Almost 150 years after the fact, future neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard his father talk about the shopkeeper in his hometown of Djúpivogur, Iceland, who was a Black man named Hans Jónatan. Jónatan wasn't born in Iceland, but he settled there, married, became a valued member of the community, and fathered descendants who still lived nearby. Later biographies pieced together the story of Hans Jonathan, who was born into slavery in the Caribbean, was brought to Denmark, walked away from his enslaver and joined the Danish Navy, became a war hero, and then had to fight for his freedom in court more than once. After losing the final court battle in 1802, he simply disappeared. There was also the story of a teenager named Hans Jónatan, who arrived in Djúpivogur on a merchant ship in 1802, and who spoke Danish and played the violin. He was also ready to settle down, and worked at the local general store and trading station, which he later ran.
The story of Hans Jonathan is quite compelling in itself, but there was a new chapter in the 21st century, when Kári Stefánsson, now a neurologist, began a vast DNA study in Iceland to investigate the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis. Since Iceland is quite genetically homogenous, mutations would stand out from the crowd better than with other populations. But the study also yielded intriguing information from Hans Jónatan's 788 verified living descendants. By studying the DNA of these descendants, Stefánsson's team was able to reconstruct large parts of not only Jónatan's genome, but that of his mother as well -two centuries after they lived, with no trace of their own DNA. Read the intriguing story of Hans Jonathan and his legacy in Iceland at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to it in podcast form. -via Strange Company
Enlarge/ Starship launched on Saturday with all 33 Raptor engines burning nominally. (credit: SpaceX)
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.
Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines started to fill my news feed. The Wall Street Journal led with, “SpaceX second Starship test flight ends in another explosion.” Bloomberg was still more dour, “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” Perhaps, after consultation with their beat reporters, editors subsequently changed these online headlines. And the stories themselves better reflected the reality. Nevertheless, much of the media coverage of the launch delivered a harsh verdict: Another failure for Elon Musk and SpaceX.
I mean, yes. The first stage of the Starship rocket, Super Heavy, did explode. And the upper stage, Starship, had a failure that caused its flight termination system—explosives on board in case a vehicle begins flying off course—to detonate. But that was to be expected on such an experimental, boundary-pushing test flight.
Leading with words like "failure" and "explosion" are kind of like putting the headline “Derek Jeter had a strikeout” on a news story about the 2001 World Series game in which he later hit a walk-off home run. Like, it’s accurate. But it’s a lazy take that completely misses the point.
Rapid rebuild of ground systems
Here’s what SpaceX actually accomplished with its second Starship launch on Saturday morning, from a narrow peninsula of land at the southern extremity of Texas.
The vehicle’s first launch, in April, caused significant damage to the launch mount and surrounding infrastructure. At SpaceX founder Elon Musk's direction, the company had attempted to determine whether it could get away with launching the massive rocket without an advanced sound suppression system to mitigate launch pad damage. Turns out, that's a no. The first Starship launch shredded the launch site by throwing chunks of concrete for miles around.
Musk and SpaceX learned their lesson and completely redesigned and rebuilt the launch pad to incorporate a sophisticated water-based sound suppression system. By August, just four months later, it had not just built the complex system, but tested it. All of these changes resulted in a far more robust launch pad, which survived Saturday's liftoff largely unscathed.
Afterward I spoke with Phillip Rench, an engineer who worked at SpaceX for five years and for a time directed the company's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. He was impressed by the speed of the rebuild and smoothness of the ground-support operations for Saturday's launch.
"The thing I think about, and which probably goes unnoticed by most, is how extremely hot and humid it is in Boca during the late summer and fall," he said. "The team that just rebuilt the orbital launch mount, water deluge, and remaining launch pad just did so in the hottest, most miserable part of the year. I remember having mild heat stress almost every day in August and September while working on the pad. I give kudos to those technicians, welders, and engineers that spent the last seven months out in the field making this happen."
Rapid revamp of the rocket
The SpaceX engineers also rapidly re-engineered the first stage of the Super Heavy booster to address issues with multiple failures of its Raptor rocket engines on the first flight. During Saturday’s launch, all 33 of these Raptor engines burned for their full duration, with nary a failure on the way to space.
Additionally, the company’s engineers gathered data on a brand-new component of the rocket called a "hot staging ring." This interstage sits atop the Super Heavy first stage and below the Starship upper stage. This new piece of hardware was intended to facilitate "hot staging," a difficult maneuver a couple of minutes into the flight at stage separation, in which the Starship upper-stage engines ignite before the Super Heavy first stage has completed its burn. This maneuver was captured with ground-tracking cameras, and it is stunning.
Remember, the first Starship launch was just under seven months ago. And in the time since then, the company—at Musk's direction, in a bid to increase the capability of Starship—implemented this radical engineering change. It is not trivial. Starship is still attached to its booster. The Starship engines, upon igniting, are blasting away at the top of this huge Super Heavy rocket that is still thrusting upward. It's kind of crazy, and it pretty much worked.
Although we don't have the details yet, the Starship upper stage successfully completed hot-staging and pulled away from Super Heavy. If you're not impressed, you should be. This is world-class engineering completed on an insanely compressed time scale.
Some things went wrong, of course
Perhaps most critically for SpaceX, on this flight, the Super Heavy booster appears to have performed a nominal flight. After Starship pulled away, the first stage had done its heavy-lifting job. If this were a normal expendable launch, the rocket would have fallen into the ocean.
But this was not a normal launch, of course. SpaceX intends for Starship to be fully reusable, and that means trying to recover both the booster and the upper stage. According to SpaceX, the Super Heavy rocket initialized its "boostback" burn, which is intended to slow the rocket down. This entails igniting a subset of the rocket’s 33 engines, similar to what happens with the Falcon 9 rocket at the top of the atmosphere. After that point, however, things went sideways. Perhaps the upper portion of the first stage was too damaged by the hot staging, as the ignition of Starship’s engines understandably singed the rocket below. It’s also possible there was an issue with tank pressures inside Super Heavy, as there was not much propellant left, and it's challenging to move the remaining fuel and oxidizer to the engines.
In any case, Super Heavy blew up spectacularly. So was this a failure? Hardly. SpaceX had just launched the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a flying skyscraper largely built with private funding. If it were almost any other rocket in the world, it would have been judged entirely as a success because first stages are disposed of. But because SpaceX took the next step, to experiment with recovery, the loss of the first stage after completing its primary mission was somehow viewed as a failure by some observers. I'm sorry to say it, but that's just dumb.
As for the vehicle’s upper stage, SpaceX reported that Starship not only survived the technically demanding hot-staging maneuver, but ignited all six of its engines and began to power its way to space. Eventually, it reached an altitude of about 150 km above the planet.
However, near the end of its burn, something went wrong. It’s possible that one or more of the Raptor engines failed. Perhaps there was a problem with the shielding around the engines to protect them from heating. In any case, Starship began flying off course, and its flight termination system activated.
Getting any data from Starship on this test flight is a pretty big win for SpaceX, and surviving staging and most of the vehicle’s propulsive burn will set the company’s engineers up well for future success. They will learn so much from this. It would not surprise me if they take enough confidence away from this flight to put Starlink satellites as a payload on Starship's third flight.
But, but, but it’s a failure compared to NASA’s rocket
One year ago NASA flew its Space Launch System rocket for the first time. After a decade of development and tens of billions of dollars, the large rocket had a flawless debut aside from some damage to the launch site. This was a great success, but NASA really had no other choice. It started building pieces of the rocket seven years before launch, and the whole ethos of the space agency is that “failure is not an option.”
SpaceX built the Starship and Super Heavy rocket that launched on Saturday over the span of a couple of months at a price somewhere between one-tenth and one-hundredth the cost of NASA's SLS rocket. Because it can build Starships rapidly and at a low cost, SpaceX has half a dozen more rockets in various stages of work, all awaiting their turn to go to space. Due to this iterative design methodology—flying to identify flaws, and rapidly incorporating those changes into new hardware—SpaceX can afford to fail. That is the whole point. By flying its vehicles, SpaceX can rapidly identify what parts of the rocket need to be changed. The alternative is, quite literally, years and years of analysis and meetings and more analysis. Iterative design is faster and cheaper—if you can afford to fail.
In some respects, on just its second flight, Starship now is as successful as NASA’s SLS rocket. Consider that the Artemis I test flight in November 2022 used a core stage, side-mounted boosters, and an upper stage known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This core stage performed well, flying a nominal mission as it boosted the Orion spacecraft into orbit.
Although the core stage was new hardware, the upper stage ICPS was a (very, very lightly) modified version of a Delta rocket upper stage that has been flying for a quarter of a century. Put another way, the core stage of the SLS rocket, and the Super Heavy booster have now both completed one successful launch. If SpaceX had stuck an ICPS and the Orion spacecraft hardware on top of Super Heavy, it could have gone to the Moon on Saturday.
This is the power of iterative design—it's faster, cheaper, and typically better than the alternative if you can survive the popular canard of being perceived as a failure.
SpaceX has an incredible amount of work to do
I'm pretty sure that most non-space people do not really understand what Starship aspires to be. And that's OK, because there's really no precedent for this. Yes, NASA went to the Moon with the Apollo program half a century ago, and that was truly awesome. But it did so with funding that approached nearly 5 percent of the US federal budget and a workforce of about 400,000 people. Such resources are completely off the table today.
Moreover, every piece of Apollo hardware that landed astronauts on the Moon was never used again. The components of the big Saturn V rocket fell into the ocean or were jettisoned into deep space. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down into the ocean and ended up in museums.
With Starship, SpaceX is seeking to build a fully reusable launch system that is larger and more powerful than the Apollo rocket. SpaceX seeks to land hundreds of metric tons on the Moon, not 15 tons like Apollo. What SpaceX is trying to do is extremely challenging from a physics and funding standpoint, and the work is only beginning.
Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.
But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday's flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.
Should we cheer for an Elon Musk company, though?
A lot of the media angst this weekend was undoubtedly driven by antipathy for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The guy's a fraud, right? His companies are a grift, right? I can only really speak to SpaceX, but Musk is definitely not a fraud. He has his flaws, certainly. Some of his politics and public statements are deeply unsettling to many. But the dude founded SpaceX and remains the vital force impelling the company forward. He has dumb ideas. He has brilliant ideas. But mostly, he gets things done.
In the aerospace industry there are basically two types of people: checkers and doers. The checkers sit in meetings, write reports, and perform analysis. They serve an important role to be sure. Spaceflight is complicated and hard and risky, and prudence demands an extra set of eyes on work. But checkers are also the bane of progress.
Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers. That's part of the bureaucratization process, and today it's not a bad place for the agency to be as it manages a slew of traditional and new space contractors. However, it's a terrible place for a space company to be. Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers, even after more than 20 years of existence.
That culture was created by Musk and is maintained by Musk. He is a hard-charging leader who pushes back on bureaucracy. He wants to move fast and break things. And he does break things. Those very public failures and his recent comments and actions have certainly hurt his reputation, and to some extent, that of SpaceX.
