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Streaming Isn’t Everything, and Blu-Rays Are Back to Prove It

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Late last month, while most Black Friday shoppers were looking for deals on high-definition televisions or new computers, Zach Killebrew was searching for Ingmar Bergman. Killebrew, a 24-year-old software developer, is the creator and moderator of Boutique Blu-Ray, a subreddit for obsessive collectors of high-end (and often pricey) movies. They’re the sort of fans who post photos of their latest Blu-ray scores, document their growing collections, and eagerly share updates on new “boutique” releases, which range from obscure ’80s horror flicks like Maniac to the 30-disc Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema collection.

It was that hefty Bergman box (which lists for nearly $300) that had Killebrew up late the night before its release scouring websites, calling local stores, and even contemplating driving to a mall about an hour away from his home in Smithton, Illinois, just to secure his copy. He eventually landed one right before the collection’s first printing sold out.

For dedicated Blu-ray hunters, such victories are hard-won. To most others, though, the notion of agonizing over physical media in 2018 is completely baffling. “My friends are always are always kind of puzzled when I say, ‘I went Blu-ray shopping,’” says Killebrew. “They usually say, ‘Why don’t you stream it?’”

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Within the small but thriving community of Blu-ray enthusiasts, the answers to that question tend to vary. Some are drawn to Blu-ray because of the unsatisfying video quality of streaming films; for others, it’s the sheer joy of tactile pop-culture paraphernalia, as some small-label discs come with elaborate packaging and hours of extras. “Customers want to see these movies on their shelves,” says Jesse Nelson, owner of Diabolik, an online store that’s been trafficking in rare and specialty movies since 2003. “They want to post pictures of them on Instagram sorted by director or label: ‘Look at all these great titles I have.’”

But one of the main driving forces behind the Blu-ray renaissance is the simple fact that the mainstreamers—which include everyone from Netflix to Amazon Prime to Apple—all have sizable gaps in their movie libraries. Those limitations have become painfully clear in the last year, as some film lovers looked around and noticed that many of their favorite movies, whether vintage releases or even semi-recent blockbusters like True Lies, were nearly impossible to find in digital form.

That point was reinforced by the sudden closure of the ambitious and well-curated FilmStruck, which featured Warner Bros. classics and arthouse flicks from Criterion Collection. FilmStruck’s demise made clear just how ephemeral streaming is: If your favorites aren’t on your shelves, there’s a chance they could disappear on short notice. “There are movies that I want to watch, or share with others, and increasingly they’re not there when I try to find them on Amazon Prime or Hulu,” says Killebrew. “Having a physical copy is my back-up.”

Killebrew’s video collection, which he estimates includes about 300 titles, features everything from arthouse entries to more out-there genre films—evidence of just how expansive the so-called “boutique Blu-ray” market has become. Its biggest players include outfits like Scream Factory, which focuses on classic and next-wave horror; the decades-spanning Kino Lorber, which has released everything from a six-disc box set on early female filmmakers to vintage dumb-fun Burt Reynolds flicks; and Twilight Time, which specializes in out-of-print studio entries, such as Robert Redford’s ace 1972 heist film The Hot Rock.

Then there’s Vinegar Syndrome, a Connecticut-based supplier of impossibly hard-to-find (and sometimes hard to describe) cult films. The company has become a bit of a cult fixation in itself: Its annual Black Friday sales are so popular that its eight-person staff actually shuts down its website for days beforehand, in order to prepare for customers looking for deals on movies like the evil-clown romp Blood Harvest and the 1989 Brad Pitt slasher flick Cutting Class (or, perhaps, some of the label's restored adult-film titles from the ’70s and ’80s). Many of Vinegar Syndrome's titles are low-budget genre horror, sci-fi, and sleaze flicks from the grindhouse and VHS eras, and were in danger of being lost or forgotten altogether.

“We're a film-first company,” says cofounder Ryan Emerson, who became interested in archival film work in the early ’00s. “We think of ourselves not as historians, because that would be a little weird, but as preservationists. When we look at a film, we say, ‘Would this stand a chance of coming out on Blu-ray if Vinegar Syndrome didn’t exist?’ And if the answer is no, we'll dive right in. We want to make sure these films maintain an audience, if not build one.”

Vinegar Syndrome, which operates its own scanning and restoration facilities, has digitally archived nearly 500 titles since launching in 2012. Its catalog includes seminal midnight movies such as the 1982 downtown-sci-fi epic Liquid Sky, as well as outré oddities like the wonderfully out-there 1978 nature-thriller The Bees. The latter is the kind of film that most fans likely never expected to find on Blu-ray, much less one that was digitally scanned from an original 35mm negative. “We get that lot: People saying they can’t believe that we’re doing these films,” Emerson says. “They also can’t believe that they’re actually selling.”

The company recently shipped its 100,000th order, driven in part by the annual Black Friday sale. (Emerson says that the event, which also includes the unveiling of surprise new releases, is so crucial to Vinegar Syndrome that staffers are already planning next year’s holiday.) Some of its customers engage in “blind buying”–essentially picking up a movie without having seen it, based solely on its title, its reputation, or a sense of curiosity. It’s a practice that captures the thrill of the hunt for collectors.

But it also speaks to a key facets of boutique Blu-ray culture: The sense that these films—no matter small or forgotten—are worth keeping alive, and within the conversation, at a time when streaming services are pushing a smaller, far more mainstream movie canon. Diabolik’s Nelson, a cult-film connoisseur, notes that the recent Blu-ray of Maniac, released by Blue Underground, has been a favorite among customers–including himself. “It’s a notorious movie,” he says of the famously gnarly 1980 flick, “but for some reason, I’d never watched it. I needed to have that in my collection.” It's a sentiment to which countless movie maniacs could no doubt relate.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Jennifer Lawrence's Russian Accent in Red Sparrow Wasn't Great

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Jennifer Lawrence is one of the best actresses of her generation. She is not, however, great at doing a Russian accent.

