Jon Christian

Incongruous rapper Macklemore’s oppressively ironic tune Thrift Shop blew up this winter, eventually taking #1 on the Hot 100. I was surprised to hear his 2005 number White Privileged, which excoriated white hip hop artists — including himself — for having gentrified the genre.

Mother Jones’ Josh Harkinson has a fascinating piece on the challenges of designing laws to prohibit driving under the influence of cannabis. The bottom line seems to be that while stoned drivers are less safe than sober ones, blood tests for THC — which can stay in a user’s blood for days after use — are not a good at indicating whether a person is actually impaired.

If the goal is to arrest only people who are driving dangerously, Ramaekers says, then laws like Washington’s could lead to a rash of false convictions.

While booze can make people drive faster and more aggressively, marijuana has the opposite effect: Pot smokers, studies show, tend to compensate for their impairment by slowing down and leaving larger gaps between themselves and other cars. Still, Ramaekers cautions against thinking that stoners acting like Sunday drivers are safer. Marijuana users may “try to create their own box of safety, and within that world they can operate fine,” he says. “But there’s a lot of other information outside of that box that they can’t process, and that is a problem.”

When Nathan Heller resurrected an old laptop, he was overcome with a time capsule of habits and memories. It’s a fascinating meditation on cast-offs and our relationships with tools.

Laptop is an IBM T42: a stripped-down, strangely square model that was the standard issue at my university tech store. But he has a rare, marvellous keyboard—deep, well-defined, solid—and has proved indestructible. The only T42 I ever saw give up the ghost belonged to a friend who treated it badly—flinging it onto tables, hammering cruelly at its keys, and dropping it repeatedly—until, one day (I think there might have been spillage involved), she broke the unbreakable. That was around the time I started to suspect that people’s rapports with their laptops reveal more about them than we might want to know.

Here’s what I’ll tell you about mine, then, with the cool objectivity of sudden reacquaintance. Laptop is dusty these days. His shell is slightly scratched. But he’s still bright on the inside—even polished—thanks to the years of oiling by fingertips and palms. He bears the marks of his experience. The A, S, E, D, C, O, L, N, and M keys are worn down to a point of near-illegibility. There’s evidence of lots of activity on the BACKSPACE key—though, having just sifted through a bunch of writing from those years, I think maybe not quite enough. Crumbs were, and continue to be, a problem.

For me, it brought to mind my housemate’s monstrous, early-2000s HP, which still works, and was her main computer until earlier this year.