Maybe the future of media is stories about being on a break from Slack.

“[CBS chief research officer David Poltrack said] two-thirds of viewers watch with a second screen either in their hands or on their lap. Yet those screens can be so distracting that their users forget to fast-forward past the ads in recorded shows. It turns out viewers are overwhelmingly absorbing the messages coming from the TV even as they stare at the other devices, Mr. Poltrack said.”
 — If you are someone who believes that 90% of the work our professional classes do is nonsense; busy-work; work that is done for the sake of justifying a salary; work that is conducted for the perceived esteem it grants its performers; work that is rationalized as vital or important because being forced to confront the reality of its insignificance — or, more damningly, the quantifiable damage it causes to the mental and physical health of the members of society who are its victims — would make it impossible for those whose identity is wrapped up in it to face themselves in the mirror each morning; or basically a combination of misdirection, wishful thinking or appeals to faith in magic, you will never run short of material to bolster your belief.

I was walking across Henry Street last night a little after seven and there was a sunshower happening on the west side of the street. It was pretty remarkable; I could see it sprinkling down, there across the road, but the only time I actually felt it was when the wind gusts that swirled around the city yesterday blew it over to my side of the block. I didn’t even mind because I had a coat on, since it was blustery and cold outside. So there I was, in the middle of May, the sun still shining into the evening and the weather characteristics of three different seasons happening at the same time, and I thought to myself, wow, we’re pretty fucked, huh? Anyway, I know nothing about this act or the music but there is something adorable about this song that might help you forget everything else for a few minutes. Enjoy.

★★★★★ Elation floated on the warm morning air. Even the dull bike-share rack and the rim of a trash can were sending off flares of light. The heat and light sunk into the skin. Everything had a faint silvery glaze on it. Members of a religious sect in matching yellow shirts wandered the streets. The buildings on Fifth Avenue stood stolidly aglow, every joint and detail sharply cut, while below passed a stream of people striding free. The moon just off the blue zenith curved one way and drifting cirrus curved the other. The sun shot the gap between buildings so deftly it seemed as if it must have been reflecting off something. All the windows were open, and the night was loud.

This is the first I’ve heard of Star Parks, but boy does this sound song perfect for a gray Friday afternoon. The album Don’t Dwell is out today and you can hear the whole thing below. Enjoy.

by Charles McNamara

— — — –
“A website is a set of webpages that are joined together.”
 — — — -

Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopedia project. There are many editions of Wikipedia other than the big English one. (I like Vicipaedia, which has pages written in Latin.) Another edition of Wikipedia is also written in English. It is called Simple English Wikipedia. This article is written like a Simple English Wikipedia page. It is easy to understand for children and people learning English.

Sometimes I use Simple English Wikipedia in my normal life. It can be very helpful! For example, some people use Google Image Search to learn about new things. But Google Image Search can be a dangerous page. You should not use it to learn about skin problems.

Simple English Wikipedia knows everything and can explain difficult ideas in simple words. It is like a helpful teacher who smiles a lot. Here are some difficult ideas that I am trying to understand by reading Simple English Wikipedia:

• “Quantum mechanics (QM) is the part of physics that tells us how the things that make up atoms work. QM also tells us how electromagnetic waves like light work.”

I never took physics. But QM sounds very Simple in Simple English.

• “The categorical imperative is an idea that the philosopher Immanuel Kant had about ethics. Kant said that an ‘imperative’ is something that a person must do. For example: if a person wants to stop being thirsty, it is imperative that they have a drink. Kant said an imperative is ‘categorical,’ when it is true at all times, and in all situations.”

Sometimes I have a “categorical imperative” for nachos.

• “A credit default swap (or CDS for short) is a kind of investment where you pay someone so they will pay you if a certain company gives up on paying its bonds, or defaults.”

Credit default swaps are middle school dares with money.

• “The word fistula comes from a Latin word that means tube or pipe. In medicine, a fistula is an abnormal connection between two hollow spaces. This can be blood vessels, intestines, or other hollow organs.”

Do not use Google Image Search to learn about this word!!!!!

• “Counterpoint is the art of composing music by combining different parts (voices) in a way that sounds nice. Music composed like this is called contrapuntal.”

It is true! Music sounds nice.

