body odor anxiety at the met…last night was the 2nd time in 3 weeks that a character checked his/her pits before a love interest enteredFri Nov 05 18:39:07 via web

Zachary Woolfe
zwoolfe

This was the oddest thing I’d seen all day so I thought I would make you know it too.

“As you become a larger insect, more of your body is taken up by tracheal tubes. Eventually you reach a limit to how big you can be. The more oxygen that is available, the smaller that system needs to be and the bigger you can grow.”
 — I’m a little offended by Arizona State University paleobiologist John VandenBrooks’ use of the second person here. But I’m much more concerned about the fact that he and his team of scientists have been breeding giant dragonflies in oxygen-rich apocalypse chambers. 50 percent more oxygen = 15 percent larger dragonflies. So you figure if a normal dragonfly can sew a human mouth shut so we starve to death, these new ones ought to be able to bite off our arms and stitch them onto our foreheads.

“The Sidwell Friends football team has been outscored 373–43 this season. When Washington City Paper columnist Dave McKenna pointed that out, he learned that the school’s tony pansies are way feistier on the Internet than they are on the field.”

by Jeffrey MacIntyre

In the lower reaches of the Hudson Valley, daytime hours now are well fastened with fall’s rust. Red-yellow patches freckle hillsides, leaf pilings assemble curbside. But lately it’s nightfall here in our semirural surround that has us most absorbed.

They come in the gloaming, padding downhill sometimes as far as the Hudson’s banks, in full gawking view from our home. Late last night I urged the sedan past the village green slowly, watchful for the deer. My wife happened upon a gaggle of them the other night, nestled there in ceremonious semicircle like village founders. In daytime they amble brazenly out of thickets, where for all their obliviousness roadways must seem asphalt meadows. Even the flying turkeys — our first sighting had us breathless, the bird hurling itself across our windshield with the poise of a winged ottoman — show better road sense.

Meanwhile, down at the dock they are lighting the dark with the best in nineteenth-century derring do. New waist-high bollards, proposed to replace the current lamp posts, shed a dimmer light, letting the ridgeline above West Point speak for itself. Set your latterns low and cast a ballot for old-timey night, tut-tut the new low-light advocates with their haute design pastoralism. And yet. It really is a pretty patch of starlight hung overtop these mountains, and every urban visitor to Cold Spring — we’re no different — votes less-is-more just in stepping off the train. It’s why we’ve come. It’s nearly enough to warm oneself to the developer doggerel of viewsheds and kilowatt-engineered atmospherics.

Still, night is the visual face to the singlemost all-conquering state of things here: quiet.

Half the newcomer appeal at this remove from the city is the enforced curfew, adjusting your night life down to candlepower measures. Stick to your knitting, the evenings seem to say. Which is part, after all, of what leaving New York lets us do.

Maybe country calm edges too easily into pensive cliche. Say what you will: it’s a healthy habit of mind.

Much of what brought me to New York — the steady gruel of Grub Street gigs — is in deep, and deeply unromantic, sunset. Even so, amid signs of decline there’s a bright fuse on developments that feel encouraging, projects that are purposeful, and talented friends brightening the path ahead. Still and all, in stretches of long twilight there’s no epiphany in store. (Darkest before dawn! Well. Too easy!) Maybe things feel less cockeyed by the combined distance of time and miles from more hardscrabble days.

Back here, the simpler fact of after-dark is you don’t venture far and, practically speaking, these towns shut down early. But on walks most weekend nights there’s friendly hubbub rising from backyards, passersby trading small talk, and low key music pulsing at house windows. Kids marauder around the bandstand in their best lanky impression of adults having someplace better to be.

We know this since we venture out often enough ourselves, curiosity and cabin fever our guides. Tonight we’re settling into folding chairs in the great room of the village library, named for and anointed by one of the local antebellum swells. The chapel-like confines, really a vaulted great room, its foyer and a basement conscripted to perennial book sale, are somehow quaintly grand. It’s a postcard setting and, tonight, the only cinema for dozens of miles.

