“Anyone that has ever owned a cat knows full well Hitler would have won had he only recognised that cats are the superior race.”

Here is a line of thought that will be paralyzing for anyone who puts text into boxes for fun or profit! Imagine someone watching you type:

In November, Somers, a developer for Genius, released an app called Draftback.1 It’s a fascinating experiment that treats writing like data. After years of trying to build a program, Somers realized that Google Docs was already saving every keystroke we enter. So he hacked Google Docs to play documents back to their authors, materializing on the screen with every stutter-step inherent to the writing process. In its latest form, Draftback is a Google Chrome extension that can reach deep into the archives of any Google Doc you have editing rights to, make sense of all that writing and rewriting you innocuously poured into it, and beam it right back to you, backspaces and all. It doesn’t matter if your document was created before or after you installed Draftback — the keystrokes have been buried the whole time. Draftback can unearth any fossil.

Draftback as it exists now is about reconstruction. It gives you insight into your own “process,” if you’re comfortable referring to such a thing, but aspires to go further:

Somers wants to use Draftback to peek over somebody’s shoulder — ideally somebody really good. His personal goal is to get A.O. Scott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The New York Times, to write a review or essay in Draftback. “He’s a beautiful prose stylist (diction, cadence, etc.), his writing is accessible and unpretentious but world-class, and he seems to always put his finger on the essence of whatever it is he’s talking about.” Somers is curious about whether all that comes naturally to Scott.

The concept eventually extends to the “ability to annotate decisions” — that is, to provide written justification or context for moments in the editing replay. This starts to sound fairly silly before you even get that far, but if you’re feeling generous you can follow along: Anyone who uses a computer or phone on a regular basis lives somewhere on the spectrum of text voyeurism, right? Messages have read receipts, posts have timestamps. People tweet as they write and write as they tweet, and it all mingles together if not seamlessly at least noticeably. Sure!

What makes this particular process feel wrong — and to some extent, what makes the (separate but related!) project of Genius feel conceptually… off? — is its application to intentional texts. Anything valuable you might learn from rewinding and watching A.O. Scott’s editing process would owe to his ignorance that someone might ever be watching. A knowingly performed writing and editing process would not be very interesting at all — the real evidence of effort and error would just move elsewhere, further out of sight. The editing product would become like the finished product, and so there would be no sense of voyeurism. Writers who intend to write in a particular form would either reject the new one or manipulate it to become more like the one they want. Requiring A.O. Scott to write about film with the knowledge that his process would be completely transparent would really be requiring him to write about writing, which is fine but undermines the whole project, right? It’s no longer peeking and stealing, it’s listening and taking notes.

The magic middle ground — the one we’re all familiar with through slightly less intentional texts — is the suggestion of voyeurism. That little iMessage animation suggests a glimpse behind the curtain — and sort of offers one, as you watch your texting partner type and then stop typing and then start again — but never lets you all the way in. It might animate then disappear forever, which could mean many different things. It might animate for a while, then pause, and animate briefly before making way for a terse “sure.” This is both performed and received as a performance, and alters the way in which people text. But it doesn’t destroy the medium or paralyze its participants. The process of creation is public but obscured. The text feels alive and urgent! Etc. An app to replay writing in not-quite real time, but instead in chunks, might be interesting.

ANYWAY, a loose prediction: This blind gap is the area from which a big part of the next internet will sprout, grow, then overgrow. Pulling down to refresh to get more and more and more is getting tiring — it feels increasingly like a passive process made unnecessarily active. The nonspecific “someone is typing” throbber, or something conceptually similar, could be the internet’s version of the chyron that never stops rolling in from the side of the screen, the 24-hour anchors that are always about to say another word. Imagine a breaking news app with a suggestive little animation at the top assuring you that something new is coming right away. Imagine Twitter with something similar! “SO AND SO IS TYPING A TWEET,” etc.

This is, I think, our next interface with the horrible endless feeds. It will be terrible! But we won’t be able to help ourselves.

