The New York Times takes some time out to haul out the always-salient question “What Is Wrong With People On The Internet?” today, this time in a Styles piece by Taffy Broedesser-Akner that looks at the more vicious reactions she received to a Salon article she had penned on the PTSD she dealt with after the particularly violent birth of her son. The Salon story eventually resulted in pseudonymous Internet people taking time out of their days to tell her things like “Do us all a favor — don’t have any more kids.” Yeesh. So much for The New Niceness!

Akner was “confused” by the mean comments, the ones that were doing little more than the e-equivalent of peeing in her pool. Or as she put it: “What confounds me is why online commenters are so gratuitously nasty; why, when given the opportunity to have an educated disagreement with an author or other readers, they use the space allotted to spew venom instead of presenting a well-reasoned argument.” Well, OK, this is a Styles piece, so there’s bound to be a bit of Unfrozen Cavewoman Writer attitude lurking within. But: Really?

Having spent a gigantic chunk of my life online (More than half my life! And I’m 34! What am I doing?), I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the answers are actually not all that confusing! Akner’s shock at people taking a cheap shortcut instead of typing out reasoned dissent is especially odd for someone who’s worked on the Internet for as long as she has — of course people who are reading online as a leisure activity are going to trend toward the glib and easy instead of the well-reasoned argument, even if the article being responded to describes an experience that’s absolutely horrifying. Generations of “wisecracking kid who always gets the laugh” characters being TV-sitcom staples is but one reason; there are also matters of time, of brainspace, and of just feeling like being an asshole. It happens to all of us!

About the “being an asshole” bit: We are in a place, and have been for quite some time, where schadenfreude is the name of so many pop-cultural games; the crappy facts of life that persist for so many people mean that the one-upmanship-through-putdowns game is ever-more-appealing. Hence the explosion in “oh my God Becky look at her butt” gossip sites, which when taken as a putrid whole make comments like the one quoted above look positively civil (not to mention extremely erudite and witty).

Tied into that is also the always-present nature of how content sites like the eternally struggling Salon make money — namely, by getting pageviews, whether it’s via overpagination or allowing anyone who gives a valid e-mail address carte blanche to comment until they get flagged down by enough irritated passerby. Sometimes, aiming for civility just isn’t worth the line-item on the budget, even if the resulting rancor has an overall effect of tainting everything around it!

And don’t think that even the most obtuse commenters aren’t at least dimly aware of their clicks’ power. Akner spoke with self-proclaimed cyberexpert Jeff Jarvis about The Deal With People Being Nasty, and he brought up the whole idea of hierarchies:

“We give people this article all nice and wrapped up in a bow, and we expect them to be happy to read it. Now, with comments sections, we have to talk about when we let people into this process and how. This notion that we’re done, now you can talk, is inherently insulting.”

As someone who has actually gotten annoyed at Jarvis’ immense capacity for issuing Grand Proclamations and who has voiced my ire right on the public Internet, I think I’m pretty qualified to note that this sort of capacity for insult ties right into the whole discussion of unpaid syndication from earlier today. Who gives one person the “license” to opine for money and the others the opportunity to maybe get extra attention via a “featured commenter” badge? It all amounts to Letting Them Eat Clicks, and it’s a vicious cycle that will probably blow up even more as budgets shrink.

Akner also brings up the old saw of pseudonymity/anonymity online, and whether or not it makes people more willing to go there as far as meanness. The answer is probably yes and no, although the capacity for meanness can be heightened when more personal details come into play. (Which might be why the reactions to Akner’s piece — and her reactions to those reactions — were so personally searing to her!) My online experience has evolved from CompuServe to Usenet to BBSes to Web-based forums to blogs to whatever Tumblr’s dashboard is. In that time I’ve mostly been shielded from out-and-out “u suck” nastiness directed my way; I’ve also developed a pretty thick skin and an intolerance for dealing with people who can only muster not-very-witty quips in their own defense. (Which is why those of you who wanted to make the jokes about thickness developing on me in other places can save them, because I already made them for you.)

In fact, the one time in the past 10 years that someone has been so brutally mean to me that I was upset enough to talk (and talk) to my therapist about it? The person’s identity was right there on the screen, in an almost-taunting way. And the worst rancor I’ve ever witnessed has been levied by people who knew each other way too well. In one online community where I hung my hat for many years, where everyone was identified by name from their first post, February was historically the time for online blowups; the theory was that the month’s nasty brutality, weather-wise, led to people staying inside too much, and hanging around their computers too much, and endlessly ruminating on the things that other housebound, modem-tethered people were saying. (At least the month was also short.)

