"But on the fourth day, Berg somehow veered off what he described as a poorly marked trail and ended up in a swamp."

"He fell, drenching his clothes, bag and food. His hiking boots fell off, but he was able to recover them. His phone, however, disappeared. 'It was like quicksand,' he said. Berg would spend the next 11 days frantically trying to find help, surviving on his small supply of freeze-dried food and drinking 'the most disgusting water that you could imagine.' Back home, his wife, Debbie, grew increasingly frightened as the days passed without word. 'Am I going to be a widow now?' she recalled thinking as her mind wandered to all the possible dangers on the island, including wolves and moose."

From "For 11 days, a lost hiker shouted for help. Then two kayakers appeared" (WaPo gift link).

The island was Isle Royale.

Berg — Craig Berg — was a 70-year-old man who thought that, with his phone and its mapping app, he was properly equipped. If you're trusting your phone for everything, it should not be possible for it to "disappear."

"Other people may have other ideas, and I don’t think there’s necessarily an institution position. But I think it’s compelling. It’s very clear."

Said Richard Kurin, a Smithsonian scholar, quoted in "Two Centuries On, Smithsonian Connects Jefferson’s Hair to Hemings’s Children/A new book describes how cutting-edge genomics techniques yielded 'extraordinary proof' that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings" (NYT gift link).

Kurin — a cultural anthropologist — worked with "a team of researchers" who "used cutting-edge techniques." The "team" involved "archaeologists, genealogists, molecular geneticists and historians, stretching across multiple changes in Smithsonian leadership." 

The publication isn't a scholarly article or academic book. It's a book for the general audience, "History By a Hair," published by Crown. And we're told that "one Hemings descendant who had given a sample in 2015 asked to withdraw her participation, saying she was dismayed that the book was appearing before a related article had been published in a scientific journal."

"It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one."

"Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way 'to get audiences back in theaters.' Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules.... Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?"

I'm reading "Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots? Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, has teamed up with Meta on a chatbot that encourages people to use their phones while watching a movie" (NYT).

In the last moments of the film "Sunset Boulevard," the delusional actress says, "There's nothing else — just us — and the cameras — and those wonderful people out there in the dark." But the phones have taken away the dark. The "wonderful people" are interposing lighted screens between each others' eyes and that screen that used to control the flow of light.

The delusion is over.

"While a prosecutor was interviewing potential jurors, [Judge Traci] Soderstrom apparently observed that he was 'sweating through his coat' and called him 'an arrogant asshole.'"

"Later, as the prosecutor questioned a witness, the judge [texted the bailiff], 'this is dumb' and 'he looks constipated.' During opening statements, Soderstrom opined that the defense attorney was 'awesome' and 'so smart,” asking the bailiff, 'Can I clap for her?'...  At another point, she appeared to have made up her mind about the case prematurely, musing that the 'state just couldn’t accept that a mom could kill their kid so they went after the next person available'... [A]fter the bailiff made a 'crass and demeaning reference to the prosecuting attorneys’ genitalia,' the judge reportedly responded with a laughing emoji.... As a witness watched a video from the stand, the judge reportedly texted: 'This shit is boring.'"

From "An Oklahoma Judge Mocked a Prosecutor’s ‘Baby Hands’ Mid-Murder Trial" (NY Magazine).

The judge has been suspended and may be removed. Her 500+ texts to the bailiff became public after this video went up on YouTube, revealing the judge using her phone to check social media and text. In the old days, the judge's mind would wander and maybe there would be sleeping or reading, but texting shows.

(You might be thinking sleeping shows, but I think, legally, that's always called "resting my eyes.")

"Yes, phones — and dogs! Both have an outsized role in the lives of many these days. Why? They're less messy than people."

"Why bother dealing directly with all of these people around me and all of the challenging negotiations required to compromise, to build bonds, etc? And we wonder why we're increasingly polarized."

That's the top-rated comment on the NYT article, "The Insidious Habit That Can Hurt Your Relationship/Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone, or 'phubbing,' can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. Here’s how to stop."