Want to make everything okay for a few minutes? Press play on this track and close your eyes. Close ’em hard. Keep ’em closed. Imagine, for a second, that you are somewhere warm. Warm enough that you have put the top down on your convertible. (I probably should have told you you had a convertible to start with.) Anyway, the weather’s nice, the top is down, this song is bouncing around in the background and you are driving along with friends on a day where you don’t have a lot to do and you’re not in any rush to get there and it doesn’t matter either way because the sun is never going to stop shining. Sounds good, right? Well just don’t open your eyes again ever and you won’t have to be reminded of just how terrible it all actually is right now. Anyway, enjoy.

Fare Collected

“Ah, the strange erotic power of the New York taxi.”

★ The early morning sunlight and the memory of the past day’s thaw raised brief and false hopes. The day-old slush was still in the side street, but the the dampness only made the cold colder. The chill hurt the nose inside and out. A woman passed wearing a furry coat so ratty one had to hope no real animals had died for it. In midafternoon little flakes came down, followed soon by bigger and more numerous ones, pulses of snow crossing against the pinholes of the sunshades. By twilight little ice pellets were falling, bouncing with dry clicks off the parka or dropping straight down into the pockets. Someone in the warm-lit interior of a store looked out and made eye contact, with a smile of pity or sympathy. People tottered along on the ice crust. One winced; one laughed. Uptown ice was becoming something wetter, and a mist was forming on the air. Little lumps of slush broke free from high up on the bright glass of the Apple Store and plopped to the sidewalk.

by Brendan O’Connor

On Tuesday afternoon, the art collective Talibam! organized a public assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The purpose of the assembly was, through collective effort and will, to levitate Vice Media up from its current location at 90 North 11th Street and to deposit it into the nearby East River.

One figures — conservatively — that the building that currently houses VICE Media weighs somewhere around two hundred and eighty-five tons.* For reference, a T-65 X-wing starfighter, such as the one piloted by Luke Skywalker and levitated by the Jedi Master Yoda, is thought to weigh five tons. Yoda generated 19.2 kW of energy lifting that vehicle out of a swamp on the planet Dagobah in 3.6 seconds; to lift VICE Media would require some ninety-one thousand kW, or over forty-seven hundred Yodas.

To levitate the building into the East River, Talibam!’s Matt Mottel invoked the incantation written and delivered by sixties avant-garde rock group The Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders when a bunch of hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967:

In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnamable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Rah, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit to raise VICE from its destiny and preserve it.

Then, the noise began: a man with a black and silver electric guitar let his instrument feed-back into its small amplifier; two small children hit drums; another man blew into a recorder. The attempt was unsuccessful. So was a second. A chant of “Out, demons, out,” sprang up. “Let’s try slower this time,” Mottel suggested before a third attempt. It was also unsuccessful. Snow fell. “Well,” Mottel said. “We tried.” People laughed.

but guys, if you levitate Vice into the East River, we’ll just ruin it in 10 years for everyone else anyways

— Ross Neumann (@rossneumann) March 3, 2015

For a final blessing, after promising to return, Mottel led everyone in recitation of a speech from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

VICE Media, of course, is moving from one renovated industrial building in Williamsburg to another — from its long-time home on North 11th Street, across the street from Brooklyn Brewery and down the block from the Wythe Hotel, to South 2nd Street. VICE has been in Williamsburg since 2001 and in its current space — which has expanded over time, subsuming other properties around it, like former-neighbor Beacon’s Closet — since 2004, a year before the massive, hundred-and-seventy-five-block rezoning plan that made Williamsburg what it is today (anodyne and expensive!) went into effect. The company says that about two-thirds of its employees live in the neighborhood, and it will receive a $6.5 million tax break from the state if it meets its hiring goals — to add five hundred and twenty-five employees to the four hundred who already work in the Williamsburg office. VICE will leave behind a roof across which the words “Signs of the times” have been scrawled in capital letters.

Asked what he hoped to achieve — short of levitating VICE Media into the river — Mottel said, “It’s about accountability to the community.” VICE’s move has had the collateral effect of edging out D.I.Y. performance spaces like Glasslands and 285 Kent. “They are responsible to New York City residents — especially the Williamsburg artistic communities that have already begun to be displaced, but also the creative people who increasingly can’t afford to live anywhere in New York.” Mottel further noted that VICE has a responsibility to the (rapidly shrinking) Latino communities of Williamsburg’s South side. VICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Vice levitation https://t.co/A9Cvs7PKsy

— Sarah N. Emerson (@SarahNEmerson) March 3, 2015

Attendees at Tuesday’s levitation included an older couple — Yuko Otomo, an artist, and Steve Dalachinsky, a poet — who claimed to have been friends with Sonic Youth during their Lower East Side days. “Well, Thurston. Kim was always very difficult to get along with,” Dalachinsky said. “I was gonna read this anti-bourgeois poem,” he told me, “but I didn’t want to be the last guy to go.” During the demonstration, he and Otomo reveled in the limited clamor. “I’m a guy who grew up but never grew old,” Dalachinsky said.