There’s been a lot of talk around certain watercoolers about “The New Niceness,” which many people have seized on as a sort of organizing principle for the Internet going forward. But venture outside of a few safe spaces where people are pretty content with their jobs and their lives on the whole (and where they are probably saving their Old Not-Niceness for backchannel communiqués) and you’ll realize that as an idea this is sort of bull, if only because, surprise, even the seemingly nicest people are just not nice all the time. And nor are the most unpleasant sons of bitches out there mean and nasty all the time! But it’s the capacity for online communication to amplify and inflate that tends to turn the best and worst aspects of human behavior into announcements written in 140-point type and plastered over every nearby bit of Internet for all of us to see, and oftentimes cringe at.

by John Murray

Following the Rio Grande southeast out of the Valley of Juarez, past the Big Bend region and across the vast emptiness of the Chihuahuan desert, one eventually comes to the states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, historic base of the Gulf Cartel and home to the newest outbreak of everyday violence in the Mexican drug war. In February, the Gulf Cartel announced the formation of “La Nueva Federacion”, an alliance with their former enemies, the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoachan, and publicly declared war on its own former enforcement wing, a group of ex-Mexican special forces soldiers known as the Zetas. The two sides went to battle almost immediately, turning the border city of Reynosa into a war zone overnight. Main streets were barricaded with trucks and SUVs as gangs of heavily armed men went at each other with assault rifles and fragmentation grenades. Within days the U.S. shut down the consulates in Reynosa and Matamoros, while the local government, as well as both the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, warned residents to stay in their homes.

So how did it happen? The Gulf Cartel has been entrenched in this territory for over 30 years, and like the other cartels in Mexico, moved from humbler beginnings in the marijuana and opium trades to become a multi-billion dollar empire when the major routes for cocaine trafficking moved out of the heavily patrolled Caribbean and into Mexico in the late 1980’s. The three major border crossings making up their turf-Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros-proved extremely lucrative and tactically beneficial, being easily fed by the gigantic industrial metropolis of Monterrey to the south and providing quick access to Houston across the border.

One of the hallmark facts about the growth of the Mexican cartels and the corresponding growth of violence in Mexico over the past decades is that where there is more money to earn, there is more money to lose. As their revenues and influence grew, it lead to the cartels becoming both more covetous of turf and more zealous about defending it. The Zetas were born out of this fact. In the late 90s, Osiel Cardenas, then the head of the Gulf cartel, began to recruit members of an elite Mexican army special forces team to become enforcers for his cartel. They were very well trained (some say in the U.S.) and one of their main goals was to combat drug trafficking. In the beginning, about 35 soldiers defected to become the Zetas-and suddenly the Gulf Cartel had its own paramilitary force.

They brought professional knowledge of advanced weaponry and battle tactics, and came with a pre-ordained chain of command. Their creation sparked a huge upward trend in violent enforcement in an already violent industry. Soon after the Zetas hit the scene, the Sinaloa cartel followed suit, organizing Los Negros and Los Pelones, similar groups of ex-soldiers, to act as wings of the business devoted to nothing but violence and murder.

The cartels were growing in size and scope.

In 2003, Osiel Cardenas was arrested, and suddenly the Gulf Cartel was weak. Taking full advantage, the Sinaloa cartel sent Los Negros and Los Pelones to Nuevo Laredo in a bid to try to take over the plaza, the term for a major drug trafficking waypoint. The Zetas took on a huge role in defending the city for the weakened cartel, and as a result became more important to it.

As time went on, the former leaders of the Zetas began to intertwine themselves more in the business aspects of the cartel. In the past few years, Zetas have taken over leadership positions in both enforcement and trafficking, becoming an inextricable part of the cartel while still remaining a unit unto themselves. This led to growing tension between the two groups, but that was largely surmounted at the time by the task at hand of defending their turf. Then in 2007, Cardenas was extradited to the US, the kiss of death for any leadership role he retained in the cartel, and suddenly the cartel and the Zetas had the future to think about.

2007 was a big year in the drug trade. The Sinaloa cartel began sending forces en masse to Juarez, Mexican President Calderon launched his ‘War on the Cartels’, and the Zetas continued their ascendancy in the Gulf cartel. But the violence that would break out over the next few years began to bite the changing industry in the ass. In addition to sucking up focus and resources, the violence in Juarez and place like Sinaloa, Guerrero, Nuevo Leon and Michoachan actually developed into a sort of public relations disaster for the cartels.

