Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103) 

The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts: 

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)

it's not so much that Venus's tectonic plates are locked, it's more that it never had them in the first place!

which is a major surprise, actually, because Venus is the most Earth-like of the other planets in our solar system.

surprise?

"what," you may say, flailing in consternation, "about Mars?? why are we trying to colonize Mars if Venus is more Earth-like???"

and it's a good question! Venus IS technically more Earth-like in the sense that it's right next door, is a solid 80% the size of Earth, and has both a working atmosphere and a liquid mantle composed of molten rock, BUT- it's also important to note that Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system and it rains boiling sulfuric acid at almost all times! our first probes to the damn place actually melted. MELTED.

this is what Hell looks like.

BUT ANYWAY so Venus is the planet in our solar system that's the MOST physically similar to Earth, our dear mother who does not rain boiling sulfuric acid on our heads hardly at all ever, so it's kind of a shock that its geology is COMPLETELY FUCKING DIFFERENT.

see, Earth's outer crust is broken up into a series of mind-breakingly-massive tectonic plates that sort of skid around on top of the liquid mantle, slowly drifting in different directions driven by Earth's rotation and bonking into each other randomly like a 300-million-year-long Pinball tournament!

but on Venus, the entire outer crust is a single solid piece sitting on top of the liquid mantle, like the peel of an orange.

though not as good for you. because of the whole Boiling Acid thing.

and contrary to what you might think, this actually makes Venus a VERY VIOLENT place! the outer crust twists and deforms slightly as the liquid mantle spins under it, like a water balloon being flung repeatedly against a wall by a small child, but all of that force can't really be dispersed because the crust is a single solid piece of rigid rock!

so what happens is that this force builds and builds and BUILDS until Venus can't take the strain anymore and has a very volcanic tantrum about it.

unlike the rest of the solar system, the surface of Venus is made of relatively new and entirely volcanic rock- because the entire planet is basically having a planet-wide eruption event at all times, with multiple huge volcanos just spewing gigantic amounts of liquid rock everywhere like it's their damn job, to the point where Venus is just getting resurfaced like a McDonalds parking lot every epoch or so.

aren't you glad Earth doesn't do this? I am SO glad Earth doesn't do this.

(much, anyway)

This extinction event, also colloquially called the Great Dying, affected all life on Earth, and is estimated to have killed about 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species living at the time.[11][12][13] Some of the disastrous events that impacted the Earth continued to repeat themselves on Earth five to six million years after the initial extinction occurred.[14] Over time a small portion of the life that survived the extinction was able to repopulate and expand starting with low trophic levels (local communities) until the higher trophic levels (large habitats) were able to be re-established.[14] Calculations of sea water temperature from δ18O measurements indicate that at the peak of the extinction, the Earth underwent lethally hot global warming, in which equatorial ocean temperatures exceeded 40 °C (104 °F).[15] It took roughly eight to nine million years for any diverse ecosystem to be re-established; however, new classes of animals were established after the extinction that did not exist beforehand.[14]

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.

So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.

And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.

All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind. 

Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.

He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.

Nothing is more dramatic than an Italian playing football. (Love you all but it make me laugh so much.

“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning another language,” says Chong.

“But… often you have a boardroom full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them.”

The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language. Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as ‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.

English corporate speak is it’s own fucked up dialect. 

It’s so incomprehensible and exclusionary that even a native English speaker with a master’s degree in English will have difficulty parsing it. Trust me when I say that nobody who isn’t a business major knows what the fuck “synergy” means.

And the jargon’s just half the problem. The other half is the gross overuse of hobby-specific expressions and analogies.

Go to most corporate offices and you’ll be bombarded with sports analogies that only make sense to someone who spends all their free time watching ESPN.

I tracked down this quote I read in a tumblr post years ago:

“I remember working with a law school in which white men heavily dominated the faculty. They used lots of sports metaphors (doing an end run, Monday morning quarterbacking, and so on), with legal jargon thrown in for good measure. I suggested that this was not a particularly welcoming trait in their school, that in fact it was sexist, but they paid little attention. I made my point by speaking for about five minutes in dressmaking terms: putting a dart in here, a gusset there, cutting the budget on the bias so it would be more flexible, using a peplum to hide a course that might be controversial. The women in the room laughed; the men did not find it humorous….Language is power, make no mistake about it. It is used to include and exclude and to keep people and systems in their places.”

- Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege

My point is,

This kind of poor communication probably shouldn’t be blamed on monolingualism alone. It’s most certainly made worse by an exclusionary and elitist work culture.