According to dialect coach Erik Singer, Lawrence’s accent in Red Sparrow was OK—but it could’ve been much better. "The back of her tongue is very loose and soft," he says in his latest Technique Critique video. "And the front of her tongue is a little bunched and kind of doing the work. I think if she’d flipped that equation so that the back of the tongue was bunched and stiff and sort of anchored and the front of tongue was spread out … I think she would’ve had a foundational logic that would’ve stitched the sounds together and made it more organic and flowing."(Alison Brie’s joke-y Russian inflections in GLOW, however, are great.)

Who else has the goods? Sam Rockwell does a fine job with the Ozarks accent in Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri; Jeff Bridges gets Texas right in Hell or High Water; and Andrew Lincoln’s Kentucky inflections are “fantastic” in The Walking Dead.

Check out the video above to get Singer’s take on further performances from Dev Patel (Lion), Giancarlo Esposito (Better Call Saul), Lucas Hedges (Manchester By the Sea), and more.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

The Unlimited Movie Plan Returns—For a Price

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

A month ago, MoviePass finally gave up on its unlimited movie ticket dreams. The $10 per month plan had cost the company millions, sending its parent company’s stock price plummeting. In retreat, MoviePass instead now offers for the same $10 just three movies per month, with a limited selection. But MoviePass was never the only game in town. And now its less-known rival, Sinemia, has stepped into the void with an all-you-can-watch offering of its own. The unlimited plan is back. It’s just a lot more expensive.

That doesn’t mean Sinemia’s version is a bad deal; that depends on how much you use it. And it closely resembles the plan that made MoviePass famous: see a movie a day, every day—not including 3-D or IMAX formats—at whatever theater you want. You can even reserve seats ahead of time. Instead of $10, though, you’ll pay $30.

Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz doesn’t expect his unlimited plan to catch fire the way MoviePass did. That’s because he sees it as just another option on a full spectrum of plans—Sinemia’s start at $5 for one movie ticket per month—designed to entice as many potential customers as possible.

“It’s not for everyone,” says Oguz. “There’s no one type of moviegoer. We’re all moviegoers. If you want to target all those segments, which is all the population, I think you need to have every option, even if they want to go every day.”

In fact, Sinemia already offers an unlimited plan in other markets, particularly in Europe—and has for years. It’s not the most popular plan in any of those countries, but it appeals to the most rabid movie fans, and has become a go-to lazy gift.

It also, importantly, hasn’t driven Sinemia to near-bankruptcy. Years of experience and data analysis have taught Oguz the price at which he can offer an unlimited movie buffet—about 2.5 times the cost of a single ticket in a given market—without giving his ledger a world-class bellyache.

That also explains why Sinemia, despite already having 10 active plans at different price points, hasn’t brought an unlimited plan to the US until now. “We couldn’t introduce unlimited because there was an unlimited, and it was $9.99,” says Oguz. “It would have been meaningless to introduce a three-times-more-expensive plan.” That meaning has been found, apparently, in the void left by MoviePass.

Oguz notes also that MoviePass parent company Helios and Matheson is publicly traded, meaning its mandatory financial disclosures provided some valuable clues to finding the pricing sweet spot.

Rifat Oguz, Sinemia

Of course, Sinemia now faces more competition than just the ghost of MoviePass. AMC, the nation’s largest theater chain, recently introduced its own subscription service, which allows for three movies per week, and includes more expensive formats like 3-D and IMAX. It costs just $20, a price point that Oguz has previously decried unsustainable. But while Oguz acknowledges that AMC Stubs A-List is a genuinely good deal, and that three movies per week might as well be unlimited for most people, he sees Sinemia as having its own advantages.

“We give you access to all movie theaters,” says Oguz, whereas Stubs A-List locks you into AMC only. “In our data, we’ve seen that people are more loyal to showtimes than to specific theaters.” AMC also only offers a single price point; if you subscribe month-to-month on Sinemia, you can downgrade to a lower, less-expensive cadence at any time.

Meanwhile, Oguz says Sinemia has seen a significant subscriber uptick in the wake of MoviePass’s retreat even before the introduction of unlimited. Whereas Sinemia's US business had been growing at 50 percent each month for its first year or so since it launched here, it saw a 50 percent increase over the course of just one three-day stretch in August.

“We fill in the gap, so that all customers, whether they’re coming from a competitor or not, they can have the plan that they want,” says Oguz. He also anticipates that Sinemia will continue to execute on its ambitions to broaden the scope of the service, as was MoviePass's original intent. It already integrates with Uber. It recently ran a promotion with Restaurants.com that gave subscribers a $20 gift card to dine out on. And it plans to introduce more night-out partnerships in the next month or so.

That doesn't mean Sinemia is perfect, or necessarily the best option for you. AMC Stubs A-List, in particular, is a compelling offer if you don't mind the theater restrictions, and some Sinemia subscribers have complained about a convoluted user experience.

But if you’re someone mourning the loss of the old MoviePass plan—and doesn’t mind paying what unlimited really costs—here’s your fresh start.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Clashes Over the Future of Gene Therapy at the US' Biggest Biotech Meeting

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

For one dizzying, schmooze and booze-filled week every January, thousands of tech execs, VCs, and investment bankers grind their way through a four-day slog of panel sessions, poster presentations, networking meetings, and cocktail-drenched after-hours parties in their industry’s premier orgiastic dealmaking event. And no, we’re not talking about CES.

