by Brendan O’Connor

On the south side of East 9th Street, a couple of storefronts down from the corner of First Avenue, is a small juice bar called Bequ — stylized “beQu,” for “Beyond Quality.” Taras Strachnyi and his brother Peter opened it at the beginning of last year. Strachnyi has been in the juice business, he told me, for nearly fifteen years, learning his trade as a teenager and in his early twenties at the long-standing East Village juice emporium Liquiteria. Strachnyi’s family moved to the East Village from Ukraine when he was nine years old, and he grew up going to the Ninth Street Bakery that closed in 2013 after eighty-seven years in business, whose space Bequ now occupies. (According to the Village Voice, the landlord raised the rent by 38 percent.) “I’ve been coming to the bakery since I was a kid,” Strachnyi told me. “This location means more to me than just some juice bar.”

Bequ, Strachnyi said, sources all of its juices’ ingredients locally, makes them in micro-batches, and doesn’t pasteurize them. When a location of the East Village coffee colossus The Bean started selling juice across the street from Bequ a few months ago, Strachnyi took it as a personal affront. “We were building out for seven months, and then they just happen to put in a juice press?” Strachnyi asked. Then, in the winter, The Bean dropped its juice prices and put a sign out advertising that they had done so — a sign facing Bequ’s storefront. “It was cold, and I had to come in every day and see that sign,” Strachnyi griped. “As a consumer, even if you don’t care about Bequ, or The Bean, wouldn’t that piss you off?”

“We were a little late to the juice game,” Bean co-owner Ike Escava admitted to me, but he denied that The Bean’s foray into juicing had anything to do with a juice bar opening across the street. “I don’t think it was in response to Bequ,” he said, but “it’ll be a part of what we do going forward.” And, because juice season is in the spring and summer, “it was a bad time to introduce that product.” Since the weather started warming up again, The Bean has raised its prices. Bequ’s prices are still low — five dollars for a fourteen-ounce juice, compared to The Bean’s nearly seven dollars — and though Strachnyi plans to raise them in the next couple of years, they’ll still be lower than their competitors’. Strachnyi believes he is building a better brand around around a better product. “We specialize in what we do, and they just…” he paused. “Do what they do.”

@KELLYWEILL if I were a betting woman I’d put my money on the shop that also sells lattes

— Kelly Weill (@KELLYWEILL) March 27, 2015

Juice is a frenetically popular cultural artifact in New York City right now, but fancy juices have been around the city for a while — Juice Generation founder Eric Helms opened his first store, in Hell’s Kitchen, in 1999. Even earlier in the nineties, fitness gurus like Jack LaLanne and Jay Kordich extolled the virtues of juice. But in the wake of the frozen yogurt boom and its subsequent bust, juice has grown far beyond its fringe, fanatically healthy beginnings, with juice bar sales doubling to nearly a billion-and-a-half billion dollars nationally between 2003 and 2013.

This would seem to have been motivated, largely, by shifting cultural norms governing what the average consumer wants to put in his or her body: cold-pressed juice, unlike frozen yogurt, is explicitly understood to be a healthy option — and not just healthy, but organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, environmentally friendly (presumably?), and so on. Frozen yogurt had hints of this, being an ostensibly healthier alternative to ice cream — or cupcakes! — but it’s still dessert (and a highly chemical one, at that). Business people have capitalized on this appeal: In 2012, tea-maker Hain Celestial acquired the juice company Blueprint, which popularized juice cleanses, in a deal valued at around twenty-six million dollars, and Juice Press raised seven million dollars in venture capital; in 2013, Starbucks opened up a seventy-million-dollar juice factory to quadruple production of Evolution Fresh Juice, which it had acquired in 2011 for thirty million dollars, and private equity firm Weld North invested tens of millions of dollars in Organic Avenue for a seventy percent share of the company. Earlier this year, a mysterious juice start-up called Juicero — founded by Doug Evans, former CEO of Organic Avenue — was reportedly working to raise a hundred and twenty million dollars. (This is all to say nothing of the Californian juice tsunami which has flooded LA, and to a lesser extent, San Francisco.) There is, it would seem, a lot of money in juice.

“Money chases ideas, and this is the new idea,” commercial broker Conrad Bradford of Miron Properties told me. When “venture capital money comes into a business, the entrepreneurs don’t have an idea that’s fully cooked — but no one has to prove these models actually work.” Bradford continued: Venture capitalists “invest in ten things, maybe two or three will be good investments. They know that. But the money is there for people who know how to access it — you go to the right school, or your father knows the right people. This is the machine. This is the way we innovate.”

