William Grimes, writing for The New York Times:

William Friedkin, a filmmaker whose gritty, visceral style and fascination with characters on the edge helped make “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” two of the biggest box-office hits of the 1970s, died on Monday at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 87.

The cause was heart failure and pneumonia, said his wife, Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. His death came just weeks before the release of his most recent directorial effort, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” a movie based on the Herman Wouk play.

The Exorcist is still one of the scariest of film ever made. An absolute masterpiece.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M writing about climate change:

Let me give you an example of a tiny impact that I just heard about. My wife told me about a new group of members at her gym: active 70-ish-year-olds who used to go on walks around their neighborhood. Due to the unbearable heat in Texas, though, they joined a gym and now walk indoors on treadmills. This story embodies several aspects of climate impacts that everyone should understand.

First, this is an example of non-linear climate impacts. Although temperatures have been rising gradually over the last century, it was only recently that they crossed a critical threshold that made outdoor walks literally unbearable for these people.

Second, this is what adaptation to climate change looks like. Contrary to how it is typically portrayed by climate dismissives, adaptation is not free. These people are paying $50 per month for the gym membership that is an inferior replacement for something they used to get for free: an environment cool enough to walk in.

So these people are worse off financially and not getting as good of an experience as they used to. And they’re the lucky ones — they have the opportunity and resources to do this.

There’s also the non-monetary costs of adaptation. When it’s too hot to go outside during the day, you are a prisoner of air conditioning instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise. We’ve lost something valuable but difficult to quantify.

Classic example of the boiling-frog effect, humans are sailing unfazed into a dire-looking future of irreversible climate change.

Associate Professor Daniel Heath, Professor Andrea O’Connor and Hazem Alkazemi, writing for Pursuit - a University of Melbourne medical research site:

First we needed to create the shape, a kind of framework on which to grow the blood vessel layers. We did this by electrospinning a layer of polymer fibres onto a mandrel, which provides the tubular shape for the blood vessel graft.

Electrospinning is a technique that uses an electrical voltage to draw a polymer stream into thin fibres that mimic the protein structure of our native tissue, a bit like spinning wool onto a bobbin at the nano-scale.

However, this process results in fibres that are randomly oriented, when we need fibres aligned along the length, or axis, of the tube to promote axial alignment of the endothelial cells.

To align these fibres, we developed a simple freezing technique.

By placing the electrospun tube into a rigid mold partially filled with water and freezing it, we caused ice crystals to grow along the axis, which pushed the fibres into alignment.

We then grew endothelial cells on the tube to create the inner layer of the vessel – the endothelium. The cells spontaneously align with the fibres, generating a continuous, aligned endothelial cell layer like we see in native blood vessels.

This layer also provides appropriate mechanical properties, enables the graft to be sutured to native blood vessels and prevents rupture of the graft.

Next, we cast a soft hydrogel layer around the electrospun fibres. This hydrogel layer prevents leakage from our graft and also acts as a scaffold for smooth muscle cells.

We know that cells are very sensitive to the stiffness of their surroundings so we trialled hydrogels of varying stiffness.

Surprisingly, we observed that the softer gels allowed the vascular smooth muscle cells to rapidly and spontaneously align in a 3D ring structure, mimicking what is found in native blood vessels.

Well - I can look forward to getting all of my internal plumbing replaced for my 65th birthday…

Thursday on August 3rd, Apple Newsroom reports:

Today, Apple announced that Apple Card’s high-yield Savings account offered by Goldman Sachs has reached over $10 billion in deposits from users since launching in April. Savings enables Apple Card users to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent.

While the Apple savings account is convenient, a much better deal can be had in 6 month CDs from major banks.

TD Bank is currently offering a 5% 6 month CD. For a $1000 dollar account on Apple Card’s high-yield Savings account works out to $20.56 for six months vs a $1000 TD Bank 5% 6 month CD of $24.7. A gain of 20% over the course of 6 months with the CD account.

Apple Card’s high-yield Savings account is not the best way to optimize returns on your savings.

Robert Reich outlines five crises (wokness, trans panic, critical race theory, coach potatoes, goverment spening) the Republican have manufactured in order to deflect from their true agenda:

• concentration of wealth
• climate crises
• undermining of our democracy

After all, when you have nothing to offer while the current administration is hitting it out of the park in regards to the economy, job numbers, foreign policy and passing legislation to address all three of the mentioned issues, all you can do is scare and distract.

I’d like to think the vast majority of the American population will see through this come election time. Yes, I am an eternal optimist.

This video essay by Adam Kovacs on why European malls are doing better than their American counterparts. It’s not Amazon or the economy. Its urban planing.

Malls, hell, all commerce has to be an organic part of towns and cities. People should be able to get to them by means other than a car, and conveniently. Such integrated commercial spaces are far more resilient. If your commercial spaces aren’t resilient — if you just plop a big box outside the town — don’t be surprised when it goes bust in a few years. And then it’s bulldozed for the next thing to be put up for it to go bust the same way and then get bulldozed and then the next thing and the next and the next so on and so forth.