But to denigrate the prodigious rocket science on display in Texas this weekend for this reason, alone, is a mistake. The smart take is to look at it as a critical step on the path toward achieving something amazing, with the potential to unlock a future of spaceflight we have only dreamed about heretofore. The smart take is to cheer on the people out there who are actually doing.
In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author, and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, Julia Child & Company, following her hit series The French Chef. Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.
While this may seem like any corporate sponsorship, we now know it was a part of a calculated campaign by gas industry executives to increase the use of gas stoves across the United States. And stoves weren’t the only objective. The gas industry wanted to grow its residential market, and homes that used gas for cooking were likely also to use it for heat and hot water.
The industry’s efforts went well beyond careful product placement, according to new research from the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, which analyzes corporate efforts to undermine climate science and slow the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels. As the center’s study and a National Public Radio investigation show, when evidence emerged in the early 1970s about the health effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide exposure from gas stove use, the American Gas Association launched a campaign designed to manufacture doubt about the existing science.
As a researcher who has studied air pollution for many years—including gas stoves’ contribution to indoor air pollution and health effects—I am not naïve about the strategies that some industries use to avoid or delay regulations. But I was surprised to learn that the multipronged strategy related to gas stoves directly mirrored tactics that the tobacco industry used to undermine and distort scientific evidence of health risks associated with smoking starting in the 1950s.
The gas industry is defending natural gas stoves, which are under fire for their health effects and their contribution to climate change.
Manufacturing controversy
The gas industry relied on Hill & Knowlton, the same public relations company that masterminded the tobacco industry’s playbook for responding to research linking smoking to lung cancer. Hill & Knowlton’s tactics included sponsoring research that would counter findings about gas stoves published in the scientific literature, emphasizing uncertainty in these findings to construct artificial controversy and engaging in aggressive public relations efforts.
For example, the gas industry obtained and reanalyzed the data from an EPA study on Long Island that showed more respiratory problems in homes with gas stoves. Their reanalysis concluded that there were no significant differences in respiratory outcomes.
The industry also funded its own health studies in the early 1970s, which confirmed large differences in nitrogen dioxide exposures but did not show significant differences in respiratory outcomes. These findings were documented in publications where industry funding was not disclosed. These conclusions were amplified in numerous meetings and conferences and ultimately influenced major governmental reports summarizing the state of the literature.
This campaign was remarkable, since the basics of how gas stoves affected indoor air pollution and respiratory health were straightforward and well-established at the time. Burning fuel, including natural gas, generates nitrogen oxides: The air in Earth’s atmosphere is about 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, and these gases react at high temperatures.
The key question is whether nitrogen dioxide exposure related to gas stoves is large enough to lead to health concerns. While levels vary across homes, scientific research shows that the simple answer is yes—especially in smaller homes and when ventilation is inadequate.
Despite this evidence, the gas industry’s campaign was largely successful. Industry-funded studies successfully muddied the waters, as I have seen over the course of my research career, and stalled further federal investigations or regulations addressing gas stove safety.
As communities wrestle with these questions, regulators, politicians, and consumers need accurate information about the risks of gas stoves and other products in homes. There is room for vigorous debate that considers a range of evidence, but I believe that everyone has a right to know where that evidence comes from.
Every time I stepped into Against the Grain, I was surprised all over again by just how tiny it was. My walk-up studio on the Upper East Side felt downright palatial compared to this shoebox on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C, in the cool-vegan-restaurant-and-punk-bar-studded Alphabet City. I had been warned never to venture to this part of Downtown when I started exploring the city on my own; maybe that’s why it was one of the first places I went upon moving to New York.
Against the Grain was the annex of a bigger wine bar called Grape & Grain. The roomy, warmly lit Grape & Grain felt luxurious by comparison, and I began to see Against the Grain as a tangible expression of how craft beer was viewed—within the New York City bar-and-restaurant industry, but also more widely—next to wine. The wine bar was spacious and well-appointed, the beer bar a tiny cave next door.
It was 2009, and beer still felt like an underdog, something you had to be in-the-know to love and appreciate. At those neighboring bars, a binary soon presented itself: I realized we could keep going to Grape & Grain, indulgently stretching out at tables, or we could pack into cramped spaces and dedicate ourselves to drinking new craft releases and revered imports while getting to know the fellow beer misfits sitting next to us. The choice was obvious.
While we were perched at the bar in the quiet of near-closing one night, Against the Grain’s bartender recommended something from Dogfish Head Brewery, with which I was then only vaguely familiar. As we enjoyed whatever it was, we chatted more; as we paid our tab, he mentioned that a Midtown bar called Rattle N Hum was going to have a Dogfish Head tap takeover that week. In about 20 minutes, I had gained so much: a new brewery to explore, a new beer bar to try, a new event to attend (a “tap takeover?”), and the pleasure of chatting with and learning from another beer geek. That conversation threw open the doors of New York City’s beer scene, leading me down a path I’d still be on 14 years later.
THE SCENE THAT BARS BUILT
New York City is used to being ahead of the curve, but in regards to craft beer, it was decidedly behind the times. Even as cities on the West Coast and in New England became destinations in the 1990s and 2000s for those seeking hyped breweries and limited-allocation IPAs, and the scenes that bloomed around them, New York remained far from what you’d call a beer town.
That stance was in stark contrast to the city’s brewing history. Thanks to the beer-drinking Europeans who settled it, New York City was home to breweries throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, until factors like expensive real estate, changing consumer preferences, and the consolidation of the beer industry virtually killed the city’s breweries by the start of the 1970s. As craft beer blossomed in the United States beginning in the 1980s, the brewpub trend did take root in New York, but almost as quickly as it rose up, it died out: Thanks to staggering operations costs, competition, and some subpar beer, most of Manhattan’s brewpubs exited stage left with the 20th century.
Instead, there were cocktail culture and nightlife scenes—the clubs and speakeasies, the rooftop bars and lounges; the places New York’s bold-faced names, glitterati, and visitors frequented, and which never had beer at their center. Even if you did have an interest in beer in the early aughts, you couldn’t do more than sip a sample in a taproom in the state of New York before Governor Andrew Cuomo signed The Craft NY Act into effect in 2014.
Those legal limitations severely constrained the city’s breweries. Brooklyn Brewery, established in 1988, was able to offer beer with a workaround: Patrons taking a brewery tour could buy tokens to redeem for pours. Sixpoint Brewery opened in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2004, but only unveiled its first taproom in 2022.
Otherwise, if you were in New York and wanted to find out what existed beyond macro brands before 2014, you went to beer bars. They were the primary places connoisseurs and curious drinkers could taste craft beers from across the country, or Belgian, German, and English imports. And as the scrappy hubs of a nascent scene, they were also where the city’s beer community was built.
I was one of those curious drinkers, trekking all over the city to immerse myself in this fascinating, new-to-me world. There was research involved. Where were the bars that specialized in craft beer? How many trains would I have to take to get there? It was like a treasure hunt, with the added excitement of joining a burgeoning group of fellow geeks.
Only after a couple years did it even occur to me to start seeking out breweries when I traveled. As I began meeting people whose entire beer journeys started and evolved in taprooms, I realized how different that was from what I experienced in New York. Sure, in other places you were drinking from the source. But you were also limited to that brewery’s beers. Even now, with New York’s brewery count hovering around 40, I often prefer to check in with beer at a bar. That the ubiquity of taprooms has presented stiff and sometimes unsurvivable competition to beer bars in recent years only enhances my nostalgia and appreciation for these spaces.
I SAY A LITTLE PRAYER FOR BEER
One of the first places to represent New York City’s modern beer bar scene also happened to be one of the first bars I frequented. Like many beer drinkers in the 2000s, my interest was grounded more in Belgian tradition than American craft. And that’s what was on the menu at the wonderfully named Burp Castle.
The bar was and remains a shrine to Belgian beer, with its church-y lighting, wooden floors creaking under carpet, and hand-painted monk murals covering the walls. To keep with its monastic ambience, quiet is mandated: When the din grows too loud, the bartenders—clad in monk’s robes until more recently—shush the crowd. It’s tongue-in-cheek, yet it effectively fosters a sense of reverence for the beer at hand, in all its tradition and history.
When Jerry Kuziw opened Burp Castle in 1992, it became an anchor for the city’s nascent beer scene. He also owned Brewski’s next door, and the pair of bars leveraged an existing beer history on Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues in the East Village. “In that building, the NYC Homebrewers Guild had their first meetings back in the ’80s,” says Jimmy Carbone, who would later contribute his own beer bar, the now-shuttered Jimmy’s No. 43, to the cluster. “That’s where [Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster] Garrett Oliver met [the brewery’s co-founder] Steve Hindy. There’s craft beer history of New York in that building, and no other real history like that noted anywhere except that block.”
In 2005, Gary Gillis took over Burp Castle and Brewski’s; the latter became Standings, a craft beer sports bar. Today, Burp Castle’s tap list remains at least 50% Belgian—expect the likes of Tripel Karmeliet, Westmalle Dubbel, and La Chouffe Blonde—with a few German, English, and American classics. And patrons still respect the quiet, even if they do need to be shushed occasionally.
1992 also saw the opening of another seminal New York beer bar: Mugs Ale House, founded by Ed Berestecki in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Compared to the high camp of Burp Castle, Mugs was a good, old-fashioned tavern that felt like it had been there for a hundred years, with a cast of regulars as firmly rooted as the barstools on which they sat.
“In that building, the NYC Homebrewers Guild had their first meetings back in the ’80s. That’s where Garrett Oliver met Steve Hindy. There’s craft beer history of New York in that building, and no other real history like that noted anywhere except that block.”
— Jimmy Carbone, Jimmy’s No. 43
As former bartender Hayley Karl recalls, many of those regulars were early beer industry members and craft beer fans. “They’d been selling craft beer since the ’90s … Places like Other Half and Threes, these ‘hot’ breweries, they’d come in and [the regulars] would say, ‘We’ll see!’ They’d seen so much.”
For me, Mugs existed in that liminal space between an explicitly craft-focused beer bar and a divey pub. “It lacked any pretension whatsoever, even though its beer list was actually quite pretentious,” says Chris O’Leary, who’s been chronicling the city’s beer scene since 2007 on his blog (and now newsletter), Brew York. If it introduced many New Yorkers to various beer firsts, Mugs was still just your corner bar, despite the a breadth of its tap list and famous events like Split Thy Skull, an annual Barleywine-and-other-big-beers festival so beloved that Karl remembers a man who flew in from England every year for it.
How could such an understated bar have been so formative for so many? Part of that magic undoubtedly had to do with timing. (The bar closed in 2019, and has since been reopened by new owners.) It doesn’t seem possible for a bar to open now in a neighborhood like Williamsburg—which has become shorthand for gentrification—and serve craft beer without being a craft beer bar, bearded hipster stereotypes and all. For most of the original Mugs’ life, however, Williamsburg was just where real people worked and lived—and, if they had any interest in beer beyond macros, they went to Mugs.
