Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Purity vs. Pragmatism, Environment vs. Health (NY Times)
A surprising, important difference between the Green New Deal and Medicare for all.
Mary Beard: Is Radio 4 for us old people? (TLS)
If there is one thing that the Brexit debate has shown us (one of many things), it is that we need a hell of a lot more debate, knowledge and complexity
and that is what Radio can offer, almost better than anything else. And it doesn't need to be dreary. It is one of the biggest fallacies of modern communications that what is complicated and intellectually challenging cannot simultaneously be fun, playful and young. It can be. I promise.
Greg Sargent: At fundraiser, Trump reveals reelection strategy: Cruelty, lies, hate (Washington Post)
it's precisely because of this that we should attempt a massive, multifaceted approach that includes big investments in improving conditions in the origin countries to mitigate "push" factors, which are dominant; sustained regional cooperation; major resources to unclog and streamline courts; and even involvement by the United Nations and improved refugee infrastructurein the region. But Trump has cut aid to those countries, making regional solutions harder. And "toughness" fails again. Democrats are beginning to coalesce around such solutions.
Alexandra Petri: Kirstjen Nielsen was rooting for you all along, you know (Washington Post)
Truly, truly there was no one more appalled by what Trump was asking the Department of Homeland Security to do than she was, which is why she only implemented the really heinous parts when she felt that a show of force was necessary to impress him and keep her job (that she might better continue to resist).
Inkoo Kang: How Game of Thrones Lost Track of Tyrion Lannister (Slate)
He was the show's breakout character. As the end nears, it's almost forgotten him.
Sarah Jaffe: The Real Ramona (Slate)
How Beverly Cleary transformed her harsh, difficult childhood into heartwarming fiction.
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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
At Cornell, an architecture professor worried that a crack in the ceiling of his lecture room would someday develop into a fallen ceiling. One day, he walked into the lecture room and saw that his fear had been realized - a big hole was in the ceiling, and chunks of plaster were lying on the floor. The professor rushed out to get some maintenance workers. When he returned with them, they saw only the regular crack in the ceiling - no gaping hole and no chunks of plaster on the floor. Here's what had happened. Hugh Troy, an architecture student at Cornell, knew of the professor's worries, so he had created a painting of a hole and even made it three-dimensional by gluing bits of plaster to the edges of the "hole." They fastened the painting to the ceiling at night, and put chunks of plaster on the floor, then after the professor had discovered that the ceiling had "fallen" and left to get help, they cleaned up the mess and removed the painting.
While in Canada, Anna Russell was invited to live at a farm with her Aunt Alice - and Uncle Ern, whom she had never met. Arriving at the farm, she discovered that Aunt Alice was gone, but she had a nice talk with a man who said he was her gardener. He gave her a lecture on plants and keeping a compost pile, and he certainly knew a lot about gardening. When Ms. Russell asked how long he had been working for her Aunt Alice, he replied, "Man and boy, fifty year. She be a right fine lady to work for." However, Ms. Russell was shocked when her Aunt Alice came home and gave the gardener a kiss. The mystery was explained when Aunt Alice said, "Hello, Ern," then introduced Ms. Russell to her practical joker of a husband.
In the musical Dreamgirls is a scene in which the actors and actresses pretend to be playing musical instruments. One actress whom Derryl Yeager disliked did not want to mess up her lipstick, so she always put the mouthpiece of her French horn not on her lips, but on her nose, reasoning that the audience was far enough away that they wouldn't notice. Mr. Yeager decided to play a practical joke on the actress, so he filled up the mouthpiece of the French horn with toothpaste. The actress didn't notice the toothpaste until she pulled the French horn away from her nose - and suddenly a string of white goo appeared dangling between the French horn and her nose.
Gladys Cooper once wrecked a theatrical performance with a series of practical jokes. One actor lit an exploding cigar. The actresses who were supposed to eat cookies on stage were given cookies with flannel inside them. An actress who was supposed to eat an apple discovered that the apple was made of soap. Actor Gerald du Maurier witnessed these practical jokes and worried that he would be the next victim. His character was given a parcel on stage, and he thought that when he opened the parcel, something might fly out. Relieved to discover that the parcel was not booby-trapped, he sat down on a cushioned chair - which was rigged to emit a series of squeaks.
