Rand Paul on CNBC: “I have heard of many tragic cases of…normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) February 2, 2015

Hospitals are terrifying in a way that I’ve only just been able to put my finger on: They are temples to science and rationality that operate according to no known logic. The institutional and individual incentives that keep things from swirling into total disarray — that keep things moving forward as people fall into and recover from their various crises — are either inscrutable or arbitrary. Hospitals are a little like the human body: they are places where the schedule rules everything until it’s an emergency and the schedule is irrelevant. Receiving care means being constantly vigilant against error, and making sure that the nurses or doctors know who you are, what has already been done to you, which leg’s getting the operation, what actually hurts and what doesn’t. But it also means having some degree of faith in the staff’s expertise and the validity of the materials from which they have trained, which are ultimately what stand between you and death.

All of this is to say that the medical establishment is attractive, as a prop or a villain, to people of a certain disposition: those who are skeptical of everything in the world but their own intuitions; people who take complexity and uncertainty to mean that surely, I know better. Honest doubt doesn’t drive anti-vaccination activists, nor does a resentment of “privileged elites.” Absolute, wide-eyed self-confidence does. This helps explain the odd bedfellows problem: the Rand Paul home-schoolers and Jenny McCarthy green-juicers of the world can cast the medical establishment, which is actually visibly sort of broken, as either a bureaucratic or corporate evil, and vaccines as a plot to either poison or exert power over the nation’s children.

“You’re not crazy” is something political candidates telegraph to people they think are crazy in order to win primaries. But vaccines are special in that they inspire a bipartisan disingenuousness, which means that they won’t necessarily disappear as an issue in the general election. Your opponent’s crazy people, the ones you considered unreachable lost causes from the start, and which your opponent would normally take for granted as supporters, will have a way to make their pet issue come back.

Vaccines will be a factor in both party’s primaries. Vaccines will be a subject in the 2016 presidential debates! This year, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will sit in rooms and listen to advisors carefully consider the optics of inoculation, and we will later score their success.

★★ Between the deep freeze just gone and the storm due to come, the day assumed the guise of uneventfulness. It was warm enough for people to amble stupidly three abreast or to stand vacantly in a still-snow-pinched curb cut because the signal was still the orange hand in one of the two available directions. The parka had been a bit more coat than was necessary, heading out, but on the way home from the pool, the wind went through the carelessly unzipped front and the t-shirt beneath, working its way between the buttons of the shirt under that. Pale faults stretched across the cloud cover. Well before 4, a rosy glow filled the sky away off behind the distinct but distant Newark Airport tower. By sundown proper, that part of the sky was colorless.

Feature Films, “2 Kool”

A comparatively upbeat track from an otherwise spaced-out — slack? dead-like? — album that occasionally wanders into Low territory; the best track, I think, is “Crickets,” which I can’t embed but streams here.

by Carter Maness

A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the websites had disappeared. Five years of work apparently evaporated from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?

Despite the pervasive assumption that everything online lasts forever, the internet is inherently unstable. Jill Lepore’s recent New Yorker story on archive.org’s Wayback Machine notes the average lifespan of a website is “about a hundred days.” Sites vanish with no explanation, or get overwritten without any traceable history. Media outlets, even those with salaried employees and editorial budgets can and do suffer the same fate.

When a website dies, it’s usually the editorial that goes first: writers, both freelance and staff, then editors. Marketing and ad sales go next. Unlike print, where archive editions get filed away or become recycling, a website can be scrubbed out of existence because a company pulls it down or simply stops paying for hosting or domain rights. Modern Farmer went from National Magazine Award to pasture in a year. (Despite some assurances it will still be around, check back in six months.) Hipster Runoff owner Carles, rather than pull his dormant site down, just sold it to an Australian investor for over twenty thousand dollars. Remember The Daily? The internet doesn’t.