Karl regales me with stories from what she calls the best bartending job she’s ever had, during the last three years of the bar’s run. There was the time a few regulars pulled one of their own out of a fight and into Mugs, only to realize the guy had been knifed. “It was like the HBO version of ‘Cheers.’ Where everybody knows … you got stabbed,” she quips.
DRINK BETTER ALE
I may have headed to Burp Castle for Belgian beers, but it was at the not-quite-divey, resolutely-rock-and-roll d.b.a., which opened in 1994, where I experienced Lindemans Framboise and Kriek for the first time.
My formative bar experiences were tied to punk and metal shows, and d.b.a.’s East Village grit meant I felt comfortable heading there to drink the kind of beers for which I had to carefully budget. I grew up over those visits to the bar, not just in beer knowledge but in life. 2010 was squinting to read the overwhelming number of beer names scrawled in a tiny script on the chalkboard menu, screaming our orders over the roar. 2015 was leisurely afternoons in the backyard with close friends. 2019 was rewarding my dog and me after a trip to the vet, she with her bone and me with my beer.
Any mystery about why d.b.a. felt special disappears when you hear tributes to its co-owner Ray Deter, tragically killed in a bike accident in 2011. Carbone calls Deter “the face of good beer in New York,” recalling how he “knew everyone,” from Trappist beer-brewing monks to early American craft brewers. How he pushed for excellence and variety in the bar’s beer offerings, from Cantillon to cask ale; believed in people’s readiness to drink them before anyone else; and sought to bring that good beer to more people with additional d.b.a. locations in Williamsburg and also New Orleans. How he influenced so many others to subsequently open their own impactful beer bars.
Brew York’s O’Leary calls Deter “such a cool, relaxed, smart person about beer and really spirits, too.” He reminisces about visiting d.b.a.’s now-closed Williamsburg extension, as well as its New Orleans outpost. “There was live jazz going on a Sunday afternoon, and I thought, ‘This is Ray personified.’ It felt like that’s the legacy he wanted to leave.”
Deter’s legacy indeed lives on, through both d.b.a. specifically and the city’s present-day beer scene more generally. He co-hosted early episodes of the podcast Beer Sessions Radio with Carbone, who still hosts the show today, and worked with him to establish The Good Beer Seal, which recognizes independent bars dedicated to both serving and educating drinkers on domestic craft beer and/or imports. The seal was both an honor and a helpful distinguisher for consumers as beer bars proliferated throughout the aughts.
True to his mission, Deter had built more than a good beer bar—he’d helped build a good beer community.
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK
With d.b.a. and Burp Castle in the East Village, some wondered if another downtown beer bar was really necessary when Dave Brodrick revealed his plans for Blind Tiger Ale House in the West Village. It was 1996, and select bars around town, including ones Brodrick worked at, had begun devoting more taps to imports and domestic craft beer. But to anyone outside that small, in-the-know set, three beer bars in Lower Manhattan felt like potential overkill.
When Blind Tiger opened, Brodrick put on beers with “gateway” reputations, including Pete’s Wicked Ale and five different Brooklyn Brewery offerings. Over time, he watched the scene flourish, as craft beer approached ubiquity at non-specialist bars and palates and consumer education subsequently matured. “The first time I put on Cantillon [not long after opening], people were like, ‘Are you insane?’ Then in the early aughts, I’d put it on and it would be gone so fast—things really began to shift.”
Brodrick is modest when it comes to Blind Tiger’s crucial role in that shift. He sees the growth of both appreciation for and access to craft beer in New York City as a sign of teamwork between the city’s beer bars and breweries. Where some beer bar owners might view breweries and their taprooms as competition, Brodrick identifies a partnership with a mutual goal: helping people understand why craft beer is great, and getting that great beer into their hands.
This kind of team effort has always been apparent at Blind Tiger. I discovered so many breweries through its tap takeovers, and the same is true for many members of the local beer scene, including executive director of the New York City Brewers Guild Ann V. Reilly, who counts “the Ghost Bottle special events Garrett Oliver would do and the every-Wednesday tap takeovers” among her favorite memories. For Brodrick, a particular brewer stands out when he looks back on the events.
“The first time I put on Cantillon [not long after opening], people were like, ‘Are you insane?’ Then in the early aughts, I’d put it on and it would be gone so fast—things really began to shift.”
— Dave Brodrick, Blind Tiger Ale House
“Sam Calagione is such a promoter,” he says. “When [Dogfish Head] brought out their Pumpkin Beer, he said, ‘I’m going to bring 200 gourds and we’re going to carve them out and serve the beer in those.’ Well, of course, when people finished their beers, they threw them at each other, and it was a massive food fight. It took us two days to clean. It was totally crazy, but it got people really excited. A lot of what brewers were doing to get people’s attention, it was totally different from what corporate brands were doing. Brewers would come up with unique ideas around beers they were pushing, and beer bars like us would showcase it.”
Blind Tiger fostered a palpable thrill around craft beer—its newness, its creativity, its variety, its potential—and surfed that wave right into a new era of ubiquity.
BEER FOR THE MASSES
The vibe was different at The Ginger Man, opened on 36th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, also in 1996. It was a sprawling pub, part of a micro-chain founded by Bob Precious with locations in Houston, Texas and Greenwich, Connecticut. It was ideally situated near Grand Central Station—perfect for white-collar commuters—and Madison Square Garden, and within the general vicinity of Manhattan’s tourist-dense center. “The common complaint from people who wanted to drink beer there was that the crowd sucked,” O’Leary says. “From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day it was standing room only and half the people didn’t give a shit about the beer at all, the other half were beer nerds but struggled to be able to ask the bartenders questions.”
On weekends, with much of the bar’s clientele home in the ’burbs, you could actually get a table and enjoy your Chimay Blue or Tröegs Nugget Nectar with a giant pretzel. On weeknights, though, I remember trying to focus on the book-length menu among what felt like a music festival sponsored by Brooks Brothers. Here was a bar with an overwhelming tap-and-bottle list, and instead of beer geeks, the place was packed with Knicks fans, finance bros, and lawyers with Connecticut zip codes.
Ash Croce, a Brooklyn-based writer who worked in beer bars and taprooms for seven years, bartended at The Ginger Man from August 2016 until March 2020, a little more than a year before the bar closed for good. The weekday crowd may not have noticed, but the bar took beer seriously: Croce says staff had to finish beer training, and pass a written test, to get on the schedule; most became Cicerone Certified Beer Servers. “Happy hour was our bread and butter, it was a flood of Patagonia-vested businessmen indistinguishable from each other,” she remembers. “This crowd didn’t really care about beer.”
Outside happy hour was different, though. Friday was a “big regular day,” Croce recalls. “These were the days we had our customers whose preferences we knew. Like my regular who was loyal to authentic European Lagers and insisted American attempts were always too hoppy.”
Croce credits a tight-knit staff for support, and was able to continue her beer education amid chaotic shifts. That kind of crowd posed a challenge for bartenders, though, and in a lower-stakes way, did the same for beer-dedicated patrons. For much of The Ginger Man’s run, its beer menu was enough of a draw for beer fans to fight the throngs. But by its last year in 2021? It was hard to imagine compromising so much on atmosphere to drink good beer.
A GATEWAY TO SOUTH BROOKLYN
Crowds pouring into your bar with little interest in your beer programming wasn’t a problem for Bobby Gagnon. After years of working with imported beer and early craft, the Boston native moved from Los Angeles to New York, waded into the city’s beer scene, met Brodrick, and bartended at Blind Tiger before deciding to open his place, The Gate, in Park Slope in 1997.
“It was a pretty tough slog in the beginning,” he says. “This end of the neighborhood is much different now. Then, it wasn’t a high-traffic area, so people who found us were looking for us because they’d found out what we were doing.” And what The Gate was doing was helping the community of beer lovers in New York expand. “We were putting beer in people’s hands and explaining why this was the direction you should be going,” he says.
If the early days were about education, The Gate’s focus has shifted during its 25 years of existence. Now, customers walk in “completely educated, they know styles and what they’re looking for down to hop profiles.” Gagnon adds that The Gate’s survival over the course of that evolution is a testimony to how far the beer scene in New York has come. People once figured out how to find a bar like The Gate in order to explore beer, then knew what beer they wanted and that they’d find it at The Gate. Today, even the most casual drinker might just happen into The Gate and not bat an eye at the extensive variety.
The Gate has long felt special in the sense that it’s a welcoming, pubby hang for fellow industry folks. O’Leary cites the chili cook-offs the bar hosted over the years, the competitors representing different breweries, and connects this specific event to an overall knack The Gate has for making industry members feel at home. “There hasn’t been a time I’ve walked into The Gate and there wasn’t someone from the industry sitting at the bar, or even behind the bar,” he says.
I can attest to being made to feel at home in this bar. I discovered The Gate at a time in my life where I needed a place that was quiet and welcoming on a weekday afternoon so I could be comfortable alone and distracted by good beer. I had just moved to Park Slope in 2018, weeks after my mom had died, and I felt completely unmoored. The Gate was a port in the storm. Nine years earlier, though, I had a comparatively more adventurous approach to finding and choosing beer destinations.
BELGIUM BY WAY OF BROOKLYN
In 2009, I was living at home in the suburbs between graduating college and moving into Manhattan. My quest for Belgian beer had begun, and after finding Spuyten Duyvil in an issue of “Time Out New York,” I was convinced it was worth the trip into Williamsburg. It was a thrilling discovery, walking through the bar’s red door and into what I’d later recognize as the atmosphere of an old Belgian beer café—thoughtfully mixed-and-matched furniture in a compact, creaky-wood space that felt like it had been there for ages, sunlight shining in through windows like Vermeer painted it—and tasting beers that felt downright extravagant, but never frivolous, to splurge on.
Tuned into beer since he caught an episode of Michael Jackson’s “Beer Hunter” when he was around 17, Spuyten Duyvil’s founder, Joe Carroll, arrived in Manhattan at an early inflection point for the city’s growing beer scene. By the time he opened the bar in 2003, though, the fervor had fizzled—temporarily. There were barely enough local breweries to make a dent on Spuyten Duyvil’s menu in the beginning, so most of the bar’s six taps and bottle list focused on beers from Belgium, Germany, and England, consistently stocking enough rare gems that Carroll says people from other states and countries knew to visit Spuyten Duyvil when seeking out rarities.
“It truly formed how I saw and thought about the beer world back then. Not only in being exposed to different brewers, styles, and regional scenes, but also in events held, which helped connect me with other people in the industry locally.”
— Niko Krommydas, beer writer
B.R. Rolya, a brewery consultant and importer who worked for the now-shuttered Shelton Brothers, remembers how exciting Spuyten Duyvil’s opening was for her homebrew club. “The idea that [Carroll] was not only focused on Belgian beers but split them into regional selections of Flanders and Wallonia was mind-blowing,” she says.
Within a few years, American craft beer had exploded, and there were more than enough local craft options to share the menu with imports. As the New York beer scene grew, so did Spuyten Duyvil’s following. It became a favorite stop for industry members visiting town, and for beer launches and events. For beer writer Niko Krommydas, like so many members of the city’s beer industry, Spuyten Duyvil played a formative role in his developing education and interest—he calls the bar “home to some of my earliest experiences with ‘good’ beer, both craft and international.”