With venture capital comes an expectation of rapid expansion. Juice Press has opened twenty-six locations in five years, including one on East 10th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues — just a block away from Bequ. “There’s no one out there who’s expanding as fast as I am,” Marcus Antebi, the chief executive of Juice Press, who apparently calls himself a juice “assassin,” told the Commercial Observer in January of last year. “If we stop at twenty stores, then we aren’t successful.” (Juice Press also has locations outside of the city, on the Hamptons and in Connecticut.) In 2013, after seventeen years in business with a single location, Liquiteria opened two new stores. Last year, it raised 4.8 million dollars, opened two more locations in New York, and this year it opened a store in Boston. Juice Generation, meanwhile, which remains independently owned, has fifteen locations right now and expects to add three more by the end of the year.

Even in Los Angeles — the healthiest city in the world — there is anxiety about the juice craze spilling over from more affluent neighborhood; a juice bar opening in Highland Park in February was seen as a signifier of gentrification: “Not only is The Juice the kind of juice bar built for pre-yoga carrot-ginger cleanses and post-hike apple-kale rejuvenations but it’s also the kind of place that’s selling $9 juices in a neighborhood filled with Mexican-owned fruterías that have been selling $4 jugos for years,” LA Weekly reported.

“Landlords are greedy,” Bradford told me — and, he said, they have every right to be, as they are “sitting ducks” for taxes — but they also have a tendency to back themselves into a corner. “They’re forced to charge what they’re asking because they’ve borrowed money against the projected value of a building — not just retail, but all the space in a building,” he said. When a landlord anticipates raising his rents by a certain amount of money when renewing his leases, and borrows money from a bank — based on that future, hypothetical revenue — he cannot afford to be negotiated down when renewing a tenant’s lease, or signing a lease with a new tenant. If he does, he will default on his loan. As far as landlords are concerned, a building’s value is determined solely by the cash-flow it generates. As such, they “are driven to try to get more on every occasion.” One solution to this problem, Conrad said, is to attract “multiple-location operators.”

When a tenant operates multiple locations — that is, a chain — and when the expense of operating each of those locations is not the same, one highly profitable location can offset the cost of another. In this way, retail tenants with more than one store are attractive to landlords because (theoretically) they are more stable businesses that are less dependent on the success of a single location. In some New York neighborhoods, retailers will open up shop in places where they know they will not be profitable — because the rent is just too high — simply to be seen in the same physical space as other brands with which they are in competition or with which they want to be associated. (The distinction is not always clear.) These storefronts are, effectively, advertisements: they have a role to play in the business, but they do not directly increase profits; if anything, they impede them. Meanwhile, these kinds of ventures ensure that a neighborhood’s rents — both commercial and residential — remain as high as possible. Chobani, for example, a mediocre yogurt company (Greek, not frozen) signed a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar annual lease in 2012 for a storefront on Spring Street, in Soho, where rents are over a thousand dollars per square foot. Chobani is a national brand, with a recorded revenue of a billion dollars in 2014: It can afford to have a fancy store in Soho, even if it doesn’t sell enough yogurt from its fancy store in Soho to “make rent” on yogurt sales at its fancy store in Soho. That is all beside the point, and its landlord knows it.

But! As it turns out, investor-backed juice bars may not be the safest bet, for a landlord. An investor at Jamba Juice began pressuring the company last year to pull out of the unprofitable New York market, either by selling off company-owned stores to franchise owners or by closing them altogether, a process which appears to have begun: In February, Jamba Juice closed two locations, in the West Village and Soho. Earlier this year, Organic Avenue announced that it would lay off thirty-eight people from its commissary kitchen in Long Island City. One Juice Press in the East Village, which was originally closed for “renovations” in March, has shuttered permanently. “It’s gone too far,” Bequ’s Strachnyi told me. “In another year or so, it’s going to collapse.”

Strachnyi’s strategy is to take the process of expansion very slow. “Once you have all that overhead, you have to start mass-producing,” Strachnyi told me, referring to the rapid expansion of Juice Press, Organic Avenue, and Juice Generation, and what he perceives to be an attendant decline in their product’s quality. “It’s going to Tropicana Valley. You’re paying eight dollars for no nutritional value, beyond what they add,” he said.

The Bean signed a twelve-year lease for the 1st Avenue location in 2012; Bequ signed a five-year lease with an option to renew for another five years after that. Bequ is likely paying a fraction of the rent of The Bean — which is on the corner of an avenue. “You can compete with a titan if your numbers are right,” Bradford said. But The Bean — not exactly a titan, but a larger business, certainly, than Bequ — can afford to lower its prices, if it feels like it, because its business model is not based on just one store, and because each of their stores are in prime locations. “They can absorb the numbers,” Bradford said.

