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This past September, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the graphic novelist Nick Drnaso signed books at the kiosk of his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. The kiosk's vertical supports, its horizontal banner, and the table where he was sitting formed a squat rectangular panel, with his upper body at its center. Drnaso (pronounced "dur-nass-oh") has small dark eyes, a wan complexion, and a narrow black mustache that seems to have been sketched in by a fine-nibbed pen. He was wearing a black shirt. His hair, which is thinning, was hidden beneath a black baseball cap.
Drnaso, who is twenty-nine, was promoting "Sabrina," his graphic novel about a young man in Chicago who is devastated by his girlfriend's sudden disappearance. Did Sabrina just leave him, or was she kidnapped or murdered? He flees the mystery, and the attendant media frenzy, seeking refuge with an old buddy in Colorado Springs. Strangers learn of awful news before he does. The Internet first denies him the privacy of his grief, and then, when the fringe weighs in, upends his certainty about Sabrina's fate. "Sabrina" depicts an eerie world of orderly tract homes, tidy parking lots, and empty streets, where roiling emotions have been displaced onto computer screens, and where powerful people make reckless pronouncements based on bottomless skepticism.
Drnaso, who lives in Chicago, has spent many hours in the darker corners of the Internet. "I have a morbid curiosity in me," he said. But "Sabrina" is not autobiographical. He told me that he had followed the advice that the celebrated graphic novelist Chris Ware once gave to aspiring cartoonists: throw out your yearbooks. "They are not reference material," Ware warned. The breadth of vision displayed in "Sabrina" impressed Zadie Smith, who had started reading Drnaso on Ware's recommendation. She has called it "the best book—in any medium—I have read about our current moment." "Sabrina" is the intimate story of one man's suffering, but it also captures the political nihilism of the social-media era—a time when a President can dismiss the murder of a journalist by saying of the perpetrator, "Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't."
When I arrived at the book fair, Drnaso was chatting with an older man who had just bought all the remaining copies of "Sabrina" at the kiosk. The book, which in July became the first graphic novel to be long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, had been sold out in bookstores for months, and the copies available at the festival had come directly from Drawn & Quarterly's main office, in Montreal. The man had piled his trove into a photocopy-paper box lashed to a hand trolley with a bungee cord; though he almost certainly planned to resell the books, he kept assuring Drnaso, "They're for friends." Drnaso, with an unreadable smile, said that he believed him. He signed each one with a spare portrait of one of the book's characters. Drnaso is as composed as his panels, which are rendered in crisp, almost rigid lines. He had only complimentary things to tell me about other cartoonists, and insisted that he wasn't bothered by the fact that Drawn & Quarterly, which specializes in indie comics, had greatly underestimated the demand for "Sabrina." "I don't care in the least," he said. "I never thought there was some sales goal I needed to hit." He is so modest that, at one point, he offered an apology for his modesty, observing that "self-deprecation can be a little bit overbearing on the person who is forced to listen to it." The only time I saw him express an impolite emotion was a few weeks after the book fair, when we were in a minor car accident on Milwaukee Avenue, in Chicago. He was taking me on a tour of Logan Square, a fast-gentrifying neighborhood about which he has "mixed feelings." It is not far from where he lives with his wife, Sarah, and their three cats. We had just eaten a meat-heavy breakfast at a favored diner—"It does the job," he commented—when a minivan rear-ended us. Drnaso's car had barely budged, but he was clearly upset. "What the fuck was that?" he said.
Within seconds, though, his emotions had been contained, and he assured the other driver that he would not contact his insurer. "People have let me slide once or twice, and you're always grateful," Drnaso explained, as we headed off. "No one wants to deal with insurance." He noted that, after a fender bender, "usually I end up being the one to apologize—'I'm sorry my car got in the way of your cell-phone use.' " Drnaso's unfailing courtesy, with its suggestion of a current of hidden anger, finds a visual correlate in his work. He draws his characters in a way that initially suggests minimal emotion: their eyes are dots, their mouths small semicircles. But this aesthetic makes it all the more wrenching when the reader detects a flicker of anguish on one of the placid faces.