Most of the media outlets I’ve written for have folded and then were flat-out deleted. In 2009, I had started blogging for AOL Music’s Spinner and The BoomBox, averaging three posts per day about indie rock and hip-hop. By 2010, I was writing approximately two print features and twenty blogposts per month on local music acts for New York Press. After that, in 2011, I joined the boutique MP3 blog RCRD LBL as the site’s lead editor/writer, publishing five posts per day. None of these outlets exist in 2014 beyond stray citations, rotten links and Facebook apparitions.

Freelance writing for AOL Music in 2009 felt like a con. For two hundred words of music blogging, I earned fifty dollars per post. It was my only job, even though I was self-employed. I pitched my posts at Spinner, AOL Music’s rock and indie vertical, and The BoomBox; interviewed Ghostface a few times; and earned a relatively decent living without ever going to the office. In February 2011, AOL purchased The Huffington Post, which already had its own successful music section. Budgets were slashed and, in April, almost every permalancer writing for AOL Music, including myself, was laid off and replaced by in-house editors who were tasked with publishing five to ten stories per day. The salaried model, despite hitting twenty-five million monthly visitors in 2012 and apparently costing less than paying dozens of freelancers on a per-post basis, did not generate enough ad revenue, and a 2013 hiring freeze foreshadowed the ultimate closure of all AOL Music properties on April 26, 2013. Spinner was its most-read music blog. But after shuttering AOL Music, the site, which averaged six million monthly visitors, was deleted entirely in August 2013. Spinner.com now redirects you to an AOL Radio homepage that won’t even load in my browser. And its Twitter account had been silent for so long enough that, in 2014, it was reset and claimed by a Japanese person named Sora, who has six followers.

When I talked to Dan Reilly, former editor of Spinner, about the disappearance, he told me, “I assume that Spinner’s archives exist somewhere, but they’re definitely not readily accessible online anymore. AOL never gave us any explanation, but it seems obvious that they wanted to wash away any trace of AOL Music and promote AOL Radio instead. I’m not sure what the pros and cons are, but it’s definitely a shame that all that content is lost, even just for reference purposes. There have been times when I’ve needed to find a quote or information from one of our pieces, but they’re just not there anymore.” AOL continues to “simplify its portfolio of brands.” Tomorrow, it will shut down both TUAW, the well-known Apple site and Joystiq, its pioneering video game blog. For now, the company says it will archive the sites as channels under its Engadget umbrella — one of AOL’s few remaining flagship properties, but arguably its most precarious.

As my AOL income evaporated in early 2011, I focused on freelance work for New York Press, which, in turn, suffered the fate of most alt-weeklies: Shrinking ad revenue lead to a smaller paper with smaller budgets and eventually, total collapse. With no meaningful online footprint, Manhattan Media, its publisher, had started focusing on growing its under-read blogs. I’d been writing sporadic music features for the paper since 2008, but this new online focus earned me and a few freelance writers promotions to associate editors and a weekly paycheck of a hundred dollars. I interviewed local bands and wrote about homophobia in rap. In July 2011, my longtime editor took a better job and they stopped paying me for months. Six weeks later, a new twenty-two-year-old “executive” was hired. She offered me a hundred dollars per month for the same amount of work.

The paper, whose circulation peaked at a hundred thousand in 2006, published its last edition in September 2011 to a circulation just twenty thousand. That’s when I quit. The online archive stayed up until a redesign went live in February 2012. Developers must have forgotten about the blogs, as all of New York Press’s online articles disappeared and large swaths of the paper’s history either got lost or were migrated into the new CMS with broken copy and unreadable line breaks. Somehow, in January 2013, Nypress.com was sold to Straus News. The URL now redirects to Straus’s community newspaper site, which has nothing to do with the storied alt-weekly besides owning its domain name. The music blog, along with over three hundred posts from my nine months on the job, is offline.

