★★★ The humidity and glare had intensified, but they still added up to nothing approaching discomfort. Real dappled shade lay under the sidewalk trees. It was the air conditioning that was going too far — sinking in, relentless. Halfway through a sandwich, the prospect of finishing it in the chilly indoor gloom became unbearable. From the fire escape, the earlier glare had resolved into white clouds. Soon those clouds resolved into full cloud cover. Traffic was aggressive; a child was screaming. Faces grew apprehensive.

Summer is finally here on the East Coast, but they’ve been making summer music in Los Angeles all year. It has been stockpiled for months in secret, fuzzy, perpetually afternoon-lit warehouses, and soon it will flood the market. But not quite yet! Consider this a preview. (via)

“My copy came with CONFIDENTIAL stamped on every page and a nondisclosure agreement that expires today.” Thus arrived the new book by Glenn Greenwald, the most unrelenting man on the planet, on the doorsteps of reviewers.

The book, No Place to Hide, does a few things: It recounts how Greenwald and Laura Poitras met Edward Snowden in Hong Kong to begin the process of exposing the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs; it provides mix of familiar and fresh details — to the public, anyway, having been squirreled away by Greenwald for nearly a year — about those programs; and it excoriates “the establishment media” for their complicity with those in power. As one might expect, Greenwald takes every revelation, every slight, and “tends to deliver them as if they were all equally scandalous.” (Also as one might also expect, the reviews in the Times and the Post are equally unforgiving in their response to Greenwald’s criticism of establishment media.)

The most consequential thing to know about No Place to Hide, perhaps, is that it is not the climax of Greenwald’s year-long series of NSA reports, but a pre-denouement of sorts. He recently told GQ:

“We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.”

Greenwald’s strategy of slowly releasing the Snowden documents over the last year, ensuring a long, rolling boil, rather than an explosive flash fry, has been sound. But his decision to withhold
the “biggest story,” “a big missing piece,” for an entire year, even in the pursuit of maximum impact, is surely impeachable, particularly if its meaning is as dramatic as Greenwald implies. Put another way: What would Glenn Greenwald say if he knew that the New York Times sat on a similar story for a year, simply because it wanted the right timing for the sky to be “covered in spectacular multicolored hues”?

I will say this though: the tease is effective! Now I really want to know, and I sort of hope the truth is completely bananas, like the NSA has been tracking us all with like butt chips since we were babies.

Photo by Agencia Senado

by Brendan O’Connor

https://giphy.com/gifs/rXjRToAXZMjEk

Godzilla is traditionally understood to be a denizen of the Pacific Ocean, attacking coastal cities from eastern Asia to western North America. That did not stop me from worrying, as a five-year-old growing up in Manasquan, New Jersey — a beach town — about what might happen if Godzilla emerged one day from the Atlantic Ocean. But even then, I had no illusions about my heroism: I would not stop Godzilla through some ingenious act of immense violence or by coercing some other, slightly more friendly kaiju to fight Godzilla on humanity’s behalf. No, I knew that I would be one of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of human insects scurrying away from the giant lizard’s thundering feet.

In the event that Godzilla was awoken from its slumber in the Pacific and made its way around Cape Horn and then back up the coast of two continents — or, more likely, that it cut a path of destruction through the Panama Canal, then slipped back beneath the waves as it made its horrible path towards North America, having completely disrupted the global economy — New York City residents are fortunate that the New York Harbor is (relatively) shallow. The natural depth of the harbor, according to Kate Ascher, author of The Works: Anatomy of a City is 17 feet — although, over the course of the past century, it has been dredged to a depth of around 50 feet. In other words, the 2014 Godzilla, as massive as it is, would not be able to approach New York City undetected either by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the NOAA’s system of buoys would be particularly useful — or by citizens reporting odd activity in the harbor. (“If you would like to report an observation of hazardous winds…waves or weather on the waters or if you find our marine forecast is un-representative of conditions on the local waters…please contact us,” the NOAA says.)

“If there’s a big lizard coming, we’ll get some advance notice,” Commissioner Joseph F. Bruno of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, the coordinating agency in a massive disaster, like an attack by Godzilla, told me. “How big is this guy?” asked the commissioner when I spoke to him over the phone. “He’s big,” Bruno said, answering his own question. “He would cause fire and explosions. Casualties. Damage. Debris.” Helpfully, the nerds over at io9 dug up this chart illustrating Godzilla’s growth over time; the 2014 Godzilla, thanks to inflation, is around 150 meters tall. “And, you know, he probably would put a whole load of slime all over our streets, which we’d need to be concerned about as well,” Bruno said. Dr. Craig McClain of Deep Sea News estimates that the current iteration of Godzilla would produce 12,921,400 gallons of urine per day, or about a quarter of the hold of the largest production oil tankers.

A sighting of the creature approaching New York through the harbor would trigger the OEM’s Area Evacuation Plan for lower Manhattan, Bruno told me, which would move and hold 600,000 people in the 65 evacuation centers and 509 shelters that the OEM owns or has access to throughout NYC, which includes buildings owned by the public school system and CUNY. (“We’d close the schools, obviously,” Bruno said.)

“Everything that occurs comes through the EOC,” Bruno said, referring to the Emergency Operations Center, a kind of command post that OEM opens up to facilitate communication between all of the different organizations — local, city, and state governments, along with utility companies, and even some not-for-profits — that are involved in dealing with things like Godzilla. “Up to maybe 140 agencies,” Bruno said. “We would put the entire government on alert, dealing with the threat and then a portion of the government dealing with the consequences of it and the protection of people.”

