Even the generic pills aren’t cheap anymore:

There was no drug shortage, according to the Food and Drug Administration, that might explain the [price] increase. There was no new patent or new formulation. Digoxin is not hard to make. What had changed most were the financial rewards of selling an ancient, lifesaving drug and company strategies intended to reap the benefits.

A fun and poetic quality of the American healthcare story is how, even as it gets better, it keeps getting worse: Every sideways step around treatable sickness is nonetheless a forward step closer to death.

★★★★ A pigeon puffed up and hunkered down in the top level of the fountain. The heat was baking, but still not crushing or unbearable; it raised a sweat but not a soaking one. A seed puff floated along at a companionable pedestrian rate till it reached the windward edge of a dumpster and sank. Cold streams of air conditioning crossed the sidewalk. On the subway, a bright-eyed young woman told a young man on other side of the doorway that she was heading to the beach, that she was going to see a movie there, that her birthday had just passed. They smiled back and forth and chatted for a few stops, and then they lapsed into the silence of strangers and he put his earbuds in. A man with a bucket partially tore down some posters from a plywood barrier, then started brushing on a poster of his own. The air conditioning drip pattered on the awning of the office entrance. It was still baking hot as the sun lowered, blindingly. A wash of taxi-colored light passed all the way under a cab, lighting the Broadway pavement. Late at night, the orange sky was raked with lightning bolts. Their shapes registered through eyelids, on uncorrected and astigmatic eyes. Rain crunched against the windows.

The Inflatable Thought Leader

by Tim Williams

You’ve probably seen the “business person writing about writing about business,” a recursion that only ends because the plug for an e-book has to go somewhere. People, it turns out, will read anything business-related, even blatant ads. But business news sites have become so flooded with editorial junk written by executives that they’ve started hiring journalists to ghostwrite #content that will stand out.

For a while, Amy Westervelt supplemented her freelance reporting income by ghostwriting content under various executives’ names for Forbes, VentureBeat and Entrepreneur.com, among others, sometimes earning a thousand dollars for just a couple of hours work. But she recently gave it up and called on other ghostwriters to do the same, saying she was “tired of making rich white dudes seem more thoughtful than they are.” So, the other day we talked about business bros, the collapse of freelance journalism for some outlets, and the inflatable thought leader business.

How did you start ghostwriting?

I worked with the launch team of a site called The Faster Times like five or six years ago and it was like a lot of —

I know people who worked there! (Including me, briefly!)

It was a lot of refugees from other traditional media outlets needing a paycheck. At a certain point, the managers were like, “Hey, we got contacted about this, we feel it’s a good way for our writers to make a little bit of extra cash, so we’ll be putting out opportunities as we get them.” One of them was for Nissan, for their corporate blog, not bylined. It paid really well, and it was one of those things where I could almost repurpose a lot of stuff that I have done before, do a couple of posts a week and make my rent.

Over time, the gigs that were coming from that network started becoming lower and lower-paid. I got to the point where I was like, “If I’m going to be doing corporate copywriting, I need to be making more than what I would make by doing shitty blog posts for other places.”

So I kind of tapered off a little bit, but then this second wave hit. A lot of companies where I had interviewed executives for stories, either the sources themselves or their marketing person or PR firm would contact me, asking if I, or anyone I knew, would be interested in some copywriting. It almost always started out just by doing stuff for the company’s own blog.

And then in most cases, it seemed to be this shift where all these websites started taking more free content, so all of these PR and marketing people started saying, “Why should we waste it on our own company blog that probably no one reads, when we could be putting it on like Forbes.com or whatever.”

You mentioned in the Medium post you only have about ten really great ideas a year. How did the contributed content take away from your other work?

So, some lady on LinkedIn went OFF about this and how anyone worth hiring should have ten great ideas before lunch or some such. I have a lot of ideas, many of them perfectly good, but the really great ones I want to sink my teeth into? Probably about ten, maybe twelve. One of them was a piece on privacy and location marketing. It’s now been written about a fair amount, but it hadn’t been last year. While I was figuring out who to pitch it to I wound up mentioning it to a CEO I worked with, who wanted to do a story on it. Totally not his fault, but a real danger of doing this sort of work.

Did your clients seem generally pleased with your work?

