Tag Archives: offbeat

Quick Reads: "The Dylanologists" by David Kinney

Mother Jones

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The Dylanologists

By David Kinney

SIMON & SCHUSTER

It seems like everybody and their dog has a book about Bob Dylan, but The Dylanologists turns the spotlight on his most obsessive fans instead. Journalist David Kinney takes us into a world of zealous collectors who will snap up anything the great man has touched, nerds who obsessively trade and catalog bootleg recordings, and code breakers who pore over every quote and lyric for meaning. We learn about the travails of dedicating one’s life to an inaccessible hero and the emotional toll of having that hero regularly reinvent our favorite parts of himself. Through it all runs a tension between the Dylanologist’s compulsion to understand the “real” Bob and the artist’s steadfast desire to remain an enigma.

This review originally appeared in our May/June 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "The Dylanologists" by David Kinney

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Unless You Can Do It Blindfolded, Please STFU

Mother Jones

I’ve long suspected this, but now we have Scientific Proof™. Professional violinists who insist that there’s nothing like a Strad can’t even tell them apart from modern instruments:

In this study, 10 renowned soloists each blind-tested six Old Italian violins (including five by Stradivari) and six new during two 75-min sessions—the first in a rehearsal room, the second in a 300-seat concert hall. When asked to choose a violin to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour, 6 of the 10 soloists chose a new instrument….On average, soloists rated their favorite new violins more highly than their favorite old for playability, articulation, and projection, and at least equal to old in terms of timbre. Soloists failed to distinguish new from old at better than chance levels.

Wine snobs can barely distinguish red from white when they’re blindfolded. Pro violinists can’t pick out a Strad from a decent modern violin. Art aficionados are routinely taken in by fakes even when they’re allowed to investigate them from inches away. The examples of this kind of thing are endless.

So am I skeptical when you claim your $90,000 turntable is really and truly light years better than some mere $2,000 POS? Yes I am. Am I skeptical when you claim you can distinguish Beluga caviar from Sterlet? Yes I am. Hell, I’m not even sure you can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. If you can do it blindfolded, then I’ll believe you. Until then, don’t even bother me with this nonsense.

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Unless You Can Do It Blindfolded, Please STFU

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Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

Mother Jones

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This morning, a few dozen housing and inequality activists from Heart of the City surrounded a Google shuttle at 24th and Valencia Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. The purpose: to draw attention to a proposed tax hike on San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni) public transportation system and to get the Bay Area’s technology companies to pay more for using public bus stops to pick up shuttle riders. It was the latest in a series of attempts to raise awareness about the tech industry and its effect on the city. What followed was a unique bit of performance theatre that might just be the most San Francisco protest ever.

As an April Fool’s day parody, protesters announced that Google would unveil a “Gmuni” program. They handed out fake bus passes to bystanders, set up a microphone for a Gmuni spokesperson, and surrounded the Google bus with a dancing team of colorful acrobats—one dressed as a Google surveillance camera on stilts, while six others in futuristic clown costumes toted yoga balls emblazoned with a logo fashioned from the search engine’s omnipresent typography.

Clad in a pinstripe suit and fake Google Glass, Judith Hart, the acting President of Gmuni, took over the loudspeaker.

“The Gmuni program is here today to offer free privatized bus service to the citizens of San Francisco. The Muni program is in decline because of underfunding. They’ve been cutting lines. We thought, you know what, let’s try a pilot program and see if we can use our customary bus service to go ahead and provide service to all the citizens of San Francisco.”

After a round of cheering, she added:

“Everyone in the entire Mission—in the quad, really—should be able to get on the bus with one of these passes. As you can see,” she announced, pointing to a stranded bus, “the Muni is not adequate enough to stop at their own stop—the Google bus got here first, so we’re just trying to let people on.”

The crowd then jokingly asked questions about the program, “Excuse me, will there be regular coffee or gourmet coffee?” “Gourmet coffee, absolutely–it’s all Blue Bottle.” “Will there be yoga?” “Will there be yoga on the bus? Currently, there is no plan for on-bus yoga practice; however, we have been looking into a development study about what we can do with the luggage compartment.”

Throughout Hart’s speech, several people tried to board the real Google bus with their fake passes, but were quickly stopped by the driver and police. After about a 20 minute delay, the police pushed back protestors far enough to allow the bus to roll along its way.