On Monday, the Westin St. Francis hotel in downtown San Francisco opened its doors to the 36th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the country’s largest biotech convention. Everyone is there either to disrupt or to be disrupted. And while some companies were there to hawk the buzziest in far-future thinking—blockchain-based everything! fully robotic operating rooms!—others came to celebrate the very real, very current progress of a field 30 years in the making: gene therapy. And the promise of a much newer technology, Crispr, to propel the long-standing field forward with even greater momentum.

After decades of setbacks, gene therapy—a loosely defined umbrella term for any technique that uses genes to treat or prevent disease—is finally here. In December, the field got its very first FDA approval with Luxturna, which corrects a defective gene in a rare, inherited retinal disease. With a half dozen more treatments in late-stage trials and an unusually open-minded FDA commissioner in Washington, the industry is expecting a flurry of new approvals this year.

Which is going to throw a wrench in the health insurance industry. Because gene therapies are one-time, curative treatments, they break the traditional insurance model, which is designed to make multiple small payments over time. “We recognize that the products in this space create reimbursement challenges to the normal way of doing business,” said Janet Lambert, CEO of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, during her presentation Monday on the state of of the cell and gene therapy industry.

Lambert’s lobbying roadmap for 2018 includes helping insurance companies understand what to do with a new gene therapy like Luxturna, which cures blindness with a single, $850,000 injection into the eye. Ranked by sticker price, it’s the most expensive medicine in America. Spark Therapeutics, the company that makes Luxturna, argues that the six-figure price tag isn’t actually that unreasonable, if you factor in all the costs that patients with the inherited retinal disease would have racked up in a lifetime of seeking better care.

But because their clinical trial patients haven’t been followed long enough to determine if the treatment benefits are actually durable for a whole lifetime, Spark has received significant pushback from insurers. As a result, the company is already exploring a some creative new pricing models. It announced last week that it’s offering a rebate program based on the treatment’s effectiveness at 30 to 90 days and again at 30 months with one East Coast provider, and is in talks about expanding it to other insurers, Spark CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo said at JPM. He said Spark is also in discussions with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on a multi-year installment plan option. Either of these could soon serve as a model for how gene therapies might be made available to patients without cutting the legs out from under the healthcare system.

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That's a problem the Crispr companies in attendance at JPM don’t have to worry about yet. But they’re hoping gene therapy will have figured it out by the time Crispr-based medicines are patient-ready and FDA-approved. The first trial in humans isn’t expected to launch until later this year. But the Big Three—Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, and Crispr Therapeutics—had other hurdles to contend with.

Over the weekend, headlines metastasized across the internet about a new study suggesting Crispr might not work in humans at all. Published on pre-print server bioRxiv by a Stanford scientist who is also a scientific founder of Crispr Therapeutics, the non peer-reviewed study found that up to 79 percent of humans could already be immune to the most common forms of Crispr, called Crispr-Cas9, which come from two strains of Staphylococcus.

The timing was pretty terrible, and all three companies’ stocks took serious hits Monday morning, even as investors crowded into ballrooms to hear Crispr execs speak. The controversy made for one of the more tense moments of a gene therapy panel, when Sandy Macrae, CEO of rival gene editing tech company Sangamo, which uses zinc-finger nucleases, poked at Crispr Therapeutics chief scientific officer, Bill Lundberg. “That’s why we use human tools to edit humans,” he said.

The crowd of about a thousand swiftly inhaled. (This is what counts as maximum drama at JPM.) But the Crispr folks swiftly pushed back on the claims that immunity will present a barrier to their pipelines, since none of them use just plain old Cas9 like it’s found in nature. They’re all making proprietary tweaks to the enzyme system that they think will make the immunity issue, well, not an issue at all.

“We’ve actually done a lot of work ourselves on this specific topic and we don’t see this as a major issue to advancing Crispr-based medicines,” said Editas president and CEO Katrine Bosley. In a presentation to investors on Wednesday, the company revealed their plans to have five medicines in human testing within the next five years. The first diseases Editas is going after include a number of inherited eye disorders. The company is also pursuing a partnership with Juno Therapeutics to use Crispr to engineer T-cells to fight off incurable cancers.

Immunity to bacterial-based gene editors won’t be an issue for the current crop of gene therapies expected to get approvals in 2018. They represent the tail ends of a long and arduous development pipeline—one that Crispr is only just beginning to enter. It might be another 30 years before anyone is arguing about the insurance implications of one-time, cure-all Crispr meds. But at least by then, there should be some good options.

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Crispr Gene Editing Explained

Maybe you've heard of Crispr, the gene editing tool that could forever change life. So what is it and how does it work? Let us explain.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Will Smith's Aladdin Genie Is Already a Meme

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Last night, amidst the hubbub of the Grammys, Disney released the first TV spot for its upcoming live-action version of Aladdin. Directed by Guy Ritchie, it features Hot Jafar, a sweeping soundtrack, and Will Smith as the iconic Genie (the character voiced by Robin Williams in the animated 1992 film). The trailer itself looked fine; Smith's Genie, however, looked, well, off.

It's hard to place exactly where in the Uncanny Valley this particular image lives, but given Smith's blue hue, it's definitely wading into Smurf territory. But in a way, this reaction definitely falls into the category of Be Careful What You Wish For. When Entertainment Weekly put the movie on its cover, fans responded harshly to the fact that Smith wasn't blue. When the actor posted the trailer on his Instagram, he captioned it with "I told y'all I was gon' be Blue!! … Y'all need to trust me more often!" Yes, folks should always trust Will Smith. Should they trust CGI? Eh, that's a different story.