Everything you need to understand the secret behind how the most commercially successful director who has ever lived sells wonder. Spielberg gets why we go to movies.

A Washington DC grand jury indicted Donald Trump for “for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding” or put simply, trying to steal the 2020 presidential election.

Heather Cox Richardson in a language that everybody here can easily understand:

The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters' choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.

When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election.

You can read the full 45-page indictment, annotated by the NY Times here. The two sections that are really troubling are:

On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th.” Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

And:

Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant’s Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, “[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic. After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was not going to work.

It is pretty obvious that Donald Trump planned to seize power by force and then maintain that power through the mass murder of American citizens by their own military. The US needs to lock this traitor permanently behind bars if we are to be taken seriously as a functioning democracy that is governed by the rule of law.

In this video, the recorded vocals to ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ are almost fully isolated so you can really hear the clarity and emotion in that wonderful voice of hers.

The amazing part is that the song was recorded in one take - delivered with conviction and a longing for lost love. No overdubs, compression, auto-tune or any of the crutches that modern artists rely on. Very few artists today could match Sinéad O'Connor on raw talent.

Richard Buskin writing for Sound on Sound:

“I actually think the intensity of Sinéad’s performance came from the breakup of her latest relationship,” opines Chris Birkett, who co-produced and engineered the track as well as the accompanying, Grammy Award-winning album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which topped the Billboard 200 for six weeks and sold seven million copies worldwide. “She had been dating her manager, Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, who’s a really good guy and had been instrumental in getting her deal with Ensign Records. However, their relationship had gone pear-shaped and they were in the process of breaking up when we recorded ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, so that’s probably why she did such a good vocal. She came into the studio, did it in one take, double-tracked it straight away and it was perfect because she was totally into the song. It mirrored her situation.”

The complete befuddlement of Europeans on American life.

As Americans we promote obesity, eat cancer brownies, discourage poor people from having babies, have zero guaranteed paid maternity leave, drive our students into servitude with university debt, refuse to provide affordable health care, and are infatuated with guns and the proliferation of them.

But look on the bright side - we are happy, friendly, and optimistically blissful in our ignorance of how the rest of the world functions.

After covid vaccines were readily available in the US, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. You read that right. 43% higher excess death rate - the Republicans were literally a death cult.

Bill Chapel reporting for NPR:

In late 2021, an NPR analysis found that after May of that year — a timeframe that overlaps the vaccine availability cited in the new study — people in counties that voted strongly for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election were “nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19” as people in pro-Biden counties.

“An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat,” as Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told NPR.

Even before vaccines were widely accessible, researchers were working to quantify the > effects of vastly divergent COVID-19 policies across U.S. states.

A widely cited study from early 2021 found that in the early months of the pandemic’s official start date in March 2020, states with Republican governors saw lower COVID-19 case numbers and death rates than Democratic-led states. But the trend reversed around the middle of 2020, as Republican governors were less likely to institute controls such as stay-at-home orders and face mask requirements.

The Biden administration on Tuesday announced a proposal to force health insurers to cover mental health and addiction care as comprehensively as they cover treatment for physical health conditions.

Levy Facher writing for Stat:

The new proposal, which will soon be published as a joint proposed rule from the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, comes as cost concerns force countless Americans to go without much-needed mental health or addiction care.

One study cited by White House aides showed people with health insurance are more than twice as likely to seek out-of-network care for mental health conditions than for physical health conditions.

The new rule would attempt to crack down on some health insurers’ more subtle tactics, too, like offering lower rates to out-of-network mental health providers or imposing prior authorization requirements for mental health care at a higher rate than for most physical health services or procedures.

Beyond seeking more accountability from insurers, the rule also closes a loophole that currently allows health insurance plans offered by state or local governments to opt out of mental health parity requirements. The change could lead to more comprehensive coverage for roughly 90,000 government employees insured by those plans, according to Biden administration officials.

The Irish singer-songwriter has died at the age of 56. The cause and date of her death were not made public. The statement released by her family:

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.

Neda Ulaby and Anastasia Tsioulcas writing for NPR:

O'Connor came to the attention of U2’s guitarist The Edge, and she got herself signed to the Ensign/Chrysalis label. Her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, went double platinum in 1990, partly because of a hit love song written by Prince: “Nothing Compares 2 U.”

I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got was a distillation of O'Connor’s prayerful sense of music and her fury over social injustice. She rejected its four Grammy nominations as being too commercial — and, in her words, “for destroying the human race.” She was banned from a New Jersey arena when she refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for its lyrics glorifying bombs bursting in air.

O'Connor was best known for her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, went double platinum in 1990, partly because of a hit love song written by Prince: “Nothing Compares 2 U”. The video released to promote the single catapulted it to #1 in January of 1990.

Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar:

Really sorry to hear of the passing of Sinéad O'Connor. Her music was loved around the world and her talent was unmatched and beyond compare. Condolences to her family, her friends and all who loved her music. Ar dheis Dé go Raibh a hAnam.