We don’t use the negation ne. We say Je sais pas (I don’t know) or On a pas à le faire (we don’t have to do it),

Speaking of which, we prefer using on rather than the pompous nous : On est arrivé-es (we’ve arrived), On y va? (shall we go)

Speaking of which, our questions are often affirmative sentences ending with a question mark (i.e. : a high-pitched tone) : Tu viens? (are you coming), T’en veux un-e? (do you want one).

Speaking of which, we chew words. When followed by words starting with a consonant, personal pronouns can lose their final letter : J’te l’dis! rather than Je te le dis (I’m telling you).

Speaking of which, we’re lazy : Je can be Che (chais pas), Il can be Y (r’garde, y’a un chat!) and grunt : many euh (uh), ah, bah (hum), ben (well), hein (tf?) and rhooo/rhaaa (ffs). We often start sentences with but : Mais tu saoules! (you’re annoying) to express displeasure.

Speaking of which, on top of dropping négations, we drop pronouns : You’re being a pain in my ass should be Tu me fais chier but can be Tu fais chier - maybe to make it universal or dramatic.

Speaking of which, we thrive on sarcasm and irony. To someone who’s babbling, we’ll answer It makes my leg look good.

Speaking of which, we repeat (personal) pronouns at the beginning or end of sentences. We’re likely to ask Qu’est-ce qu’il en dit, lui? and answer Moi, je veux bien (tonic pronouns, careful!).

Speaking of which, we like to use the conditional mode to indicate a wish or hypothesis : lots of Si j’avais su, j’aurais dit oui (had i known, i’d have said yes), J’aimerais bien pouvoir- (I wish I could-), etc.

Speaking of which, we add useless words : Bien (j’irais bien), Petit (un petit peu), Très (très vrai), Trop (je ne sais pas trop), ça (C’est quoi, ça?)...

what would i say to her? 16 and shivering. i’d tell her the truth - we missed the  ten year anniversary of our attempt because we were too busy and too full of life and so happy that we no longer count hours in crescents. there will be a lot of people who tell you it is worth it, that it gets better, but you will not believe them. little mouse, it is not easy. you will break down so many times you will have a fondness for rock bottom. you will become soul tethered to sisyphus, feeling yourself push the burden of your baggage up-and-up-and-up, over and over, each season like a metronome.

i would like to tell you do your homework or make more friends or try laughter instead. but we are older now, my love, and the world is different. tiny things seem silly now. instead, if there’s anything - just, while you’re there, look around. you do not have to like where you are. you do not have to squeeze juice out of the rotten core of your weeks. instead, take note of the changing of leaves. of how many clouds were worth noting. of bees and butterflies and hands that hold. one day you will miss just-being-home. one day your memories will flatten like a well-worn stone. keep a few, if you can, of the smell of baking and of loam.

people will tell you just live for right now, but you will not be able to do that, because your life is a wound and it needs to bleed. live, instead, if you can, just for me. for being 27 and loving green tea and a job worth doing and people in your phone you can call at any minute and having a dog you rescued and two tattoos and friends you can lay in bed with while all three of you read. for being in love with birds and having beaten another pokemon game and for learning your new favorite joke. we end up living only so our mother won’t be sad - and she’s doing great. she’s happy. they live up in maine now, isn’t that funny. but live, a little, just for me.

i sometimes, weakly, regret all the things that have been taken from me. i could have been a doctor! i could have a steady job! I could have gone to so many things! instead i was panicked or hungry or sobbing or so numb i could have been an ice rink. 

but we never regret being here. we never regret what we gained in the bargain. you get to go to weddings (you’ll love her, i promise) and carnivals and graduations and halloween parties and you will love, wholeheartedly, all of it. one by one each emotion will come crawling back and one day you’ll realize you laugh without faking it. you just laugh. you experience movie-like joy so easily. can you believe that people call you bubbly? it’s lovely, what you’re waiting for. we have access to art supplies and good food and ice cream (it’s diary free - while you’re young, eat as much you can, just trust me).

when you’re 22, a friend will tell you - tomorrow might be the best day of my life. people’s luck changes all the time. maybe tomorrow i will make friends with bill gates. maybe tomorrow i’ll rescue a tiger from a cage. maybe today i make a small change, and by three weeks from now, i’m running the city under a new name. 

the truth is that, at 27, you don’t live for tomorrow anymore. you don’t white-knuckle brace-for-it, hope-it-gets-better-somehow. you just wake up, and grab a coffee, and laugh about dumb things, and listen to your music too loudly. the world in 10 years will taste like honey.

It was Harry Styles’ birthday this week, which is why I am going to tell you about the time I met him, and what it taught me about a phenomenon called “gender contamination” in business.