VICE employees peered over the building’s window sills to take photos with their phones, sheepish grins on their faces. One or two came down the steps to stand in the glass vestibule and watch from behind locked doors. Later, after everyone outside went home, a VICE employee taking a coffee meeting at Konditori, next to the Bedford Avenue subway stop, was very glad to not have to pass through the assembly to get back to her office.

“It’s garbage,” Otomo said, sweeping her arm from copies of VICE magazine strewn across the ground to the building where they were produced, which she had just a few minutes before attempted to levitate. “And then it becomes garbage.”

* Physics calculations contributed by Awl pal and Columbia physics graduate Casey Johnston.

“Employees who receive work-related emails and texts after hours become angry more often than not, which can interfere with their personal lives,” finds a survey from the College of Business at the University of Texas at Arlington.“People who were part of the study reported they became angry when they received a work email or text after they had gone home and that communication was negatively worded or required a lot of the person’s time. Also, the people who tried to separate work from their personal life experienced more work-life interference. The after-hours emails really affected those workers’ personal lives,” notes the study’s author. A follow-up to the survey is expected to determine whether those who actually welcome off-hours emails and texts from work are either desperate to distract themselves from the horror of their own personal lives or so profoundly afraid of their own cosmic insignificance that they need to convince themselves that the work in which they find themselves employed in has some actual value and that they are a vital component to it.

The news
Just came in
From the County of Keck
That a very small bug
By the name of Van Vleck
Is yawning so wide
You can look down his neck.

This may not seem
Very important, I know.
But it IS. So I’m bothering
Telling you so.

I never noticed, until Zelda was born, my very odd need for repetition and order. Only now, where chaos is born and reborn in the space of a child’s room each day anew do I see it: I do the same things over and over. I write in my journal each day, no matter how mundane the activities I log. I note the temperature and the time. I sometimes count in my head while doing other things for no reason other than I feel like it. I silently stand at the kitchen drawer sorting the silverware after opening the drawer just to get a spoon. It feels satisfying in a way I can’t make sense of. It’s not that I’m overly neat or fastidious; don’t open my clothing drawers, because they are worse than a teen’s.

And so, because I am insane, I take the “make your baby’s bedtime routine the same every single night” thing to heart. Like, seriously: I do the exact same thing down to almost the minute, night in, night out, in the hopes that my daughter, like her mother, will one day grow up to list “sleeping” in her top five life activities. I read Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book to Zelda every single night.

Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book is one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six words long and has fifty-six pages. It used to take me approximately twelve minutes to read, but now I can mow through it in about eight. By my count, (I counted), I have read the book to her two hundred and ninety-eight times (once I subtract the first horror-ridden weeks where bedtime didn’t exist and the very few nights when someone else has put her to bed). I know the book inside out and backwards. By August — when Zelda was six months old — I was already bragging to friends that I had it memorized (cool brag). My memory was tested a month or two later when I turned down the lights as Zelda finished off her milk, laid her down in her crib, cranked up the white noise, and began, as always, while still cleaning up: “The news just came in from the County of Keck,” I said, reaching for the book which wasn’t there. “Shit,” I realized, “I took it downstairs to tape one of its pages back together earlier today. I can’t leave the room; I’m going to have to wing it.”

I did. I could. I didn’t fuck up, not once. I remembered Van Vleck and the Biffer-Baum birds, the Herk-Heimer Sisters and the old drawbridge draw-er. I remembered the stilt-walker walkers, the Hinkle-Horn Honkers, the Collapsible Frink and Jo and Mo Redd-Zoff. I didn’t forget the Hoop-Soup-Snoop Group or the Curious Crandalls or the Chippendale Mupp or Mr. & Mrs. J. Carmichael Krox. Of course the sleepers at the Zwieback Motel were recalled, as were Snorter McPhail and his Snore-a-Snort band, plus the two Foona-Lagoona Baboona and of course, my favorite, Jedd. The Offt I remembered and the fucking Moose and the goddamned Goose too. Who could forget the Bumble-Tub Club? Or the five foot-weary salesmen taking a load off from a long day of trying to peddle Zizzer-Zoof seeds? And the worm and the fish and the whale and “good night.”