• “Bitcoin is a digital and global money system (currency). It allows for the pseudo-anonymous (not linked to a real name) trading of money across the internet. The mathematical field of cryptography is the basis for its security.”

“Pseudo-anonymous” is not Simple English. I reported this page.

• “Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American writer. Hemingway’s sentences were short, the way he had been taught to write at the Kansas City Star newspaper. He wrote about what he knew and felt. He used few descriptive words. His statements were clear and easily understood.”

RIP Ernest Hemingway, our nation’s greatest Simple English Wikipedian.

I thought the one thing that we all agreed on about journalists was that they are too hideous to ever be shown to the general population. The real crime of Facebook Live is not the way in which it is dumbing down an already intelligence-depleted population, but the fact that it is breaking the social contract in which we read what journalists have to say so long as we’re not forced to see their horrifying faces. Good Lord, children could be watching these idiot videos, do you want to scar them for life?

by Ketti Wilhelm

On a recent Sunday afternoon, on the waterfront in Wellington, New Zealand, an unusually large crowd gathered before a repurposed shipping container with a neat, black-and-white sign that read, “The Water Bar.” The bar was part of an exhibit of art installations inside cargo-shipping containers at the downtown harbor, called The Performance Arcade. Several attractive and busy-looking young people were handing little samples across a bar in shot glasses, tiny cups, and miniature porcelain spoons. The smiling crowd grew steadily in size and apparent interest. They were slurping saltwater slushies out of the spoons, sipping spring waters from the shot glasses, swirling and sniffing small tumblers, including one containing distilled water over a smoke-flavored ice cube. “The only thing missing to make it a legitimate water bar,” Kane Laing, the bar’s creator said, “is people paying for it.”

Laing wanted to create a project that poked fun at the spendy, gourmet, “connoisseur culture” he spent his college years immersed in. The twenty-three-year-old art school graduate drinks his “long blacks” (that’s New Zealand for “Americanos”), and the V60 is his preferred at-home coffee filtering method. He has attempted roasting coffee beans at home, in a popcorn maker. “I love this sort of stuff,” he said, referring to gourmet beverage stuff. “But I hate how these sort of things can be extremely exclusive. But that’s what I’m aiming to bridge with my projects.”

After performing his interactive installation at several local expos, Laing booked The Water Bar for a friend’s wedding, where he said his new “water mojito” was a hit. “There’s a sincerity on one side and also a total ironic side,” Laing said. “I want them to be both there at the same time.” Laing is clearly passionate about water as a beverage, just like coffee, beer, or wine. But he is also concerned about the pollution of local rivers and famously pure springs in his native country, and wants to raise awareness of it. “Art can give people an education in a way that’s not so linear or direct,” he said. “You can open people up to things.”

One of the waters on the menu is “100% Pure Manawatu River Water,” which has been “filtered, purified and sterilized for your drinking enjoyment.” It continued:

“The Manawatu River is … one of the most polluted rivers in the southern hemisphere. The main impacts are diffuse nutrient pollution from intensive farming and sedimentation. The dire condition of our lowland streams is directly related to the intensity of farming within their catchments and the vegetation clearance in steep country.”

The description of its taste reads, “River stones, algae and waterlogged wood are the main components of this muddy tasting water… A classic NZ river flavour, with a sad story behind it.”

Serving free gourmet water from behind a bar while wearing horn-rimmed Ray Bans, Laing looked, at first blush, sufficiently pretentious. But in conversation, he seemed nearly contrite for the seeming ridiculousness of his project. “I thought it would be sort of hilarious,” Laing said, of his original idea. “Before I realized it was a real thing.”

Even in the years before Laing’s idea was fermenting, restaurants and real water bars began serving selections of gourmet waters. One water bar, called Via Genova, opened in Chappaqua, New York in 2006, but has since closed. A few restaurants currently offer water menus in LA; one of the first was Ray’s & Stark Bar, a swanky restaurant in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They offer twenty-one different spring waters, ranging from four to twenty dollars a bottle, including Antipodes, an acclaimed New Zealand spring water, for $12 a liter, and Beverly Hills 90H2O, for $4 for a half liter. The man who designed this menu was Martin Riese, a German-born LA transplant who claims he is the only water sommelier in the U.S. (out of about a hundred worldwide). His gives lots of specific-but-vague advice that’s hard to put to use, such as: “Low mineral water with a smooth mouth feel pairs perfectly to salads.”