Yeah. One of the things that I think kept me doing it for so long was frankly, it’s nice. I think the expectations are fairly low, so everything I would turn in, they’d be like, “This is amazing!” It wasn’t like I was having to do revisions for anything. It was really just like, the time it took to interview the CEO and the time for you to write up a post.

Was there a specific point you can recall where you were like, “Nope, I’m done doing this?”

Well, there were two things that happened. One, I got a request from a PR firm to write for a CEO who had a social app thing. Not to trade in stereotypes, but he seemed like your garden-variety tech bro. They wanted me to write up things that were sort of relevant to his business but that would also make him seem really philosophical and artsy. That was just like, oh, I can’t.

Philosophical and artsy?

Yeah, they wanted stuff on transiency and ephemerality; self expression; creativity and what drives it. And then, in the same week, a director of marketing wanted me to pitch a story I had ghostwritten to a publication that I write for and did not understand why there would be any problem with that.

I’ve had a couple of people — I don’t know, I think they kind of saw it as a two-fer: They had a journalist who was writing stuff for them, a freelancer, so that person would also pitch the story. In the course of trying to explain to the marketing director how that would be strange and probably frowned upon and whatever, she was like, “But I don’t understand. I mean, how else would they get content? Who has the time to write all this stuff?”

“Well, writers. Who used to be paid for this.”

Do you feel like Forbes and other places were aware that this was the result of their wide expansion of contributed content, or were they in the dark and didn’t know what policies should be?

I would say they were aware. I mean, I know Forbes had to have been, because first of all, they were accepting a bunch of free content from the CEO of X company, and then they had a lot of high-profile mishaps with it. The National Resources Defense Council threatened Forbes with a lawsuit [for libel].

Plus, you would get regular emails to all of the Forbes.com contributors that were like, “Since a lot of you aren’t trained journalists, we just want to remind you that it’s not OK to copy and paste from other websites.” So even they knew the standards were dropping.

I do think that it’s improved. In the last year or so, I have heard from people that they’ve gotten better about cracking down on posts that are overly self-promotional and things like that. But even then, there was a guy from Forbes who commented on that Medium post saying, “nearly 40 percent of contributors are or were freelance journalists.” I was like, oh, I can’t believe you would say that in public, that’s even worse than what I thought! So, more than 60 percent are not, which is crazy.

And if sixty percent are not bylined as writers, probably a lot of the posts are being ghostwritten.

Right, right. I mean, I don’t think any CEO has the time, nor should they, to write one post a week. That’s lot of extra time, especially for someone who struggles with writing.

Is there a good example of a transparent way to do this?

I think there’s a lot of people who brought up to me that one way to do this transparently would be to have the writer’s name in there too. Or, I would like to see some kind of visual treatment of these things that clearly differentiates contributed content. But no, I haven’t yet seen anyone that I think does a great job.

Do you have friends who are doing this sort of work or still do this work? How did they view the piece?

Yes, I do. Most of them said, “Yes, even though I’m still doing this, I agree with what you’re saying, and I feel like there’s a part of this that’s really fucked up, and if I were making more money, probably I would choose not to do this.” Then, I had a couple of people that got really defensive about it and felt like I was trying to be the ethics police.

Did they have a specific defense of ghostwriting?

Actually, it’s funny, because one of the people who got the most annoyed about it used the “people need to make money” kind of defense, but is someone who does not need the money.

OK. So, you’re not ghostwriting, what are you doing now?

I’m still freelancing for a variety of publications. I co-founded this project on the Beacon platform. It’s a platform that allows writers to charge their readers for subscriptions, and doing so, get access to all the other writers on that platform — but our group is doing kind of a magazine-style experiment. I still do a lot of copy editing and editing and proofreading and copywriting. I’m not saying no to those jobs.

This is a thing that I kind of wish I had said in that post, but it’s not like I have reached this pinnacle of freelancing where I’m making it, so now I’m like, “Screw all these stupid other jobs!” I just feel I don’t want to contribute to this one thing that really makes it easy for publications to not pay writers.

Do you feel with things like Beacon, there’s hope for another way to pay journalists on the internet?

Yeah, I do! I mean, I was part of the staff for this Faster Times experiment, and they had a lot of the same write-ups and accolades Beacon is getting now, six years ago. So initially I was like, “I don’t know, I’ve been there before, and it didn’t work.”