“It truly formed how I saw and thought about the beer world back then,” says Krommydas. “Not only in being exposed to different brewers, styles, and regional scenes, but also in events held, which helped connect me with other people in the industry locally.”
UNDERGROUND BUT ON THE RADAR
While he would never take this credit himself, Jimmy Carbone could easily be mistaken for the unofficial mayor of New York City’s beer bar scene.
On a phone call to discuss his former bar, Jimmy’s No. 43, the conversation ends on the importance of other bars and their owners. Perhaps that’s no surprise considering that Carbone is behind foundational moves that organized the city’s beer bars into a community in the first place. There was the Good Beer Seal, as well as NYC Good Beer Month, which laid the groundwork for NYC Beer Week (later taken over by the NYC Brewers Guild). He also keeps beer bar owners and staff at the center of the local industry conversation with his Beer Sessions podcast. It can’t be forgotten, though, that from 2005 to 2015, Carbone was a beer bar owner himself.
Jimmy’s No. 43 opened below Standings, making its own mark on that stretch of East Seventh Street. Carbone came to beer bar ownership through having cooked professionally, worked with wine, and owned a restaurant, which had started to stock imports, then American craft beer. When the restaurant closed in 2005, he leveraged his beer interest, knowledge, and relationships with distributors to open Jimmy’s No. 43. Carbone was hands-on every step of the way, cooking every meal served at the bar and writing every beer list. Local beer lovers noticed, and quickly developed an affection for Carbone’s dedication and the resulting stellar tap and bottle list.
“[The bar] was haphazard and cramped and smelled kind of damp and the backroom with all the events was really small—and I loved everything about it,” O’Leary says. “It was one of those places where none of these things on their own should work but all together, it just somehow does.” I can still conjure up that smell and the bar’s dim lighting. I recall feeling older than my years as I used my cell phone light to study the menu. Maybe it all harkens back to that punk rock spirit, the beer geek’s love of being pushed into dark little caves where they’re free to fixate on every sip, because beer industry and community members couldn’t get enough of Jimmy’s.
Indeed, Jimmy’s No. 43 was at the center of the community, often supporting local breweries before anyone else. “For five years, we did Jimmy’s Homebrew Jamboree,” says beer journalist and author Joshua M. Bernstein, who’s been running local homebrew tours for over 13 years. “People from Finback, Strong Rope, KCBC, and beyond poured at the tours and the jamboree,” he adds, emphasizing how the homebrew scene and places like Jimmy’s were the only places to embrace this good beer movement pre-taprooms.
Jimmy’s closed in 2017, the same year as Against the Grain’s demise and that of Paloma Rocket, a pour-your-own beer bar on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side that had only been open a little over a year. 2018 saw the closing of Rattle N Hum, a sportier and beer-geekier Midtown answer to The Ginger Man that had been popular with breweries launching New York City distribution with tap takeovers and meet-and-greets. In 2019, Mugs shuttered before its eventual change in ownership.
This ever-shifting cycle of openings and closings feels emblematic of the difficulty of running a small business in New York City, where greedy landlords jacking up the rent can mean the end for a beloved neighborhood bar or restaurant. But as New York belatedly becomes a brewery-led scene, it’s hard to ignore that bars have declined as taprooms have finally begun proliferating. Where New York City’s specialty bars were, less than a decade ago, the city’s beer scene in its entirety, now they are a complement to its breweries, no longer the gravitational center.
I'M IN A NOSTALGIC STATE OF MIND
Following conversations with my fellow New York beer enthusiasts, my nostalgia surges, and I can’t help but wonder if they also got off the phone to marinate for a minute in the memories of those early days, of chasing Belgian rarities and new craft releases from borough to borough. It’s immediately clear we share many of the same affections, even while having our own journeys into the scene.
Some people couldn’t believe I wasn’t discussing Bierkraft, a now-shuttered Park Slope spot with staff that carried on to brew at some of the city’s best-known breweries, but I’d never been there. Only Dan Lamonaca, owner of Williamsburg bottle shop Beer Karma, remembered frequenting an Upper East Side bar I loved called David Copperfield’s, while owner of the East Village’s ABC Beer Co. Zach Mack was one of the few with memories of Against the Grain. Lamonaca shares some of my fondness for Spitzer’s Corner on the Lower East Side, while others I spoke with viewed it as a death knell for authenticity among beer bars because it was opened by a slick team of restaurateurs.
Plenty has changed in the nearly 13 years since I moved to New York and became a regular at the city’s beer bars. Exploring beer in the city undoubtedly looks different now, and this evolution isn’t the only lens through which I’ve been looking back at these spaces. After living here for so long, I’ve finally started to plan a new course—one that will take me to other cities to explore what it’s like to live there, and, inevitably, immerse myself in those beer scenes. Knowing now that my New York days are finite has introduced preemptive nostalgia for a moment that hasn’t even passed yet.
For now, I drink in every last drop—not just of my beer, but of the atmosphere, the people, the music, and the conversations. It’s in doing so that I’m reminded: As much as this little New York City beer world looks different, and as many special places as we’ve lost, our beer bars are alive and well, still offering unique experiences in the way my admittedly biased heart believes creative, resourceful New Yorkers do best.
Burp Castle, The Gate, d.b.a.—these neighborhood staples still pour stellar beer alongside fellow stalwarts like George Keeley on the Upper West Side, Fourth Avenue Pub in Park Slope, and the now 14-year-old Double Windsor near Prospect Park. Bar-bottle-shop hybrids like Beer Culture, Top Hops, ABC Beer Co., Beer Karma, Covenhoven, and Beer Witch offer still more options for locals to engage with good beer, and a newer generation of beer bars with openings spanning the last decade like Gold Star Beer Counter, BierWax, Beer Street, Glorietta Baldy, Bondurants, and Hops Hill attract fresh crowds alongside people like me, who have been stalking local beer destinations since the late aughts.
I love New York City’s breweries, but I owe the will to frequent them in the first place to the city’s beer bars. It’s a vibrant scene I’m grateful to discuss with fellow New Yorkers, recommend to travelers, and will look forward to revisiting long after I’ve left town.
Words by Courtney Iseman Illustrations by Colette Holston
Thursday brought Congress one step closer to banning the Chinese-owned TikTok in the U.S. It also raised questions about user data and privacy regulation throughout the tech sector as a whole.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The CEO of a popular social media company walks into a congressional hearing, sits down in front of a bunch of cantankerous lawmakers, and gets treated like a political punching bag. The complaints go something like this: The platform violates user privacy. It’s addictive, psychologically damaging, and dangerous for kids. It’s both too “woke” and overflowing with hate speech. It’s vulnerable to disinformation and foreign interference. It works in ways that House members don’t understand, but they know they don’t like it all the same.
The CEO meets these grievances with vague promises of reform and an unlimited supply of I’ll get back to yous. By the time the hearing is over, it’s clear that this was primarily an exercise in political theater. The average onlooker doesn’t really believe there will be meaningful reform to how tech companies operate. And usually there isn’t.
It’s not a particularly uplifting ritual. But if you’ve paid attention to the ballooning of big tech over the past two decades, you probably know it by heart. A good congressional paddling has become a rite of passage for nearly every major U.S.-owned social network. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram have all been interrogated on Capitol Hill, scolded for being devil-may-care data vacuums, and then released back to their natural oat-milk-rich Silicon Valley habitats to keep making everyone—including the lawmakers who questioned them—more money.
On Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew went to Washington, D.C., and threw a wrench into this established tradition. Because—despite being an indisputable cultural catalyst that has 150 million monthly active users in the United States—TikTok is not an American product. The video-sharing app is owned by ByteDance, the privately held Chinese internet giant that is based in Beijing.
This detail set a fire under the typical congressional step-and-repeat, inspiring an opening statement that felt unusually aggressive and dismissive: “You are here because the American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington). She underlined concerns that TikTok collects “nearly every data point imaginable,” which the Chinese Communist Party is able to use “as a tool to manipulate America.” She cast doubt that TikTok would ever embrace “American values” for “freedom, human rights, and innovation.” She ridiculed TikTok’s plan (nicknamed “Project Texas”) to store all U.S. user data on American soil as “a marketing scheme.” Finally, she arrived at a conclusion shared by our twomost recent presidents, that TikTok “should be banned.” Her mind had been made up before Chew ever got a word in.
The hearing as a whole followed a similar script. More than 50 representatives lambasted Chew for virtually every big tech violation under the sun, from encroaching on user privacy to harming the mental health and well-being of teenagers. Many of the reps’ talking points sounded familiar, as if cribbed from previous hearings featuring prominent U.S. tech executives. As Ron Deibert, the director of a University of Toronto laboratory that has analyzed TikTok’s data collection practices, put it on Twitter: “Concerns with TikTok should serve as a reminder that most social media apps are unacceptably invasive-by-design, treat users as raw material for personal data surveillance, and fall short on transparency about their data sharing practices.”
Though a few Democrats in the hearing offered up comparable rationale, the rare bipartisan fervor in the room underlined a clear, unspoken truth: When our companies guzzle data, it’s tolerated. When a Chinese company does it, it’s a national security threat.
This conflict has taken center stage in the ongoing geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China. The United States has along, if inconsistent, history of blocking Chinese business deals while citing national security and human rights concerns (the most previously notable of which involved the Chinese communications company Huawei), and gripes against TikTok in particular stretch back to 2019, when its rise in popularity stirred bipartisan grumblings about its potential national security risks. Unlike other Chinese companies doing business in the U.S., TikTok is a social media app with real cultural cache, and has the power to influence the kind of media that Americans consume daily. Not only can it surveil Americans, but it can collect information about what they like, and potentially use that to launch disinformation campaigns as well.
At the core of legislators’ concerns both then and now is China’s 2017 national intelligence law, which broadly states that companies and citizens are required to “support, assist and cooperate” with state intelligence work if asked. The implication here is that if the Chinese government ordered ByteDance to hand over hundreds of millions of Americans’ data, the company would be compelled to do so. Chinese government spokespeople have challenged this interpretation of its law, saying that intelligence work is conducted according to local laws abroad. But given the country’s authoritarian leadership, sweeping citizen surveillance, and record of human rights violations, Congress is right to question the validity of that explanation. Having the power to collect detailed data, and use that data to influence what people see and believe, is the next political frontier. And it’s hard to deny that if the Chinese government had access to all the data TikTok collects, it really could use that to its advantage on the global stage.
Since initial worries about TikTok materialized in 2019, the U.S. government and the platform have been in the throes of a public back-and-forth not unlike the kind of snappy drama that regularly occurs on the app itself. In August 2020, then-president Donald Trump signed an abrupt executive order that banned the app. (The move may or may not have been inspired by an incident earlier that year, in which a bunch of Kpop fans on TikTok claimed to sabotage attendance of one of his campaign rallies.) This kicked off negotiations to reach an agreement that would both satisfy the U.S. government’s security interests and allow the app to keep operating on United States soil. Ultimately, the ban didn’t take, and TikTok went on to pursue “Project Texas,” a partnership with Austin-based Oracle that aims to move U.S. users’ information to domestic data centers and restrict access to that data abroad.