Still, both Strachnyi and Escava expressed the same feeling about their landlords — that the only thing you can do to try to make sure you don’t get priced out is pay your rent on time and hope for the best. “There’s not a lot you can do,” Escava said. “There’s no hometown discount.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

“I was popular in certain circles”

Among the river rats and the leaves.
For example. I was huge among the lichen,
and the waterfall couldn’t get enough
of me. And the gravestones?
I was hugely popular with the gravestones.
Also with the meat liquefying
beneath. I’d say to the carrion birds,
I’d say, “Are you an eagle? I can’t see
so well.” That made them laugh until we
were screaming. Eagle. Imagine.

The vultures loved me so much they’d feed
me the first morsel. From their delicate
talons, which is what I called them:
such delicate talons. They loved me so deeply
they’d visit in pairs. One to feed me.
One to cover my eyes with its velvety wings.
Which were heavy as theater curtains. Which I was
sure to remark on. “Why can’t I see what I’m eating?”
I’d say. And the wings would pull me into
the great bird’s chest. And I’d feel the nail
inside my mouth.

What pals I was with all the scavengers!
And the dead things too. What pals.
As for the living, the fox would not be outdone.
We’d sit on the cliff’s edge and watch the river
like a movie and I’d say, “I think last night…”
and the fox would put his paw on top of mine
and say, “Forget it. It’s done.” I mean,
we had fun. You haven’t lived until a fox
has whispered something the ferns told him
in your one good ear. I mean truly.
You have not lived.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, and is Senior Poetry Editor at Los Angeles Review of Books. Her third book of poems, Rocket Fantastic, is forthcoming. She’s at work on a memoir called The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

The campaign for U.S. Senate candidate Mike Beitiks begins with a message of comfort to his prospective constituents: “ISIS. Obamacare. Russia. The NSA. Wealth disparity. Immigration reform. Gun control. What do all of these hot issues for the 2016 election have in common? None of them matter because we’re all going to die.” Beitiks’ platform is singular: Halt government action until climate change is addressed. While the San Franciscan native is certain this message won’t get him elected, he’s hopeful that his extremely narrow campaign will at least offer consolation to those who fear human extinction, if only by letting them know they’re not alone.

The other day, I spoke with Beitiks — a licensed lawyer and father of two — about his first foray into politics.

Where did the campaign come from?

I’m pretty much just a regular person. I have a law degree and I’m not completely unfamiliar with the political system. But, like many people, I have a certain level of unresolved anxiety about the climate crisis, and was not seeing any political reaction I found satisfactory, or even close to satisfactory. I just decided, well, if no one else is going to be the voice of reason, I’m more than happy to do this.

How does one throw one’s name into the ring?

It is initially as simple as just doing a website and reaching out to different media outlets. I am not officially registered with the Department of Elections yet. That’s something that doesn’t have to happen until you raise ten thousand dollars in campaign contributions. It is currently out of my fundraising budget.

Why are you making climate change your central — I guess, only — issue?

It is very clearly a huge problem that is not being put to rest in any meaningful way. It’s being approached as something that will improve our quality of life, rather than what we’re actually dealing with, which is something more akin to a wartime effort. And I don’t want that to sound extremist, but there’s a certain level of morality that can be removed from the situation. So much of politics is saturated with morality, talking about individual liberty — things I don’t belittle in any sense — but I think the climate crisis is something as real as Pearl Harbor, and is being treated as debatable as something that’s a matter of private morality. This is an issue of survival and fact-based rational action rather than a time for nuanced moral debate.

You say you don’t want to sound extremist, but your website starts with “we’re all going to die”?

There is obviously a certain level of absurdity in the way I present myself. But I consider that to be an equal and opposite reaction to what I see as the absurdity of, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline debate — which, if you’re really grasping climate change, and what’s going on with fossil fuels and the downward spiral we’re having, the absurdity of actively debating expanding our fossil fuel production in a way that would degrade the environment further, it’s equally absurd.

We exist in a political climate where it’s not okay to treat Americans as adults who understand responsibility. No politician is willing to look us all in the eye and say, “Hey, we’re in bad shape. Let me tell you the truth and let’s do what is necessary.” It doesn’t seem like politicians are willing to impose tough love on their constituents. No one wants to be the guy who says, “We have to change our lifestyle dramatically, everything we’re doing is not working out,” because generally folks want to be re-elected.

This is, let’s say, a two-part question. What’s wrong with the general conversation about climate change? And if you do get elected, how would you change that?

The amount of kow-towing that happens with climate change deniers and the amount of time you spend politicizing an issue that is not a political issue is, obviously, a huge issue. My solution is using various political tools — — such as Senatorial holds and filibusters — to essentially stop politics until we deal with that. It sounds extreme — it is extreme — but that’s my opinion of what’s necessary.

I would like to be the extreme voice on the other side. No one on the left is willing to be as extreme as climate deniers are, and I think that is a failure of the climate realist. Given that I have no desire to have a future in politics, I’d be more than willing to torch my political career to do that.

How has the response been so far with your campaign? Has there been a response?

