Percentage of Americans who were paid to babysit as teenagers: 56
Who say they would trust a teenager to babysit today: 11
Numbers from the June issue of Harper's magazine. As phrased it's not clear to me whether the 11% is of Americans or of Americans who babysat as teenagers. In either case the discrepancy is striking.
A radar tower stands alone in northeast Oklahoma City, surrounded by a green field. It is one hundred feet tall and topped with a smooth, white orb. Hidden inside the orb, an antenna rotates while pulsing electromagnetic waves into the distance, waiting for a faint bounce to arrive back in the dish. It is not quite an all-seeing eye. The tower can identify hail, rain drops, a cloud of cicadas, the spiraling debris in tornadic winds from more than one hundred miles away.[On July 6, 2025] At 9:35 pm, a bearded man approached the radar tower and began to climb the chain-link fence around it. As he reached the top bar, the bearded man paused to rock back and forth and lean his head back, yelling into the night sky some unheard complaint. He gazed around and the lens of a security camera caught his face, retinas glowing back in the dark.On the other side of the fence, he got to work. With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. It is unclear whether he understood that destroying cameras would not destroy the images they had captured of him. On a bicycle, he disappeared back into the night...The following day, Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who is the leader of a militia named Veterans on Patrol, contacted media outlets and the Oklahoma City Police Department to take credit for the incident. He claimed that [Anthony Tyler] Mitchell was one of his followers, taking the direct action that Meyer had been threatening for months. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are “directed energy weapons” that the military have “pointed at the American people.” Meyer claimed that Veterans on Patrol would not stop at disabling one radar tower, that they had plans for taking down at least a dozen more.In his statements to reporters at the time, Meyer insisted that his crusade was a divine one. The weather was being modified, there were powers out there that could control it, and this was against God.“When the military plays God with the weather, they’re mocking our Heavenly Father,” he said.
"The "ventilator" cancel (ventilatorstämpel) featured a specialized postmark wheel with built-in, fan-like rotating blades. When the postal clerk pressed the device onto a letter, the wheel spun and physically cut or punctured small, geometric slits directly into the paper fibers of the stamp. If anyone tried to steam or peel the stamp off the envelope to reuse it, the stamp would tear apart along those slits. Because the security incisions resembled the radial slats of an air vent or ventilation fan, philatelists nicknamed it the "ventilator" cancel. Similar mechanical safety trials from that era included the bikupestämpel ("beehive" cancel) and the sågtandsstämpel ("saw-tooth" cancel)."
A representative for the U.S. Postal Service was unwilling to discuss current sanitization protocols. But the agency’s website reports that the only mail items receiving treatment are letters and parcels sent to ZIP codes beginning in 202, 203, 204 and 205, which serve federal government agencies in Washington, D.C. In a process that began shortly after the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Postal Service sends mail destined for those ZIP codes to New Jersey, where they are put on a conveyor belt and passed under a high-energy beam of ionizing radiation that kills bacteria and viruses. The letters and packages are then “aired out” for a while, before being forwarded to their destinations. The paper is left slightly faded and somewhat crispy, but sterile.Should mail irradiation be extended beyond these exclusive ZIP codes, to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus? On CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned that SARS-CoV-2 could potentially be transmitted by contaminated objects. “This is a sticky virus,” he said. The structure of the coronavirus’s protective envelope helps it bond tightly to certain surfaces: skin in particular, as well as fabric and wood, but also plastic and steel...David Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, noted that the surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, along with the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, has “indicated that there is currently no evidence that COVID-19 is being spread through the mail.”..Then again, contact transmission is notoriously difficult to study and document...
Reposted from 2020 to accompany a newer and related post.
"A passenger was removed from a Breeze Airways flight that traveled from New York to Florida after allegedly taking snacks from the beverage cart without paying, airline officials said...
Breeze sells a variety of snacks on board, including $5 options such as gummies, potato chips and popcorn, as well as $10 premium items including ramen noodles and cheese trays.
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. . . All they do is show you’ve been to college. "(Kurt Vonnegut)"I suppose this is a trivial matter but I do want to object to the maddening fuss-fidget punctuation which one of your editors is attempting to impose on my story. I said it before but I’ll say it again, that unless necessary for clarity of meaning I would prefer a minimum of goddamn commas, hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks and fucking (most obscene of all punctuation marks) semi-colons. I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript" (Edward Abbey) [In reference to The Monkey Wrench Gang and preserved in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast]"With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say I have a great respect for the semi-colon; it’s a useful little chap." (Abraham Lincoln)"I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”" (Ursula LeGuin) [from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination]
Semmicolon tattoos explained [2014]
"Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and older.The US defense secretary unveiled plans for a new screening program for testosterone deficiency among troops that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels” to perform at their optimal conditions in a video posted to X...“Warfighters” aged 30 and above will undergo annual tests as part of their health assessments, while those under 30 can choose to opt in, Hegseth said. Treatment, including testosterone replacement therapy, is voluntary and aimed at “restoring and optimizing” natural capabilities...Hegseth is not the first member of the Trump administration to address the so-called “crisis” of low testosterone, or “low T”. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the 72-year-old health secretary, has spoken about injecting testosterone as part of his personal “anti-ageing regimen”. In October, he warned, without evidence, that today’s American teenagers have “50% of the testosterone of a 65-year-old man”.Testosterone, and concerns about a shortage thereof, has become a political fixation on the right. Alternative media commentators such as Tucker Carlson have decried a crisis of masculinity in films such as The End of Men, while influencers promote “T-maxxing” and direct-to-consumer testosterone injections...According to research published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, young men are being aggressively targeted online by influencers and wellness companies promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man”, despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most people in this age group.
Sima* is 18, but has already given birth four times. Her youngest is a newborn, the eldest is four. Sitting with her children in their mud-brick room in Badghis province, Sima says: “After the Taliban entered the country, I had just finished the sixth grade and was supposed to start the seventh. But two months later, my father pressured me immensely to marry my cousin. After being beaten by my father several times, I was forced to accept.”...Interviews with workers at one public hospital in northern Afghanistan revealed that 42 underage girls gave birth in the first five months of this year. Six were in their second pregnancy. Five had ectopic pregnancies – a leading cause of maternal deaths – and 18 had caesarean sections. Two died, though their babies survived...They are victims of a growing trend toward child marriage, driven by Taliban policies legalising the practice and forcing girls out of school, combined with a deepening humanitarian crisis in which families are forced to sell their daughters to pay debts or buy food...Some families falsely believe the younger the mother, the healthier and smarter the child. Mothers who are still children themselves often haven’t completed their physical or psychological growth and face higher risk of severe bleeding, anaemia, miscarriage, obstructed labour and premature birth, along with a greater likelihood of a low-weight or unhealthy infant...Shabnam says families often resist caesarean section, believing they limit future pregnancies. Two young mothers in her care recently died in childbirth because their husbands refused to permit one...The other three families interviewed for this report, all in western Afghanistan, say their daughters had been used to settle debts – money paid in advance, the daughters to be handed over later. Three of the girls are still under 10, unaware of the future that has been planned for them...“When she turns eight, they will take her from us,” says Golnar. “They gave 100,000 afghani upfront, and they will give another 100,000 after they take the girl from me. We gave it directly to the creditors for the debts.” She worries about her granddaughter’s future, remembering girls sold years ago in her neighbourhood: “They have no future. Whether they leave us to burn in a fire or face anything else, we will not know.”