You have to remember, Mexico tends to revere its drug traffickers, iconizing them in corridos and viewing them essentially as peasants who rose up to strike back at the dominance of the Mexican oligarchs and the U.S., playing off the latent anger of generations past at the Hacienda system and serfdom. These images are carefully cultivated by the culture and the cartels themselves, because having the people on their side is a huge advantage, especially in the rural and mountainous regions where they base operations. The border cities are ruled more through fear, but even there the children grow up wanting to be like the narcos, who they see driving fancy cars and flashing money around.

So though it may sound strange, the drug trade is still a business, and every business has to deal with their public image. Just last week, Sinaloa honcho Mayo Zambada actually gave an interview to the magazine Proceso that had all the elements of positive marketing spin. Mayo talked about how he lived “constantly in fear,” chased by the Army and authorities. He painted himself as a persecuted farmer, whose only recourse was to flee to the mountains and country side, where “I know the vegetation, the rivers, the rocks, everything.” It’s touches like these, along with generous bribes to the right people, that have allowed people like Mayo and Chapo to stay in business as long as they have.

For the Zetas, like most military groups, public relations isn’t exactly a first priority. This became apparent as they rose to power. The Zetas seized their window of opportunity and as they gained more control, the difference in how they operated compared to the Gulf cartel was striking. In Nuevo Laredo (a plaza controlled by Miguel Trevino, the Zetas second-in-command) there were reports of extortion, armed robbery and kidnapping for money. It’s hard to corroborate all of them or directly link them to the Zetas, but it’s worth noting that they did occur, and that the rumor mill blamed the Zetas for them. For example, rather than buying cars from local dealerships in Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, the Zetas have been accused of simply stealing them, a story that was corroborated when a raid in Tamaulipas the other day uncovered a Zeta operating headquarters with a garage full of SUVs-every one of them stolen.

Whether stories like this are actually unique to the Zetas is up for debate, but the fact that the Zetas are not in line with the traditional role of drug traffickers and do not have the confidence of the people is at the heart of the current conflict. Gulf cartel propaganda, including that found on their own YouTube channel, is aimed at discrediting the Zetas as bandits, common thugs who don’t have the people’s interest at heart. The Gulf cartel now says that they only wish to operate in peace as the cartel the people have known for so long and, presumably unlike the Zetas, do not want to harm the citizens of their region. It’s a war to win hearts and minds as much as it is a war for turf. The Gulf cartel is playing off the perception of the Zetas as brutal, lethal enforcers. This, ironically, is what the cartel originally hired them to be.

But perhaps the most telling detail about the war on the Zetas is the fact that La Familia Michoacan and the Sinaloa cartel have actually allied with the Gulf cartel to fight them. These three groups have been bitter enemies for years, but they’ve found a common goal in stamping out the Zetas. What could the reasoning be? Firstly, the Zetas really are a threat to the established cartels. They are highly trained to fight, and have continued to develop a growing force of their own over the years, even recruiting defectors from the Guatemalan Kaibiles special forces. They’ve also reportedly formed strategic alliances with the Juarez cartel and have a long-standing ally in the Beltran-Leyva cartel, the rogue former employees of Chapo Guzman. From a business standpoint, putting down the Zetas is the best interest of all these groups.

However, it’s also important to take the notion of public relations into account. For starters, playing on the unpopularity of the Zetas allows the cartels to position themselves as the better alternative, so that when the Zetas are defeated, the citizens of Mexico can look forward to things ‘going back to the way they were’, which will be advantageous for the cartel. But to really get to the crux of this issue, we have to distinguish between the two ‘drug wars’ currently going on. There is the war between the cartels, but there is also Calderon’s war on the cartels. This second war has everything to do with public relations, politics and appeasement. Calderon is the first president in a while to (at least ostensibly) try to do something about the cartels, and showing success in that effort requires events that look like victories. Offering up the Zetas is a perfect solution for the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels in this situation, because it’s as close to working together as the government and the cartels can publicly come. If the public comes to associate the Zetas with the death toll and all the terrible by-products of drug violence, it’s a strategic win for both the cartels and Calderon’s administration once they are defeated.

The Zetas are keenly aware of this, even if it is already too late to stop it. A recent email circulating that claims to be from Zeta command says:

I hope everything is clear about what the true reality is. Who recruits people who are not prepared, who murders innocent people to then blame us, who want to cause confusion in the city so that the citizens think that with them, all the Extortion, Murder and Kidnappings will end, who publishes thousands of Communications and pay big amounts of $$$$$ so that their videos are published.