This is what happened:

It was a few years ago at the press junket for Dunkirk. Now press junkets for big films like Dunkirk are rather strange affairs. In this case the studio sent my group of European journalists to view the film at the gigantic London Imax at seven o clock in the morning. And believe me, watching a WAR FILM at an IMAX first thing in the morning is INTENSE…

Then they drove us off to one of the fancier London hotels.

At a press junket you are normally put in a hotel room where you sit with a few other journalists and wait for the different cast members and the director to come in for their individual interviews.

The room was a bit chilly and most of the female journalists started putting cardigans and coats on. If you are familiar with the work of Caroline Criado Perez (which you all should be) you know that air conditioning temperature is often set based on a formula developed around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year old man. This is usually too cold for the average woman.

Then Harry Styles came in.

He looked around the room and IMMEDIATELY noticed that the women looked cold and IMMEDIATELY asked if he could turn the heating up. He even got up and tried to do it himself (unsuccessfully). He was the only man that day who noticed.

I would argue that this little incident tells you A LOT about the commercial success of Harry Styles.

Why?

If it’s not too painful - let me take you back to the time when One Direction broke up. Some other members of the band (no names!) did everything they could to distance themselves from their boy band roots.

Not Styles.

When Rolling Stone asked him if he felt pressure to prove himself as a “serious musician” with “an older crowd”. He said:

“Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music— have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy?”

Then he pointed out (correctly) that The Beatles became successful thanks to hords of screaming teenage girls.

“You gonna tell me they are not serious?”

And this is the key: Harry Styles has made a career of not looking down on female preferences or things perceived as female. You might say: well who does that? Who looks down on things just because women and girls like it?

A LOT of people.

There is even a name for it. It is called “gender contamination”.

Research from Harvard Business School shows that loyal customers often get upset when a brand associated with men expands to include products perceived as feminine. Coca Cola couldn’t get American men to drink Diet Coke because women liked it. In the end they launched Coke Zero - in a (manly) black tin…

There’s a paper by Jill Avery that looks into the reactions when Porsche launched Porsche Cayenne, it was a SUV and therefore by many perceived as a car “for mums”. Would this “catering to female consumers” contaminate the whole Porsche brand?

It is not surprising that these sentiments exist. When people call my youngest daughter a “tomboy” it’s a compliment. Hell, it’s basically a promotion! Congratulations you are almost a boy!

It’s the things we perceive as “feminine” that we look down upon.

But Harry Styles has always wanted us to know that he doesn’t. He is the first man to pose solo on the cover of American Vogue.

And he did it wearing a dress.

Is there a more OBVIOUS way to say: “Hey, I am a man who does not fear my brand being “contaminated” with things perceived as feminine?!”

And when it comes to business and consumption he is right: the bigger story is how things first liked by women and girls have taken over the world. Everything from The Beatles to Star Trek (women created the first Star Trek fandom). And as you probably know Porsche ended up selling a lot of those Cayennes…

Women influence 80 percent of all consumer decisions in the economy. It’s frankly irrational to pay as little attention as we do to their preferences - whether that’s for warmer rooms or pop stars from Cheshire with great hair.

Happy Thursday!

I want to write you a poem for your birthday but I have to wait until I’m feeling softer and less hungry and I can tell you that you’re like a garden or the right hand of a piano melody

Today I can only tell you that you taste like a mouthful of river water, and that you feel like the scraped knee I got from the rocky bottom

Your birthday poem will be about the baby birds you nursed all night until you were aching with love and exhaustion

But this poem is about what our friend said when we found the hatchlings half dead in the chimney

That her parents taught her that in the world there was good, there was evil, and there was wild

If I would love you then I would love you wild

Frenzied

Thighs trembling and slick with black oil, with black ink

Love down to your marrow

Some days you feel like something stuck in my teeth (you love to write about teeth)

And I hate that I can smell when you’ve been in a room

A shiver an ache but an ache not in my head but my stomach like hunger: I’m only myself when I’m wanting

Everything they write about you is also about me and also about you

I get nasty when you insist on being soft I can see that you aren’t all soft that’s for your birthday poem

I don’t want to be holy I don’t want to be tender unless it’s tender like the flesh that you sink your wolf teeth into

For your birthday poem maybe I will file those canines down but in this poem I want a bloody lip

A dream I have not had but would like to:

You a princess with a blighted heart and me your gladiator

Sent into the ring to fight your demons in mismatched combat

I’ve never felt more alive than when they’re snarling and circling and I’m bracing myself for the first strike, spear and shield ready

Except for maybe I’ll feel more alive when you dance into the ring kicking up dust

Cut through the numb silence of the spectating crowd

And hold me covered in sweat and iron and demon blood