But, I think that the Beacon guys are really experimenting with some different things. And then I think like, Quartz is doing some interesting things, or the Glenn Greenwald project that I can never remember the name of. The fact that a lot of the tech-y business people are getting into the media space makes me think that maybe there’s a chance that we’ll see some new business models.

Those are all the questions I have. Hopefully, they’ll publish this.

Will they pay you?

They will pay me.

That’s exciting.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Photo via Niel vuolo.

Tim Williams is a community moderator for the New York Times.

As of writing, a Kickstarter campaign for “just making potato salad” has raised $37,115. Every few seconds that number climbs higher, and each uptick is greeted with cheers. It’s a self-perpetuating humor machine, and it is horribly efficient. There is no joke, at least not anymore; whatever joke there was has become an adaptive, joke-like arrangement of circumstances. It is a perfect device, compatible with all known theories of humor and therefore with none of them.

— The Superiority Theory, which suggests that all humor derives from a feeling of “sudden glory,” explains potato salad: Its participants have money so disposable that they can spend it on nothing. But the Inferiority Theory of humor, which holds that much humor derives from modesty, works too: It is both an assertion of cruel dominion over the world and an act of self-deprecation to donate ten dollars to a Kickstarter to make potato salad.

— The Relief Theory of humor, which claims that laughter comes from the “release of excessive energy,” explains the potato salad as well. The campaign is a release of seriousness, a release of techno-utopianism, a release of capital. It is a multi-purpose blowoff valve, BUT WHERE DOES ALL THE ENERGY GO NEXT?

— The Incongruity Theory suggests that humor stems from absurdity or inconsistency, or, in a more specific formulation, the “mechanical encrusted upon the living.” Kickstarter is, in its own formulation, “a new way to fund creative projects.” Potato salad is not a typical “project,” nor is it particularly “creative.” But the campaign itself — the use of Kickstarter — was initially creative, before the parody was so effortlessly assimilated. An inversion, an incongruity, another explanation. And yet still: despair.

Potato salad satisfies these and all other doomed attempts to systematize humor, which might be the only way to understand it: It is humor-shaped and perfectly optimized. If it was ever whimsical it isn’t anymore — there is too much money, too much potential, tied up with this salad. But this foundation of whimsy has created circumstances in which more capital is equated with more humor, which is too horrible an idea to even joke about: It is a transcendence that is out of our control, a villain, an invader, an awakening of The Old Ones, a Dire Event, or at least a Portent. What’s funnier than $37,115 for potato salad? $47,115 for potato salad, ha ha. What’s funnier than $47,115? $100,000. With every new dollar it feels more urgent to a viewer that he attach his name and his dollars to the thing, which is now obscured entirely by noise — a fee for ensuring that you’re in on the joke.

It’s an investment compulsion, and the investment is a scam. (It’s fun to imagine all business opportunities as jokes: They are temporary and dependent entirely on context; they are taken advantage of at the expense of someone or something that is often neither aware nor present; they are — necessarily? — cruel; they inspire the same embarrassing urge for inclusion, and the same shameful regret upon misapprehension or exclusion. Jokes! Look around you: Isn’t it nice, that it’s all just jokes?). If the campaign keeps going, some people may start to claim that, at some specific level of investment, the joke is no longer funny. It will be too much — the money could be better used on another campaign, or in another context entirely. This will be true but it will have always been true. None of these people will be able to explain to you what exactly changed.

This is when it will begin to feel obvious, after Kickstarter takes its five percent, after Amazon banks its cut, when all at once the internet feels an opposite, equally irresistible urge to pretend that none of this ever happened, that we realize what the joke really was, and at whose expense it was told.

by Ed Ballard

1130 hrs — 150 km from the finish at Bourg-d’Oisans

Phil: Good morning to all our viewers and welcome to day 17 of the 219th Tour de France. We join the last of the alpine stages just after the 50-kilometre mark as the peloton passes through another of these nameless mountain villages. And here in the yellow kevlar of the race leader is the familiar hunched figure of Eugene Kutts, surrounded by his henchmen from the Protea Correctional team.

Paul: Tell you what, Phil, I’m still in awe after his attack on the Col de la Madeleine.

Phil: That was the most ferocious performance I’ve seen in years, Paul. But today is another day, and the riders in the peloton have hours of arduous racing ahead of them. Would you say they’ve been dreading this stage more than any other?