Consider also that on the day this fight began in February, eight Reynosa journalists were kidnapped. There has been a virtual media blackout in the area, with citizens getting the majority of their information and warnings about gunfights and roadblocks from Twitter and other open source Internet media.

But despite the onslaught from their enemies, the Zetas show no signs of backing down. This battle of wills could be the culminating battle of the drug war. The defeat of the Zetas would be a huge step towards reestablishing a balance of power that could lead to relative peace in the region. It’s funny that such a fight is being fought where it began, against the group that originally precipitated a huge forward step in the culture of violence that made these cartels capable of causing the destruction that they have. There’s something supremely ironic about watching the Gulf cartel desperately try to destroy the monster it created. But it will be a long bloody fight before that occurs, and it’s certain that the legacy of the Zetas is something that will never entirely just go away.

Previously: The Sinaloa Cartel and Where We Are Now

John Murray is a lover of obscurity. He lives and writes in Arizona.

“We’ve hit a new high point when candidates are accused of pretending to be gay to win a seat.”
–Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal sees the bright side in recent claims by Democratic State Rep. Babette Josephs that her primary opponent is faking bisexuality for votes.

Sean McDonald, best known as “James Frey’s editor” from his time with Nan Talese, has left Riverhead Books for the hallowed, chummy halls of FSG.

This is admittedly kind of a ridiculous way to begin an article about a dead rapper named Guru, but let me posit up top that death is the ultimate contextualizing force. That is, relative to death, everything else falls into a sort of desperate kind of perspective. The difference in re: hip-hop is that bad rap’s rhetorical over-deployment of death — this is the thing that Fox News squeakers pretend to think corresponds one-to-one with actual homicides — makes it seem cheap. Listen to a corny 50 Cent song — or check out 50 Cent’s cornier shoot-em-up video game — and violence is simultaneously the entire context and totally meaningless. What this means is that 50 Cent sucks like crazy, but what it also means is that because death is a half-assed constant in so many stupid, don’t-fuck-with-me boasts, this actually really important thing gets reduced to punchline status — a couplet-ending flourish, not even a verse-ender.

All that cheap money, cheap violence, cheap death: all that grandiose transgression can become weirdly constricting for its authors, to the point where you’re telling good rappers from less-good by the relative novelty of their near-identical 16-line verses. I’m speaking only for myself, here, but if what drew me to hip-hop in the first place a couple decades ago was something that sounded alive and new, what finally led me to more or less give up on it a few years back was that listening to it made me feel like a fucking figure skating judge, trying to distinguish the little grace notes that set clever money/coke/at-the-club/gun verses apart from lame ones.

Tupac is dead, Biggie is dead, but they’re still fairly iconic 14 years after their deaths. Guru from Gang Starr, who died at 43 on Tuesday after months in a medically-induced coma, passed before his time, too, but he was different from those iconic stars in basically every other way. As important as songs like “Just To Get A Rep” and “Mass Appeal” and “The Mall” (j/k on the last one) are to a certain generation of hip-hop fans, Gang Starr didn’t sell many records even when people used to buy records, and Guru wasn’t even the star of his own group — he had the great professional fortune and relative reputational misfortune of working with DJ Premier, the genius producer who is for all intents and purposes the best hip-hop beat-maker of the last 20-odd years. At the time of his death, Guru hadn’t worked with Premier since 2003, and I was surprised to see how many records (that is, any) Guru had recorded with collaborator MC Solar since 2005. Because I, like most everyone else, never heard these Guru solo records, I know Solar only as being 1) not the French rapper MC Solaar and 2) apparently the hip-hop equivalent of the creepy, defective svengali types that circled Britney Spears during her doped-up Brian Wilson-y exile. After Guru’s death, Solar released a posthumous letter of dubious authenticity that purported to be from Guru and essentially disavowed all his work with Gang Starr.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, right: the real difference between this one and other hip-hop deaths — real and rhetorical — was that Guru’s death offered the same sort of bleak and saddening perspective and context that actual death does. One of the most-used words — and certainly, inarguably the worst-used word — in hip-hop is, still, “real,” which maybe will cheapen the next sentence somewhat. But for those inclined to feel something about the passing of a 40-something, mid-tier rapper, Guru’s death felt improbably and painfully real. In this sense, and maybe not only in this sense, Guru was a better, realer rapper than his more iconic, more talented ex-contemporaries.