It’s mostly Internet stuff at this point. I was on Reddit, albeit the humor section. I got a couple thousands hits off that, and a few dozen emails from concerned and excited Californians. Part of the absurdity in what I’m trying to do with the website is that I think there’s a large population of people who feel the way I do; what is absurd is that it’s not okay to voice that concern. We are dealing with a very terrifying thing, and the fact that we’re not admitting how terrifying it is is greatly inhibiting how we can realistically address it.

I don’t expect to win the election. I would love to — I would be more than happy to carry out as many of campaign promises as I can before they kick me out or I get assassinated. But my hope is to remind people who are ultimately going to be having this debate that there are people who feel as strongly about something as they do.

I don’t think climate change is a very distant and slow-moving process, and I want my campaign to attach immediacy to that problem. I use a lot of humor in my pitch because I feel like humor is immediate, humor is right now; you understand directly, you don’t have to run any models. I would like to connect those two energies. The slow-moving terror and quick-moving laughter, basically. There’s so much darkness around climate change. Most of us who are feeling the way I am — scared or like nothing’s happening — it’s a bad place to be, mentally and on a day-to-day operations level.

What one person can do doesn’t seem like it’s going to help at all.

There’s a certain freezing effect of global warming, for lack of a better… [laughs] it’s such a weird language term there. But that’s what it feels like. I talk about filibustering and doing what I can to shut down government until this gets addressed, but people don’t change unless they’re forced to change. You don’t sweep your driveway if your neighbor’s not sweeping his driveway. There’s basic human psychology where, I’m not going to do something that someone else is not required to do. A lot of it comes down to individual liberty and what people want to believe, and I’m a full supporter of individual liberty, but there’s a lack of social responsibility when it comes to climate change that I feel should be dealt with, even if it’s some super under-qualified person as myself.

As afraid that people are of climate change, they’re afraid of what they would have to give up to properly address it, and I am of the belief that there is nothing to be afraid of there. We have become attached to certain ways of life that are not only damaging, but much more unnecessary than we would lead ourselves to believe. I was in Ghana for over two years. I lived in a village that had no electricity, no running water, essentially no real vehicle access in and out of the town. I fear climate change; I do not fear an upheaval of the current level of American comfort. That’s also not a popular opinion. Historically, things like that do work if you can sell it the right way — rationing for World War II, etc. Americans, or humans in general, are capable in paring down their consumption when persuasively presented with the facts of what needs to happen.

If this message resonates, what would be the next step for someone to do in regards to your campaign?

Yeah, this is as grass roots of a campaign as it gets. I would even say grass root, singular. So, just reach out to me, email me through the website. At this point I’m just building people support, and if anyone wants to connect me to money support, that seems to be necessary for this game. But just contact me through the website. Or just share with other people, let other people know.

Let’s be real. I would be shocked if I got on the ballot. There’s no one willing to put money in the political account of the guy whose platform is, let’s slow the economy down. That’s never going to happen. But don’t be afraid to ask your Congressional or Senatorial candidates why they won’t address it. Ask them what their plan is.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Some songs just sort of roll along in the background for a bit before you suddenly snap forward and say, “You know what? I think I like this.” I had this new one from Heathered Pearls going earlier this morning, not particularly calling attention to itself but simply setting a sound, and you know what? I think I like it. Perhaps you will as well. Enjoy.

★★★★ The indoor air had held a minatory heaviness, but outside the humid breeze was forbearing, the plaza under its translucent green awning of trees was busy with people gone out to face the day. The twin subway stairs downtown inhaled fresh currents from above. Up on the roof the bone-tinged glare hurt the eyes and made them water, but the rest of the body sank into the warmth. A new birdsong sounded, and something barred and dun — a house finch, most likely, in the blurry light — tugged at the wine-colored maple leaves. The way home was not the least bit hot. One white-brick facade, on the daily route, somehow now stood out luminously from its neighbors.

What? You don’t think you can really get behind the emerging wave of neo-classical music that, thanks to the diverse set of influences embraced by its creators, has finally shed the staid, pretentious parlor-room associations with which it was so easily dismissed in the past? Well, fuck you. Be an idiot, what do I care? The world gets dumber every day and the acceleration by which that overwhelming stupidity encroaches has probably reached escape velocity, so if you choose to live a life of gleeful fatuity you can be sure at least that you will have plenty of compatriots with whom to spend your remaining days of drool discharge in agreeably innocuous company. If, on the other hand, you are willing to give something a little less obvious a try, please press play and, if possible, enjoy. You can stream the whole of Rachel Grimes’ excellent The Clearing here.

My favorite view of the web is a list of stories that have, according to analytics company Newswhip, achieved “Highest Velocity.” It’s essentially an of-the-moment collection of the most-shared stories on social media platforms (you can see a similar public page here).