This was the focus of Chew’s retort to questioning on Thursday. He went so far as to question the American exceptionalism at the heart of the hearing: “I don’t think ownership is the issue here,” he said late in the session. “With a lot of respect, American social companies don’t have a good track record with data privacy and user security. Just look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, for one example.”
The Biden administration has conveniently chosen to ignore this point and doubled down on its opposition to Chinese ownership. It has moved quickly in recent months to protect itself from the possibility of TikTok data breaches. In late February, the White House gave federal agencies 30 days to delete TikTok from government devices. Canada, Britain, the European Union, and New Zealand also recently called for similar measures, and India banned the app entirely in 2020. At the start of March, a House committee advanced a bill that would allow Biden to ban the app. (You’ll never guess what it’s called.) Soon after, the Biden administration said that the only way to prevent a TikTok ban would be for ByteDance to sell it to a U.S.-owned company. On Thursday, the Chinese government said it would oppose a forced sale.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. If Biden does the equivalent of saying “Fuck it forever!” and bans TikTok in the U.S., he would likely face legal challenges over free speech violations. (Just as Trump did.) The administration could nevertheless place TikTok on a blacklist that would make doing business with the company illegal. This would leave a monumental void in the social media space, one that other tech companies are frothing at the mouth to fill. It’d also leave hundreds of millions of users who’ve adapted to using TikTok as a money-making tool in a state of limbo, and it wouldn’t address the larger user privacy concerns that have long gone unchecked in the tech sector.
Thursday’s hearing managed to both intensify and conflate two separate conversations. There may very well be legitimate national security interests in preventing a Chinese company from maintaining control of TikTok. But legislators’ concerns for their constituents’ individual privacy ring hollow when the U.S. government has so far failed to pass anything resembling a comprehensive privacy law that applies to misbehaving American companies and their data brokers. Many representatives may not be willing to take the political risks necessary to confront our tech sector hypocrisy, but they’re certainly game to whip out some flashy poster boards and put on a show.
Enlarge/ The now-extinct Haast’s eagle hunting moa in New Zealand, which lacked other large predators. Today scientists are looking at the ancient history of the islands’ birds to better understand how “natural” biological invasions happen. (credit: John Megahan/CC)
New Zealand has long been known as a place for the birds—quite literally. Before people arrived 700 years ago, the archipelago hosted an idiosyncratic ecosystem, nearly free of mammals. More than 200 bird species filled a food web all their own. Rather than cows or antelopes, there was a family of flightless birds known as moa. And in place of apex predators like tigers, New Zealand had Haast’s eagle.
Ever since a group of farm workers drained a swamp in the late 1860s and uncovered its buried bones, this eagle has captivated researchers. Julius Haast, the explorer and geologist who published the first notes on the species, described it as “a raptorial bird of enormous dimensions.” Today, biologists estimate that the eagles weighed up to 33 pounds—roughly 50 percent more than any raptor known today. But with a wingspan of only two to three meters—just beyond the range of a bald eagle—this was an oddly proportioned bird.
The shape of Haast’s eagle was one of many puzzles that scientists faced as they studied this long-extinct species, preserved in just a few skeletons, plus scattered bits and pieces. For nearly a century, there was a debate over whether such a large bird could fly; even after that feud was settled, questions remained about whether the bird was capable of killing moa, which in some cases would have been more than 15 times larger than the eagle itself. Now, new scientific techniques, combined with a clearer understanding of New Zealand’s geological history, has placed the Haast’s eagle amid a much larger ecological discussion: how species comes to “invade” new territories.
Scientists now believe that this superlative bird was one in a wave of feathered invaders that conquered New Zealand over a relatively short period. And this was not the only wave of invasions. Haast’s eagle—despite being gone for centuries—has revealed that we live in a much more connected world than we once thought, says biologist Michael Knapp of the University of Otago, who has studied the eagle. If such seemingly isolated islands have repeatedly attracted so many incoming species, he says, then “natural invasions” must be a major force in ecosystems across the world.
Digging for answers
New Zealand has always held an important place in scientists’ understanding of extinction. When Western scientists first encountered moa, the idea that species could go extinct was just a few decades old. Their skeletons soon became a hot commodity. “You could pretty much name your price,” says paleobiologist Paul Scofield, senior curator at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. “It was really what enabled our museum.” Haast himself launched the museum and assembled its initial collection by exchanging moa fossils for various other archeological and zoological curiosities.
New Zealand retained unusual species—including, famously, the flightless kiwi. Combined with these extant oddballs, the moa fossils helped to establish the idea that New Zealand was a lost world, a place where ancient creatures, sheltered by distance from the rest of the world, managed to survive mass extinction events. Later geologists confirmed that these rocky islands had once been a part of a supercontinent they called Gondwana, but split away about 80 million years ago. In 1990, a television series described New Zealand’s islands as “Moa’s Ark,” popularizing the catchy name of the long-held model of how its bird-filled ecosystem came to be.
By the end of the 1990s, though, scientists realized that there was a period during the Oligocene, about 25 million years ago, when geologic and climatic changes might have put all of New Zealand underwater. Such a flood would have wiped out most—if not all—of the islands’ species. The theory, which became known as the “Oligocene drowning,” met resistance from some scientists, launching a heated debate over just how much land was covered.
Fortunately, new technologies were emerging to answer that question. Scientists began to extract and sequence DNA from fossils; this meant researchers could compare ancient DNA to modern genomes and create family trees of the evolutionary relationships between living and extinct species. Such “phylogenies” could roughly pinpoint when two species split apart from their common ancestor—data useful in settling the fight over New Zealand’s geological history.
In 2005, a team of scientists published a paper that compared DNA sequences extracted from two Haast’s eagle fossils to the genomes of 16 modern eagles. The scientists ascertained that the great lost bird’s closest living relatives included Australian species, as expected. The genomic data suggested that the family tree had split within the past few million years. Subsequent analysis has put the divergence time around 2.2 million years ago.
Score one for the Oligocene drowning hypothesis: The eagle appeared to have arrived after the time of the proposed submergence. But later analyses of several other New Zealand species showed divergence times on the order of tens of millions of years. Some species had persisted through the Oligocene, then.
By 2014, geological evidence had convinced most scientists: Yes, much of New Zealand had drowned, but small slivers of land—perhaps 20 percent—had remained above water. While a few of the islands’ species date far back to Gondwana, many others, including Haast’s eagle, were newer arrivals.
But the genetic analysis had revealed a new mystery—one that scientists hadn’t even thought to contemplate. Scientists had often compared the extinct bird to the wedge-tailed eagle, the largest extant raptor in Australia. It was an obvious candidate for the eagle’s closest living relative. Instead, the genes showed a closer link to the booted eagle and the little eagle, species that both weigh around 2 pounds. (The little eagle, as its name implies, is one of the smallest species of eagle alive today.)
This discovery suggested that Haast’s eagle had made a gigantic leap in size from its closest relatives: a 15-fold increase in just 2 million years. That’s a “staggering” rate of change, as Knapp put it in a recent paper. Rapid changes in size have been observed in dogs, but that’s a process driven by human selection. Knapp says he knows of no other instance where natural selection led to such substantial growth over such a short period. It is possible that all three eagles share a not-yet-known ancestral species whose size lay somewhere in the middle; its descendants could have morphed in different directions. But Knapp thinks this scenario less likely. The first wayward eagles, blown across the Tasman Sea in a day-or-two journey from Australia, would have landed in conditions that favored ever-larger birds.
Knapp notes that other raptors, perhaps owls or falcons, could have fed on the islands’ smallest birds. But there were plenty of moa running around, ranging in size from turkeys to ostriches — too big to be picked off by most raptors. “That’s huge amounts of meat that isn’t taken,” Knapp says. Such a scenario would have quickly selected for the largest eagles, who would have had the easiest time consuming such prey.
Knapp is now turning toward the smallest scales of this mystery: By comparing the genomes of various eagle species, he wants to identify precisely which genes changed to facilitate the rapid growth of Haast’s eagles. “Finding out how that works on the molecular level, that’s really the next step,” he says.
Another bird in hand
Already, though, the eagle genetics have helped to deepen our understanding of New Zealand’s ecological history. A second extinct New Zealand bird, known as Eyles’s harrier, is the largest known harrier in history. But it’s not just superlative size that makes this bird reminiscent of Haast’s eagle: The great harrier also appears to have evolved from a smaller bird. The closest living relative of Eyles’s harrier was nearly five times smaller, Knapp and colleagues reported in 2019. And the two harrier species appear to have split apart from their shared ancestor roughly 2.4 million years ago—relatively close to the divergence time of Haast’s eagle.
As Knapp was preparing to speak at a conference about this work, he became intrigued by the shared timing. So he looked for other examples of similar divergence times. “I found a lot of them,” he says. As he began to contemplate this “suspicious clustering,” as he calls it, his colleague Paul Scofield pointed out one more commonality: The recent migrants were all open-habitat species.
Around 10 million years ago, Australia began to grow arid. New Zealand, meanwhile, remained heavily forested—at least until 2.5 million years ago, when the ice ages began. Then large swaths of the islands cooled, causing glaciers to blossom atop New Zealand’s mountains and killing some forests. Suddenly, the islands featured extensive fields of grass: a brand-new habitat.
Knapp uses Haast’s eagle and Eyles’s harrier as case studies in a paper published in the 2021 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics; these are illustrative examples of “natural invasions,” he thinks. Australian species cross the Tasman Sea quite often, but they typically struggle to compete against the islands’ existing species. But when cooler temperatures killed some forests, these new arrivals found a familiar ecological niche — one that no New Zealand species had yet evolved to fill.
This process was entirely natural, but it has implications for conservation. It’s well known that human beings can carry species across the globe—directly causing biological invasions. But the way that Haast’s eagle and Eyles’s harrier arrived suggests a more subtle role human beings can play: We too can alter habitat. We open and close ecological niches. By doing so, we can indirectly lure species into new geographies.
Much of New Zealand’s forest has been burned since the first people arrived, creating even more open habitat. Around half the islands’ bird species were wiped out after humans arrived in New Zealand — including Haast’s eagle and Eyles’s harrier—pening new niches. Now, history is repeating. Over the past several centuries, New Zealand has become home to the Australian bittern, the white-faced heron, the welcome swallow.
“The same thing that we see 2.5 million years ago is happening right now, again,” Knapp says.
The one thing that’s never mysterious about Haast’s eagle is what species wiped it out. Perhaps the eagles were hunted. Certainly, the moa were, which would be enough to doom the predator. “If you're evolving to fit a specific and very rare niche, then you have a hard time when that niche is gone,” Knapp says. One way or another, human beings take the blame.