Riese helped design Beverly Hills 90H20, “the first crafted water,” with specially engineered levels of calcium, potassium, and silica. You can buy in a bottle with a diamond-encrusted lid for $100,000. The price tag includes delivery to any location in the world, and a private tasting with Riese himself. Riese appears in a GQ “Most Expensivest Shit” video with 2Chainz and Diplo, letting the rapper and DJ sample the diamond-bottled stuff, which you can also buy a case of in plastic bottles for $3 each.

It’s disconcertingly easy to get sucked in to the world of water — how the ground a particular spring water comes from affects the mineral content and thus the taste, just as the soil grapes are grown in affect the taste of a wine. Sommeliers of both beverages use the same term for this: “terroir.” Riese said he designed his water menu with the idea that people needed more choice in their water. It should be like wine, he said.

Mark Smith, owner of aquadeli, a “concept store for water” that sells New Zealanders bottled waters from eight countries, echoed that sentiment with a simple explanation. “People will always drink cheap wine, beer, and instant coffee,” he said in an email, “but a minority will appreciate the pleasures of quality products, including water.” But the quality Smith is talking about seems to have more to do with taste, and perhaps the thrill of savoring something unusual, than with an occasional diamond lid or other flash.” Most commercially bottled waters now come from a limited range of sources, all very similar in mineral make up,” Smith said, “Hence the common misconception all waters taste the same.”

Those commercially purified tap waters, like Dasani and Aquafina, have been stripped of all natural minerals to standardize their taste, which makes them of no interest to Riese or the customers of aquadeli. They have no unique flavor, none of their original nutrients, and no sense of origin — no terroir. As Riese and Smith were quick to point out, mineral waters and spring waters are of far more interest in Europe. Only about one percent of the bottled water in the U.S. is imported. In 2014, sixty-three percent of the bottled water we bought was the boring, purified kind, according to Gary Hemphill at the Beverage Marketing Corporation. “Most (American) consumers don’t seem to rank water source high in importance in their buying decision,” Hemphill said in an email.

Laing serves filtered spring waters, purified waters, and local mineral spring waters. He’s also added flavored waters for entertainment value. One was a home-made sports drink for the kids. Another was a “sea-water granita,” which the menu says was “the cleanest and most mellow water” he found, “after sampling an assortment of sea waters around the lower North Island.” He also gave out a version of thickened water, which normally is for people who have medical problems causing difficulty swallowing.

His idea for The Water Bar was born of “a semi-drunken conversation about hipster culture” in art school, while Riese’s is a passion steeped in pedigree and luxury, but they do share an earnest appreciation for their subject. “The problem these days, is that a lot of people have forgotten the importance of water.” Riese said in an email. “I give water the value back it deserves, and when people see water has value, they might stop wasting it.”

Laing is interested in the science of filtration and in developing cheap, accessible, emergency water filters for use in the aftermath of earthquakes, of which New Zealand has many. He likes his art and his water best when they are of the people, just like his personal favorite type of water: Rain. He also spoke highly of Antipodes, whose water is shipped all over the world in recycled glass bottles (the company says it is certified carbon-neutral to any shipping destination). Riese said in an email he likes the spring water’s “extremely refreshing taste.” He explained, “Even when Antipodes is warm and not chilled, it feels in your mouth (as if it were) chilled,” Riese explained. “So much fun.”

I asked a representative from Antipodes Water named Morven McAuley what he thought about Laing’s tongue-in-cheek project. He wrote, “I understand that (…) there was some satire involved, but anyone else who is prepared to make people think twice about water is a bit of hero in my opinion.” It occurred to Laing while he was developing The Water Bar that “There’s actually more potential to this than just a joke,” he said. “But it’s also a joke.”

“New research suggests use of digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly.”
 — This means that when you read things on a tablet or laptop you really only pay attention to the objective points of the material instead of making more complex connections.

It’s Friday. Here’s some Welsh weirdness from Super Furry Animals. (“Bing Bong is a Welsh folk idiom that we have appropriated, but its pronunciation has been partly inspired by the sonic motif of the talking robot, Twiki, in the 1979–81 sci-fi series: Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century.”) Did I mention it was Friday? Well it is. Your terrible agony is almost ended. Enjoy.