But hey, maybe this look isn't final. Maybe by the time Disney releases the film on May 24 the blue will be better. Or maybe everyone's collective eyes will adjust? Time will tell. Until then, Twitter will be busy turning images of Smith's Genie into everything from Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining to remixes of the Star Is Born meme from last year. Also currently taking off on Twitter: Comparisons to Tobias Fünke's "I blue myself" bit from Arrested Development and Violet's transformation into a blueberry from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

So let's enjoy the memes—shining, shimmering, splendid.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Why It's Almost Impossible for Fastballs to Get Any Faster

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

A wickedly fast fastball isn’t the anomaly it once was. A decade ago, Major League pitchers threw a grand total of just 196 triple-digit fastballs in a single season. Last year, 40 pitchers collectively threw 1,017.

But while baseball’s hallmark pitch has increased in popularity, it hasn’t increased in velocity.

Consider the confusion over the game’s fastest fastball ever. On paper, the honor goes to Yankees relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who clocked 105.1 miles per hour in 2010. But the record could have been set all the way back in 1974. Back then, Nolan Ryan was the first MLB pitcher to be tracked by radar during a game—and while his heater topped out at 100.8 miles per hour, the radar measured Ryan’s ball just before it crossed the plate. Had it eyed the pitch as it was leaving Ryan’s hand (as Chapman’s was), experts believe it might have registered at upwards of 108 miles per hour.

Similar retroactive estimates have put Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller’s fastest fastball at 107.6 miles per hour—and that was all the way back in 1946. Walter Johnson, who played from 1907 to 1927, is also thought to have thrown pitches at 100 mph or more. All of which is to say: Pitchers have been throwing north of 100-mph for the past 100 years. Over the same time period, advances in training, technology, nutrition, and, yes, drugs, have fueled a dramatic upward trend in world-record athletic performances, from the marathon to the long jump to the 50 meter freestyle. But when it comes to hurling a five-ounce, leather-wrapped sphere as fast as possible, humans appear to have plateaued.

“I don’t see it going much higher,” says biomedical engineer Glenn Fleisig, research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute and an expert in the biomechanics of pitching. “I'm sorry to say that, but I don’t see it happening. Baseball isn’t like other sports, where we see people running faster or swimming harder or whatever, where today’s records are smashing the records from 10 years ago.”

That hasn’t prevented pitchers from pursuing the triple-digit barrier at the expense of their arms. A significant number of them undergo major medical procedures to correct injuries from competition. Like the “Tommy John” surgery: When the tendon in a pitcher’s elbow tears, surgeons can replace it with a fresh one from the player’s wrist, forearm, hamstring, or even their toe. Swapping in the relief tendon involves the surgeon drilling holes in the ulna and humerus bones and threading them in a figure-8 pattern with the healthy tissue.

A 2012 survey found that a quarter of Major League pitchers had undergone the Tommy John surgery at some point in their careers. And as the popularity of the fastball has increased, so has the surgery.

Fleisig thinks the rise in Tommy John surgeries has to do with the immense strain that hurling baseballs puts on a pitcher’s arm. By studying cadavers, he and his colleagues found that the force required to tear elbow ligaments is roughly the same as what a pitcher asks of his arm throwing at top speed. When the arm flings back, the shoulder ligaments experience about 100 Newton meters of torque. When it flings forward, the elbow ligaments suffer the same. “It’s the equivalent, at each point, of holding five 12-pound bowling balls,” Fleisig says. “So imagine I hang 60 pounds from your hand. That’s what it would feel like on your elbow or shoulder.” At those forces, he says, pitchers are effectively throwing their arms off. The odds of them throwing much faster seem pretty slim.

Which may actually be a good thing, as fastballs are already right at the limit of what batters can reliably hit.

A 100-mph fastball reaches home plate in under 400 milliseconds. The swing itself takes about 150 milliseconds. That leaves less than a quarter of a second for a batter to spot the pitch and decide whether and where to swing. That’s absurdly fast, which may explain why the swinging strike rate for triple-digit heaters is almost three times higher than it is for lesser fastballs.

But the tiny reaction window is only part of why batters struggle to connect. The other culprit: lack of practice. As popular as they’ve become, 100-mph fastballs are still pretty rare—rare enough that you’re not going to face off against them regularly at batting practice. Unless you’ve got a workaround.

The baseball team at Villanova University recently got access to a tireless pitcher who can throw fastballs all day long—even impossibly fast ones. Engineer Mark Jupina designed a virtual hitting simulator that allows batters to practice identifying and even hitting against any pitch in the MLB’s PITCHf/x database. (PITCHf/x is a tracking system installed in every MLB stadium that records the velocity, trajectory, release point, and spin of every pitch.) Players can either face off against the virtual pitcher in the university’s CAVE (an immersive, four-walled virtual reality environment equipped with infrared cameras), or by donning an Oculus Rift headset. “We have data sets that are appropriate for a high school level, all the way up beyond the pro level,” Jupina says. “We can even show you what, realistically, 120 mile an hour fastball would look like.”

I stood in the simulator and stared down a 120-mph pitch. It was ludicrous. The trip from the mound to the plate took just three tenths of a second; I felt like I needed to start my swing before the ball even left the pitcher’s hand.

Then a few members of Villanova’s baseball team took a crack at the simulator, and Jupina showed me how they planned to use it in training. Fastball practice was only part of the exercise. In one activity, he’d freeze the ball 150 milliseconds after leaving the pitcher’s hand, and ask the batter to ID the pitch. Was it coming in fast and straight, or was it a slow breaking ball? Would it cross the plate high and inside, or right down the middle?