So while you could take the recent wave of Australian immigrants as a reminder that ecosystems adapt—that life goes on as new species fill the gap—this story is also cautionary. Evolutionary history is full of strange twists and turns, but also dead ends.
Boyce Upholt is a writer and editor based in New Orleans. He’s currently working on his first book, which will explore how the Mississippi River has been altered and changed. Follow him @BoyceUpholt.
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.
I have done a lot of interviews over the years, more than even I can possibly keep track of. Inevitably, a lot of them touch on the same subjects. One of the things I have been asked about most is my writing process. If you have seen any of those interviews, you have probably heard me talking about the two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. I have given that same spiel numerous times. Here’s one of the most thorough explanations:
Another question that I get a lot, especially since the end of GAME OF THRONES on HBO, is whether A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, will end the same way. An architect would be able to give a short, concise, simple answer to that, but I am much more of a gardener. My stories grow and evolve and change as I write them. I generally know where I am going, sure… the final destinations, the big set pieces, they have been my head for years… for decades, in the case of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. There are lots of devils in the details, though, and sometimes the ground changes under my feet as the words pour forth.
(Another question fans and interviewers alike ask a lot if “Where do you get your ideas?” Honestly, I wish I knew. When confronted with the same question, Harlan Ellison used to say, “Schenectady.” The ancient Greeks spoke of the muses. Freud talked of the conscious and subconscious minds, the id, the ego, the superego. More recently, we hear about the right brain and the left brain, one analytic and rational, the other imaginative and creative. I am pretty sure the answer is not Schenectady, but aside from that… hell, I don’t know. Yes, there are some instances where I know the seed from which something in my garden sprang. The Wall sprang from my visit to Hadrian’s Wall in 1981. The Wars of the Roses inspired much of GAME OF THRONES. The Red Wedding was a mash up of the Glencoe Massacre and the Black Dinner from Scottish history, turned up way past eleven. But for every instance like that, there are a hundred for which I have to say, “I don’t know. One day the thought just came to me. It wasn’t there, and then it was.” If that was the work of a muse, may she keep on musing).
Which brings me to THE WINDS OF WINTER.
Most of you know by now that I do not like to give detailed updates on WINDS. I am working on it, I have been working on it, I will continue to work on it. (Yes, I work on other things as well). I love nothing more than to surprise my readers with twists and turns they did not see coming, and I risk losing those moments if I go into too much detail. Spoilers, you know. Even saying that I am working on a Tyrion chapter, as I did last week, gives away the fact that Tyrion is not dead. Reading sample chapters at cons, or posting them on line, which I did for years, gives away even more. I actually quite enjoyed doing that, until the day came that I realized I had read and/or posted the first couple of hundred pages of WINDS, or thereabouts. If I had kept on with the readings, half the book might be out by now.
So I am not going to give you all any kind of detailed report on the book, but…
I will say this.
I have been at work in my winter garden. Things are growing… and changing, as does happen with us gardeners. Things twist, things change, new ideas come to me (thank you, muse), old ideas prove unworkable, I write, I rewrite, I restructure, I rip everything apart and rewrite again, I go through doors that lead nowhere, and doors that open on marvels.
Sounds mad, I know. But it’s how I write. Always has been. Always will be. For good or ill.
What I have noticed more and more of late, however, is my gardening is taking me further and further away from the television series. Yes, some of the things you saw on HBO in GAME OF THRONES you will also see in THE WINDS OF WINTER (though maybe not in quite the same ways)… but much of the rest will be quite different.
And really, when you think about it, this was inevitable. The novels are much bigger and much much more complex than the series. Certain things that happened on HBO will not happen in the books. And vice versa. I have viewpoint characters in the books never seen on the show: Victarion Greyjoy, Arianne Martell, Areo Hotah, Jon Connington, Aeron Damphair They will all have chapters, and the things they do and say will impact the story and the major characters who were on the show. I have legions of secondary characters, not POVs but nonetheless important to the plot, who also figure in the story: Lady Stoneheart, Young Griff, the Tattered Prince, Penny, Brown Ben Plumm, the Shavepate, Marwyn the Mage, Darkstar, Jeyne Westerling. Some characters you saw in the show are quite different than the versions in the novels. Yarra Greyjoy is not Asha Greyjoy, and HBO’s Euron Greyjoy is way, way, way, way different from mine. Quaithe still has a part to play. So does Rickon Stark. And poor Jeyne Poole. And… well, the list is long. (And all this is part of why WINDS is taking so long. This is hard, guys).
Oh, and there will be new characters as well. No new viewpoints, I promise you that, but with all these journeys and battles and scheming to come, inevitably our major players will be encountering new people in lands far and near.
One thing I can say, in general enough terms that I will not be spoiling anything: not all of the characters who survived until the end of GAME OF THRONES will survive until the end of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, and not all of the characters who died on GAME OF THRONES will die in A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. (Some will, sure. Of course. Maybe most. But definitely not all) ((Of course, I could change my mind again next week, with the next chapter I write. That’s gardening)).
And the ending? You will need to wait until I get there. Some things will be the same. A lot will not.
No doubt, once I am done, there will be huge debate about which version of the story is better. Some people will like my book, others will prefer the television show. And that’s fine, you pays your money and your make your choice. (I do fear that a certain proportion of fans are so angry about how long WINDS has taken me that they are prepared to hate the book, unread. That saddens me, but there nothing I can do about it, but write the best book that I can, and hope that when it comes out most fans will read it with clean hands and an open mind).
That’s all I can tell you right now. I need to get back to the garden. Tyrion is waiting for me.
News broke recently that the Court of Master Sommeliers has expelled six of its members following investigations into sexual harassment allegations. This is an ongoing matter that has been met with a string of resignations and calls for change within the Court. But in the wake of the scandal, many within the industry are left wondering whether these repercussions will be enough to inspire meaningful change within the larger wine industry.
On this episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” hosts Adam Teeter, Joanna Sciarrino, and Zach Geballe tackle the topic of sexual harassment within the wine community. Does the court value its reputation more than putting an end to the persisting issues found within it? What can be done to address the court’s power imbalance? How should news outlets cover these issues going forward?
Adam Teeter: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, I’m Adam Teeter.
Joanna Sciarrino: And I’m Joanna Sciarrino.
Zach Geballe: In Seattle, Washington, this is Zach Geballe.
A: And this is the “VinePair Podcast.” So what have we been up to? What have you guys been drinking? How are we feeling? We’re moving into December, it’s cold as sh*t here, I’m not really feeling it. But besides that, Joanna, what have you been drinking?
J: Recently, I celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday, and we went to Temple Bar.
A: Oh, now you’re a regular.
J: It’s such a scene now. There were multiple celebrities there that night. Sienna Miller, Emily Blunt, allegedly, but I did not see her. And Heather Graham.
A: Really? Wow. Quite the little trifecta.
J: Yes.
A: Were they there together or separately?
J: I think separately, I don’t know. Who’s to say?
A: Their publicists should talk to each other.
J: So I had their version of an Espresso Martini. It was really good. It’s called “Sick as the Espresso Martini.” It uses cold brew, and it’s flavored with vanilla and banana. And I love banana drinks. I’ve realized this about myself.
A: Do you like banana ice cream?
J: You mean the one-ingredient banana ice cream?
A: No, banana-flavored ice cream. One ingredient of ice cream is not ice cream, it’s frozen banana. Get a clue. I am sick of that sh*t on social. Here’s how you can have ice cream, but not — it’s pureed frozen banana. That’s not ice cream. Get that sh*t away from me.
Z: I bet vegan ice cream does not go over well with you.
A: No.
Z: Me neither, to be fair, I’m very much with you on this one.
J: Adam’s the dairyman.
Z: I don’t like it when they’re like, “What kind of milk do you want?” I’m like, “I’d like milk.” And they say “What do you mean?” You know, milk that comes out of a cow.
A: Anyways, so you had a nice Espresso Martini cocktail. Anything else?
J: We had a few different drinks. I had another Gibson, which is very good. I’d like to make a Gibson at home.
Z: It’s the only thing that gets mentioned more than Temple Bar.
A: Yeah, seriously.
J: Moving on. What about you, Zach, what are you drinking?
Z: Over the weekend, my wife and I made one of our favorite dishes. We make a lot of pizza at home.
A: Do you have a pizza oven?
Z: Not a separate pizza oven, no.
A: What do you use then? What do you do? Do you have baking steel?
Z: Yes, we call it a cast iron platter, basically. It’s basically baking steel. You need something that gets very hot so that you can get the texture on the bottom right.
A: Exactly.
Z: We actually had a pizza stone for a while, and it bit the dust. And frankly, the cast iron is way better, in part because it’s not fragile. But what we did this last time was instead of making it the way we normally do, which is more conventional, we made something that we do occasionally. It was a tarte flambée, which is a German/Alsatian dish. Instead of using a tomato sauce base, you use a dairy base. You slice onions very thin and marinate it in a mixture of crème fraîche, sour cream, and ricotta for a couple of days. The acid in the dairy helps break down the onions, you put that on top and usually add bacon bits or lard. I like to add a thinly sliced Yukon gold potato over the top, or some other things. We made one with Brie as well. And you just bake them for as hot as your oven can get for nine minutes or so. Along with that, my cousin came over and joined us for dinner. So he brought over a bottle of Albert Boxler Muscat.
A: Did you mandate that the wine had to be Alsatian?
Z: Well, I told him what we were making, and he’s a wine professional also.
A: How can you have more than one wine professional in the family?
Z: It’s a family business of sorts. So we opened a bottle of Pinot Gris that we had, and he brought that bottle of Muscat. And I gotta say, that Muscat really surprised me. It’s a class of varieties that produce very floral wines and sometimes can be annoyingly or cloyingly floral and often made sweet. But there’s a growing trend in Alsatian in general towards drier styles of Muscat. This was quite dry and very aromatic, but not cloying, and went really beautifully with the flambée and was just a lot of fun. I love Alsace as a place, I had the opportunity to visit a few years ago and it was one of the more spectacular wine regions I’ve been to. I love the wines and it was a really fun opportunity to do that little thing where you travel without going anywhere. How about you, Adam?
A: I had a really amazing wine, a Cinsault, from the producer De Martino from Chile. They basically age it all in amphorae that they have dug up from the ground that are antique amphorae. So they’re all different shapes and sizes, and they found them all around Chile, and then they refurbish them and age the wine in them. It’s like before the egg, if you will. So that was a delicious wine. Then I had a few cocktails recently, and I’ve been noticing this growing trend, which is acid correcting. Three of the cocktails I think I had or shared with people that I went to this bar with all had acid-adjusted orange juice as one of the key ingredients. I think it’s interesting because I know that this was on the fringes in terms of what was happening in cocktail culture. And now it feels like so many bartenders are adjusting the acid components of their drinks.
J: What does that mean when a bartender does that?
A: So they can either be upping it or lowering it. But they are adjusting the acid.
J: Are they adding citric acid?
A: Yes, so it’s really interesting. Then, I had a Milk Punch at the Horse Inn, which was delicious. That’s about it. So a little more serious podcast post-Thanksgiving. For those of you that really found a lot of value in the Black Friday episode, you’re welcome.
