an embarrassed sigh.

“More like the whoopsie party, am I right?” he says, handsomely.

If Adolf Hitler is the Michael Jordan of Nazis — a comparison the racial exclusionist would admittedly not have enjoyed — Duncan is the Kristaps Porzingis, a hot rookie sensation with angular Latvian features who favors a skinny tie. For years, the 38-year old non-traditionalist has been shouting quite literally into the void, proclaiming on Twitter that whites are the superior species, that a fourth Reich will indeed rise in America, and that Paul Smith suits are “hot fire.” In Duncan’s view, there’s just something special about the centralized power of an authoritarian government, and the clean lines of well-cut wool. He also has a lot of thoughts about depopulation.

“Is it PC to believe that whites are the ‘master race’?” he asks, making air quotes with his well-manicured fingers. “Maybe it’s un-PC to deny the possibility.” Duncan’s brash views weren’t finding much traction online beyond Twitter users with anime avatars and usernames like “ShrekPissSlave420”. Then a certain presidential candidate emboldened him and his brethren with a worldview that dovetailed nicely with their own.

Recently, he’s been organizing meetups around the DC area, under the innocuous moniker, The League of Good Pals. The so-called “Good Pals movement” gained steam throughout the election cycle, with the media latching onto it as a user-friendly term to describe Nazis.

In some ways, the Good Pals movement resembles an older generation of “aggressively racist rabble-rousers” — or “straight-up Nazis,” as Duncan prefers to put it — who have long sought to be taken seriously. Duncan enjoys rock star status among many distinct fringe groups beneath the Nazi banner because he owns at least two suits, doesn’t live with his parents, and has managed to avoid being beaten up yet, even once.

He also likes to mix it up with colorful wordplay.

“I don’t know about Chance the Rapper, but I’d like to wrap the Chancellor of Germany in a loving American embrace,” he says, a slight smile dancing on lips that are a weird amount of glossy. “But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day Chance the Rapper is detained in a re-education camp.”

After taking a moment to tie his red shoelaces, which are pristine, artisanally crafted, and meant to symbolize the blood he’s shed for “the cause,” Duncan leans back and laughs.

“Remember when I made the swastika with my fries?” the dapper Nazi says, shaking his head a little.

Duncan knows that a white ethnostate is for now just a beautiful dream, but his first goal is to make it acceptable for he and other Nazis to talk about it in public without getting beaten up mercilessly. He hopes that as his media coverage grows, America’s nonwhites will come to accept his extreme opinions as a valid point of view, and possibly even leave the country willingly. He’s earmarked several districts in each state to become designated “Little Dachaus,” though, just in case.

Duncan looks wistfully through the window in the general direction of the Lincoln Memorial. “Sieg heil,” he adds, thrusting his arm out in a salute that somehow does not wrinkle his majestically fitted jacket sleeve.

Later that evening, Duncan met with a who’s who of area Nazis for dinner at the musky cigar bar, Ashes, a classic DC watering hole. The group includes Fred Gummer, who runs the website White Genocide and has been dubbed a “coat-and-tie Nazi” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Garth Buckwell, the translucently pale founder of anti-immigration website, The N-Word. The dashingly dressed literal Nazis resemble Washington lobbyists more than members of an Aryan prison gang. And it’s clear from the way they discuss setting up a GoFundMe to get industrial rockers Rammstein to play Duncan’s birthday party, that these enterprising rebels are working out of a new playbook. A playbook for jaunty Nazis.

“This election has awakened everyone to our presence,” Duncan says, adjusting a satin cravat festooned with the Imperial Eagle.

Duncan nods, and does a celebratory goosestep. It is quite awkward. By now, most of the bar has filed out — or at least our section has mysteriously depleted. I gather my things and quietly leave, so as not to disturb the rogue nonconformist while he’s in his element with friends. On the way out, I can’t resist a last glimpse at Duncan. He’s a man with audacious plans, making big moves in a powerful city, his finery so deliciously impertinent you almost forget he’s a total, balls-out Nazi.

• White nationalists dress up and come to Washington in hopes of influencing Trump
• Meet the white nationalist trying to ride the Trump train to lasting power

Joe Berkowitz is a staff editor at Fast Company. His first book, You Blew It!, is in stores and you can pre-order his next one, Away with Words, out June 2017.