The headlines, taken together, tell a familiar story: publications’ sensibilities have conformed to the platforms that send them visitors; their sites have adopted the tone and language of social media; news and entertainment, mixed as ever, now mingle according the demands and preferences of the feeds into which they are deployed. It’s a brutal and honest list: sparse and vital breaking news next to aggregated news so partisan as to transcend the concept of truth; TV casting news next to celebrity social media updates; a first-person video of a man firing two double-barreled pistols next to a story about “The Beautiful Origin Of Memorial Day Conservatives Don’t Want To Talk About”; a story about Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti below a remembrance of American Sniper Chris Kyle; a clip from the reality show “Street Outlaws” followed by flood news from Texas followed by an interview with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas. “15 things you should do with wine this summer. Number 11 made made me drool!” sits a few stories above “Studies Find Ginger To Be More Effective Than Chemotherapy At Fighting Cancer Cells” just up from “Muslims Say Fallen U.S. Soldiers Should NOT Be Honored on Memorial Day.”

It’s soothing, almost, to see these items together in a list. Yes, they’re formally and ideologically disparate, and, like Most Popular lists in nearly any context, they are not a flattering reflection of their audience. But these stories are not mysterious. They share a teleology: this is a list of things that people consume and engage with most vigorously on social media; this is a list of links that very different people share on platforms to tell other people about themselves.

A Most Popular list created by everyone makes a publication for no one. But it’s easy to see where these stories, even — especially? — the terrible ones, find traction. Some of this garbage is my kind of garbage, the kind of stuff that I might welcome into my feed and even cram into other people’s feeds. The kind of stuff the companies that operate my feeds might deem appealing — or at least engagement-probable! — for me. The rest belongs, just as recognizably, to someone else.

More interesting than the headlines is the list of places that produced them.

Here, in order, are the publications that supplied some of the “Highest Velocity” stories on social media on Tuesday morning of this week, according to Newswhip’s (incomplete) survey: ABC13 (Texas); Comicbook.com; Discovery (as in the channel); Today (as in the show); HLN (channel); the official site of the San Francisco Giants; The Weather Channel; BearingArms.com; the NFL; NASA; National Geographic; CainTV (Herman Cain’s viral site, appears multiple times); TMZ; HollywoodLife; RightWingNews; NBC News; AddictingInfo; the NBA; Qpolitical; Bam Margera’s general interest viral news site; KiroTV (local news in Seattle); ESPN; WorldViralz; HipHopDX; MarcoRubio.com; The Score; Mashable (numerous times*) The Federalist Papers; CBS; SimpleOrganicLife.com.

Starting from a position of total ignorance — imagine some sort of alien inexplicably interested in the content industry — these sources, unlike their stories, are mysterious. What are they? Why are they doing the things they’re doing? They seem to be publishing their stories in hopes of gaining traction among particular factions on services they don’t control. They are providers of content in the most literal sense, supplying liquid volume to fill a set of voids created, or left, in other companies’ systems. Some of them have official partnerships with these systems, indicated either by symbolic blue flair or special content formats and advertising arrangements.

Most do not, which leaves their status somewhat unclear. Are they like… professional users? The unlicensed street vendors of social media? Pushy content club promoters? Feed beggars? They certainly speak and behave in an uncanny way, appropriating the language and poses of human users. Other companies, companies that create things besides content for Facebook — hamburgers, guns, financial instruments, whatever — do this too, achieving similar effects. They tend to be less honest about their subjects but more honest — or at least direct — about their brands.

Now descend one layer to your own Facebook or Twitter feed and try a similar exercise. Who are these people in your feed? What are these things? You will be presented with a more familiar set of non-human entities, partially determined by both intentional and arbitrary filtering. Some of these names will be present because of legacy or prior preference; others you may have discovered more organically and recently. It will all feel a little more intuitive from down here, because it’s customized for you. But it’s still fundamentally strange. Your relationship with these publishers is necessarily mediated by the platform, either through some sort of follow relationship or less directly through a friend relationship.

This has always been the case, here! It just didn’t really matter that much when a site’s traffic came directly, or through many channels as a result of its established existence elsewhere. Now, among sites that get a majority or near-majority of their visits from social referrers, or which hope to publish exclusively on platforms, the issue has gone from curious to existential.

Imagine a reader perspective that totally privileges the feeds — that has known nothing else, and is only interested in what’s happening now and what comes next. The Content Teen of myth. Then reconsider the familiar names in your feeds as mysterious metadata, without assigning to them whatever legacies they might have. And ask again: What are they? Why do they exist? What are they doing, and why are their hosts allowing them to do it?