In June 2011, as I sensed the New York Press was crashing, RCRD LBL offered me a full-time editor position publishing blog posts that featured MP3 downloads and a few sentences of copy. I was tasked with leading a staff of four freelance writers. RCRD LBL — and MP3 blogs generally — began shriveling that same year as fans transitioned from downloading tracks to streaming them. Why deal with downloading and managing files when you can just click a link to play nearly any song in existence? Why bother wading through wordy recommendations from a dude who secretly just wants to listen to Pavement all day when your real friends constantly share music you actually like on Spotify and Soundcloud? With operating costs around three hundred thousand dollars per year on top of hosting for fifty thousand songs, RCRD LBL’s business model quickly became untenable. In September 2012, freelance budgets were cut, and in October, the entire staff, other than me, was laid off. I reduced the posting schedule to one piece per day, and revenue from the site’s ad network, SpinMedia, flatlined.

On May 14, 2013, I published an interview with Austin, TX haze-rock trio Pure X and an MP3 by French post-punkers Le Femme, knowing those would be the blog’s final posts. They stayed at the top of the site for five months. Even though I felt an obligation to the readers, funding had dried up, so I just stopped. Hardly anyone noticed until October 2013, when the entire six-year archive, including my roughly eleven hundred posts, disappeared from the internet altogether. Facebook and Twitter provide the last evidence of blogs like RCRD LBL. Like profiles of dead friends, fan pages and reader messages sometimes float into my feed as ghostly reminders that my work once existed.

We assume everything we publish online will be preserved. But websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache clears? As I found with that pitch at the end of 2014, my writing resume is now oddly incomplete and unverifiable. Ex-editors can provide references, but I have surprisingly few examples of published work to show beyond scanned print features from my early days, so I’ve started backing up my work.

For media companies deleting their sites, legacy doesn’t matter; the work carries no intrinsic value if there is no business remaining to capitalize on it. I asked if RCRD LBL still existed on a server somewhere. It apparently does; I was invited to purchase it for next to nothing. I could pay for the hosting, flip the switch on, and all my work would return. But I’d never really look at it. Then, eventually, I would stop paying the bills, too.

by Caroline O’Donovan

12. Emerging technology: biometrics
Potentially marginalized technology: keys

11. Emerging technology: driverless car
Potentially marginalized technology: driver’s licenses

10. Emerging technology: artificial uterus
Potentially marginalized technology: motherhood

9. Emerging technology: in vitro meat
Potentially marginalized technology: fishing

8. Emerging technology: genetic engineering
Potentially marginalized technology: tattoo artistry

7. Emerging technology: powered exoskeleton
Potentially marginalized technology: wheelchairs, forklifts

6. Emerging technology: exocortex
Potentially marginalized technology: libraries, pocket calculators

5. Emerging technology: e-learning
Potentially marginalized technology: transport of humans

4. Emerging technology: immersive virtual reality
Potentially marginalized technology: consensus reality

3. Emerging technology: cloak of invisibility
Potentially marginalized technology: camouflage

2. Emerging technology: artificial intelligence
Potentially marginalized technology: human decision

1. Emerging technology: cryonics
Potentially marginalized technology: cemeteries

The flat white coffee drink was $4. A suggested tip was $3.

The cashier at Café Grumpy, a New York City coffeehouse, swiped the credit card, then whirled the screen of her iPad sales device around to face the customer. “Add a tip,” the screen commanded, listing three options: $1, $2 or $3.

In other words: 25 percent, 50 percent or 75 percent of the bill.

There was a “no tip” and a “customize tip” button, too, but neither seemed particularly inviting as the cashier looked on. Under that pressure, the middle choice — $2 — seemed easiest.

American consumers are feeling a bit of tip creep.

This person has never used a computing device before, so is apparently unfamiliar with the day-to-day constrictions that often present themselves in software design, such as in this case, where Square Register clearly requires that stores present three distinct tipping options to the customer, largely because of a warped aspect of American psychology which bizarrely demands “choice” when it comes to compensating underpaid service workers, in part because many older Americans believe that wielding influence over these workers’ livelihoods incentivizes better service (while younger Americans just crave the feeling of raw power, which is otherwise inaccessible to them on a daily basis). Thus, to ensure that these workers, such as baristas, receive something that might approach a living wage, if you squint real hard — because we are not ready to join other civilized nations in abolishing tipping except at the very highest ends of the restaurant industry — shops such as Grumpy (and taxis!) often present the minimum acceptable tip as the cheapest option.