Paul: It’s one heck of a tough stage — 200 kilometers of treacherous mountain roads from the ruin of Moûtiers to the fortress of Bourg-d’Oisans, taking in three hors-category climbs including the legendary Alpe d’Huez — but these guys are too jacked on focus pills and minotaur hormones to know the meaning of fear.

Phil: Do they experience any emotions, Paul?

Paul: Hatred, Phil. Hatred for each other and hatred for the gods who selected them for this contest.

Phil: And let’s not forget, hatred for the viewers at home.

Paul: For them most of all. It’s no exaggeration to say that many of these riders would have chosen any other fate above this one. Forced labour, exile — even death, Phil.

1202 hrs — 130 km to go

Phil: Here’s the first attack of the day, and the two riders making the move are wearing the red jerseys of Digisoft Panoptikon, the big-spending outfit from the New Colonies.

Paul: This move smacks of overconfidence, Phil. Dyson Sanchez is a promising rider, but he’s yet to impress in the mountains, and Yosef Johnson fell to pieces in the Pyrenees.

Phil: Eugene Kutts certainly doesn’t look too worried.

Paul: He’s not the worrying type, Phil. Most of these riders are only concerned with survival, a few are thinking about the stage win, but Kutts has bigger fish to fry. He’s thinking about overall victory in the Tour de France. He’s thinking about 500,000 New Credits.

Phil: And the only chance he’ll ever get to win his freedom.

1244 hrs — 112 km to go

Phil: There’s still well over 100 kilometres of agony between here and the dark fortress of Bourg-d’Oisans, and life isn’t getting any easier for the leaders on the road, Dyson Sanchez and Yosef Johnson. They’re riding into the poisoned wind that blows from the north, and there are wolves in these mountains.

Paul: And things worse than wolves.

1310 hrs — 95 km to go

Phil: As the famished riders snatch what food they can in the militarized feeding-zone, the drone gives us a fantastic shot of one of the great relics of this part of France: the vast abandoned power station of La Mure, built back in 2064.

Paul: All those pylons, covered with vines. It makes you think, Phil. But something’s happening back in the peloton!

Phil: Bandits! Bandits have picked off one of the competitors, and I’m hearing over race radio that the victim was the lanterne rouge!

Paul: That’s right, the unlucky rider who drew the bandits’ attention was Tony Lochner, another of the Panoptikon boys. The bandits might be vicious but they’re not stupid, Phil; they sensed he was in a vulnerable position near the back of that main group.

Phil: He’s had a rotten Tour, Paul.

Paul: I’ll tell you the rider I’m most concerned for now, Phil, and that’s Brutus Murdoch — after that bandit attack he’s the only Panoptikon rider left in the peloton.

1313 hrs — 93 km to go

Phil: Well, that didn’t take long. A brief churning deep within that mass of riders, a spray of red across the road, and that’s the end of Brutus. The peloton parts around his body like a traffic island. Would you say death comes for us all, Paul?

Paul: That he does, Phil, and more to the point, he’s turning this into a very costly day for Team Digisoft Panoptikon. I don’t envy the guy whose job it is to radio the news to Johnson and Sanchez up ahead: “Listen boys, pedal like your lives depend on it, because things got messy back here.”

1420 hrs — 74 km to go

Phil: Good to see the locals lining the cobbled streets just as they did in years gone by. They really love their cycling!

Paul: It would be more accurate to say they’re hungry, Phil. You’ll notice that none of the riders wants to be the one riding closest to the crowd, and the last thing they’d ever do is make eye-contact.

Phil: The Protea Correctional boys have certainly formed a tight cordon around Eugene Kutts.

Paul: Funny to think there was a time when the maillot jaune would ride near the front of the peloton. Nowadays that makes you a sitting target.

1501 hrs — 65 km to go

Phil: I’m hearing that the two Panoptikon boys leading the race have left the course and are heading onto a side-road. We’ll get pictures for you just as soon as we can, but it sounds like they’ve given up the ghost.

Paul: I’m not surprised, Phil. Sanchez and Johnson know all too well what’s happened to their team-mates. Their best hope is to lay low till the peloton has passed by; maybe they’ll ride again tomorrow.

Phil: How do you rate their chances, Paul?

Paul: In these hills, with the fog coming down? Not good.