Me, I couldn’t tell a fastball from a slider, but Villanova’s players took to it quickly, using things like the position of the pitcher’s arm and the spin of the ball to identify the pitch. It was impressive to watch, in part because it’s always impressive to witness someone exercise a sense you do not possess yourself. But also because the latency, the resolution, the sense of depth—they were all good enough to make reading an incoming pitch possible. All of which could make this a tremendous training tool.

“In the future, I could see every Major League baseball organization having this available to their hitters,” says Villanova’s head baseball coach Kevin Mulvey, a former pro pitcher himself. “If you could upload the pitcher that you're going to be facing to this virtual interface, in the stadium that you'll playing, at the time you'll be playing, and you can get in there and re-live an at-bat that you had against him, you're going to be better prepared to face this guy than if you were just taking batting practice off a generic lefty or generic righty."

After all, not many people can throw a triple digit pitch. But with a tool like Jupina's, a whole lot more could train to hit one.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Why I Just Can't Quit Watching Reality Dating Shows

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

When Are You The One? returned to MTV this month for a seventh season, it did so with all the predictable tropes of the reality dating subgenre. There was Zak, the Toxic Relationship Addict. Kayla, the Guy-Crazy Romantic. Kwasi, the Muscled Egomaniac. Sam, the Independent Feminist. Tevin, the Too-Suave Pretty Boy. All were reductive archetypes; all were irrestistible.

The primary architecture of the show, too, adheres to a simple, if effective formula: throw a group of beautiful, sex-drunk souls into a house, add endless amounts of liquor, stir, and wait for the drama to spill over. It’s a social experiment disguised as a dating show. And, like the best dating shows, it melds fact and fantasy into something that's more like the real thing than you might expect.

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In 2016, I began obsessively watching the MTV franchise—then in season 4—as a form of self-care. I was in search of easy detachments from the nonstop barrage of daily life, with its personal and professional glitches; mindless reality TV worked like the perfect tranquilizer, helping to momentarily alleviate the disquiet that rattled around me. AYTO was a mirage, and there was solace in its fabrication, in the spectacle and riot it made out of love. If real life had become too defeating, perhaps there was something I could discern from the unreal.

I don’t consider myself a reality TV junkie, but there is a unique magic to the genre’s dating shows I find especially intoxicating. In my 32 years, I’ve failed—spectacularly, foolishly—at fortifying any semblance of true romance. It’s partly why I’m enthralled by this particular breed of show.

The early-aughts run of mid-tier reality dating staples—Blind Date (UPN), Change of Heart (syndicated), Next (MTV), and Paradise Hotel (Fox)—exposed me to the genre’s saccharine chaos. I was a teenager completely, and oddly, enraptured by the romantic failures of grownups. It didn't take long to see through its pretense of realness, though. But such is the nature of TV that hinges on confession and courtship, where authenticity is a matter of perception: we yearn for the big reveal no matter how hollow it turns out to be, no matter how quickly we puncture its illusion. The consumption of these shows became my own secret diet. I devoured them without a thought.

In Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, Lucas Mann writes of the genre’s inherent polarity. “In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.” Then and now, I find myself striving for the opposite of this: I hope to whittle the spectacular into fact, to mold the exaggerated into a shield against imminent failures of the heart.

With its choreographed sentimentality and the promise of emotional sabotage, Are You The One? exploits a uniform TV framework but offers a twist. The conceit of the show tests science against free will. MTV picks “22 singles who suck at love”—11 women and 11 men; like most reality dating shows it’s stubbornly heteronormative—and puts them in a house for a given number of weeks (typically no more than two months). Before AYTO contestants can enter the house, however, they must consent to a detailed matchmaking test, whereupon producers secretly pair the most compatible guys and girls. Once in the house, through a series of drunken social encounters and challenges, contestants have to find their “perfect match.” Emotions bubble and froth, arguments are had, and by the finale, with $1 million on the line, the goal is to have all the perfect matches coupled together.

Having to find one’s “perfect match” in such a truncated, high-stakes time frame forces contestants into a continual state of exchange: through conversation, through sex, through fighting. This reciprocity often translates like Twitter or Instagram, with its never-ending circus of communication between users and its manufactured gaze: we enact a performative identity so that others might see us as we wish to be seen.

Kelli Korducki, writing in Real Life about ABC’s Bachelor franchise, pointed to the sticky parallels between reality TV and social media. “Any person with an Instagram account can confirm that it’s pleasing to see people as they desire to be seen, even while knowing that the proffered glimpse is curatorial at the least.” But it doesn’t typically play out like that on a show like AYTO. What I’ve come to love particularly about the various, and very cheesy, reality dating series, above other reality TV subgenres, is how contestants seem less polished; there is a loss of control that, at some point, overtakes the show—one contestants seem to willfully embrace.

And so reality becomes a fantasy for us, and a dark fiction for the contestant. The gulf between the image on screen and our interpretation of it, as Mann points to in his book, expands and contracts, and pleasure—at least, the pleasure I’ve found in such shows—arises from what we choose to hook our hopes, fears, and desires into.

In April, Hulu acquired Love Island, the popular UK reality dating show that just ended its fourth season. As with AYTO, I’ve become consumed by it. Unlike AYTO, though, it’s a show of shameless, indulgent excess: seasons run 34-57 episodes, each is an hour long, and it airs six nights a week over the summer. (I’ve made my way through the first two seasons.)

What transpires on screen has less of a maximalist feel: five guys and five girls live and sleep together in a mansion in Majorca. (Even if couples don’t share a romantic spark, they must still share a bed). They drink, bicker over easily-resolved miscommunications, and occasionally compete in embarrassing challenges. Not a lot happens. Every few days the public votes contestants in and out of the house, and the lone surviving couple wins a lump sum of cash. But Love Island is not without its cracks. The show is a brash representation of its predecessors: all but one or two of the contestants are white and thin, and everyone is aggressively straight. It’s a stark reminder of how archaic the subgenre remains. (Are You the One? is reportedly seeking “sexually fluid” castmembers for its next season, however.)