Lee Greenway, a makeup man on The Andy Griffith Show, was a practical joker. An extra once came in for his makeup job at the beginning of the week, and Mr. Greenway asked him to remove his left shoe, then he put on the extra's makeup. The next day, the extra again came in for his makeup job, and Mr. Greenway said, "Forgot to take your shoe off." After the extra took off his left shoe, Mr. Greenway put on his makeup. The following day, the extra came in for his makeup job, and he started to take off his left shoe, but Mr. Greenway said, "No, no, this is Wednesday. We don't take our shoe off on Wednesday."
Leo Slezak knew an operatic tenor who continually boasted of his prowess in billiards, so Mr. Slezak decided to play a joke on him. He knew a professional billiards player by the name of Pfeiler and arranged to have Mr. Pfeiler play billiards with the tenor, who had never heard of Mr. Pfeiler. In the game, Mr. Pfeiler allowed the tenor to get ahead, then he prepared to dazzle the tenor with brilliance. As he was shooting ball after ball into the pockets, a waiter entered the room and told the tenor that Mr. Pfeiler had said for him to hold the tenor's cue stick until the game was over.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the screenplay for Wuthering Heights, one of critic Alexander Woollcott's favorite books. Mr. Woollcott invited Mr. Hecht and Mr. MacArthur to his island, where he hoped to find out details of their screenplay. Knowing how snoopy Mr. Woollcott was, Mr. Hecht and Mr. MacArthur deliberately faked pages of their screenplay and left them out for Mr. Woollcott to find - the pages portrayed Heathcliff as a Wild West cowboy with six-shooters.
In an episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver, jumps into a swimming pool. The scene was scheduled to be shot in the morning, but it kept being delayed until afternoon. When he finally jumped into the swimming pool, Mr. Denver found out why. The crew had filled the pool with ice cubes and had to wait until they melted so Mr. Denver would not know how cold the water was until he jumped in.
At the Metropolitan Opera, tenor Leo Slezak had just finished performing in Christoph Willibald Gluck's Armide. He saw an old, distinguished gentleman standing nearby, so he pushed him onto the stage, pointed to him, then bowed. Afterward, reporters asked him whom the old gentleman had been, and Mr. Slezak told them that it had been Gluck himself. The reporters printed the story, not knowing that Gluck had died in 1787.
In his book The Compleat Practical Joker, H. Allen Smith tells about Brian G. Hughes, a manufacturer in Manhattan who used to go into a bar on a rainy day and purposely leave his umbrella at the bar so it would be stolen. Then he would find himself a good seat and wait for the thief to go out into the rain and open the umbrella - from which would fall confetti and streamers reading "This umbrella stolen from Brian G. Hughes."
As a young man, Italian baritone Tito Gobbi really got into his roles. After playing Scarpia for the first time in Tosca, Mr. Gobbi took his parents out to eat. At the restaurant, Mr. Gobbi behaved exactly like Scarpia, snapping his fingers to get attention from the waiters and in general making a nuisance of himself. His father leaned across the table and said softly to him, "Come back, Tito - the opera is over."
Warren Beatty played a rich kid for a while on the TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Once he was locked in a dressing room near where the director was shooting and no one would let him out. Mr. Beatty stayed calm. He waited until the next scene was being shot, then he started singing opera at the top of his voice. He was quickly let out of the dressing room.
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Enshrined in Cement
Billy Crystal
Actor/comedian Billy Crystal sank his hands and feet into cement in the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Friday, joining the list of entertainment-industry luminaries enshrined at the famed venue.
The 71-year-old native New Yorker was honored as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival sponsored by Turner Classic Movies. The event coincided with the 30th anniversary of the iconic romantic comedy "When Harry Met Sally...," which was screened Thursday night as part of the festival.
Crystal took part in a discussion at the screening, joined by co-star Meg Ryan and director Rob Reiner. Reiner was also among those on hand Friday for the hand-and-footprint ceremony.
Crystal said during the Chinese Theatre ceremony that he started in comedy with his brothers Rip and Joel.
"You start doing this and I know it's the same for almost all funny people, ... make your parents laugh. You try to make your parents laugh and that laugh becomes this delicious drink that I was always thirsty for," he said. "And all these years later I think of the times that we performed, Rip, and dreamed about something like this happening. Never would have imagined that it could happen for me."
Billy Crystal
Hits Record
Disney
Shares of Walt Disney Co touched an all-time high on Friday after Wall Street analysts said the aggressive pricing of its new video streaming service could help it better compete with Netflix Inc.
Netflix's shares fell about 4 percent after Disney priced its streaming service, Disney+, at $6.99 per month, below the video streaming pioneer's basic plan of $8.99.