Following the speech, organizer Amanda Ream dropped the tongue-in-cheek circus act to explain the move. This afternoon, the Board of Supervisors are considering a series of transportation changes, including a Muni fare hike and a proposal to generate $1.5 million by charging tech companies $1 a day per stop. Ream and the other activists would like tech companies to pay more. “While we appreciate the proposal and that Google funded the free Muni for Youth program, we want to see that the tech industry in San Francisco pays their fair share and actually pays taxes so the people of San Francisco can fund Muni.”

Deepa Varma, a housing rights attorney and spokesperson for the protest, elaborated. “Today, there are hearings about Muni increasing their fares and that’s happening at a time when wages aren’t going up for most people in the city, but they’re going up for the people riding the free buses. To pay even more for transportation to just get to and from work is not viable and it’s not fair.” As a result, she says, many people are being displaced.

She went on to explain that the Google bus is largely a symbolic stand-in for issues of gentrification and fare hikes, and that the protests aren’t directed at employees of Google or any other tech giant. “It’s absolutely not a housing activist against tech worker dynamic. It looks like that right now, but it’s more about trying to draw attention to the fact there is this disparity in terms of how people are treated and in terms of what people have access to at city hall.”

Ream agrees, “We want to stop the gentrification, and the displacement, and the Ellis Act. We believe that all these issues are tied together. The tech industry has an opportunity to show real leadership and be a good neighbor and make it possible by paying taxes for Muni to actually be affordable and accessible to people all year round—not just with their gift to the city.”

According to polling by EMC Research on behalf of the Bay Area Council, San Franciscans are generally positive about tech buses, although 48% of those surveyed do believe employee shuttle buses are contributing to gentrification and 38% think they’re causing the growing gap between rich and poor.

For more on the protest, our friends at Mission Local have a great video of the demonstration here.

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Google Bus Protest the Most San Francisco Thing Ever

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WATCH: San Francisco Gentrification, Explained Fiore Cartoon

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: San Francisco Gentrification, Explained Fiore Cartoon

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Barbie Designer: If We Made Her Look Normal, Her Clothes Wouldn’t Fit

Mother Jones

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By now, it’s well known that Barbie’s body isn’t exactly realistic. If the famous doll were human, her waist would be just 16 inches around—half the size of the average American woman’s. She hasn’t always been this way; in fact, before 1997, Barbie was even less realistic.

In an interview with Fast Company Design, Kim Culmone, vice president of design for the Barbie doll, spoke candidly about why the doll remains so proportionally different from real women. Her argument essentially boiled down to: We can’t make Barbie more realistic because her clothes wouldn’t fit anymore.

Co.Design: What’s your stance on Barbie’s proportions?

Culmone: Barbie’s body was never designed to be realistic. She was designed for girls to easily dress and undress. And she’s had many bodies over the years, ones that are poseable, ones that are cut for princess cuts, ones that are more realistic…Primarily it’s for function for the little girl, for real life fabrics to be able to be turned and sewn, and have the outfit still fall property on her body.

Co.Design: So to get the clean lines of fashion at Barbie’s scale, you have to use totally unrealistic proportions?

Culmone: You do! Because if you’re going to take a fabric that’s made for us…her body has to be able to accommodate how the clothes will fit her.

In actuality, Barbie was created in 1959 so that the daughter of Ruth Handler, co-founder of the Mattel toy company, could imagine herself as an adult. In 1977, Handler told the New York Times she invented Barbie because “every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future.”

When asked whether she thinks girls compare their own bodies to Barbie’s, Culmone said no way.

Co.Design: You don’t think there’s a body comparison going on when you’re a girl?

Culmone: I don’t. Girls view the world completely differently than grown-ups do…Clearly, the influences for girls on those types of issues, whether it’s body image or anything else, it’s proven, it’s peers, moms, parents, it’s their social circles.

When they’re playing, they’re playing. It’s a princess-fairy-fashionista-doctor-astronaut, and that’s all one girl.

But a 2006 study in the American Psychological Association found that girls exposed to Barbie had lower self esteem and a desire to be thinner. Another 2006 study showed that young girls ate significantly more after playing with average-sized dolls.