Bruno says the OEM would ask the federal government to get involved almost immediately, making it easier to coordinate with the inevitable military response. “They’re already here, to some extent,” said Bruno, referring to Air Force’s McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst joint base, just 75 miles away. “Obviously we’d have a military command out in the field where the thing is coming ashore, but we would supply logistic support, assets that might be required for a battle,” the commissioner said. “We’d bring them in along with a very robust police department that we have.”

“How long could this lizard survive with the amount of resources we would be bringing in to support us?” Bruno wondered. Neither of us knew, but in the trailer, Ken Watanabe says that “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around,” so, like, be careful, I guess?

Brendan O’Connor enrolled in Notify NYC during the reporting of this story and also will definitely be going to see Godzilla on Friday.

“The thing was, he was a very nice man. All the men who attended the seminars were very nice men — also quite brave men, because they’d catch flack on their campuses for going to a women’s college to do a feminist seminar. And I found myself going back and forth in my mind over the question, Are these nice men, or are they oppressive? I thought I had to choose. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could be both.”

“Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger who designed the monster and revolutionary sci-fi sets for the film “Alien” has died, his museum said on Tuesday. He was 74.” — Above is a clip from a strange and beautiful corner of Gigerland, a documentary called H.R. Giger Revealed. It contains, among other things, about 30 minutes of 3D-animated renderings of concept art, including designs for Jodorowsky’s cursed adaptation of Dune.

So something happens in the culture and you want to immerse yourself in it completely and immediately — say, a Knowles/Carter internecine conflict. Where are you supposed to go? Facebook is too slow and too dumb. Twitter is an overwhelming cascade of bad topical jokes and links; it will get you there, but it feels like work. Tumblr is great if you already know your way around and unapproachable if you don’t. You can check all your popular culture websites sites for the roundups and updates but at that stage the magic has been stripped away. What are we supposed to do, Google stuff? No! Nightmare.

Here’s what I’ve been doing lately: When something BUZZY happens, something that people will want to riff on, something that the internet will process in its accelerated late-night-comedy way, I skip straight to Vine. Honestly! It’s an oasis of joy in an otherwise barren land: People are having fun there, or at least it seems that way. I groan at Tweets and Facebook posts and image memes almost instinctively. I don’t yet groan at Vines, because I know if I keep scrolling for a minute or two I will find a good one. Vine humor, for now, is allowed to be casual: For whatever reason, the form is kind to people who are naturally, not professionally, funny. Funny-with-their-friends funny. It’s an app full of pretty good singers, pretty good physical comedians, pretty good video editors and pretty good sketch performers. It’s refreshing and, since Vine doesn’t really have useful search or subject pages, effectively transient.

On off days, when Viners don’t have anything in particular to talk about, it’s still captivating. The app’s “Comedy” section is sort of like an infinite, obscene episode of America’s Funniest Teen Videos; some of it is mean, some of it is stupid, a lot of it is just endearingly try-hard and ragged. And as far as I can tell, Twitter, which owns Vine, has no idea what to do with it and sort of regards it as a failure. This, counter-intuitively, means it will probably stay good for a while. Soak it in! It will be ruined eventually, too.

“The socks-with-sandals look has undergone a gradual rebranding to its now-cool status, Quinn said. Designer Kate Spade helped revive it by showing closed-toe pumps with fun socks. Tory Burch showed socks with flats, and in their ready-to-wear Spring 2014 show, Band of Outsiders paired socks with flat and heeled sandals.” Socks with sandals, men in very short shorts, the return of crop tops — it’s gearing up to be a miserable summer.

★★★★★ At last, in full, if perhaps briefly: clear but not vivid blue sky, invigorating or insinuating breezes, the gentle and ideal springtime. After every crosswalk, the two-year-old went running ahead, taking the full available liberty from curb to curb. A passerby’s eyeshadow glittered; the cellophane on a bouquet was momentarily blinding. Clothes and the bodies under the clothes moved with ease, relaxed or dapper, all the lightness and bareness permitted rather than required. The breeze flowed through flowing fabric, as intended. Outside the hotdog storefront, a spritz of air-conditioner mist drifted down. Why not open a window, open all the windows? The afternoon playground as half in shadow, but the two-year-old was as indifferent to sun or shade as he was to whether he had chased his borrowed basketball into the middle of some older kids’ real basketball game. The demands of thirst and of heavy squirt guns meet in a standoff at one of the concrete drinking fountains. Children with foam-dart arsenals were forming up into militias by the tall end of the climber, arranging and debating and occasionally even playing war games. When no one was looking and his brother was arguing about a game of catch, the two-year-old separated his helmet from his parked scooter and began zooming around bareheaded. A woman emerged from the open front of the brand-new wine bar to bring a container of water to her dog, waiting at the hydrant outside. The late sun made its way all the way through the smaller bedroom and the kitchen doorway to flash off the side of the rectangular knife at each stroke through the asparagus.

January 2008, New York Times. A German scientist named Thomas Wagner soothes our nerves about the planet:

Thomas Wagner, a German scientist at Newcastle University in England who was among the authors, cautioned against concluding that modern ice in the Arctic or Antarctic might resist current global warming.

“It’s difficult to draw a direct relationship between our findings and the current discussion on the climate,” Mr. Wagner said.

“The results, however, show that even in a very warm world it is possible, at least temporarily, to build up larger ice caps in cooler regions,” he said.

May 2014, New York Times. An American scientist also named Thomas Wagner basically tells us it’s too late. WAY TOO LATE:

The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

How many Thomas Wagners are there? And what will they say next?