For the longest, I told myself, there was emotional sustenance to be mined from Are You The One? and Love Island. In front of me was profound advice—on how to open up, or how to better communicate—but only if I watched long and intently, spinning their obvious failures into tangible lessons.

But I don’t know if this is true any more, or if it ever was. Maybe I just wished it was for my own sake. I now realize what mesmerizes me isn’t the wisdom of these shows, but their brazen emptiness. It’s what I’ve come to enjoy the most. They manufacture authenticity not into a utopian form of devotion or unattainable love—there are no perfect relationships on display—but into a messy vision of affection and longing.

The pursuit of love is an imperfect, chaotic endeavor. Scripted stories strive to acknowledge that in their own way, whether syrupy melodramas and meet-cute rom-coms—but it’s the ersatz verité of these gaudy dating shows that fully captures the shaggy unpredictability of passion and partnership. In all their contrived falsity, they manage to be more alive, more true, than anything else on TV.

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Is This Stem-Cell Clinic Really Making Cancer Vaccines?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

On the first Saturday of March, Kristin Comella put on a white doctor’s coat and took the stage at the fourth annual conference for the Academy of Regenerative Practices. The founder and president of the academy, Comella also oversees an expanding empire of stem cell clinics that promise patients cures for most anything that ails them. None of those treatments—for everything from diabetes and asthma to multiple sclerosis and arthritis—have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The procedure—which costs a few thousand dollars—is always pretty much the same, regardless of its purported target. It involves sucking out some of a patient’s fat tissue with a liposuction needle, isolating the stem cells within, and reinjecting them into the patient’s body. The simplicity of the procedure is why people like Comella say it’s “insane” for the FDA to try to regulate stem cells.

So it was surprising when she announced onstage that her firm, US Stem Cell, had recently begun developing a radically new kind of treatment—this time, for cancer.

“Your stem cells are antigen-presenting cells,” Cormella told the audience, in a Facebook live video the company posted of the event. “We can make them express a protein from your specific cancer. So, it’s an individualized cancer vaccine, if you will.” US Stem Cell, a publicly traded firm that sells stem cell separation kits and operates one of the largest networks of clinics in the country, achieved this with something called an “electroporation protocol,” she said.

Electroporation is essentially zapping cells with electricity—a microbiology technique used to get drugs, proteins, or, most commonly, DNA into cells. “When I hear electroporation, that’s equal to genetic modification,” says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at UC Davis. “That’s what we do when we want cells to permanently express a protein.”

Knoepfler writes a blog about stem cells, and that’s where he surfaced the video on May 9, after an acquaintance tipped him off. He’s sort of a watchdog for the industry. Since 2011, he’s tracked the proliferation of unregulated stem cell clinics and followed US Stem Cell’s cavalier approach to experimenting on its patients, sometimes to disastrous effect. In 2015, one of its clinics injected liposuction-derived stem cells directly into the eyeballs of three elderly women suffering from age-related macular degeneration. All three went blind, two sued, and US Stem Cell settled out of court.

But this, he says, might be the most dangerous thing he’s seen yet. “If my assumption is correct that they’re introducing DNA, this is up near the top of the riskiest things I’ve ever heard a stem cell clinic doing,” he says. “The big worry here is giving cancer patients another cancer, or a dangerous immune response."

US Stem Cell did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the procedure, so it’s still unclear if it does indeed involve genetic modification and whether any patients have actually been treated with it. In the video Comella only described it as one of the company’s “current protocols.”

What we do know is that the approach sounds similar to a powerful new class of anti-cancer medicines known as CAR-T therapies. They involve extracting a patient’s immune cells and genetically rewiring them to more effectively recognize and attack cancerous cells in the body. The FDA approved the first CAR-T, Kymriah, in late 2017 after scrutinizing years of data from animal studies and human clinical trials. Novartis claims it spent $1 billion to get the treatment to market.

Compare that with the $6,664 US Stem Cell reported having spent last year on research and development. The company—formerly named Bioheart—has nine clinical trials listed on the national registry ClinicalTrials.gov, none of which are actively recruiting and none of which are for cancer treatments. Though listed as the lead investigator on some of the trials, Comella isn’t a medical doctor. She received a three-year online PhD in stem cell biology from the Panama College of Cell Science—a non-accredited virtual university founded by stem cell evangelist Walter Drake, according to reporting by the LA Times. And she’s not afraid to spar with the federal government.

Last August the FDA sent a warning letter to US Stem Cell and to Comella, specifically, for “significant deviations” from good practices. And after Comella responded with a letter of her own, denying FDA has any jurisdiction to regulate her company’s activities, the agency followed up with a lawsuit.

On May 9, the FDA along with the Department of Justice filed a complaint seeking a permanent injunction against US Stem Cell and Comella, accusing them of endangering patient safety and failing to meet manufacturing standards for cell therapies. The federal officials also filed a similar lawsuit against another clinic—California Stem Cell Treatment Center—which was involved in giving patients an experimental cancer treatment made from a mix of stem cells and a smallpox vaccine inappropriately acquired from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stockpile under the auspices of research. When officials found out they were being administered to patients, US marshals raided the clinic and seized the remaining vials.

Both California Stem Cell Treatment Center and US Stem Cell said in public statements they plan to fight the injunctions, the most aggressive volley yet in the conflict surrounding direct-to-consumer stem cell treatments. At the heart of the clash is the phrase “minimally manipulated,” which the FDA uses to exempt therapies like bone marrow transplants. Both clinics will likely argue in court that their cell-based treatments fit that description. But Comella’s recent statements at the conference could undermine this claim. Electroporation is a tool designed explicitly for cellular manipulation, and there’s nothing minimal about it.