The article doesn't mention dogs. The commenter widened the subject matter quite interestingly, don't you think? 

Is the NYT promoting a new word in "phubbing" or is it real slang that already part of the culture and I just never noticed? I see from the "Phubbing" article in  Wikipedia that it's a word an advertising agency tried to make happen a decade ago:

"Can a modern young person ever understand what it was like to simply watch whatever happened to be on television?"

"To explain what life was like in the days of yore, I interviewed a number of people who are (roughly) my age about what it was like being (about) 27 in (around) 2002" (at Slate).

I'll cherry-pick and blend the various interviewees together:

"My first thought was 'wow.' My second thought was 'what a clever way for someone to acquire things over the objections of their partner -- get it all set up and let the toddler hit 'place order.'"

Writes one commenter, on "A New Jersey toddler spent nearly $1,800 using his mom’s phone. She didn’t know until packages started arriving" (WaPo). 

From the article:

Although she’d loaded the items into her online Walmart shopping cart while browsing for the family’s new home in Monmouth Junction, Kumar knew she hadn’t purchased any of them.... While playing on his mom’s phone, the 22-month-old had gone rogue, buying nearly $1,800 of furniture that was in the cart. When the Kumars realized what had happened, they tried to cancel the remaining orders but were too late....

"Scientists have long theorized about a hypothetical 'most excruciating dinner party possible,' and now a potential breakthrough has been made: In October..."

"Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump had dinner in Washington, D.C. NBC News confirmed the existence of the dinner, which neither Facebook nor the White House had announced," Max Read writes in "How Should You Feel About Mark Zuckerberg’s Dinner Date With Peter Thiel and Donald Trump?" (NY Magazine).

Not only is it normal for the CEO and a powerful board member of a major U.S. company to have dinner with the president, it’s normal for Zuckerberg to have dinner with right-wing pundits and conservative figures...

“It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg, and Thiel discussed,” NBC reports... So how should we feel? At best, I suppose, we should feel thankful that none of us had to be physically present as the trio chewed on well-done steak, Trump interjecting every so often to share his thoughts on Andrea Mitchell.

Hmm. I didn't expect the last 2 words to turn out to be "Andrea Mitchell." That surprised me. Did Trump tweet something about Andrea Mitchell just recently?

I wonder why the teaser "How Should You Feel About...?" worked on me. I'm not looking to be told how to feel. I guess I thought the article would be more manipulative and that would give me something to vocally resist. It didn't, and this post is what it is... a jumping off point for me to go look and see what Trump has tweeted recently!

I couldn't find anything about Andrea Mitchell in in Trump's Twitter feed. She was one of the debate moderators last night, but I don't think Trump said anything about the debate. So let me leave you with this tweet, which is tangentially related to Zuckerberg and Thiel:

During my visit yesterday to Austin, Texas, for the startup of the new Mac Pro, & the discussion of a new one $billion campus, also in Texas, I asked Tim Cook to see if he could get Apple involved in building 5G in the U.S. They have it all - Money, Technology, Vision & Cook!l

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2019

"Recently I heard a woman say her department is full of freaks, they don’t like her, and she doesn’t have a life, but that sounded more like a whine than an epiphany."

"I’m no sociologist so I don’t know if this era is less interesting. You’d think people would be as tormented by sex, self-fulfillment, and relationships (and babies) as ever, but I’m not hearing it on any movie lines I’ve been on lately. Maybe I should ask the NSA."

Said Stan Mack in a 2013 interview on the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Stan Mack drew the fantastic cartoon "Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies" that ran in The Village Voice from 1974 to 1995. The words in the cartoons were all things Mack claims to have heard people say around New York City. I, myself, had long loved the absurdity of the partial conversations you'd overhear as you walked around or half-minded your own business in a restaurant or shop. Here's an example showing part of one week's Stan Mack cartoon:



If you like that, you can order a collection of the funnies — remember when we called the comics "the funnies"? — here (at Amazon).