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Barbie Designer: If We Made Her Look Normal, Her Clothes Wouldn’t Fit

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The West Wing’s Big Block of Cheese Day Ideas, Ranked

Mother Jones

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Wednesday is “Big Block of Cheese Day” at the Obama White House, an homage to two episodes of the television series The West Wing in which senior staffers were forced to spend a day dealing with constituents who don’t normally get an audience with the president. (That idea, in turn, was inspired by an enormous block of cheese housed in the Andrew Jackson White House.) The implication of the episodes is that the people who want to talk about these issues are kind of crazy, but a Mother Jones analysis of the projects presented to Sam Seaborn et al. reveals more nuance. On further examination, the dismissive tone with which Big Block of Cheese Day activists were greeted (or embraced) says more about the smallness of the Bartlet administration’s aides than it does about the issues at hand.

Here is the official Mother Jones ranking of Big Block of Cheese Day ideas, from best to worst:

Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Society: It’s never fully explained what the Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Society wants, but we can probably guess. According to National Geographic, the Kemp’s ridley is “the world’s most endangered sea turtle” and according to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, there are somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 nesting females left. Their greatest threat is shrimp trawlers, which snare the tiny turtles in their nets. But the turtles are also vulnerable to man-made disaster. Most of the 156 turtles that died as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were Kemp’s Ridleys, because the spill interfered with the creatures’ nesting habitat. It’s a tragedy that these turtles can only get the government’s attention on “total crackpot day.”

Wolf highway: The plan: “Eighteen hundred miles from Yellowstone to the Yukon Territory complete with highway overpasses and no cattle grazing.” Badass! The price: “With contributions and corporate sponsorship, the cost of the taxpayer is only 900 million dollars.” Damn. We have no idea why it costs that much, though, and it seems like something that can be scaled down. Montana and Washington state have already built natural bridges to help animals cross highways at a considerably cheaper rate.

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The West Wing’s Big Block of Cheese Day Ideas, Ranked

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Sochi’s "Pizzly Bear": Meet Halfpipe Freeskiing Star Maddie Bowman

Mother Jones

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In the lead up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, ski jumping has taken center stage—it’s the first year women will be allowed to compete, a milestone the New York Times Magazine recently explored at length. But let’s not forget another extreme sport premiering in Sochi this year. That would be women’s (and men’s) free skiing, which encompasses halfpipe (hair-raising tricks done off the edge of an icy, steep-walled half cylinder), slopestyle (jumping off rails and obstacles), and ski cross (in which four skiers barrel simultaneously through a downhill obstacle course).

Maddie Bowman, 19, is a rising star in this new Olympic realm, one that seems to scream skate park more than professional arena. A favorite in the halfpipe, Bowman cut her teeth on the steep terrain of North Lake Tahoe. Even though thousands of viewers will be watching the sport for the first time in February, Bowman doesn’t really care if they see her kind as a bunch of park rats: “I think we want people to see that side of us—just being kids goofing off. That’s what we do. That’s why we love what we do. That’s how we’ve gotten so far in skiing.”

Okay, but what does it take to rule the halfpipe? Here’s Bowman in her own words.

On her sport’s spirit animal: It’s like a polar bear-grizzly bear mix—a pizzly! As the ice is melting, the polar bears are migrating south into grizzly territory and they’re mating, and they have this baby that’s a hybrid. So two hybrid pizzlies could make a baby pizzly. It’s a new species, and it’s super badass.

On whether freeskiing is male-dominated: I don’t think we think about it that way. We love skiing with the guys; they’re our friends. I grew up always skiing with boys. We’re out there trying to do the same things and push ourselves. We’re definitely all in this together.

On breaking with traditions: I was a racer before, but it felt a little too serious—a little too strict. I just kind of fell in love with the whole idea of skiing around with your friends and having fun, trying new things, and being creative. It allowed for a lot more freedom.

On mastering a trick: The first time I ever did a “left nine,”—it’s two and a half spins, and I’m spinning down the wall, rotating to the left—I was so excited I completely forgot the rest of my run; I just sort of made it up.

On anxious parents: My parents are both ski race people, so when I first started switching over, they were a little resistant, but then they came and skied with us and realized we think about things before we jump off of stuff. They definitely get nervous. You can’t have my mom video a run at all because it’s so shaky—she always misses it!

On falling smart: Most skiers can think pretty quickly on our feet—or off our feet if we’re falling, and hopefully fall the right way. We like to push the limits and that’s what makes our sport fun—pushing those limits and getting that adrenaline going. Sometimes the limits push back. It’s always a rude awakening when that happens.

On those rude awakenings: Concussions are something everyone worries about. If I hit my head, I always make sure to get a new helmet and stuff like that. But you can’t be out there worrying about getting hurt, or else you’re more likely to get hurt.