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While You Were Offline: The Truth Is Out There

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Last week started ominously, with the news that Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke was firing the department's inspector general even though he—Zinke—is the subject of multiple investigations, and ended with the news that one of those investigations had found Zinke guilty of violating official policy regarding government travel, costing taxpayers $25,000 in the process. (That inspector, by the way, wasn't fired. It was all, apparently, one big misunderstanding.) But it wasn't just a Zinke week; there were also shouting matches at the White House between the president's chief advisors, Facebook hiring a famously unsuccessful British politician to head up its global affairs unit, President Trump cheering violence against journalists, and Canada legalizing weed and then immediately running out. You guys, it's been a week, and that's not even going anywhere near this:

…Whatever the world is coming to, let's try and piece it together, together. Shall we?

The Truth About What Happened to Jamal Khashoggi

What Happened: As evidence mounted that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered by Saudi authorities, the President of the United States did his best to pretend that had never happened, assisted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

What Really Happened: As the week began, the clamor around the disappearance and suspected killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi had reached such volume that it was impossible for even President Trump to ignore it any longer—as much as he seemingly wanted to, preferring to offer vague comments on the subject, accompanied by more concrete statements about wanting to protect arms deals with Saudi Arabia. Was there some way that he could accept the mounting evidence while still leaving himself some wiggle room to get out of actually blaming anyone? As everyone familiar with Trump's 400-pound hacker theory already knows, the answer is, "Yes, but no one would believe it."

It was a ridiculous and patently unbelievable suggestion, as many people pointed out, including some prominent Democrats.

But if "Sure, rogue killers somehow got into an official consulate and killed a dude without anyone noticing and/or stopping them, and it's just coming out now" didn't stretch credibility enough, don't worry; something even more unlikely was about to emerge.

If nothing else, "Yes, we killed him by accident" is certainly a novel defense, especially when you consider that it does contain an admission that they were interrogating him. Not to mention that whole earlier "We didn't do it" thing.

For those wondering how the president dealt with this new development, considering that it also contradicted his previous speculation about what had happened, he did pretty well, considering.

A fact-finding mission! That certainly sounds productive. How it ended up going?

That doesn't look like a particularly hard-hitting meeting, but diplomacy is a game best played with handshakes and smiles, right?

To make matters worse, it emerged that Saudi Arabia delivered $100 million to the US on the day Pompeo arrived. (It was a payment promised back in August, although the timing was certainly an unfortunate coincidence at best.) Still, surely this was a very thorough, potentially explosive, confrontation.

But… still, a lot could be accomplished in 15 minutes, yes? At least we'd know more when he returned and addressed the American people.

Meanwhile, at the Saudi consulate where Khashoggi disappeared…

Would Trump say anything?

Oh, never mind. Throughout the week, more and more grisly details emerged about Khashoggi's murder, including leaked audio of his death. (Something Pompeo reportedly heard on his trip, although that may not be true.) And yet, it took until Thursday for the president to admit that Khashoggi was dead, and even then, he couched it in uncertainty.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post, which published Khashoggi's work, ran his final column the same day. On Friday, Saudi Arabia confirmed Khashoggi's death and claimed it was the result of a physical altercation at the consulate in Istanbul.

The Takeaway: To call this shameful would be an understatement.

Putting Healthcare Back in the Game

What Happened: When voters aren't getting behind your message, what's to stop you from just pretending your unpopular opinions actually belong to your opponents, and vice versa? Apparently little, if you're the president.

What Really Happened: With the possibility of the Republicans losing the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterms, President Trump has been returning more and more recently to the idea that Democrats are trying to dismantle healthcare (they're not, by the way), and that only Republicans can be trusted by those who worry about their health.

As if last week's USA Today editorial debacle didn't deliver enough of a sign that things weren't going to go smoothly for the president on this one, this week saw his attacks hit their zenith with the following tweet.

The tweet came days after Republican Senate Majority Mitch McConnell gave an interview where he talked about his personal, deep disappointment in not cutting "entitlements," giving people the idea that the Republicans would try to repeal Obamacare again given the chance. Considering that healthcare is an issue that voters care about—and tend to side with the Democrats on, enjoying the Affordable Care Act and the coverage of those with pre-existing conditions—it's easy to see why Republicans feel the need to falsify things on the subject.

All of which is to say, people noticed that Trump was essentially saying the very opposite of what was true.

The question, as always, is this: How many people will believe the president despite the evidence of … you know, the rest of the real world? The answer might depend on how many people have found themselves relying on the Affordable Care Act's coverage for pre-existing conditions and have been affected by the Trump Administration's attempts to take it away.

The Takeaway: Hey, TV's David Simon. You're filled with righteous anger, would you like to take a swing at summarizing this one?

'Horseface'?

What Happened: Despite his busy week, President Trump still found the time to take a jab at Stormy Daniels.

What Really Happened: Perhaps we're spending too much time on the ways in which the president deals with political matters. Maybe we should spend a little moment or two on how petty he can be instead. Early last week, a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit against Trump brought by Stormy Daniels. For most people, this would be a relief, and perhaps a sign to rein in the over-the-top rhetoric. Donald J. Trump is not most people, as this tweet from the next morning made particularly clear.

Folks are generally used to this nonsense by now, but really, let's just take a moment to actually think about this.

Of course, the comment prompted all manner of coverage, because, come on. And yet, it's hardly surprising.