Phil: What a fiasco today has been for Team Digisoft Panoptikon!

Paul: They made a lot of noise in the run-up to the race, Phil. New coaching staff, big-money sponsorship deals, the Tour’s most sophisticated gene-splicing lab. And they signed a whole chain gang of talent in the penal draft. We expected big things. But the Tour is more than a bloodbath; there’s a game of chess being played out there, and on today’s evidence Digisoft Panoptikon are still learning the moves.

1524 hrs — 52 km to go

Phil: Eugene Kutts has put the hammer down!

Paul: This is where the racing starts! Kutts has bided his time all day; he’s watched, he’s waited, and now he’s looking his rivals right in the eye and saying, “Come on boys, what have you got?”

Phil: Who can live with the murderous pace being set by Eugene Kutts? The man sticking grimly to his wheel is Leo Martens, the Vampire of Ghent, and Moya’s still here, like a golem in black lycra, and we’ve still got a couple of riders from BigPinkPenitentiary, and that tall thin killer in the shades is Abdelkader.

Paul: Don’t forget the polka-dot jersey, Andrius Kavalskis; what a Tour that young man is having! But only one thing’s for sure: we’re going to lose a lot of men to the mountain tonight.

Phil: What kind of attrition rate are we looking at for the laggards struggling up those endless hairpin bends, Paul?

Paul: As a rule of thumb, it’s usually safe to say between 10 and 20 percent won’t make it to nightfall.

1540 hrs — 45 km to go

Phil: If you’re just tuning in, you join us on the road to Alpe d’Huez with our two race leaders. The monster in black is Ivan Moya, one of the survivors of last year’s Tour, and this young man in the red and white polka-dots of the King of the Mountains is Andrius Kavalskis, the young contender from Team AlmazVodkaKishka.

Paul: I like this boy, Phil.

Phil: He was the only man who could stay with Moya when he made his move, and now they’ve put a good stretch of road between themselves and the yellow jersey of Eugene Kutts.

Paul: I think we could be looking at today’s decisive attack. 97 times the Tour has ridden up this mountain, all of them murderous bike races, but these two look ready to make their mark. I love their contrasting styles! Kavalskis is such an elegant, sprightly rider. Look at him turning over that high cadence — this guy was born on a bike.

Phil: And so young! Whatever crime he committed back in civilisation, it’s hard to believe he’s earned this fate. But how about Ivan Moya, Paul — what power this man has!

Paul: He’s one tough customer. El Esbirro, they call him — the Goon.

Phil: An arsonist, I believe.

Paul: Sure, he’s not what you’d call graceful, but he can pump out a thousand watts for hours on end. This guy has the VO2 max of a killer whale.

Phil: The faces of these two! Like ghosts in the fog.

1554 hrs — 37 km to go

Phil: Now we rejoin the yellow jersey. The chasers have regrouped around Eugene Kutts but he can’t afford to let Moya and Kavalskis stretch their lead, not with so much mountain still to climb.

Paul: You know what, I think Kutts in trouble, Phil!

Phil: I think you might be right! The big freak from Joburg is wearing the mask of pain! He left a trail of carnage up the mountainside yesterday, but has that effort taken its toll?

Paul: Don’t forget, it takes something serious to slow this man down. He’s legally a mutant. He’s been pumped so full of weapons-grade steroids he can barely talk.

Phil: He looks like a gorilla.

Paul: He practically is a gorilla, Phil. Just look at those red eyes: the eyes of the first man in fifty years who volunteered to take part in the Tour de France.

Phil: But wait, Paul, is he bleeding? Is that blood?

Paul: Hold that thought, Phil — there’s been an attack!

Phil: His rivals are smelling blood and someone’s gone off the front! But who’s the plucky rider trying to bridge the gap to the leaders?

Paul: I think that’s Abdelkader, Phil.

Phil: Now there’s a racer I love to watch. As deadly on the breakaway as he is with a shiv.

Paul: He was one of the pre-race favourites, Phil, but he’s picked a heck of a dangerous time to make his move: we’re nearing a tunnel, and that spells danger.

1606 hrs — 33 km to go

Phil: Well, we’re seeing the yellow jersey group emerge from the tunnel, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief. But there’s no sign of Abdelkader, and I’m fearing the worst.

