Author: Bailey Reutzel

North Dakota

Posted by | Oct 29, 2015 | |

“It’s punch, fight, fuck.” At least, that’s how a native Texan describes roughnecking, the principal occupation in northern North Dakota. “Those boys ain’t right,” he adds, throwing back his third shot of whiskey before 2 pm. Google Williston or Watford City, and you’ll see most of the news coverage on the area follows a similar narrative–the two quickly-assembled oil towns have become synonymous with stupefying amounts of alcohol, meth pipes, heroin needles, violence and prostitution. Primed with this backdrop, I was expecting tents and trailers, wide-eyed and haggard men walking the streets aimlessly, a place devoid of women where roughnecks away from their families are flush with cash to spend on vice. Actually, though, Williston was quite nice. The cheapest hotels in town charge about $90 per night. Local coffee shops sell lattes for more than $4, and they’re interspersed between antique and gift shops. All the staple fast food chains – Culver’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Dairy Queen – handle lines that wrap around the building. The town was built up less than five years ago, and all the buildings look like it, clean.  Driving out of town, I end up at The Cafe, a small Ukrainian restaurant that has seen increased revenues from the oil boom, but also trouble in the form of traffic mishaps, drug problems and prostitution. The owner and an elderly woman who waits tables three days a week...

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Minnesota

Posted by | Oct 23, 2015 | |

“You’re the only estrogen in here, right?” he asks. The man says a lot of strange, slightly intimidating things as he paints guitars on Minneapolis bus maps. I smile and feign interest. Supposedly, art is his only source of income as he bops from one American city to the next, but between me and you, I’m skeptical. Later on he’s telling me about the bathroom light, how it “turns on and off by itself. It’s (I think) an attempt to scare me into sleeping with him. At some point he gets up to show me where he’ll be drinking tomorrow night and grabs my arm as he passes. I’m meeting some friends of mine tomorrow, I say. It’s the first time I’ve used that excuse. I get into bed in a hostel dorm, alone with four empty cots not worried about ghosts in the bathroom, but the man in the kitchen. The next morning, walking into the “haunted” bathroom, the light blinks on before I locate the switch. It’s motion-sensing. Things are not always what they seem. ——— Minneapolis is supposedly a miracle, a bastion of healthy American politics. The city has made sure affordable housing is built throughout the city instead of being relegated to one part of town so that it becomes a ghetto. It’s a city with distinct neighborhoods, like St. Louis or Cleveland or Pittsburgh....

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The New Moneytripping

Posted by | Oct 20, 2015 | |

The road forks. The wind shifts. Moneytripping has evolved to become more politically charged. I’m still eavesdropping on conversations about the dollar and spending my afternoons in bank museums but more broadly, I’m covering the political and economic culture in the U.S., the anthropology of American interactions with the economic system. It’s political economy, the interplay between economics, law and politics, and how institutions develop in different social and economic systems, tailored for the era of globalization. My nature pulls me towards the edges, in the direction of alternative lifestyles that don’t much care for the mainstream’s worship of capitalism’s ravenous effects. We’ve become a society only interested in competing, not for the love of the game but only to win, in hoarding our kindness, wealth and success, or the love of ourselves and our traditions. In an effort to stay on top, in an effort to be self-righteous, we hide these things, keep tabs on these things, lock and chain these things so that others will not take. There’s nothing wrong with shooting for the moon, but in how America measures success today, with six figures of data sitting on bank ledgers, power and fame, the moon isn’t attainable for us all. And those that reach the moon become more reluctant to share the sky when our society makes these notches the only ones worth putting on your...

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Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Posted by | Oct 15, 2015 | |

“The moon doesn’t exist in America anymore.” It’s a tossed-off remark made over the phone to a friend. I hadn’t been able to view the Blood Moon in Virginia, and since then had had trouble locating the Earth’s natural satellite. Driving into rural Wisconsin, about nine miles from Osseo, the moon’s still nowhere to be seen but the Big Dipper hangs in the sky in front of me. It’s beautiful, but drowns out the Little Dipper that I never manage to spot. I’m still thinking about the moon. It was a joke. But maybe there’s more truth in it...

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Virginia

Posted by | Oct 10, 2015 | |

OpenSSL may not be a household name, but every household with an Internet connection uses it. That’s why few security vulnerabilities ever garnered the attention of Heartbleed, a security bug uncovered in the OpenSSL protocol last April. The OpenSSL software stack encrypts communications between computers and is the way we secure everything, including connections to mobile banking applications, Facebook logins, credit card transactions and emails, on the internet. Manu Sporny, founder and CEO of Digital Bazaar, which develops payment and identity standards for the Web, argues that of the 3 billion people that have ever logged online, all 3 billion people have used OpenSSL or SSH (another security protocol) at one time or another. With major newspapers inciting panic, eyes were on the core OpenSSL team to stem the damage that left private keys and passwords vulnerable to theft. However, at the time, the project had only 11 developers, only two of which were paid full-time for their work… again, on a protocol that protects the sensitive information of 3 billion people. This may seem surprising given the importance of the software, but it’s endemic of the current culture around open source. In a free-market capitalist society, incentives are set up so corporates can search for efficiencies in an effort to provide better products and services in less time and at lower costs. Sporny and his team at Digital...

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