Everyone is talking about the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by a senior official in the White House—and by “everyone,” of course, I mean journalists on Twitter (that’s straight from Merriam-Webster’s by the way). It is a surprise. When was the last time a member of the White House staff revealed publicly that he or she was “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [the President’s] agenda and his worst inclinations”? But it won’t change anything—there will be no impeachment proceedings started despite claims that the op-ed proves that President Trump is unfit for the office and should be removed—and it will be entirely forgotten within a month. Still, it’s fun to speculate about who wrote it.
Elsewhere in publishing: The Atlantic launches a new “Ideas” section. It will be edited by Yoni Appelbaum. Let’s hope it’ll be more interesting than BuzzFeed’s abortive vertical by the same name and longer lasting than the Washington Post’s short-lived but always interesting “In Theory” blog.
Also, The Outline, an online magazine that was launched in December 2016 with the aspiration of becoming one of the “touchstone” media companies of the 21st century, just laid off its two remaining staff writers and another four people, reducing the total number of employees to 18. Cale Guthrie Weissman writes in Fast Company that “the company raised $5.15 million. Perhaps all that money went to designing the website.” Ouch.
In other news: Did Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi belong to an English nobleman who followed Charles I to the scaffold in 1649?
Dorothy’s stolen ruby slippers have been found as a result of an FBI sting. (Well, technically, they are the Wicked Witch of East’s ruby slippers, which Dorothy herself stole, but let’s not ruin a perfectly good headline.)
The return of French electro-pop: “In the hazy late-July sun, festival-goers at Biarritz en été meandered to the main stage. Their ankles were flecked with mud; their stomachs were full of Toulousian fare. But the hypnotic melodies and beats of ‘Aqualand’ by Polo & Pan, a French electronic duo, proved compelling: transfixed and transported to imaginary lands, the audience swayed with ease.”
Google wants to get rid of the URL. The problem is how? “‘People have a really hard time understanding URLs,’ says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome’s engineering manager. ‘They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity.’ If you’re having a tough time thinking of what could possibly be used in place of URLs, you’re not alone.”
Maybe we should get rid of Google. Alan Jacobs reviews Adam Fisher’s oral history of Big Tech, Valley of Genius: “I am not especially fond of Marxist cultural critique, but this kind of thing begs for it. Of course the stories were never about money! Of course the people who have become wealthy beyond the imaginings of mere mortals and are rapidly transforming the whole city of San Francisco into a playground for themselves and their fellow megarich think of themselves as dragon slayers instead of Daddy Warbuckses in antimicrobial T-shirts and $300 jeans! Such delusions are among the first and most lasting symptoms of affluenza. And since this is an oral history, told wholly by participants, the reader should not be surprised to find the gee-whiz triumphalism of Fisher’s preface echoed throughout the book.”
Houman Barekat reminds us of a charming and wise 19th-century wrestling memoir: “Towards the end of the book we find Litt on the touchline of the school sports field, watching his sons playing football and reflecting on the character-forming function of organized sports. He poses, but does not presume to answer, one of the defining questions of our time: ‘What do we do with all our young men? How can we allow them to fight without destroying themselves and also, perhaps, us?’”
Essay of the Day:
In Wired, Lauren Goode visits Kelly Slater’s artificial wave pool in the middle of the California desert:
“The Kelly Slater Wave Co. purchased the 20-acre property in Lemoore in 2014. According to a report in Bloomberg, Slater chose Lemoore, a small city with a population of around 25,000, primarily because it was inexpensive. The property cost around $575,000, roughly half the price of a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco. The fact that two lakes already existed on the property also made it appealing. But if Slater was hoping for discretion when he chose Lemoore, which is located more than 100 miles from the California coastline, that part didn’t quite pan out: The internet has been in a frenzy about this man-made wave since Slater first started filing patent applications.
“By 2015 the first version of the wave pool was operational. It is not open to the public for surfing, and may never be—although if you’re a Slater buddy, like Eddie Vedder or Tony Hawk, or a philanthropic organization, or an LA-based venture capitalist or tech executive with deep pockets, you can arrange an outing there.
* * *
“In 2017, after an extensive overhaul, Surf Ranch 2.0 launched. Wave pool overhauls aren’t a matter of just tweaking the software or changing the location of a button. It means draining the entire lagoon, changing the contour of the bottom, fixing large pieces of equipment. It’s a massive, ongoing construction project. The Surf Ranch as it exists now, the 2.1 version, would look pretty darn good to any outsider; and yet it’s still considered a prototype.
“This prototype is a giant, rectangular, freshwater lagoon, 700 yards long. Directly next to the lagoon is another freshwater lake, one that is still used for wakeboarding and paddleboarding. The area is surrounded by dozens of trees, some of them planted to create a buffer for wind, since wind affects the formation of the wave. This cluster of conspicuous trees is the only thing that gives the place away as you’re driving down Jackson Avenue in Lemoore.”
Photos: Typhoon Jebi in Japan
Poem: George David Clark, “Ultrasound”
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