For what it is worth — which is apparently something??? — until our civilization betters itself, the formula by which one should tip in a modern coffee shop is simple: a minimum of one dollar per drink. (This includes iced coffee and tea. And if you order twenty flat whites for your entire office during the pre-work or post-lunch rush — or something that involves a blender — you should probably leave a lot more!) If you cannot abide by this, drink Diet Coke.

My Yoga Nemesis

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, librarian Dolly Moehrle tells us more about the yoga nemesis phenomenon.

@ohheygreat @LisaMcIntire I had to stop going to yoga because I developed a nemesis and it ceased being relaxing

— dolly m (@loather) January 25, 2015

Dolly! So what happened here?

The nemesis was an accident, but in retrospect I have a tendency to think of things in terms of competition, so it might have been inevitable for me to look around a room full of other people practicing yoga, reaching inside themselves for inner calm, and find someone whose presence, poise, and perfection annoyed the living shit out of me, and then take that anger at the perfect person to the limit.

Not to start with my childhood, but to start with my childhood, I am the youngest of five, and all of my older siblings were involved in sports in some way, and I very much was not. When I say my siblings were “involved,” I mean in the athletic scholarship, trophies, and letter jackets type of way. And when I say I was not, I mean in the staying-in-my-room-all-day-reading-books sense.

As age has begun to take its toll on my ability to eat pizza for every meal and continue to fit in the same size pants, I tried to learn how to exercise. I tried gyms and running. I tried a “boot camp,” which was a terrible, terrible idea. I turned to yoga. Yoga can be a great workout and has an added bonus of being treated by many practitioners and teachers as not a workout but rather a relaxing, “spiritual” endeavor. I can do relaxing! I can do spiritual! Spending long amounts of time upside down frightens me far less than a weight machine!

I pictured myself emerging from yoga classes glowing with both an internal radiance and a faint sheen of sweat that said “I work out hard, but I’m still feminine.” This yoga-inspired clean living would, I was certain, lead to a macrobiotic diet and developing a bit of a British affectation to my speech; you know, I figured I’d come out of yoga as Gwyneth Paltrow. However, the place I signed up at does hot yoga (but not Bikram), and after every class I emerged covered in sweat, gasping, head throbbing, hair half wet, half dry and rapidly puffing up from the humidity, wondering with great shame if had snored after falling asleep in shavasana. (No matter how hard I tried to stay awake, I regularly passed out in shavasana. I know I snore, so trying to figure out if I had disturbed everyone else’s total relaxation with my sinus problem was a source of further after-class shame.) It is difficult to be a Gwyneth in hot yoga.

As it turns out, I have no natural talent or ability for yoga, just a dogged determination to see through the things I pay for in advance. I spent the first month or two trying to internalize the regular reminders from teachers that “yoga is practice.” Holy shit did I need to practice, but: Yoga is practice! Every time my thighs threatened to give way after spending what felt like hours in Warrior II, every time I pictured collapsing onto my fifteen-dollar yoga mat from Target, I would try to remind myself of the practice aspect. I would look around at the room full of sweating people contorted into ridiculous poses, trying to figure out who felt as awkward, fat, and inflexible as I did, and remind myself: Yoga is practice! Gradually, I got better at it. As I got better at it, I continued looking around the room at other people a lot, because an hour and fifteen minutes without my phone is boring no matter what I’m doing. And that’s when I started noticing the nemesis.