Every era of media is broken in its own way, so it’s worth thinking about how a platform-centric media might be at least workable. What room is left in the feeds, next to the friends and the brands and the ads? This is a fun thought experiment, depending on where you think you stand. Publications that depend on access will have very little leverage over their subjects; they will soon share not just a platform but a fluid audience with the companies or people they cover. Anything too closely adjacent to brands will get caught in their terrible gravity (which, honestly, is probably for the best). Oppositional journalism seems conceptually safe but also not very shareable (maybe purely performative praise, in a stunning turnaround, begins to seem… pathetic?? Hm). Explainers: the one true social format? Maybe this will be great for breaking news, or, somehow, for local news. Or maybe not at all! Maybe platform ideologies will narrow. Maybe they will work to preserve power or to work to check it. Maybe Apple will make some small change to how its home screens work and undercut every single app-based platform overnight. Maybe the entire internet will just be about how great and merciful the machines are. (Human content creators have a special brand authenticity that machines crave.)

These questions don’t just pertain to newer publications built around social sharing, which, often stunned by sudden investment and growth, default to internally and externally defining themselves in terms of the demographics they can offer advertisers. Older publications, even those with strong institutional identities, are rendered flat in the feed — the most venerable publication is reduced, in a casual reader’s endless cascade, to a slightly more trustworthy username among countless others. Each unit of content is a pitch not just for the story or media it contains, but for whatever brand posted it. (Again: in a world in which institutional identity is more durable, through a subscriber base, a destination site, or demonstrated ownership of a beat — this is obvious but not terribly urgent. On platform internet, it is not.)

In most cases, then, a publisher reliant on platforms — reluctantly or enthusiastically — is required to give up a substantial part of its identity. It borrows its audience. It takes editorial cues from the company from which the audience is borrowed. It rents space not just with promises of unusually high-quality content, but, in some cases, with the splitting of revenue. This is a situation in which success is aligned with sublimation. A truly successful platform publication is not a publication at all. It’s… an agency? (Maybe a truly successful platform publication is just a platform acquisition.)

What’s been easy to miss over the last few years, as traffic to publishers and platforms has exploded in parallel, is how total this loss of identity has been. Sites that want to scale quickly tend to do so through general-interest social arbitrage, resulting in an absurd sameness:

The mix changes; Grantland is some more sports and a little less news and whatever intern is currently writing the “Bill Simmons” column. Slate is a little less sports and a little more politics and Troy Patterson endlessly writing the word “gentleman” into his Mead notebook in cursive while admiring his new glasses in the mirror. New York is a little of everything with some soothing noises to remind New Yorkers that they are very very important. The revamped New York Times Magazine is a lot of the same edited by people who think you can get more sexy Millenials to your website by adjusting the kerning on your font. The Atlantic is a lot of the same plus Ta-Nehisi Coates plus Coates’s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins. Business Insider is a lot of the same only written for the illiterate. The New New Republic is the same stuff written by every non-white male Gabriel Snyder could find to exorcise the vengeful presence of Marty Peretz’s farting ghost, and thank god for that, plus Jeet Heer with an essay made up of 800 numbered tweets. Buzzfeed is a lot of the same only if life was a Law & Order episode about the Internet from 1998. Salon is the same stuff but every single piece is headlined “Ten Things You Won’t Believe Rethuglicans Said on Fox News” regardless of content. Vox is a lot of the same stuff plus a new-fangled invention called the “card stack,” an innovative approach which allows webpages to “link” to other pages. The Awl is a lot of the same stuff brought to you by the emotion sadness. Gawker is a lot of the same stuff, cleverly hidden across 1,200 sub-blogs along with several thousand words of instructions for how to read the site that are somehow still an inadequate guide. Vice is a lot of the same stuff written by that guy you knew in high school who told you he did cocaine but seemed to only ever have that fake marijuana called Wizard Smoke you could buy at a gas station. Five Thirty Eight, I’m told, exists, although whenever I try to open it my browser seems to show me a strange lacuna into which the idea of a website was, once, meant to congeal. But one way or another, you could take 90% of what each of these sites publish and stick it on any other, and nobody would ever know the difference.

That “you could take 90% of what each of these sites publish and stick it on any other, and nobody would ever know the difference” rings true in an additional way: it’s not clear, when it comes to some core types of stories that perform best on social media, that readers care much which publishers stock their feeds.

This would present a problem! If handing over distribution and reader relationships to a platform doesn’t result in consistent distribution or any sort of useful loyalty, then what’s left? Within a site like Facebook, not very much; in the absence of Facebook, god forbid, virtually nothing: a group of employees working under a brand, aimlessly producing content for a container that’s either full or closed. The movement from sites to social platforms threw off so much waste traffic in the beginning, and felt so charitable and affirming, that I’m not sure most participants realize how wide the gap between a coherent, functioning website-centric organization and platform publisher actually is — and how clean the breaks will be.