Shares of Disney jumped 10 percent to $128.26, adding $21 billion to the company's market capitalization of $209 billion on Thursday.
Disney+ will launch on Nov. 12 in the United States, featuring content from a host of Disney brands including Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar as well as recently acquired Fox properties such as "The Simpsons" and National Geographic programming.
Disney said it expects to attract between 60 million and 90 million subscribers and achieve profitability in fiscal year 2024. It plans to plow a little over $1 billion in cash to finance original programming in fiscal 2020 and about $2 billion by 2024.
Disney
'Transparent' to Kill Off Character
Jeffrey Tambor
After much speculation since the firing of Jeffrey Tambor from Transparent last year, creator Jill Soloway has finally confirmed that his character will be killed off in the extended series finale of the critically acclaimed Amazon Studios comedy.
The upcoming musical ending to the series will begin with the passing of Tambor's leading character, Maura, and will then follow the Pfefferman family as they come together in their grief and celebrate her life, according to an Amazon release about the movie musical that will serve as the final chapter of Transparent.
"When the time came to bring the Transparent journey to a close, it was clear that saying goodbye to Maura was our path forward," Jill and Faith Soloway said Thursday in a statement. "In this musical finale, we dramatize the death of Maura in an odyssey of comedy and melancholy told through the joyful prism of melody and dance."
The statement continued: "As we reflect on the process we began so many years ago to bring Maura Pfefferman to the screen, we hope this tribute to the meaning her story brought to the public consciousness also marks a moment in time where art-makers recognize the importance of trans actors playing trans characters. Everything changes, and we are grateful to make art that will live on as a bridge from this era to the next. As the world transforms, so does the Pfefferman family. Transparent is not ending, it is transitioning into a musical, becoming itself over and over again."
The extended finale, titled "The Transparent Musicale Finale," was directed and written by Jill Soloway (who identifies as nonbinary and prefers the third-person plural pronoun "they"), with their sister, executive producer Faith Soloway, penning the music and lyrics. The final installment of the series will be released on the streaming service in September.
Jeffrey Tambor
Disney CEO
Bob Iger
Accepting an award for his humanitarian work Wednesday, Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger attacked social media for its role in spreading hate.
"Hitler would have loved social media," said Iger at the Simon Wiesenthal Center tribute dinner, according to Variety. "It's the most powerful marketing tool an extremist could ever hope for because by design social media reflects a narrow worldview filtering out anything that challenges our beliefs while constantly validating our convictions and amplifying our deepest fears."
"It creates a false sense that everyone shares the same opinion," he continued. "Social media allows evil to prey on troubled minds and lost souls, and we all know that social news feeds can contain more fiction than fact, propagating vile ideology that has no place in a civil society that values human life."
Iger was being honored by the center, a global human rights organization that "confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations."
"In the last few years, we have been harshly reminded that hate takes many forms, sometimes disguising itself as more socially acceptable expression like fear or resentment or contempt," Iger said during his speech at the Beverly Hilton. "It is consuming our public discourse and shaping our country and culture into something that is wholly unrecognizable to those of us who still believe in civility, human rights and basic decency."
Bob Iger
60 Big Companies Paid
$0 In Taxes
Big businesses are faring better than ever under the Trump era tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).
According to analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), 60 Fortune 500 companies avoided paying all federal income tax in 2018 (with their total average effective tax rate being roughly -5%).
That's more than three times the number of companies that avoided paying corporate taxes on average from 2008 to 2015. During that period, 18 companies managed to pay 0% or less (with their total average effective tax rate over 8 years being roughly -4%).
"There are a lot of breaks and loopholes that allow a company not to pay," Steve Wamhoff, ITEP's Director of Federal Tax Policy, told Yahoo Finance. "People, when they think of tax reform, think the government is going to fix the tax code and get rid of breaks and loopholes and get rid tax dodging. What we got at the end of 2017 was not that. It was the opposite of that. The Tax Cuts and jobs act left a lot of special breaks and loopholes in place and created some new ones."
In 2017, the effective corporate tax rate was 13.6%. In 2018, corporations paid just 7% of their profits as federal taxes, according to data provided to Yahoo Finance by research firm Oxford Economics.
$0 In Taxes
Operatives Boast
Netanyahu
Political operatives working for Benjamin Netanyahu's party have boasted that they drove down voter turnout among Arab-Israelis by illegally hiding 1,300 cameras inside Arab polling stations.