The Sleep Book, and parenting in general, has given me a wide range of ways to explore and recognize my more insane, compulsive desires. I test myself every evening: I count in my head the number of pages left as I “read.” These days, sometimes I literally phone it in: Zelda half asleep, barely listening, passing out in the crib, me writing sick burns on Twitter, my iPhone hidden in the book whose pages I don’t bother turning anymore. I snap photos of her curled into a ball and drop them into GroupMe or Slack. I email editors. I browse baby clothes on the Gap.com. All while reciting this poem, all two hundred and forty-seven lines of it. And I do this, not because I’m fully bored (though man I am bored some evenings), but because I like the challenge of multitasking. I like to see what all I can do while not fucking up my beautiful recitation of The Sleep Book.

Another way my compulsions reveal themselves is in Zelda’s toy collection. One afternoon a few months ago, my friend Lisa and I had hauled our daughters in the cold to Play, a sort of indoor playground for babies and toddlers in Greenpoint. It’s just a large open space with padded floors and a ton of toys in bins. Sitting there on the floor in the chaos as our babies did baby stuff, I watched the girl working there periodically and methodically putting away the toys. She wasn’t just chucking them into the bins however: she was slowly and gently organizing them: the play food into one bin, the toy cups and plates in the next. The bristle blocks together, the sorting blocks together. She did it almost as a reflex, a soothing and gentle ritual, it seemed to me. It seemed that way to me because I recognized it, and I longed to join her.

I remarked to my friend that I too, did this at the end of every night. Not because I wanted the things out of sight exactly, but because I felt a keen sense of fulfillment from seeing like with like. For instance, Zelda has a little bucket shape sorter: there are two square blocks, two star blocks, two circles, and so on. For months now, at the end of each day, I count them out as she lays in bed to make sure all ten are there in the bucket where they belong. I put all of the musical instruments together in a bin. I sort the books by type or size and shape and sometimes, as I said, alphabetically. Even when I am just dead tired, I go through some form of this ritual. I just hadn’t thought about it until I saw someone else — who was being paid to do it — doing it.

And the book, that’s it. It’s a ritual. I can’t NOT finish the book. Even if Zelda is totally zonked out, I almost always see it through to the end. I feel something tickling inside me: I want the book to be over — dear God why did I choose a bedtime story that is so fucking long — but I can’t not finish I MUST FINISH, I must get to the worm on the fish hook. Zelda doesn’t give a shit but I’ll be damned if I walk out that door before every light between “here and Far Foodle is out.”

Being this way has helped me in this past year, because babies are nothing if not creatures of some habit. They seem to flourish on the repetition and the mimicry. Just now, Zelda wiped her hands together as if washing them as I stood at the sink, washing my own grimy mitts. And nothing, I mean nothing makes me happier than to see her newest skill, repeated and repeated: Picking up her shape sorting blocks and returning them to their bucket, one by one. When she immediately dumps them out again, I feel safe in the knowledge that she knows where they go now.

Sometimes I randomly blurt out, in the middle of the day, just to see what happens: “The news just came in from the County of Keck.” Invariably, Zelda looks at me, smiling but bewildered, as if to say, “not now: it isn’t the right time.” She is already learning that there is a time, and a place, for everything. If she is still awake, at night, when I get to the end of The Sleep Book, she always smiles and lays her cheek onto the mattress, as if giving up on the day finally, when I get to the same point:

Ninety-nine zillion,
Nine trillion and two
Creatures are sleeping!
So…
How about you?

When you put out your light,
Then the number will be
Ninety-nine zillion
Nine trillion and three.

Good night.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

Yes, that Sam Prekop. He’s doing this now. Anyway, further proof if any were needed that words are unnecessary. Enjoy.

“An Op-Ed article on Feb. 21 about national dietary guidelines incorrectly described the change in cheese consumption in the United States. Americans have been eating more cheese, not less.”