Paul: Like I said, Phil, a dark tunnel is a suicidal place to launch an attack. I remember one incident in the Pyrenees a few years back; an entire team bus just vanished.

Phil: Yes, it was the bus belonging to Team Maximum Security-Dippin’Fries, and as I recall the incident took place on the road to Luz Ardiden.

Paul: And that bus of theirs was a very well-armed team bus indeed.

Phil: It was a team bus that could execute a scorched-earth policy.

Paul: That team bus razed villages in its time, Phil, but it never made it out of that tunnel.

1610 hrs — 31 km to go

Phil: Oops! I’d advise viewers of a sensitive disposition not to look at what’s dangling from that ski-lift. And I thought we’d seen the last of Abdelkader!

Paul: Well, we’d seen the last of most of him.

1622 hrs — 24 km to go

Paul: Moya’s gone! He’s made his move on the slopes of Alpe d’Huez and Kavalskis is struggling to stay with him!

Phil: That’s a huge acceleration — out of the saddle, tongue protruding, legs turning over a monstrous gear. This man has the engine of a mountain goat!

Paul: Kavalskis is slowing — I think he may have a technical fault.

Phil: What a cruel blow to his Tour hopes, and his dreams of liberty.

Paul: It’s his chain, he’s lost his chain.

Phil: But that chain is the least of Andrius’ worries — he’ll be thinking about those wolves. They’re closing in!

Phil: But Moya’s slowing too! He’s had a peek over his shoulder and spotted the wolves. He’s turning his bike around —

1623 hrs — 24 km to go

Phil: And that’s something I’ve never seen! With Kavalskis at the mercy of the pack, his rival is batting the wolves away with his pump. What heroism! When people talk about the Tour de France you hear a lot about infighting, about backstabbing and bloodshed —

Paul: Wholesale slaughter —

Phil: But this race has a spirit of comradeship that has always endured. These guys are competing for the stage win, remember, not to mention 10,000 New Credits and the pleasure of a local maiden — the stakes could not be any higher! And Kavalskis is back on the bike; now they can resume this enthralling battle in the fog.

Paul: You know what, Phil? I’d think twice about taking on Ivan Moya if I was a wolf.

1648 hrs — 17 km to go

Paul: It’s not looking at all good for Eugene Kutts. He’s managed to stem the bleeding from that shiv-wound in his side, but he’s haemorrhaging time to the two riders in front.

Phil: He just has to keep moving forward — right now all his enemies are sharpening their knives as they chase him up this mountain.

Paul: Look at him. Slumped in the saddle, chainmailed fist clamped over his stomach — you’d almost think he was afraid. Nobody knows better than Eugene Kutts how easy it is to finish off a weakened rider. All it takes is a shoulderbarge and you’re over the precipice, kevlar or no kevlar.

Phil: It’s sad, Paul.

Paul: But we’re going to have to leave Kutts for now, because we’ve missed some action further up the hill.

Phil: Kavalskis is on his own! He’s riding like a man possessed — but what happened to Ivan Moya?

Paul: It looks like the Alp has claimed him, Phil. Only one man knows what happened to Ivan Moya, and that’s the man we’re looking at right now, pedaling like he’s never pedaled before. Look at the face on him, look at the eyes!

Phil: All I know is, Andrius Kavalskis is flying on the wings of terror, and he doesn’t look back as he crests the summit of Alpe d’Huez.

Paul: Don’t forget, the road down to the grim fortress of Bourg-d’Oisans is a treacherous descent, especially in these wet conditions. Overshoot the apex of one of these bends and splat! — you’re in the forest. And once you’re in the forest…

Phil: But look at this boy, Paul — every bit the GC contender, growing in confidence with every metre of road that flies under his wheels.

1703 hrs — Bourg-d’Oisans. The finish.

Phil: What an effort! He barely has the energy to raise a gauntlet in celebration as he crosses the line. Smile, Andrius, you’ve just won a stage of the Tour de France!

Paul: The question is, will he cash in the 10,000 New Credits he gets for the stage victory, or trade them for a ninety-second time advantage in the general classification? That would bring him within touching distance of Eugene Kutts, and after today he must like his chances of closing the gap. But Kutts is never a man you want as your enemy, even when he’s wounded.

Phil: You know what, these are the questions Kavalskis will be weighing up in his mind right now on the podium. Sure, he’s a young rider, but he’s a tactical rider — but look, the guards are leading forth the maiden.