J: I hope you got your Blundstones, Adam.
A: Oh, I did. But on a more serious note, in the last few weeks, news has broken. It’s been an ongoing issue for the last nine months to a year. The ongoing sexual harassment assault scandals that have been plaguing the Court of Master Sommeliers, and it was reported that the six people who were accused of sexual harassment have been stripped of their titles. They are allowed to appeal, though it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to appeal — at least not that we know of right now. I don’t know about you guys, but this announcement was kind of a thud. Like, that’s it? You’re stripping them of their titles? In nine months, that’s what you did?
J: And this is just six cases out of 22.
A: I was doing a little bit of research on the six individuals who have been stripped of their titles and OK, so they’ve lost their titles and can no longer call themselves a “master somm.” But they all seem to be doing pretty fine. One of them still owns a restaurant in Napa. Another one, the biggest offender, is still working for Dao Vineyards, at least according to LinkedIn. It’s really interesting to me that their titles were stripped, but nothing else.
J: Right, how much is this hindering their careers?
A: Yeah. I don’t want to name any names here because it’s not what we do.
A: But in terms of people who know them, right? There’ve been a lot of people who defended them in the wine community who said, “Oh, well, I know that person, they’re a good person. They were having a hard time in their relationship with their significant other, so they decided to cheat” or whatever it was. There’s been a lot of that. So I feel like it’s a lot of, “People are bad, but not the person that I know.” So, many of these six are not all in the same community — they are all in the wine community — but then they actually exist in this wine community in California and have been insulated by the people who know them really well. So these people are saying, “Well, they’ve been really great to hang out with and they’re a mentor to me” and things like that. I think it just shows how hard it is to stop this kind of behavior and actually eradicate it, because you never want to believe, even when someone’s accused, that it’s the person you know. Look at this across the board with sexual harassment, all the comedians that have defended Louis C.K., for example. It’s always, “Oh, he’s a good dude, I loved him.” Even Sarah Silverman came out in defense of Louis C.K. He might have been a great mentor to you as a comedian, but what he did is really bad and really wrong. You have to start separating that personal relationship you have with him and what you think he’s done for you with what he truly did to people. This is kind of the same here. Stripping them of their titles, there seems to be no economic retribution. There seems to be no one pulling back and asking them to step aside professionally in the world. So I don’t really understand how this will completely impact them. Does losing the MS title really matter that much in their longterm career? I don’t know, but those are my thoughts.
J: What’s actually really surprising to me about this is that we’ve seen over the past year or two or five that this has happened in different industries, of course. But it seems like the immediate repercussions are that the accused or the perpetrators are without a career, or they have to step away, or they don’t have jobs for at least a little while. Maybe they come back, Louis C.K. is back, right? But what is surprising to me is that it doesn’t really seem to have affected them, even in the immediate term, that they are without jobs or anything or that they’re shunned. People in the wine community are defending them and their careers.
A: Does that mean that the title of master somm is f*cking bullsh*t? Because if losing the title has not lost them everything else, then maybe the title didn’t matter for sh*t to begin with.
Z: Well, that’s certainly something that you and I have talked about a few times, Adam. I mean that for a variety of reasons. I think there’s always been the conversation about, to what extent does the title truly indicate something meaningful about the person who holds it? Even setting aside all this horrible behavior, just in terms of what they know about wine and their ability to serve wine and communicate about wine. It is certainly not a precondition for being very, very good at that to hold that title or any title from any accrediting organization. Beyond that, you guys both got at something very important here that I think is relevant, which is that one of the things that is difficult about this situation is that in the end, the Court of Master Sommeliers does not actually have all that much power. And again, it’s also important to note this is the most horrific of the scandals that have embroiled the court. But there have been a lot of them over the last few years. And there are a lot of things about the court that — as we have again gone into detail on in past episodes — do not work for a lot of would-be professionals. The way things are handled, the way things are administered, the structure of it, all that. But in some sense, it does show the toothlessness of the court in some way that they don’t have any kind of a greater ability to punish other than to say, “Hey, you can’t be part of our club anymore.” What it says about our broader society — that some of these people are not necessarily being completely driven out of the industry — that’s a whole other part of this conversation. I don’t think it’s something that the court itself can do. It’s frankly something that the larger community has to do. One of the things that comes into this, and I’d be curious to know both of your thoughts is, do we as a publication and as individuals avoid talking about these people and their endeavors? Do we mention, by the way, that person was expelled in disgrace from the Court of Master Sommeliers. I don’t like this in general, but there has to be kind of a scarlet letter attached to them by everyone or else this stuff does really recede into the background. Obviously the celebrities we mentioned, the comedians and whatnot, are much more famous than any of these people and have a much larger fan base. Master sommeliers don’t have fans in the way that Louis C.K. had fans. So it’s not just that other comedians defended them, it’s that hundreds of thousands or millions of people defended them. Or they thought, “wow, that’s bad but I think they’re funny.” There’s a lot of excuse-making for men who do this — especially famous ones who people have a personal connection to. That is a little less the case here because again, people who don’t work with or around these master sommeliers or former master sommeliers don’t necessarily have a personal connection to them. But like you said, Adam, these peoples’ businesses didn’t stop existing. People are still going to Compline in Napa. They’re not like, “Well, Matt Stamp was forced to leave the organization in disgrace; we’re not going to go there anymore.” Maybe some people have made that decision, but presumably, if everyone made that decision, the business would stop existing. So I think there’s that piece of it. The other thing I want to throw out there is, and we kind of mentioned it, that these are not the only six or seven if you include Geoff Kruth who was previously expelled back when the allegations first came out. These are far from the only people about whom formal allegations have been put forth to the court. In part because I think there were a lot of people who maybe were connected to this who were frankly not sure what the court would do or how they would handle it, I know there are other people who, as far as I’m aware of, have not been formally accused of anything but that the rumor mill has been swirling pretty aggressively about. The problem with this whole resolution is that I don’t think anyone thinks that these six individuals should have been allowed to remain a part of the court. I don’t think anyone thinks that was a mistake. There are some people who think that what else was done with the other people who are accused, not naming them and telling them to just shape up …
J: Undergo training.
Z: Yeah, exactly. For the people who have sort of skated to this point, many of whom have been accused of doing essentially the exact same thing that the people who were kicked out did, it does again raise this question raised by the Court of Master Sommeliers over and over again, which is: Who does it exist for? Who does it exist to protect, and why should anyone who isn’t in that inner circle believe that the powers that be will listen to them will protect them, as opposed to the powerful members already within the circle?
J: There are so many things in there, Zach, that I want to address. To what you just said, though, I was reading some of the articles that were written last year when this all transpired. This idea that the board was aware of these patterns of sexual misconduct and coercive sexual contact between masters and candidates, and that the rules about reporting that stuff were largely disregarded. There were ignored reports of abuse, and I think that’s really disgraceful and horrible. What confidence does that inspire in the court members to feel safe or comfortable or trusted to come forward with this kind of information?
A: As we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about what it means to have actual consequences. The one thing that we said at the very beginning of this conversation was that no one has appealed. I think that the reason no one has appealed, if they do believe that they are innocent in this, is that there were no consequences. If there are no consequences, there’s no need. It just shows how toothless this all is. And it shows why people who had the courage to come forward are so upset because, like in other cases like this across the country, the person knows they were a motherf*cker and they slink away and never return like Mario Batali or Matt Lauer.
J: No more restaurants, kicked out of his restaurant groups.
A: He lost it all. Matt Lauer, same thing, no more public spotlight. You be the news network that’s going to rehire him. It’s never going to happen. Maybe he’ll be on local Hampton news doing the weather, but besides that, he’s done. Anyways, I think there will be something, but he’s basically gone. In this regard, most of these people are still OK. So they’re not speaking up to defend themselves because they’re OK. That’s what makes it so weird, too. If you’re not saying anything, I’m assuming you’re really guilty.
J: But what I want to mention, and this is going back to a point that Zach made or a question that he asked. That’s why I think it is our responsibility as a publication to make it known what these men are accused of or what they’re being expelled for. Because I think about my parents. Would they know any of these people by their names? No, absolutely not. So maybe they would go to one of their restaurants or have their wines or whatever it is. But then I think about Batali.
A: They all knew him, yeah.
J: His name is big enough. But it was covered so heavily as well by the food media and the “actual” news. So I think it is our responsibility as a publisher to have a stand on these things and to share the news with our readers and then also not cover these men ever again in a positive way.
Z: In addition to that, there’s also this other piece. You mention this and I think it’s a good point, Joanna, that there’s a pretty big gulf in terms of the fame of these six or seven men. The piece of this that is important, and why I think some of this is different, is that Batali faced real consequences for his actions. Let’s keep it in food and drink just because I think this analogy will hold better. But part of what was necessary about that was getting the message out broadly that this sh*t is unacceptable. Batali obviously wasn’t the only chef or restaurant, there’s John Besh. There are some other well-known chefs around the country, too. Undoubtedly, that kind of sh*t is still going on all over the country. Why this had to happen in addition to just, “F*ck those guys,” the court needed to be proactive about saying, “This is not allowed.” And that is where that frustration comes from, because there’s at best a mixed message here. Again, it’s sheltering the other 16 who were accused. Maybe you weren’t willing to expel any of them. Maybe what they were accused of doing seemed less severe. Maybe there were fewer people willing to go on the record and say what happened. Within the Court of Master Sommeliers, there remains this very dangerous power imbalance and hierarchy. It creates these kinds of situations. To come back to something you said at the beginning, Adam, people are defending some of these men and saying, “Well, they were going through a tough time in their marriage, and it was really just an affair and they weren’t taking advantage.” But the whole point of these power structures is that there was such a power imbalance and so many advantages that these men didn’t have to drunkenly force themselves upon a woman for them to abuse their power. That is a problem that we face societally when dealing with these allegations is that some people only consider this to be a problem when it’s grotesque, violent, or persistent. The thing that is, for lack of a better word, dramatic. And it can be insidious and hard to hard to define. There are a lot of cases that I know about but can’t speak about because they don’t involve me directly and have been said to me in confidence. But if you look at many of them there is a lot that’s insinuation. It’s relying on the fact that the people who aspire to reach the inner circle and the master sommelier level, especially women, know what some of the men who hold that title and are the gatekeepers might want from them. It may never be spoken, but that doesn’t make it right. It’s no better to take advantage of someone’s lack of power in an interpersonal dynamic because you don’t force yourself upon them drunkenly at 2 a.m. That’s obviously really bad. But the other stuff isn’t OK. Where the frustration with the court is that the court has kind of said, “Well this grotesque stuff we can’t allow because it’s obvious, but we’re not really doing anything to eliminate the other stuff.”
J: This other stuff is less bad. So maybe we’ll just suspend you, but we won’t expel you.
Z: They won’t even tell anyone that you’re suspended. There’s no “We couldn’t kick this person out because we didn’t have enough evidence, but we think there’s something going on here.” They obviously think there’s something going on; the other 16 were apparently required to take training. So it wasn’t that there were zero problems here. There’s obviously a problem, but you’re saying this is a problem that we can live with.