In the quote that begins in the post title, Mack is comparing the words he used to overhear with the words he overhears today, which, unlike then, include a lot of talking into cell phones. In fact, the reason I was looking up Stan Mack this morning is because I read (on Facebook) this post by Annie Gottlieb:

Really, the things you hear on the street. People on their cellphones seem to assume they’re in a soundproof phone booth, and people just conversing seem to have been made unselfconscious or oblivious by phone culture to being either intrusively loud, or private and overheard. You hear some funny things.

(a woman on her cellphone, crossing the street, indignantly: ) “I don’t want ANY bacteria.” (Apparently no one has yet broken the news about the microbiome.)

(Young man to his girlfriend, walking along holding hands, conversationally) “You know how some people jerk off just to jerk off?” (as opposed to?)

(today) “Hydroglyphics”

ADDED: Did people become less self-conscious because of cellphones? It's very hard to compare what you're hearing now with what you heard back then. Stan Mack is kind of an authority on the subject, and the difference he cites is in the interestingness. If what people are saying these days is less interesting, it could be that people are more private, less prone to revealing themselves when they can be overheard. But it could be that the eavesdropper has changed, and not just because we've all gotten older. We're different because we're listening to phone talkers, not to people who are with other people and talking in the flesh. People talking into a phone irritate us a lot more, so we're more judgmental. We think they're intruding on us. When we listen to people who are together in real life — as in "Real Life Funnies" — we feel that we are intruding on them. Our transgression makes things inherently more interesting.

"If experiential travel signifies engaging meaningfully with the people, history, environment and culture of a destination (like a local, not a tourist), then transformational travel is..."

"... supposedly the next step: Engage so meaningfully, the trip actually changes you. This can mean extreme adventure travel...  Or it can mean wellness-inflected, small-group trips aimed at building fellowship, as with a slew of female-focused companies... Black Tomato, a New York- and London-based agency, recently debuted a 'Get Lost' service, which drops travelers into remote destinations, requiring them to find their way out.... This past spring I swallowed my skepticism.... ... I was whisked from the Lisbon airport in a black sedan with tinted windows by the driver and a local guide. After dropping my bags at a hotel on Lisbon’s central Praça do Rossio, the guide, Edgar Miguel Rodrigues, took me on a walking food tour of central Lisbon. We tried ginjinha, a smooth, sour-cherry liqueur, ate bifana... Edgar dropped me off at the hotel at the point of bursting and informed me that my next guide would soon arrive for — I’m not kidding — an evening food tour, coinciding with the Feast of St. Anthony.... [T]he breakneck pace and constant chaperoning felt suffocating, and the only viable option seemed to be drinking heavily until I joined a cluster of middle-aged women dancing wildly to an onstage band playing pimba, an up-tempo style of Portuguese shlock-pop, in a packed Alfama square.... The next morning, moderately hung over, I was in the back of a car headed for... pastel-hued villas and palaces... [W]e found ourselves descending the spiral stone staircase of the initiation well at Quinta da Regaleira... 'This is the rebirth process,' said [the guide] Susana as we made our way through a tunnel... 'You are buried in the earth. You go through the dark, this tunnel, until you come out and are born again. The entrance of the cave is …' She trailed off. 'A vagina? I offered. 'Yes, like a vagina,' Susana said...."

From "Can a ‘Transformational Journey’ Change Your Life? Our Writer Had Her Doubts/Seeing the world “through new eyes” was the aim of a rigorously planned trip to Portugal, offered by a new breed of tour operator. It almost worked." (NYT). The photograph at the top at the link looks (unintentionally) like a skull. Oh! I see it's the thing that's supposed to be like a vagina.

I'm interested in that Black Tomato "Get Lost" idea. When I was a teenager, I used to drive my car until I got lost, then try to find my way back home. But that's not really possible anymore, not if you have a phone that sees where you are and gives you directions. Does Black Tomato take away your phone? This service you pay for is strangely like getting victimized by a crime. Some will rob you with a sixgun and some with a fountain of youth promo.