She’s in that age group where she could be thirty-five or forty-five — hey, maybe she’s even pushing fifty — but her face is dignified and refined and adult looking. All her yoga clothes are lululemon, and she’s not only model-thin, but also strong: Her upper arms are toned to perfection. The nemesis wound up in a lot of my classes, so I did a lot of contemplation of her because, again, spending ten minutes in down dog while your teacher talks about life forces can get dull. The thing about the nemesis is, she seems like a perfectly nice lady — we only spoke, blandly, a few times — and a talented practitioner of yoga, and that is why I slowly began to focus a great deal of negativity towards her. She would emerge from class, daintily dabbing her face with a towel, having done all the binds, all the “if you want to go a bit further . . .” intensity poses offered by the teacher, and would go the whole class without having to drop to the mat and take child’s pose for some god-damn relief — and it drove me crazy.

The nemesis was a Gwyneth.

At what point did you realize that this whole thing had gone too far and messed with your ability to experience a fruitful, positive yoga experience? And do you think you’ll ever go back?

Nicole Callahan was saying a nemesis might be “a good source of inspiration,” and, initially, having a nemesis was amazing for my motivation. Though I knew I could never hope to reach the same level of trim, athletic body type, seeing the nemesis be so damn good at everything activated my hyper-competitive mode and I rose to the challenge. At one point I found myself in an extended side angle pose, following the nemesis’s lead as she brought one arm around her back and the other up from under her bent knee, clasping both hands together firmly in a perfect bind, and then I realized I could also clasp my hands together behind me, like some kind of wizard. I deserved a medal.

At a certain point, though, I started having more responsibility at work and missing classes, and then when I did go I felt like all that forward progress I’d made had evaporated and I was back to being Not Very Good At This, and in every class, there was the nemesis, her toned arms, her perfect form, her lululemon. I struggled to interact with other students before and after class, listening to their calm, mindful tones, their enjoyment of the practice. When they went to their mats, they didn’t look around eagerly at how everyone else was doing, and they truly practiced. When I went to my mat, my thoughts and judgment and self-loathing never left me, and I could feel myself glaring at the nemesis. It’s wrong to be using your yoga practice to be channeling hatred, and that’s what I felt myself doing. As my hatred was consuming me, I had a particular class where I was on the floor in shoulder stand, my legs high in the air, my hands on my lower back holding me steady, and I realized the girl next to me was staring at me. When I slowly lowered down, to plough, to deaf man’s pose, to the floor, I looked over at her again, and she said: “You’re really good at that! I couldn’t do it.” This was the kind of praise I had always longed for, but I felt terrible, and knew I was a fraud. All that time I had been in shoulder stand, I kept glancing over at the nemesis who was in a full headstand, a pose I wasn’t able to do. I figured I needed to get the hell out of yoga before I destroyed the experience for other people.

I do like the practice of yoga. And I liked the studio I went to. I might go back at some point, but maybe I’d be better suited to kickboxing? On the other hand, when you do yoga, especially hot yoga, you start to accumulate a lot of specific towels and things like that, so I might go back just because I have all these yoga tops.

Lesson learned (if any)?

You can’t divorce yoga from its roots as a religious and meditative ritual, and spending your practice directing anger and hatred outwards really is counter-intuitive to the process — even if you’re just there for a workout. I suppose I will maybe try not to do hate people with the fire of a thousand dying suns anymore if I do go back.

Just one more thing.

I don’t even like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Photo by Texas A&M;

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

by Awl Sponsors

Brought to you by The Bold New Camry | Toyota.

Studies indicate that if you grew up with a father who was a positive role model, you’re more likely to become a good father yourself. But what we discovered in Toyota’s new film directed by Lauren Greenfield tells us a much bigger and inspirational story.

‘To Be a Dad’ proves that even if you didn’t grow up with the best father, you can make the choice to become a good father yourself. We talked to some incredible fathers from all walks of life who made that choice. And while some of them had great dads, others had emotionally unavailable dads, absent dads and some had no dads at all. The more we listened, the clearer it became: You can’t choose the father you have; you can only choose the dad you’ll be.

Check out the video below honoring dads everywhere. Honor your dad. Tweet us photos of him using #OneBoldChoice to join our big game celebration.