A: Would you think that that speaks to how little influence or power that the court actually has? It’s like, “Sh*t, we can’t lose another 16 of these f*ckers, we got to keep them in the fold.”
J: Do you think that’s a consideration?
A: I wonder.
Z: I think it’s more about the very way that the structure is designed; it’s oriented around protecting the members. This is going to be a vaguely controversial thing, I apologize. It gets said a lot these days in work circles that human resources is sometimes just there to protect the company. And in this case, I think this investigation is to protect the reputation of the Court of Master Sommeliers. It’s not really an end to protect the master sommeliers, male and female, who are not a part of this.
A: Well, that’s what I’m saying. If they lost 16 more people, it would completely ruin the reputation. It’d be over.
Z: I don’t think that’s necessarily true. There are several hundred of them. If you were to say we are taking a very forceful stand here, we are getting rid of anyone who is credibly accused, you might actually engender more support. The thing for the court is that their model has been, they want people pushing to reach that level. That’s what supports the classes, the tests, the employment of a number of master sommeliers. Their job is to work for the court. And if you protect the existing members at the expense of potential members, I’m not sure that’s a good long-term plan.
A: Since this all came out, I have not looked to see if people who are choosing to pursue the court or take the test have gone down.
Z: Because they don’t make that information public.
A: Then you might stay status quo, because who knows what happens if we expel 22 members?
A: But those people were in protest. This is expulsion.
J: To Zach’s point, if I’m somebody who’s interested in joining the court but I know that there are 16 predators, why would I ever want to join?
A: I agree, but then what’s the fear? Because they have to be scared of something.
Z: Maybe there’s a threat of some of these other 16 where the evidence is a little less clear-cut. You could face a lawsuit. Obviously, there’s big financial ramifications, even if we don’t see it, with the six who were just expelled. There’s lawsuits, there’s liability. And again, the system exists to protect the people already within it. That goes back to the cheating scandal. Why did they do what they did? Because they wanted to protect the reputation of the court and of the existing master sommeliers at the expense of a bunch of people who did nothing wrong. They had all had their testing invalidated because they happened to be taking tests at the same time as a former master sommelier who wanted to give his buddies an advantage. The decision of the court at that moment told you everything you need to know. They did not want to dig into what had happened. They did not want to know what was under those rocks because it was ugly and it was easier to say, “We’re just going to invalidate this entire exam and give everyone another chance. That’s such a great solution and please don’t ask any more questions.” That’s been their M.O. for years. As someone who participated in exams through the court — and had my certified exam proctored by one of the men who has since been expelled — my feelings about court changed a lot over the last half-decade or so. There’s a bigger conversation to be had that we’re not going to have now about whether there’s any point to it at this moment. I don’t really know that there is, but certainly, no one can believe that it exists to do anything other than protect itself. That’s its function these days.
A: The only way that you could make the case is by following the money, and we again can’t have that conversation right now. If salaries are still higher or if job opportunities are still better with this certification than without it, then unfortunately, it will still continue to exist. At the end of the day, it’s all about money.
J: And power.
A: Yeah, both. If you get a more powerful position and more pay because of the certification, then you can see people continuing to pursue it. People of all sexes and all backgrounds, because that’s the way in. It would have been nice if the court had taken more of a dramatic and really strong step here. Just the stripping of titles is not enough. But as Joanna was saying, we have to continue to talk about it. When we do write about these individuals, we have to say what it is about them. And the same for the other 16. When they’re mentioned, we need to say “Those who have been accused of X, Y or Z,” when that information is public. If it’s not public, there’s very little we can do. Well, all right. Very interesting conversation. I will see you both back here on Friday.
Z: Sounds great.
Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.
Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all of this possible, and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team, who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.
Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.
Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including US government agencies such as the Homeland Security Department and State Department, American nuclear research labs, government contractors, IT companies and nongovernmental agencies around the world.
It was a huge attack, with major implications for US national security. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the breach on Tuesday. Who is at fault?
The US government deserves considerable blame, of course, for its inadequate cyberdefense. But to see the problem only as a technical shortcoming is to miss the bigger picture. The modern market economy, which aggressively rewards corporations for short-term profits and aggressive cost-cutting, is also part of the problem: Its incentive structure all but ensures that successful tech companies will end up selling insecure products and services.
Like all for-profit corporations, SolarWinds aims to increase shareholder value by minimizing costs and maximizing profit. The company is owned in large part by Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, private-equity firms known for extreme cost-cutting.
SolarWinds certainly seems to have underspent on security. The company outsourced much of its software engineering to cheaper programmers overseas, even though that typically increases the risk of security vulnerabilities. For a while, in 2019, the update server’s password for SolarWinds’s network management software was reported to be “solarwinds123.” Russian hackers were able to breach SolarWinds’s own email system and lurk there for months. Chinese hackers appear to have exploited a separate vulnerability in the company’s products to break into US government computers. A cybersecurity adviser for the company said that he quit after his recommendations to strengthen security were ignored.
There is no good reason to underspend on security other than to save money — especially when your clients include government agencies around the world and when the technology experts that you pay to advise you are telling you to do more.
As the economics writer Matt Stoller has suggested, cybersecurity is a natural area for a technology company to cut costs because its customers won’t notice unless they are hacked – and if they are, they will have already paid for the product. In other words, the risk of a cyberattack can be transferred to the customers. Doesn’t this strategy jeopardize the possibility of long-term, repeat customers? Sure, there’s a danger there – but investors are so focused on short-term gains that they’re too often willing to take that risk.
The market loves to reward corporations for risk-taking when those risks are largely borne by other parties, like taxpayers. This is known as “privatizing profits and socializing losses.” Standard examples include companies that are deemed “too big to fail,” which means that society as a whole pays for their bad luck or poor business decisions. When national security is compromised by high-flying technology companies that fob off cybersecurity risks onto their customers, something similar is at work.
Similar misaligned incentives affect your everyday cybersecurity, too. Your smartphone is vulnerable to something called SIM-swap fraud because phone companies want to make it easy for you to frequently get a new phone — and they know that the cost of fraud is largely borne by customers. Data brokers and credit bureaus that collect, use, and sell your personal data don’t spend a lot of money securing it because it’s your problem if someone hacks them and steals it. Social media companies too easily let hate speech and misinformation flourish on their platforms because it’s expensive and complicated to remove it, and they don’t suffer the immediate costs – indeed, they tend to profit from user engagement regardless of its nature.
There are two problems to solve. The first is information asymmetry: buyers can’t adequately judge the security of software products or company practices. The second is a perverse incentive structure: the market encourages companies to make decisions in their private interest, even if that imperils the broader interests of society. Together these two problems result in companies that save money by taking on greater risk and then pass off that risk to the rest of us, as individuals and as a nation.
The only way to force companies to provide safety and security features for customers and users is with government intervention. Companies need to pay the true costs of their insecurities, through a combination of laws, regulations, and legal liability. Governments routinely legislate safety — pollution standards, automobile seat belts, lead-free gasoline, food service regulations. We need to do the same with cybersecurity: the federal government should set minimum security standards for software and software development.
In today’s underregulated markets, it’s just too easy for software companies like SolarWinds to save money by skimping on security and to hope for the best. That’s a rational decision in today’s free-market world, and the only way to change that is to change the economic incentives.
A lot of people say often "if you're comfortable, you're not learning", "the only
way to grow is to get out of your comfort zone", "don't expect to enjoy changing yourself"
and the like.
And you know what? This is wrong. Sure, sometimes when you're doing a new thing you
don't know how to do, it feels weird and scary and you're a little embarrassed and
a little lost. But not all learning is like that. Sometimes learning a new thing is
joyful and exhilarating and marvelous. Sometimes you have a teacher who is reassuring
and supportive, sometimes you're just discovering connections and trying things that
work and it's just fantastic. Don't tell those people they're not learning! Learning
can be one of the most pleasant and wonderful things we do. I try to live my life
that way both while I'm learning and while I'm teaching.
I think it's some sort of leftover Calvinist thing: we're not supposed to like work,
we're not supposed to find joy in good things, we're supposed to push ourselves and
do them even though they're horrible. Think of sayings like "No pain, no gain", "Feel
the burn", or "They call it work for a reason." Sure, some stuff is difficult and
you don't really want to do it but you do it anyway because it's important, or you
said you would, or someone's paying you, or you know you want the end result of it.
But some stuff is fun and joyful and delightful and you do it with happiness and it's
still important, still something you said you'd do, you still get paid, and you still
get the end result. I remember teaching someone some stretching exercises and they
said with complete surprise "I like doing these! I thought exercise was supposed to
be horrible!"
How would it change your learning to you let yourself enjoy it? If you let go of the
idea that learning only happens in discomfort? If you could feel yourself improving
at whatever you're learning and enjoy that?
But that's not the worst of it. Yes, people are missing out on a ton of joy that they
could tap by just sitting up and thinking "hey, I really like my work. learning this
stuff is super fun. Wow, what a great time I'm having." But on top of that, there
are a pile of "teachers" who basically make you feel bad, and if you object they say
you're resisting learning. Fitness instructors who literally make the fat people cry
while exercising, because "that's the only way they will change what they've been
doing." Activists and influencers and everyone who wants to change your opinion starting
with upsetting you and keeping you upset. "hey, don't blame me. If you're comfortable,
you're not learning." "If you're happy, you're not growing." First, that's not true.
And second, it doesn't then follow that if you make me uncomfortable or unhappy I
magically grow and learn. You need to focus on teaching, leading, inspiring, educating,
showing, demonstrating, and modelling.
Yes, I may feel clumsy as I learn a new technical skill, lost as I try to understand
new facts, embarrassed as I realize things I did wrong in the past. When those come
as a side effect of learning, I need to embrace them because discomfort can be part
of learning and growing. But there isn't some short cut where you tell me I'm horrible,
say things to upset me, and claim that upsetting me is proof you're a great teacher. It's
not. There is no need for you to actively try to put me in a bad place. Sure,
I may need to be ok with feeling bad as part of learning. But yelling at me, telling
me I am not good enough, speaking roughly to me -- these aren't teaching skills. They're
psychological tricks and I am not ok with them. Perhaps you truly believe it's important
to cry in order to learn. Well, you're wrong.
I'm not saying everyone has to centre my happiness to teach me. What I am saying is
that some teachers (and I have names) claim they don't care if they upset others,
but that's a lie: they do care. Step 1 is to upset the learners. It's their trick
to get people to listen, or to let themselves feel important, or to say they have
changed a person by making them feel bad. If you meet a teacher like this, whether
it's a fitness trainer, a culture improver at your workplace, a twitter influencer,
a tech trainer, or a conference speaker, walk away. You can find someone to learn
from who won't emotionally manipulate you as part of the process. You can learn in
comfort, or in the discomfort that comes from realizing you have a lot to learn; you're
not obliged to learn in artificial discomfort imposed by someone who thinks it makes
them a better teacher to do that to you.
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