(Assuming celebrities take baths.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

To: The celebrity community
From: Your friend Christine Friar

Subject: Bathtime playlists

Hey guys,

It’s been a while since I Bcc’d everyone, but one of the newest people in your ranks has done something good and I’d like to bring it to your attention. Chance the Rapper (whom you may recognize from his Coloring Book mixtape or Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam”) shared a playlist called “Yup” with fans this week, and instead of throwing a haphazard arrangement of his favorite songs together, it’s specifically tailored to his dream bathtub experience.

“I take a shower everyday. But when is it Bath time? Now,” he tweeted. “Enjoy a bath once in a while… Get in the tub, press shuffle and treat yourself.”

The playlist includes Donny Hathaway, Kirk Franklin, Solange, and Bon Iver, but that’s almost secondary to the simple fact that he made it in the first place:

Yup by Chancelor Bennett on Apple Music

Do you listen to music in the shower, celebrity friend? I do. I keep a running Spotify playlist of my favorite new songs every year (this year’s is called ~2016 favs~), and when I bathe I like to throw it on shuffle and chill just as Chano suggests. The fact that he does this too, and that on top of it he seems to enjoy a soak just as much as any bath bomb-having Pinterest queen, is very endearing. He even posted an Instagram story of himself listening to the playlist in the bath:

🛀 @chancetherapper real af for this 🛀 https://t.co/QXJPMj60Y1 https://t.co/KX36zWUSAK

 — @Genius

Could this be a paid ad by Apple Music? Definitely. But if so it’s working. You should get your people on the horn with whoever Chance’s team is talking to*. It is fun to imagine different people unwinding.

Anyway, thanks for your time. Looking forward to what you come up with as a community.

Christine

______

* I would ask that you do it on Spotify though, so I can engage the playlist without my phone and computer hemorrhaging like it’s 1999 and I’m trying to open a Powerpoint email attachment.

Hahaha, just kidding, it’s too late for you now.

To understand why scale is so important, however, you have to start to understand some of the more technical details of what, exactly, machine intelligences are doing with the data they consume. A lot of our ambient fears about A.I. rest on the idea that they’re just vacuuming up knowledge like a sociopathic prodigy in a library, and that an artificial intelligence constructed to make paper clips might someday decide to treat humans like ants or lettuce. This just isn’t how they work. All they’re doing is shuffling information around in search of commonalities — basic patterns, at first, and then more complex ones — and for the moment, at least, the greatest danger is that the information we’re feeding them is biased in the first place.

One day there will be something that can read this whole story for you and give you a simple explanation but until then you need to do it yourself, which is better because you will actually learn stuff. Maybe email yourself the link and save it for tonight or the weekend, because oh my God there is so much of it. “How machine learning is poised to reinvent computing” is just one thing you’ll learn. There’s a whole lot going on here.

The Great A.I. Awakening

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck is on Instagram.

You could be serving your family little bits of metal

So uh, there’s no easy way to say this in a non-alarming fashion but, Conair is recalling EIGHT MILLION FOOD PROCESSORS sold over a period of TWENTY YEARS because the blades are liable to break off into pieces in your food and cause mouth lacerations. The recall covers TWENTY-TWO different models of Cuisinarts, sold between 1996 and 2015. If the metal blade thingy that goes inside your food processor has rivets, you’re screwed. You can go here to see if your model is affected. Call Conair and they will send you a new blade.

Product Recall: Cuisinart food processors recalled by Conair due to laceration hazard

“Laceration Hazard” is a good name for a bad band. Anyway, maybe you are reading this thinking, who has a food processor, only people who live in the suburbs and have full-size kitchen cabinets? To which I would reply, yeah, and whose house do you think you’ll be going to for Christmas? Stay safe out there, and maybe skip the rum balls.

Should you panic?

There has been a good deal of chatter lately in punditry circles about whether or not you should panic over what is about to happen to our country and, by extension, our world. I am aware that, down the years, I have developed a reputation — one that is completely deserved given all the effort and struggle put in on my part to pass along my wisdom and experience in the face of so much facile and cloying countervailing opinion — as a truth-teller who cuts through all the fog and spin and self-interest that usually accompanies all the prescriptions and predictions about what the future holds, and that so many of you wait for my counsel before making your final decision on the way to approach the important issues with which you are confronted as you go about your life. It is a duty I hold sacred and I apologize for being so tardy in delivering the final word on this question. As an attempt to make amends for causing you to wait, I will offer you two options: 1) Panic, but don’t expect it to make a difference. 2) Don’t panic, but don’t be surprised when everything you’re not panicking about happens anyway. The choice is yours!

Now that we’ve got that settled, we can move on to the morning’s music. Here is some light percussion with lovely African-style guitar in accompaniment. Enjoy.