The coolest man in the world smokes.

That guy is Tony Tovar, who afterwards said he figured the guy just wanted drug money and wouldn't hurt him. Celebrated on the internet, Tovar advises: "It’s probably not in your best interest if they have a loaded firearm, I wouldn’t suggest that to just anybody."

"[T]aking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs..."

"... and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience. 'To document,' Jurgenson writes, 'is to be involved with our own experience instead of passively letting it float by.' On this subject, Jurgenson has all the right, if somewhat dutiful, opinions: nostalgia is overrated, but he’s not into 'digital austerity.' We shouldn’t hark back to an era in which we were less attached to technology—mostly because that era doesn’t exist. 'Our reality has always been already mediated, augmented, documented,' he writes, 'and there’s no access to some state of unmediated purity.'.... For him, the risk of constant documentation is alienation: a sense that our bodies are generating still moments rather than constant movement. He cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German scholar who wrote about the effect of the railway on human perception. With its speed and glass windows, 'the train flattens nature into something smooth and predictable, not something traveled within but something easily seen and consumed,' Jurgenson writes. 'As more of life is experienced through camera screens, does it occur at a similar remove, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable?'"

From "How Social Media Shapes Our Identity/The Internet constantly confronts us with evidence of our past. Are we losing the chance to remake ourselves?" by Nausicaa Renner (in The New Yorker). "Jurgenson" is Nathan Jurgenson, author of "The Social Photo/On Photography and Social Media."

At the Self-Portrait Café...

... take a look at yourself.

In China, painted lanes on the sidewalk for pedestrians who stare at their cell phones.

The lanes are painted with messages like "Path for the special use of the heads-down tribe" and “Please don’t look down for the rest of your life," the NYT reports.

Kanye West was "talking about cleansing."

Kim Kardashian explains what she thinks her husband meant to be saying:

"I mean, I hear him say all these things in the house just about — I think what he was saying about, really to everything, he was talking about clarity, and he always talks about how we should not have our phones first thing in the morning and in the house when we’re with the kids, let’s not have our phones. It’s our rule that we really try to live by. So I think he was talking about cleansing."

"A lockbox instructed me to abandon my phone for the duration of the stay. There are no mirrors, I discovered."

"The survival manual encourages you to avoid emails, work, competing, planning. And – interestingly, paradoxically – suggests being bored.... That first evening we worked our way through the What Now? booklet, full of riddles and poems about the woods, and a list of questions to ask each other...."

From "Is ‘being bored’ the next travel trend for millennials?" (UK Telegraph).

@getawayhouse 👌

A post shared by Greg Dickinson (@travelographs) on Mar 30, 2018 at 10:52am PDT

"Salt Bae lives for weeks at a time at the Plaza Hotel. He commutes to his restaurant using a self-balancing board."

Caption — at "How Salt Bae, Restaurateur, Spends His Sundays/Nusret Gokce has moved into the Plaza Hotel in order to be close to his new restaurant, Nusr-Et, where he spends most of the day" (NYT) — on a photograph that shows Nusret Gokce (AKA Salt Bae) walking down the steps at the Plaza. There are 6 photographs at the article. We also see him working out at the gym, posing with steaks, serving steaks doing his signature salt-throwing move, posing with a baby, posing with 2 women, and lighting a cigar. But we do not see that "balancing board," let alone get any explanation about what it is and how you can commute to work on it.

I have an item I'd call a balancing board — it's this thing — and you cannot travel anywhere on it. I see that mine is rated #1 at "10 Best Balance Boards Reviewed." None of these boards are designed to take you anywhere. You just teeter back and forth on it. Is there a different item called a "balancing board"? After much googling, I arrive at the conclusion that the NYT must be talking about a hoverboard, like the SWAGTRON T580 Bluetooth Hoverboard w/ Speaker Smart Self-Balancing Wheel. I'm seeing hoverboards with the term "self-balancing." I guess "self" is key. My understanding of English says that means the board balances itself, but maybe the rider is the self. Who knows?