I take a pull from my coffee cup, the lights come down and, just like that, the room flickers to life: the pianist knocking out the first chords of accompaniment to the silent we’ve gathered to see. There’s carousing and fisticuffs and a flash of romance down at the New York dockside of the film, one that makes a far cartoon cry of our own as the piano tinkles happily away. At intermission a couple introduce themselves, recalling their own Brooklyn migration forty years prior. In younger years they took the work week’s last, standing room-only train from Grand Central, coming unspooled from a Friday’s fun in Manhattan.

Heading back, my eyes light on the homespun local excitements. How long will they feel so unfamiliar? Any given weekend there are lights on at the VFW. The local paper notes the Masons are recruiting. I don’t know about the Knights of Columbus or the Legion, but the odds favor festivities underway someplace near. It’s like some Grand Wood hereafter.

The reality is I’m yawning into my sleeve, the chill outside is biting, and we point ourselves home. We’re in fine fettle alone together, easing down the steep hill, no wildlife escort in sight. Small town Saturday night is well underway.

* * *

Photo credits sequentially: “Sky of West Point Evening” by Wei Zhang. “We have to shoot that church” by grace*c*. “409 143a” by Paul Grebanier. “Cold Spring, NY” by D Dipasupil. “my morning commute (1): waiting” by jennifer könig. “Service Station 05” by rt48state. “the divisive nature of the trees” by jennifer könig. “Cold Spring” by Jordan Confino. All images used with permission.

* * *

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a freelance writer and consultant. His writing appears widely.

“William McKinley was elected after a passing crowd glimpsed him through an upper window of a nunnery.”

“Politico isn’t after a plausible story, it’s after the Narrative — the things that lawmakers, lobbyists, and veterans of previous administrations say to reporters in background conversations to explain how history would be different, if only the people in charge were as smart as they are. Barack Obama is a prisoner of his monstrous ego and blind self-confidence, and that is why Blanche Lincoln lost in Arkansas.”

by Jonah Furman

Partisanship! Don’t you hate it? Jon Stewart and David Broder do! And so do a lot of other people. But who is actually causing all of this partisanship? We decided to take a look at every Senate race in the United States since 1980, which we are arbitrarily defining as the beginning of the modern political era.

Why the Senate? Well, for one thing, Senate races are statewide elections, meaning their results are unlikely to be skewed by legislative gerrymandering. For another, a full third of the Senate is on the ballot every two years, and the results of those races are a better indicator of a national mood than the quadrennial gubernatorial votes. Finally, there are 435 seats in the House, and that’s just way too many to research.

What did we find? The most partisan states — that is, the states which always vote one way — are split equally between Democrats and Republicans. The most stubbornly red: Idaho, Kansas, Utah, and Wyoming; the most adamantly blue: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and… West Virginia?! That’s what the stats say. Now obviously some of this has to do with the Senators themselves — West Virginia was unlikely to go red so long as Robert Byrd was funneling dollars to its many fine roadside rest stops — but that doesn’t fully disguise trends over time: If you count the brief period when Jim Jeffords left the Republican party and gave control to the Democrats, the chamber has changed hands six times in this modern era. That’s considerably more volatility than in the House.

A degree lower in the partisanship hierarchy are those states which have, at least once, since 1980 (which, by the way, is roughly a dozen elections, depending on exact terms and special elections), elected a candidate from their less-favored party. But make no mistake — Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alaska, and the three bet-you-didn’t-know-they-were-red states of Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire, love the Republicans, electing them to the Senate 75%-99% of the time. On the other side are the sticks-in-the-Democratic-mud: California, Illinois, Connecticut, North Dakota, Michigan, Maryland, and the Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Republican Arkansas and Louisiana.

Basically, the only states that can’t be singled out as contributing to whatever vicious partisan cycle our two-party system might engender — or perhaps just the states that can’t make up their collective mind — are Oregon and Iowa on the just-barely GOP side, and Vermont, Colorado, Florida, Ohio and South Dakota barely leaning Democrat. Georgia and Minnesota are the anti-partisan’s wet dream, literally splitting their dozen or so Senate races down the line, 50–50.