Israeli police intervened in the middle of Tuesday's election after it emerged that volunteers for Mr Netanyahu's Likud party were monitoring Arab polling stations with hidden cameras attached to their clothing.
Israeli election forbids filming inside polling stations and police confiscated the cameras. Mr Netanyahu defended the use of hidden cameras as an effort to combat voter fraud in Arab areas.
Arab and Left-wing political parties said the cameras had deterred Arab voters from turning out because they were intimidated. Overall Arab turnout was at 50 per cent, down from 63 per cent in the 2015 election.
The heads of Kaizler Inbar, an Israeli PR firm, wrote on Facebook that they were behind the hidden camera operation and boasted "the percentage of [Arab] voters dropped to 50%, the lowest seen in recent years".
Netanyahu
Hold Secrets
Bats
University of Maryland researchers analyzed an evolutionary tree reconstructed from the DNA of a majority of known bat species and found four bat lineages that exhibit extreme longevity. They also identified, for the first time, two life history features that predict extended life spans in bats.
Their work is described in a research paper, published in the April 10, 2019 issue of the journal Biology Letters, which concluded that horseshoe bats, long-eared bats, the common vampire bat and at least one lineage of mouse-eared bats all live at least four times longer than other, similarly sized mammals. The researchers also found that a high-latitude home range and larger males than females can be used to predict a given bat species' life span.
"Scientists are very interested in finding closely related species in which one is long lived and one is short lived, because it implies that there has been some recent change to allow one species to live longer," said Gerald Wilkinson, a biology professor at UMD and lead author of the paper. "This study provides multiple cases of closely related species with varying longevity, which gives us many opportunities to make comparisons and look for some underlying mechanism that would allow some species to live so long."
Longevity is often correlated to body size, with larger animal species generally living longer than smaller ones. For example, an African elephant can live as long as 70 years, while a common house mouse typically lives only one to three years. Humans are considered relatively long-lived animals, tending to live about four times longer than most other mammals when adjusted for size. But bats can far exceed that. Some species can live 40 years -- eight times longer than similarly sized mammals -- which is why scientists have long sought to understand bats as a model for healthy aging.
This is the first time researchers have reconstructed longevity on an evolutionary tree of bats and used that information to compare traits that could account for life span differences between related species. Wilkinson and his coauthor, UMD biological sciences graduate student Danielle Adams, analyzed traits that were known to correlate with longevity -- body size, cave use and hibernation -- as well as traits that had not been previously considered, such as home-range latitude and size differences between males and females.
Bats
Deep-Sea Explorers Find
Rainbow-Colored Wonderland
Deep in the Gulf of California, scientists have discovered a fantastical expanse of hydrothermal vents, full of crystallized gases, glimmering pools of piping-hot fluids and rainbow-hued life-forms.
Punctuating it all are towering structures made of minerals from the vents, looming as tall as 75 feet (23 meters). A decade ago, scientists visiting this spot saw nothing unusual; this psychedelic seascape seems to have built up around an increase in hydrothermal venting - spots in the seafloor where mineral-laden and superhot water jets out - in the last 10 years.
"Astonishing is not strong enough of a word," said Mandy Joye, a marine biologist at the University of Georgia, who led the team that discovered the vents.
Joye and her colleagues were studying microbial mats in the Guaymas Basin in the central Gulf of California late last year when they conducted an autonomous vehicle survey nearby, looking for interesting sites to explore on their next research expedition.
"We saw a lot of really interesting topography, which made me scratch my head," Joye said. Chemical traces in the water also suggested there might be hydrothermal vents nearby.
Rainbow-Colored Wonderland
Ends Wartime Emergency Coffee Stockpiling
Switzerland
Switzerland on Wednesday announced plans to abolish the nation's emergency stockpile of coffee, in place for decades, after declaring the beans not vital for human survival, though opposition to the proposal is brewing.
Nestle, the maker of instant coffee Nescafe, and other importers, roasters and retailers are required by Swiss law to store bags of raw coffee. The country stockpiles other staples, too, such as sugar, rice, edible oils and animal feed.
This system of emergency reserves was established between the First and Second World Wars as Switzerland prepared for any potential shortages in case of war, natural disaster or epidemics.
According to the plan released for public comment, coffee stockpiling obligations would expire by the end of 2022, with companies free to draw down what they store in their warehouses.
"The Federal Office for National Economic Supply has concluded coffee...is not essential for life," the government said. "Coffee has almost no calories and subsequently does not contribute, from the physiological perspective, to safeguarding nutrition."
Switzerland
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