Paul: Poor girl.

Phil: Well, we’ve come to the end of our coverage, and the end of the Alpine stages. There’s just one thought now in the minds of the survivors: only three days till Paris.

Paul: What remains of it.

Phil: But before then the Tour will head for the Pays de la Loire. What awaits the peloton in the blasted plains? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

Ed Ballard is a journalist and writer who lives in London

A theory as to why the rent is too damn high and a potato salad is ten thousand dollars and Uber is ten billion dollars and you’ll have to buy reservations for restaurants like concert tickets and tickets for Transformers 4 in IMAX are like twenty-five dollars so that it made three hundred million dollars its opening weekend:

Welcome to the Everything Boom — and, quite possibly, the Everything Bubble. Around the world, nearly every asset class is expensive by historical standards. Stocks and bonds; emerging markets and advanced economies; urban office towers and Iowa farmland; you name it, and it is trading at prices that are high by historical standards relative to fundamentals. The inverse of that is relatively low returns for investors.

The phenomenon is rooted in two interrelated forces. Worldwide, more money is piling into savings than businesses believe they can use to make productive investments. At the same time, the world’s major central banks have been on a six-year campaign of holding down interest rates and creating more money from thin air to try to stimulate stronger growth in the wake of the financial crisis.

Tidy theories that explain an unruly world are rarely as neat as they purport to be, but they are comforting, aren’t they?

“The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity. Imagine what she could do with 100%,” is the tagline for Lucy, the new Scarlett Johansson speculative thriller, but isn’t it just as likely that the reason our average brains max out at around one tenth of their dimensions is due to an abundance of caution? Given our transcendent abilities to do damage to ourselves and those around us with that mere sliver of cranial capacity it seems probable on an evolutionary standpoint that the other 90% of our head-stuffing chooses to remain fallow from the firm conviction that exercising even another couple percentage points would result in destruction on such a massive scale that this species and all others which come in contact with it would perish from the face of the earth leaving not even the most rudimentary of traces, and while the prospect of such a planetary cleansing seems admittedly appealing — particularly on a hot day when the streets of our major metropolises are filled with putative adult males trundling around in shorts and flip-flops (and t-shirts bearing terrible double entendres suggesting specific sex acts their wearers would like to have performed on them) while they drink from plastic bottles filled with sugared water and careen about the sidewalks like clueless oversized babies, a group whom they additionally resemble in their utter disregard for anyone else walking alongside them — one supposes the brain is doing its part to prevent our speedy extinction and is instead hoping that by keeping the cap at the ten spot enough of us will muddle through somehow that the dumb shit we do won’t be immediately fatal, but will just hurt a lot until it’s all over, at which point it will be some other brain’s chance to fuck things up and hurt and be hurt and do everything it can to keep itself from feeling that sorrow that it has brought upon itself, not to mention the sorrow that has been brought upon it by the brains nearby. The more I think about it, the more it would make sense if our brains managed to drop their usage number down by about half — something at around five percent seems both more manageable and less lethal. Think about how happy everyone would be in a world which worked that way. Even if it’s impossible it’s at least the kind of movie I’d like to see, I guess. Lucy is in theaters July 25.

★★★★ Out in the open, the clarity was a bit punishing. Noise seemed muffled, the colors bleached out. The side street was tranquilizingly dark and breezy; the avenues piercingly hot. Just inside the Park, liquid birdsong flowed. A sparrow ate a Cheerio in the shade of a parked stroller, crunching it with sharp, predatory strokes of its beak. Indoors, a small and active fly had ridden the fresh air currents through the window, and the relative dimness made it all but impossible to pick out and track. The once-empty blue sky acquired a few ribbons and dotted clusters of white. A hot eddy lifted and spun some sidewalk garbage. Heavy-duty squirt guns took up positions around the playground; a boy in a wheelchair, injured leg elevated, carried one across his lap while another boy pushed him in and out of combat. Even in the benevolently shadowed end of afternoon, the unfiltered sun was harsh wherever it reached. The heat from the kitchen stove, combining with the late-day sun load, was overwhelming. The air conditioning had to come back on.

There is something very old, and satisfying, running through this track by DOOM, the guy who is always wearing a mask, and Bishop Nehru, the teen. [Via]