As the content industry consolidates in weird and unsettling ways over the next few months, understand the stakes: venture-funded publications, aware of how quickly their borrowed social audiences appeared and therefore understanding how quickly they could go somewhere else, will rightly crave security in the form of an exit. The best might go public, and find new ways to justify their independent existence, creating something like full-service content agencies, producing news and entertainment and ads as their ever-shifting context permits. Others will simply attempt to pitch their value to Facebook (or whatever) as something valuable to companies other than Facebook (or whatever). Those purely dependent publications that fail–maybe those middling, boldly cynical latecomer social mills about nothing?? — will take stock of their remaining parts, and realize that they assemble into nothing. They will only be able to lurch forward until the money runs out.

There is something to the idea, casually expressed by some members of the tech industry, that this would represent a cleansing cycle — a period of, sure, creative destruction, leading to a situation in which news and entertainment reach people in ways better suited to they way they live now. This would be a little easier to swallow if it didn’t coincide with a period of dramatic internet centralization. But corporate consolidation, an optimist might say, will create new opportunities for outsiders — it will set the stage for the types of stories the internet produces all the time, of disruption and healthy change and… narrow enrichment? Fresh short monopoly? Interesting Case Studies in Extremely Fast Capitalism?

All of this is to say, for better or for worse, I think the next year is going see a fairly large shaking-out: an elimination of redundancy by platforms that incidentally encouraged it; a choosing of partners and therefore winners and losers; a fundamental change in the terms that publishers thought they had with the platforms they’ve come to depend on, even though the platforms never actually promised anything. Some of the most successful websites may prove to be the most vulnerable. The speed and nimbleness with which they were able to appear, grow and surpass their print-centric predecessors’ publishing businesses on the internet was dazzling; so too will be the speed with which they can disappear.

*NewsWhip displays a sort of sharing trajectory for each link, which usually shows a gradually and accelerating rise. Mashable’s shoot straight up. Their stories, which display similar widgets next to their headlines, seem to be instantly tweeted many, many times upon publication.

Gifs from this video, courtesy of MIT.

The loudest and clearest message delivered to prospective parents is that “your whole life is going to change.” It comes from family, friends with kids, parenting books, and websites. Fair enough. But after a couple of months of actual parenting, you realize that, in some ways, your whole life didn’t change so much: You’re still the same person. You still have the same interests and goals in life, even if you have less time to squeeze accomplishing those things in every day. I’m still me. Wonderful, sometimes miserable old Laura. I certainly didn’t change my name.

Our culture has an extreme love-hate relationship with parents and their children. We deify the cult of motherhood, proclaiming that there’s nothing more inspiring than the sight of a mother with a baby in her arms. What a beautiful thing! And yet, as a society, we don’t do much to actually support it: Paid leaves are non-existent in many workplaces; childcare is expensive; and the world around us generally seems to be designed to cater to the childless, with its lack of quiet spaces to breastfeed or pump, changing tables in restrooms (especially if you’re a man looking to change a baby’s diaper), high chairs in restaurants, or ramps into subways. We talk a big game about parenting, but sometimes, talk is all there is.

The first time I remember being referred to as “mama” was months before my daughter could even attempt the word. My husband and I had brought Zelda to a cardiologist’s office to check for a suspected heart murmur. Though our pediatrician assured us such a thing was very common and nothing to worry about, we were stressed out. And Zelda, nude but for a diaper on an exam table, didn’t seem to like it either. The nurse who was there to help us attach the little sticky things with the wires to her body leaned over her. She seemed frustrated that Zelda didn’t want to comply with her request not to move while she attempted to take her blood pressure, as if this were the first time she had worked with infant. In the midst of the ordeal, I was annoyed by this: “Mama, if you can try to hold her body, I will get her arm.” Mama.

Here’s what my mind walked through in a matter of seconds, in the middle of a cluttered and cold examination room: “She doesn’t know my name, this is a matter of convenience. This is her job. She probably sees fifty parent-child combos a day; ‘mama’ is the path of least resistance. The appellation is accurate: I am this baby’s mother. It sounds gross, really gross, coming out of a stranger’s mouth, as if she had said, ‘Oh you need to use the potty? Down the hall to the left’ to me. No one would say that to me, would they? What is “Mama” shorthand for? She didn’t call Josh ‘dada.’ I feel oddly belittled.”

Being a mother isn’t belittling, it’s great. But I still felt the article was misplaced. If I thought about it (and I did, LOL), I realized that in that moment, it wasn’t “mama” that I wanted the nurse to appeal to. I didn’t need to recognize the emotional attachment to my baby there, on the gurney. I wanted an adult to professionally address me — by my name or no name — and help me understand what I should be doing to help get through this moment for Zelda. (Whose heart was fine.) The nurse meant nothing by calling me “mama.” We left, but I didn’t stop nursing my musings about the title.