Michael Avenatti, who came to—fame? infamy? We're not sure what the correct term should be, really—as Stormy Daniels' lawyer, took to Twitter to release a statement in reply.

And how did Daniels respond?

It would be nice to say that the president learned the error of his ways and apologized afterwards, but instead, he apparently believed he'd done a great job.

The Takeaway: Once again, reality feels like it's significantly outpacing satire, to the point where even The Onion is struggling to keep up.

Elizabeth Warren's DNA

What Happened: Senator Elizabeth Warren released the results of a DNA test. It went impressively poorly.

What Really Happened: As we noted above, the midterms are just a couple of weeks away, so as you can imagine, everyone on both sides of the political aisle is definitely concentrating on the important stuff.

… And yet, here we all are, somehow actually discussing a senator’s DNA test results. Senator Warren, what were you thinking?

Well, surely this had the president and his staff preparing an apology, given how eager they usually are to try to make peace with their political enemies.

Maybe you caught Trump denying that he'd offered $1 million to a charity of Warren's choice if she proved Native American heritage. Looks as though he was lying—or, as some would say in vague defense, being somewhat economical with the truth—as was easily demonstrated on Twitter, for the little good that it did.

But, wait! That was just his first attempt at a response, and it got worse as he kept going.

Well, at least Warren didn't upset anyone else with this seemingly pointless stunt. Oh no, she definitely did.

I think we can chalk this whole thing up to a spectacular own goal on behalf of Warren, despite attempts to redeem the argument at its core. And so, as probably expected (sadly), guess who got the last—and, really, probably only—laugh in this whole sordid affair?

The Takeaway: Oh, wait. We forgot to note that things actually got worse on Thursday, thanks to a tweet from former Chairman of the Oversight Committee and current Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz.

A Tough Spot

What Happened: A new radio spot for a congressional race in Arkansas upset a lot of people.

What Really Happened: But, hey! The midterms are coming, and not everything is about the president. For example, let's look at this ad for a local race in Arkansas…

Yes, that was a real ad. And, yes, people were noticing it outside the state. On Twitter, the response was… Well, you can probably guess, really.

More than a few people wondered who was behind such an ad, and there was an answer to that which was … well, somewhat unexpected.

That's not to say that this makes the organization he represents legitimate, of course. Or, for that matter, what it even pretended to be.

At least Rep. French Hill did the right thing—even if he didn't do it until after the ad had gone viral and been shared across the internet.

The Takeaway: Regardless of one's reaction to the advertisement, it is compelling, even if it's compelling for all the wrong reasons.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

How Ice Skaters Turn Physics Into Astonishing Spins

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Many people don't know too much about angular momentum—and that's fine. But what about figure skaters? Whether they understand the concept of angular momentum doesn't matter but they use it in one of the all time classic skating moves. You've seen it before. The skater starts off in a standing position and spins about the vertical axis. After a few rotations, the skater pulls both arm in closer to the body and spins faster. In physics, we call this conservation of angular momentum.

Just as an example, here is this same maneuver performed on a rotating platform instead of on ice.

Really, you can try something like this on your own. Sit on a nice spinning chair or stool. Start with your arms stretched out as you spin and then bring your arms in. Don't barf.

But what exactly is angular momentum? In short, it is something that we can calculate that can be conserved. That's a tough definition, so let me give an example of a conserved quantity—like mass (which only mostly conserved). Suppose you take add some baking soda to vinegar. If you've ever done this, you will see that the resulting mixture foams and produces some gas. But here's the cool part. If you measure the mass of the stuff you start with (vinegar and baking soda) it's the same as the mass of the stuff you end up with (carbon dioxide and water and sodium acetate). Boom, mass is conserved. It's the same before and after.

OK, I have to point out that mass isn't always conserved. n a nuclear reaction, the mass of the stuff before doesn't have to be equal to the mass of the stuff after. But if you look at energy (and include mass in the energy), then energy is conserved.

Now for angular momentum. The angular momentum is a quantity that we can calculate for rotating object. It's the product of the angular velocity (how fast it spins—represented with the symbol ω) and the moment of inertia (using the symbol I). I think most people are OK with the idea of the angular velocity—but the moment of inertia thing is a bit more complicated. Basically, the moment of inertia is a property of an object that depends on the distribution of the mass about the rotation axis. If you have more mass further away from the axis of rotation, the moment of inertia is larger than if that was was close to the axis.

Here is a super quick demo—and you can try this at home. I have two sticks with juice boxes taped to them such that both sticks (plus juice) have the same mass. However, there is a difference. One stick has the juice boxes at the ends of the stick (high moment of inertia) and one stick has them taped to the middle of the stick (low moment of inertia). Now look at what happens when you try to rotate these sticks back and forth (remember—they are the same mass). Oh, to make things more fun I gave the higher moment of inertia stick to the stronger girl. Also, here is a longer video version of this demo.

So let's review. The angular momentum depends on both the angular velocity and the mass distribution of the object. You can change this angular momentum by exerting a torque (a twisting force)—but with no external torque, the angular momentum is conserved.

Now getting back to the ice skater. In the vertical spinning position, there is very little torque exerted on the system (since ice is slippery and the skates are close to the axis of rotation). This means that the angular momentum should stay at a constant value. But what happens if you change something—like bringing your arms closer to your body? This would decrease the moment of inertia. Since the angular momentum has to stay constant, the angular velocity must increase. It's the only way to conserve angular momentum.

Here is another view (from the top) of this same move—just for fun.

Really, you could easily take some measurements from this. It wouldn't be too difficult to measure the angular velocity both before and after the arms being pulled in. From that, you could calculate the change in the moment of inertia. But still, I think this move is best left to professionals—the spinning would make me sick.

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