“Whether supporters of other explanations will be silenced remains to be seen.”

You still have time to pick up one of our fresh, DELISH dips for your #BigGame gathering. pic.twitter.com/AwUaWMcLQg

— Duane Reade (@DuaneReade) February 1, 2015

We tend to think of the Super Bowl as a fiesta of brands choking the social airwaves with Fresh Terrible Content. But if you review the output of the top couple hundred most-followed brands on social media, you start to notice that the majority of them actually go dark for the night. The fashion brands mostly ignore sports; the airlines without sponsorships don’t chime in. Non-football sports, car, apparel and energy drink companies even often counter-program with extreme or winter sports material. These are all companies that have learned that it’s better to be not thought of for five seconds than to face-plant.

The most interesting non-participant last night? Seattle-based Starbucks was silent.

But not every brand desires its dignity. As some weird sex thing happened between Doritos and Victoria’s Secret last night (I don’t know!), a number of brands hatched misshapen strategies and exhibited bad impulse control.

From the *Crickets* Department:

Excited for the #SB49 tonight? Or are you more excited for the commercials? RT and tell us!

— P&G everyday™ (@PGeveryday) February 1, 2015

Heard there’s a good old-fashioned football match going on tonight! Who’s going home winners tonight?? #Patriots or #Seahawks?? #Superbowl

— Hollister Co. (@HollisterCo) February 1, 2015

But they told us we should make Vines! They just didn’t tell us no one would watch them….

The award for Never Giving Up Even When Life Must Be Murder goes to….

With #XperiaZ3v & PS4 #RemotePlay, you can savor your own big game victory anywhere around the home. https://t.co/0qSnr5fsnw #SB49

— Sony (@Sony) February 1, 2015

Poor Sony. Must be literally the worst social media job in the world, just getting screamed at by millions of angry would-be gamers all day, even just while trying to post some weird kind of perverted animated Vines with a tangential Super Bowl relationship.

From the girl not now Department:

Go for gingham, it’s shaping up to be spring’s favorite print. #StyleTip

— Michael Kors (@MichaelKors) February 1, 2015

From the Needlessly Soliciting Brands Department:

WOW ! I still can’t believe the outcome on the Super Bowl. What a shocker. @nfl @pepsi @SuperBowl @Patriots @Seahawks @budlight

— Vanilla Ice (@vanillaice) February 2, 2015

I SAID NOT NOW:

With the exception of Trinidad, Tobago, the Caribbean region depends on imported fossil fuels for elec, transport. http://t.co/Q2KFkBsbsr

— World Bank (@WorldBank) February 2, 2015

Heh. Bless.

Even horrifying enormous mega-monster super-engagement Twitter account The Notebook sent out one lone sports tweet last night. :/

Admit it.. pic.twitter.com/qB8aUR2tZD

— The Notebook (@Notebook) February 2, 2015

And it wasn’t about football, actually, it was just about… sexism, I guess.

Oh, here’s a dispatch from the land of native teen media. It’s not good. Do not have any teens if you can help it.

Where’s our active followers at ?

— The Fangirl Life (@YHFangirls) February 2, 2015

Fav if you have our notifications on

— The Fangirl Life (@YHFangirls) February 2, 2015

Whaaatt a gaameeeee I JUST WATCHED TOM BRADY THE WHOLE TIMEEEE

— The Fangirl Life (@YHFangirls) February 2, 2015

It’s scary, I know. Hey, let’s end with some good news. NASA did something great!

Supernova remnant with jets that extend trillions of miles: http://t.co/BFktjwxM0W #superbowl #supernovasunday #sb49 pic.twitter.com/xzNPbPJDBS

— NASA (@NASA) February 2, 2015

How will the big game end? Echoes of a stellar ending on #SupernovaSunday: http://t.co/lZMeprVG51 #superbowl #sb49 pic.twitter.com/tavNCax6X3

— NASA (@NASA) February 2, 2015