Anyway, with 6 photographs, including a pointless shot of Salt Bae holding up a baby that isn't even cute, I can't imagine why there's no picture of him on the damned hoverboard tooling around in Manhattan traffic. Actually, I do see the point of the baby picture, and the non-cuteness of the baby is part of the point. Salt Bae displays his his slab-o-meat attractiveness in a restaurant full of unglamorous people. Lots of kids (that shot with the baby has, in the background, a not-that-young kid with a pacifier in his mouth). A man in a teal-colored hoodie staring into his cellphone. The baby's dad in schlumpy bluejeans and mom beaming and wielding her cellphone camera. The more I stare at this photo, the more details I see — grease stains along the back of mom's chair — and I'm now sure the message is: People of New York, stay away from this tourist trap.

"The man who takes the aisle seat next to me looks about my age. He’s tall, walleyed and bushy browed. Cologne, khakis."

"He does human things: clicks his seatbelt, reaches into a pocket, places a phone on the armrest between us. Then, contorting, he goes to another pocket and sets another phone facedown on his thigh. Two phones. It’s clear: We’re doomed. Here’s what happens in my pre-takeoff anxiety attack: The man toggles between devices, glancing — deviously, I decide. My heart batters that hush from two minutes ago. I throw side-eye behind my sunglasses. I read my neighbor’s texts. They’re in an app with orange bubbles, in an alphabet I don’t recognize. I twist and turn in my seat, giraffe my neck, telekinetically press the 'call flight attendant' button, gulp enough air to inflate a balloon, cloud my sunglasses with tears, sweat through my dress, think: This is it, the plane will be hijacked, I’ll die, and my fear that flying in an airplane is reckless and dumb will be confirmed...."

From "My $1,000 Anxiety Attack," by JoAnna Novak (in the NYT).

This description of irrational anxiety about hijacking is interesting. There's so much detail about the man's looks — and his writing — and yet there's not the whiff of a hint about his ethnicity. This goes to show that in the NYT, your mind may be spiraling wackily out of control and yet you maintain stiff discipline in the crucial center of political correctness.

"This one Clinton quote shows why her supporters hate the media."

Headline on a David Weigel piece at WaPo. To me, it's just ludicrous to think that the media were anti-Clinton — at least in comparison to Trump.* But what Weigel has is this Clinton quote...

If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles. And so, even in towns — so, the president was in Harrisburg. I was in Harrisburg during the campaign, and I met with people afterward. One of the things they said to me is that there are places in central Pennsylvania where we don't have access to affordable high-speed Internet.

That got boiled down into a tweet (by Phil Elliot of Time Magazine):

"You cannot get cell coverage for mile," Clinton says of the places that voted against her.

Weigel says that reporters knew that Clinton had "a quarter-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan" to help people out in those places that beat the heck out of her, but they nevertheless went for the easy snark that fit the "firmly established narrative of Clinton and Trump is that she couldn't connect to rural voters, whereas he was a 'blue-collar billionaire' who made surprising emotional connection."

__________________

* They surely favored Clinton over Trump, but I think at the primary stage they favored Bernie Sanders. But Trump did figure out how to use the media that hated him just by making himself available and speaking in a way that was compulsively watchable. He got a ton of free media — interviews and rallies — and so did Bernie — who used a very similar approach of being available and chattily interesting. Clinton was so guarded, so withholding. Even when she made herself available she seemed unavailable. And there was that meme — did she believe it? — that she is most liked when people don't see her at all.

Justice Breyer's cellphone rang during oral argument today.

SCOTUSblog reports the news and refers to the sound as a "lively chime."

Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan chuckle. Breyer looks to Chief Justice John Roberts with an apologetic expression before sharing a laugh with Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of my colleagues think they see Breyer handing the phone to one of the court aides who sit behind the justices....

I would like to be able to say that after the argument, reporters retired to the press room and began discussing the finer points of personal jurisdiction. But all we can really talk about for several minutes is Justice Breyer’s cellphone....