In terms of actual rapping, though? No, not so much at all. Guru had his strong suits as a rapper, admittedly. These were, in no particular order: a distinctive monotone; an understated knack for detail (more on this in a second); a comparatively vast vocabulary that he used in enjoyably unconventional ways; a unique accent (thoroughly Boston: Guru’s father was the first black municipal court judge in Boston); and an uncommon knack with old-timey dis-words like “knucklehead.” And of course it didn’t hurt that Guru rhymed over beats made by Premier, a craftsman who produced great songs for artists as impossibly dissimilar as Nas (“New York State of Mind,” for starters) and Christina Aguilera (“Ain’t No Other Man”) (seriously).

But for the most part, when people remember quotable Guru lines, they’re of the goofy/flubby variety. The line for which Guru might be most remembered — and it’s incredibly memorable, admittedly — is a retardo-koan from the 1993 Nice and Smooth collaboration “DWYCK,” in which Guru confidently proclaims, “Lemonade was a popular drink, and it still is/I get more props for stunts than Bruce Willis.” Lyrics-of-fury-wise, Guru’s simple, space-filled verses veer uncomfortably close to Barney Rubble rapping about Fruity Pebbles territory with uncomfortable frequency.

As is true of any rapper who sticks around long enough, Guru’s verses became pretty predictable over time. There are only so many ways to say “I’m a better rapper than you” or “Bad rappers make me angry,” and for the most part that was the turf that Guru worked with Gang Starr during the group’s 1990s golden period. On Guru’s two Jazzmatazz side projects, he delivered more or less the same raps, only with Donald Byrd and Lonnie Liston Smith and Ramsey Lewis standing in for Premier’s chopped-up samples. He was decent enough at it, and his voice and delivery made him easy to listen to, but it wasn’t exceptional, and it wasn’t what made Guru unique, and kind of great.

Rapping clearly didn’t come easily to Guru, and there’s a lot of work evident in each of his verses — a struggle to stay on beat, to deal with spacing and pacing and everything else that makes rapping difficult. And while Guru’s palpable lack of natural facility led to the occasional uh-oh proclamation on the enduring popularity of lemonade, it also gave an earnest, blue-collar feeling to even his most conventional verses. Add to this the fact that Guru always rapped old — there was something gym-teachery about his quickness with the motivational platitude, something whippersnapper-slapping about his dismissals of not-ready-for-prime-time rappers in his battle rhymes — and it was easy to pick up a weird and incongruous modesty under all that rote braggadocio. Instead of bragging on his success or bank account or anything else, Guru spent a lot of time big-upping his own work ethic. It was redundant; you could always hear how hard he was working.

And at his best, Guru sounded not just old, but mature. One of my favorite Gang Starr songs, “The Planet,” is probably as close as hip-hop has ever come to “Augie March.” Admittedly, that’s not very close at all, but for all the rap critics who feel compelled to use the words “novelistic detail” every time Ghostface mentions what’s on the TV or burps up some undigested bit of pop-culture from his youth, “The Planet” is one of the very few hip-hop songs I can think of that actually feels novelistic.

The song tells the story of Guru’s pilgrimage from Boston to Brooklyn in hopes of making it as a rapper in New York. This is something that other rappers just never really touch on, and Guru’s gritty getting-there narrative — working in a mailroom, living with his aunt in East New York, being broke and trying to pick up girls at Fulton Mall, writing lyrics late at night — is pretty much the only one of its kind I’ve ever heard. And the details are novelistic not just in their specificity about where Guru used to go to get his haircut (Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene) and the rules for living in his aunt’s apartment (No ho’s, don’t come home bent), but in their frank emotional honesty: the homesickness, the scary foreignness of a violent neighborhood in a new city. Guru hasn’t yet made it, by song’s end: the triumphal “now I fly to Monaco on a champagne-powered invisible diamond helicopter” verse that would be there if Jay-Z wrote the song never comes. It’s the rare hip-hop song that’s intensely and intentionally relatable, and while Gang Starr street fables like “Just To Get A Rep” — a poker-faced answer to the question, “Why do kids shoot other kids?” with a hint of righteous weariness from Guru — are justifiably what the group is best known for, “The Planet” is the sort of song no other rapper could’ve or would’ve made. That he was in his mid-twenties when he wrote this mini-memoir is an example of him rapping old; that he wrote it at all is a big part of the reason why I’ll miss him.