Intersting post published a decade ago by Doc Pop:

The Remote Lounge was a high tech bar in NYC’s Bowery District from 10/2001 to 11/2007. The bar’s gimmick was that it was packed full of monitors and closed circuit television cameras. Each CCTV camera was mounted on a servo and could be controlled by anyone in the bar via any of the terminals throughout the bar. Each terminal had a joystick (for controlling a camera), a camera button (which would capture an image and upload it to the RemoteLounge.com), a next button (for switching to another camera), a chat button, and a land line phone. So you could cycle through the bar until you found someone sitting near a camera, then you could request to chat with them via the phone. Sometimes as you were watching a scene your camera would start to move and you’d realize someone else was watching and controlling the same camera that you were.

[…]

12 years later, it’s funny to think how this novelty bar in NYC would so closely mirror our modern experience. Just replace the always connected security cameras with smart phones and opt-in social media. Sometimes I’m shocked at how my experiences at the Remote Lounge would be recreated time and time again by following a hashtag on twitter, to a photo on instagram, to a small conversation online, and finally with meeting someone face to face… all over the course of ten or twenty minutes on my iPhone at a local bar.

Its only gotten more surreal.

Here are the links:

• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond.
• Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane.
• King: A Life by Jonathan Eig.
• Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.
• All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby.
• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.
• What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro.
• The Wager by David Grann.
• Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison.

The latest NPR studios’s Tiny Desk Concert celebrates 50 years of hip-hop with a performance by Cypress Hill.

While the term “pioneer” is used loosely in pop culture today, few terms describe Cypress Hill’s impact over the past three decades more adequately. They are the first Latino hip-hop group to achieve platinum and multi-platinum status. B Real, Sen and producer DJ Muggs crafted a sound in the ‘90s that stretched beyond regional boundaries. It was dark, psychedelic and at times directly addressed mental health before the topic was commonplace. Many dismissed the group as “stoner rappers,” yet the members were fervent advocates for the legalization of weed long before it came to fruition.

Still not a fan of hip-hop, but I did enjoy this if only as a historical account of a pioneering band.

Architect Michael Wyetzner for Architectural Digest runs us through why American diners look the way they do:

So let’s take a look at a typical American diner. So the outside has a shape that’s reminiscent of a train. In fact, that’s how diners got their name. They’re named after the dining car on a train.

Many of the design elements in a diner are based on the necessities of dining on a train in a railroad car, like booth seating and counter seating, and an open kitchen.

So I like these two photos because they show all the elements that go into the classic American diner. On the exterior, you have that stainless steel smooth curvature, you’ve got that Art Deco typography. And then on the interior you have the checkered floor, you have the booths, you have the globes, and you have the jukebox.

In the early part of the 20th century, trains were the dominant form of travel. If you look at some of the earliest diners, they were in fact, actual train cars that were placed permanently on the ground.

Tatum Hunter reporting for The Washington Post:

Three grown men against one printer wasn’t a fair fight. But Armando Islas and his friends didn’t care. The three gathered around a defunct HP printer, brandishing giant hammers and standing in the smashed-up remnants of dead electronics.

Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room, a basement unit where customers pay $120 or more to break stuff for 30 minutes. Smashing the printer would feel good, they said, like revenge on the shoddy campus printers that plagued them through the past six semesters of graduate school.

That sort of rage against the machine has spawned an entire industry. Across the United States, customers can book sessions at a smash rooms and pay anything from dozens to hundreds of dollars to smash dishes, furniture and — most of all — printers.

Who would ever think a scene from the cult Mike Judge movie “Office Space,” in which frustrated office workers take a printer to a field and smash it to pieces with baseball bats, could be turned into a lucrative business model known as smash rooms. Since 2016 or so, smash rooms have provided a space where regular people can live their “Office Space” fantasies.

Victoria Bouloubasis reporting for The Gaurdian:

In the launch event’s recap video on the company’s YouTube channel, men in kilts play bagpipes, and bikers slowly cruise a parade route. Fankhauser delivered a speech that becomes a voiceover to the tune of the national anthem. His remarks end with this signoff: “God bless this community, and God bless this great nation.”

Fankhauser’s nonspecific brand leans into what American studies professor Ben Railton refers to as mythic patriotism, which “creates and celebrates a mythologized, white supremacist vision of American history and identity”. Railton, author of Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, argues that such thinking led to the January 6 insurrection and the Trump-initiated 1776 Commission that targeted professors and other educators.

Railton said this ideology “very often has meant agreeing with that white-centered vision”. And “a lot of the time, that also defines someone who doesn’t agree with that vision, who is entirely outside of it and not a part of it. When I was looking at the [1776 Gastonia] website, it’s this undercurrent of, if one doesn’t share this perspective, then there’s not a place for you here.”

Bingo. Just look at their own official ad (in the YouTube video above) - notice that there is only a particular subset of Americans represented.

Enforced patriotism is not freedom. Its tyranny.

MeidasTouch Contributor Tennessee Brando recently went megaviral after handing truth to the Republicans and MAGA. We need more of this.