Alternative paths: If I got hurt, knock on wood, I don’t know what I would do. Maybe I’d actually be a real college student.

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Sochi’s "Pizzly Bear": Meet Halfpipe Freeskiing Star Maddie Bowman

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Why Does the NYT Dialect Map Think I Come From Stockton?

Mother Jones

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Everyone’s favorite timewaster of the past couple of days has been the New York Times’ online dialect map. Answer 25 questions and it will tell you where you grew up. My results were disappointingly vague. Lots of people reported that the app practically located the city block they came from, but in my case it didn’t even get the right part of the state. I’ve spent my entire life within a radius of about 20 miles centered on Orange County, but the app thinks I come from northern California:

I had trouble with several of the questions. The freeway/highway distinction had a couple of answers that seemed OK. I refer to large vehicles on highways as big rigs, trucks, and semis fairly interchangeably. I’m fairly agnostic between yard sale and garage sale, as well as between drinking fountain and water fountain. But I took the test several times to see if answering these few questions differently made a difference, and it didn’t. I kept coming up as a northern Californian.

So I dug in further. Which question was IDing me wrong? After plowing through the test about a dozen times giving different answers to one or two questions at a time, I finally figured it out. It was this one: “What do you call the small road parallel to the highway?” I think of this as a frontage road, but when I switched to service road, the app pegged me with eerie precision:

So what’s going on? The truth is that here in Orange County we don’t really have roads like this, so I don’t call them anything. The only time I see them is when I’m traveling, usually in a car going north on I-5. Once you get up into the San Joaquin Valley, there are signs for these roads all over the place, and they’re always called frontage roads. Since that’s the only exposure I have to them, I call them frontage roads and thus peg myself as a northern Californian.

I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than just this, but since the test rotates questions it’s hard to consistently hold every variable constant but one in order to get clean results. As near as I can tell, frontage road reliably places me north of Bakersfield, but service road occasionally does too depending on how I answer some of the other questions. Most of the time, though, service road plus my natural answers to everything else places me solidly in Southern California.

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Why Does the NYT Dialect Map Think I Come From Stockton?

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What Would Happen If We Really Went to War Against Christmas?

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard about the “War on Christmas,” a cynical but largely successful attempt by grown men and women to drive up cable news ratings and sell terrible books. But what about an actual war on Christmas? If President Barack Obama wanted to take down Santa Claus*, how would he do it? And would it work? A classified report obtained by Mother Jones sheds new light on the Department of Defense’s plans. Take a look:

Overwhelming force: On paper, it looks possible. The United States has 16,000 military personnel in Alaska, mostly at major Air Force bases outside Anchorage and Fairbanks (home to the 354th fighter wing). A military airstrip at Barrow, the country’s northernmost point, could also be used a forward operating base, as could Thule Air Base in northwest Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The Navy and Air Force regularly conduct carrier group exercises in the Gulf of Alaska; so they’re not exactly coming in cold.

But Santa’s best defense is that the North Pole is—spoiler—really cold. The US Navy doesn’t have any icebreakers, and the Coast Guard only has two, both of which are research vessels. (An amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act would have commissioned four new icebreakers, but that’s still pending congressional approval.) And unlike the Russians and the Finns, the United States doesn’t have any ground units specifically trained to handle polar climates.

Nor is Santa himself a pushover. Some images of the old man depict him with a Kalashnikov. Elsewhere, he’s armed with a sword. Futurama‘s Robot Santa has some sort of laser blaster. In Scrooged, Santa is able to repel a terrorist attack with an M16A2; his elves carry M60 machine guns. Oh, and about those elves. According to NorthPole.com, “There are an unlimited number of elves because it takes a lot of help to keep the northpole maintained and the presents made every year” sic. Even if an expeditionary force succeeds in taking the workshop, the elves’ sheer numbers make the possibility of a post-invasion insurgency likely. And then there’s Santa’s sidekick Krampus, a massive goat-demon who according to Germanic legend, captures his enemies in a bathtub, eats them, and transports them to hell. How do you stab the devil in the back? No, really—it’s our only hope.

Leo/Shutterstock

Missile intercept: Targeting Santa while he’s on his rounds sounds good in theory. NORAD already purports to track Santa’s progress on its website, owing to a typo in a 1955 Sears advertisement that accidentally broadcasted a secret government phone line to the general public. And the NSA is well-equipped to spy on Santa’s kingdom. Arctic Fiber, a Canadian company, is laying a new fiber-optic cable underneath the North Pole that will link Tokyo and London, to get a leg up on high-frequency stock market trading, but it could also give the US government’s super-secret (until recently) data-collection programs the lowdown on what’s going on at the workshop.