The weird, sordid business with the deathbed letter and the sketchy new collaborator is a bummer, but the passing of what Guru and Gang Starr represented is the sadder part. Whatever it was that divided the East and West Coast schools of hip-hop back in the 1990s has melted away; I’m generalizing, but what bores me about hip-hop now, whether it’s from Brooklyn or Los Angeles or Atlanta or Kanye’s Fortress of Solitude in Dubai or wherever, is that it’s explicitly about itself, as disingenuous, navel-gazing, self-important and tired as mall-bound macro-pop.

But the East/West difference that used to exist was always, to me, about urgency. It helped immensely, it made Guru’s career, that Premier’s beats were so jittery and nervous and energizing. But hearing how hard Guru worked to keep up with those quintessentially New York beats remains energizing and even inspiring at a level that has nothing to do with his actual lyrics. Even after he made it and settled into same verse/different beat predictability, there was something endearingly scrappy and striving about Guru, a hip-hop immigrant eternally trying hard to make it, shadowboxing against his limitations and pounding out battle raps long after his peers devoted themselves to portfolio diversification and multi-platform media leverage.

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is “Hot For Teacher.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks that the “Tea Party” will turn into the “the militant wing of the Republican party,” which is a slick way of avoiding the fact that it pretty much already is. [Via]

Politicians in Albany are going on serious diets out of fear that in a time of “voter anger and political upheaval,” a few extra pounds might cost them their seats in the next election. Because that’s really the problem in New York: We’re fine with the corruption and incompetence, but we will NOT put up with any lardassery on the part of our elected officials.

The Good News: Nielsen Co. has completed study on efficacy of targeted social network ads using 800,000+ Facebook users, 14 brands. Found that in cases where Facebook homepage ad incorporates the name of a user’s friend, ad recall/awareness/purchase intent levels improved strikingly over those generated by non-”social” ad. Overall click-through rate quadruples from generic banner ad to organic impression.

The Bad News: Some ads still triggered by false positives in user news feeds, e.g., Facebook status update “Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, are native to the Congo” yields ad for Bonobos brand pants, only some of which are made of ape skin.

The Problems: Software cannot compensate for multivalence of human language or extract opinion from complex syntax. User-provided information insufficient to form 100% accurate/effective ad mosaic. Social networking still dominated by non-commercial data, i.e., quotidian/creative user content.

The Solution: Since juxtaposition of brand and user’s friends elicits profitable response, micro-pay savvy users per embed of neutral or positive brand mention in wall posts, status updates and arbitrary white rectangle that appears below users’ profile pictures. Added benefit of tailoring ads to friend-cluster of individual user: chance to measure efficacy of same organic impression on cross-section of sub-demographics including People From High School To Avoid Ages 21–29 and Co-Workers Who Only Communicate Through E-mail Even Though They Sit Twelve Feet Away. Added benefit of shifting organic impressions to center and left (or “important”) columns of Facebook layout: possible gain in high-receptive eyeball scannage.

The Potential Solution Reinforcement: Have user display profile picture that provokes greater than 70% rate of involuntary neurocorrelation to trusted authority for optimal message-prefrontal cortex bonding.

The Target Projection: 350 bilingual education programs (Spanish/Adspeak) in U.S. 2012 federal education budget.

Miles Klee is going to figure out your Internets.

“Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”
 — Bob? Yes, BOB DYLAN. This whole interview IS INSANE and wonderful. Joni Mitchell also says: “When Prince later became a star, he told me, ‘You used to be shocking, but I can cut you now!’”

Screw your jetpacks or your flying cars, the promise I’ve most been waiting on The Future to deliver is the invisibility cloak. Unfortunately, much like diet bourbon or a remote control that turns everyone on TV naked, Science has not yet been able to turn this dream into a reality. The problem is apparently an issue with the stuff that makes up invisibility cloaks: “the physical fabrication limits of their metamaterials were too close to the wavelengths of visible light, and they could only bend waves on the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.” But what’s this? Science has discovered something new?

[Researchers] found they were able to bend visible light by using a two-dimensional array of coaxial waveguides arranged in a hexagonal configuration. The waveguides were composed of two layers of silver sandwiching a gallium-phosphorus insulator; they could maintain a negative refractive index for light of wavelengths as short as 450–500 nanometers, corresponding to the color blue.

I don’t know what any of that means, but if I’m reading it right it means we are so much closer! Hurry up, Science, I want my invisibility cloak and I want it NOW. I have plans.