Here’s what I came up with: I don’t want to be called “mama” by anyone whom I haven’t birthed. Ever. I’m not “mama,” I’m Laura. I’m a mother, a writer, a woman, a white person, a person. The fact that I’m a mother is more important than all or most of these things in plenty of situations, but never does this fact of being a mother subsume me. Zelda and I exist, distinctly and independently, without our association or relation to one another.

In the months since someone who wasn’t my child first called me “mama,” I’ve noticed it comes up most often in email threads on the parenting Yahoo! Group I am a part of. “Hey mamas, any advice on diapering?” “Any other mamas out and about today who want to meet up at the park?” Mama. This is a generalized call and I don’t take personal offense. We’ve claimed the word as a positive, because it is. But there aren’t just “mamas” on the list. I see plenty of dadas emailing inane questions to a group of three thousand on a regular basis. Amazon Mom doesn’t discriminate: It ships just as much garbage to dads at a discounted rate as it does to “Moms.” The baby shop in my old neighborhood, Caribou Baby, recently changed its name: Wild Was Mama. Hey Mama: that’s a bad name! Some babies don’t have a mama. And isn’t dada wild, too?

Yet, everywhere: mama mama mama. Poor dad, left only with articles about his bod, which, as we all know is very hot despite having put on a few pounds DESPITE not giving birth. I’m in a heterosexual marriage. Zelda has two parents: a mother and a father. Let’s try to recognize, if we all agree that, at least in theory, parenting should be a more equal responsibility between mother and father (or whatever), that what we call things does matter. It infects how we think of things and people and families. Calling me “Mama” more easily than you would call Zelda’s father “Daddy” implies something about the relationship that I have with my family. It implies that I’m more of a parent than my husband (not true) and that I’m more of a mother these days than I am anything else (also untrue, most of the time.) It also, I think, makes it easier for us continue to hold that insane dichotomous view of parenting: “Nothing better than mothers!” but “You had a kid AND also need to make money? Fuck you, your problem.” YOU’RE THE MOTHER. Sure, I’m the mother, but I’m a lot of other things too.

“Mama” is reserved for babies. Call me Laura. Or at least, “Zelda’s mother.” I can deal with that.

Photo by Eric Ward

In 2009, a venture capital firm now called Comcast Ventures led a seven-million-dollar series B funding round in a blog network called SportsBlogs, Inc.; it invested in SportBlogs again in 2010 during a 10.5-million-dollar series B round. A couple of years later, in 2012, SportsBlogs launched a new technology site called The Verge and became Vox Media. Comcast Ventures invested in the company again, this time during a thirty-four-million-dollar series D round; it and Accel Partners were the only two investors in the round. According to CrunchBase, to date, Vox Media has received nearly a hundred and eight million dollars in venture capital from six investors.

Comcast Ventures is the “venture capital affiliate” of Comcast.

When Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched Recode in 2014, NBCUniversal News Group made a “strategic investment and content partnership” in Revere Digital, the parent company of Recode and its Code conferences. Its content was distributed “across NBCUniversal News Group’s multiple media platforms,” while CNBC became “Revere’s media partner for its global conferences.”

NBCUniversal News Group, which includes NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC, is a division of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast.

Yesterday, Vox Media, which has received millions of dollars from Comcast Ventures, announced that it would acquire Revere Digital, which had received an undisclosed number of dollars from NBCUniversal News Group, in all-stock deal.

Comcast Ventures is made up of the combined entities of Comcast Interactive Capital, which was the venture capital affiliate of the company, and the Peacock Equity Fund, formerly the venture capital affiliate of NBCUniversal and General Electric; it and the NBCUniversal News Group are owned by Comcast.

Last month, Fortune reported that Vox Media held acquisition talks with Comcast; it fell apart. Comcast Ventures, one of Vox’s several institutionally powerful investors, would still like to sell Vox Media to Comcast imminently. (We have heard.) There sure are a lot of Comcast people roaming around the Code Conference currently happening in California, where Vox CEO Jim Bankoff formally announced its acquisition of Reverge Digital. (We have also heard.)

Comcast is Comcast.

★★★★ The early clouds made the daylight slow-rising too, putting the whole morning on holiday time. There was shade enough by the inner fence of the playground to roll ground balls with a child-safe baseball. Then a booming roar came down and filled the paved yard, as a military jet blasted up at an angle into the smoky blue. After it passed, the softer roar of ordinary, flatter-flying jets kept pulling the eye up, the usual background noise claiming the foreground. The three-year-old and a friend climbed over the low iron enclosure and got down in the mulch. The swings were hot but not too hot, nor would they likely afford such open-ended swinging for months, once the crowds came back. The direct sun was baking by afternoon, but then in the span of a short dip in the kiddie pool — by the time the adjustable kiddie pool floor rose from four feet through three feet and all the way to zero, beaching the stragglers, for adult swim — the sun’s hold broke and mild shade controlled the streets.