But the United States has never successfully shot down a ballistic missile, which doesn’t inspire confidence in its chances at taking down Santa, whose packed schedule requires him to travel at pace somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed. Norwegian physicist Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaar argues that Claus is equipped with an ion shield, which prevents him from being torn apart by gravitational forces and protects him from being incinerated (by fireplaces, atmospheric reentry, or missiles). Also, he travels between dimensions.

Special ops: Why not? Let us count the ways: “I cannot think of too many worse environments to infiltrate and then exfiltrate from than the North Pole,” says Andrew Exum, a former special adviser for Middle East policy at the Department of Defense who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I have no idea how many elves would remain loyal to Santa Claus, but given the open terrain, you would probably want to surround Santa’s workshop with at least a company of Army Rangers before sending in a team from one of our special missions units to capture or kill Santa himself. That’s 150 to 200 men right there that would have to make their way to one of the most remote locations on Earth, carry out a very difficult mission in low visibility and freezing temperatures, and then march back out. As much as I love and admire our special operations forces, that’s a huge ask.”

Drones: There’s nothing to stop the United States from sending a few Predator drones over the North Pole and targeting Claus’ infrastructure—the workshop, the reindeer runway, the gingerbread valley. But that would trigger an international incident with Russia, which in 2007 claimed the pole falls on its continental shelf and is therefore sovereign territory. Canada recently made the same claim (invoking Santa in the process), although the evidence was dubious. The United States could claim the North Pole for itself too, but only if the Senate gets around to ratifying the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. (Also, holy collateral damage, Batman!)

Andre Adams/Shutterstock

The long game: Probably our best shot. Santa’s workshop is a political powder keg just waiting for a spark. With only reindeer milk, fish, and the odd seal readily available in the harsh Arctic landscape, the North Pole has to import eggs, dairy, and sprinkles to sustain its inhabitants’ principal diet of Christmas cookies. Elves also consume enormous quantities of maple syrup, which must be imported from the United States or Canada by way of a cartel. All that makes the North Pole uniquely vulnerable to tough international sanctions and a coordinated push for regime change—by aiding militant factions if necessary.

The North Pole is also vulnerable to climate change, putting an already fragile environment in flux. Literally. The North Pole is now shifting because melting glaciers are affecting Earth’s mass. And Santa’s workshop sits above potentially lucrative deposits of oil and gas that energy companies want to get their hands on ASAP. It’s only a matter of time before the locals face displacement in the face of humanity’s unceasing thirst for material wealth.

Under the brutal Claus regime, which exiles its radicals to the Island of Misfit Toys, the elite few have grown fat on the labor of the many. How long can Santa’s elves endure such pressures before they begin to question the leader they’ve followed blindly for so long? How long before the workers seize the means of production?

The problem with waiting for an elvish uprising, Exum says, is that it might take a while—even if they get assistance from the Green Berets. “I have no idea how combat-ready these elves are. They could be like the elves in the Lord of the Rings, in which case they shouldn’t need much training, or they could be like those Keebler elves, in which case I can’t imagine they have any military training or experience. So I’m afraid Christmas is likely to go on this year as planned in all its gaudy commercial excess.”

Just kidding, kids. Santa is your parents.

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What Would Happen If We Really Went to War Against Christmas?

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How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

What do Somali pirates have to do with climate change?

Not much, except that the threat of the machine-gun slinging bandits has ended critical oceanographic research on the seabed of the Indian Ocean—research that is crucial to our understanding of how and when, exactly, the world’s largest arid region dried out. Climate investigations off the Horn of Africa were suspended just weeks before September 11, 2001, after a scientific vessel, the Maurice Ewing, was attacked with rocket propelled grenades 18 nautical miles off the Somali coast.

But, amazingly, one final research vessel somehow passed through a phalanx of small-craft pirate boats in the Gulf of Aden unscathed.

“It was like the wild west out there,” Columbia University marine geologist Peter B. deMenocal told me in a phone interview. They were getting frequent emergency faxes saying that ships all around them were being attacked. But their vessel was seemingly invisible to the pirates, whose launches they could clearly see.

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How Somali Pirates Almost (but Not Quite) Halted Vital Climate Change Research

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