For good measure we also examined how voters tend to react to appointees, those replacements who are dispatched to DC when an sitting Senator passes on to the next world (e.g. the Executive Branch). Since Ronald Reagan was elected president, almost none of the appointed Senator of the opposite party of his or her predecessors have achieved reelection. A notable exception: Georgia’s Zell Miller, the Democrat who showed up at the Republican convention in 2004 to fulminate and emit spittle and just basically bark about what a pussy John Kerry was. So maybe there’s less to this than meets the eye. Either way, numbers: you have them!

Jonah Furman is an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Give him a job or else he will stay in school forever and write books on, like, the figuration of dogs in Rilke’s poetics, and nobody wants that.

by Lindsay Robertson

Three years ago, my friend Stephanie and I were both invited to celebrate Thanksgiving at a mutual friend’s house. Most of the people coming, including the mutual friend, were crazy insane foodies. Just complete and total insufferable food snobs from hell (but were great otherwise!). So Stephanie and I, who are not foodies, and who are both from northern Florida, decided to bring a fake, disgusting casserole and pass it off as a Northern Florida/Southern Thanksgiving tradition that both of our families, who didn’t even know each other, made every year. (The other people at this Thanksgiving celebration, in addition to being foodies, were also Northerners.)

The idea was to make a huge deal about how excited we were about the casserole and to talk about it for weeks before the holiday and present it proudly and to laugh while recounting the little quarrel we had about our differing family traditions on a recipe ingredient and how it almost derailed the cooking project entirely before we finally reached a compromise. We also wanted to make sure every single person tried some of the casserole. We wanted to watch each person eat some and note their reactions and say things like “Right? Isn’t it delicious! We’ll email you the recipe if you promise not to share it!” We hoped to do all this with totally straight faces.

We also hoped that in the course of the evening, the other members of the party would get the chance to talk about our revolting casserole behind our backs while we were out of the room. We planned to go out for several long smoke breaks in order to facilitate this shit-talking.

At the end of the night, we would do our big reveal: “The casserole was a joke! What kind of trash did you guys think we were? We know how to cook normal food in Northern Florida! There is absolutely no culinary tradition that involves Cheerios as a topping on a casserole!! Hahahahaha! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

We got as far as co-authoring the recipe, adding ingredients back and forth over IM and making a shopping list. Then, when Thanksgiving Day actually arrived, we said fuck it and made a pumpkin pie. (You know, starving people and all.) But here’s What Could Have Been the Best Foodie-Shaming Practical Joke Ever Though In Retrospect We Would Have Been Found Out Because Our Friends Are Not Stupid:

Prank Casserole

Three boxes Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, prepared
2 cans of peas
2 cups mayonnaise
2 packages Oscar Meyer baloney
3 jars of tapioca pudding
1 bag of Cheetos
2 cups Apple Cinnamon Cheerios
Ketchup, to taste

Mix everything except the baloney, Cheerios, and ketchup in a bowl.

Line a large casserole dish with the baloney, taking care to make sure it sticks out and hangs over the sides in an attractive manner.

Dump everything in the casserole dish.

Sprinkle the Cheerios evenly.

Cook at 350 for however long, until it looks on purpose.

Serves as many as you can get to try it.

Lindsay Robertson makes more evil plans than she executes.

So yes, Keith Olbermann is getting an unpaid vacation, for making donations to Democrats. Shocking right? This would have been the first time I ever watched his show, if he was going to go on the air and rip his NBC bosses a new one for being morons. And now there will be an audit of all the world’s network employees. (Except at Fox. Which is owned by a political entity.)

“More than 75 Florida firms were awarded more than $26 million in federal tax credits or grants for research and development of new products with promise to significantly advance healthcare in the country… The federal credits or grants are designed for projects that show significant potential to produce new cost-saving therapies, create U.S. jobs, increase the country’s competitiveness or significantly advance the goal of curing cancer within the next 30 years. The program was created as part of the national healthcare overhaul.”

For the first time in history, for one night, both the staff of The Awl and the staff of n+1 were separately having the exact same conversations at the same time. (Actually there was that one other time, back in January, when both publications experienced a simultaneous a craving for chutney.) This is the sad and frightening tale of what it’s really like when your server goes kaput.