Drnaso grew up in Palos Hills, a suburb southwest of Chicago. He went to the local grade school and high school, and disliked them both. When he was around ten, a teen-age boy, a neighbor, sexually molested him multiple times. Ashamed, Drnaso told no one. He had never been an extrovert, but after the assaults he grew withdrawn and depressed. He could never predict when something would revive his memory of the trauma. One day, in a high-school health class, he watched a video on sexually transmitted diseases, and he became fixated on the idea that he had been infected by his abuser. "It was the typical process of blaming yourself," he told me. "At that point, I hadn't so much as kissed someone."
Drnaso remembers this as a time when he mostly tuned others out. He listened to music all day long, with a preference for the indie-folk songwriter Will Oldham, and sometimes even went to sleep with his headphones on. He gave pot and alcohol a try, but neither eased his anxiety. "I discovered cigarettes when I was seventeen," he said. "That was a great relief." (For a few years, at least, until he became "terrified of the health effects" and quit.) His older brother was into heavy-metal music, and Drnaso began to join him at concerts and record stores, developing a love for splenetic bands like Acid Bath and Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
Drnaso began drawing, inspired, in part, by the phantasmagoric album covers of the heavy-metal bands he liked. A close friend was also into cartooning, and he tended to draw comedic panels; Drnaso gravitated toward much bleaker stories, tales of high school as a crucible of humiliation and failure. They bore the mark of Todd Solondz, the director of "Welcome to the Dollhouse," an abject coming-of-age comedy that Drnaso admired, and of R. Crumb, the counterculture cartoonist. Drnaso assimilated both Crumb's uncorked adolescent anger and the heavy cross-hatching that expressed it. Drnaso told me that he regrets this early work, which he considers facile in its darkness. When I asked to see some of the drawings, he said that he had destroyed them all. He startled me with the intensity of his renunciation: "I hate the person I was then."
Drnaso told me that, during his adolescence, he spent a lot of time reading about "serial killers and mass murders and Chernobyl and other forms of gruesome terror." When his family got Internet access, he looked at many things that he shouldn't have. "There would be a beheading video, and I kind of couldn't help myself and would be compelled to watch, and then I'd condemn myself," he said. He understands why so many people click on such material, though: "It sounds really sick, but a lot of times you'd just end up in tears, but you'd feel something visceral. The feeling is something."
After graduating, Drnaso spent two years at a local community college; then, in the fall of 2009, he transferred to Columbia College, in downtown Chicago, to study illustration. He was already interested in making book-length cartoons; he liked storytelling and the solitude that long-form work offered. A drawing-class professor showed some of Drnaso's cartoons to the illustrator Ivan Brunetti, who also taught in the department. Brunetti told me that the cartoons were "just beautifully drawn," and reminded him of "the early-seventies work of Bill Griffith," who is best known as the creator of the irrepressible and irreverent character Zippy the Pinhead. Brunetti particularly admired a thirty-six-page cartoon that presented a perverse backstory to "It's a Wonderful Life." Drnaso's retelling focussed on the boy George Bailey sweeps Mary away from at the Bedford Falls High School dance. The jilted classmate tries to poison Bailey, then commits suicide. Brunetti sent the story to the underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, who wrote a letter to Drnaso that praised his drawing and his ambition, and also admonished, "You have to find something more interesting, storywise, to do."
Drnaso was not offended. He already had grown to dislike his parody, along with what he calls "even worse stuff." When I asked him to name the most objectionable thing he'd drawn, he described a cartoon that he'd created when he was eighteen: "The whole strip is this young man speaking to the reader about how he's lovelorn and this sensitive guy, and how he has this great new relationship. And then the clever reveal—'clever,' in huge quotes—is that it's this kidnapped woman. He's tied up a girl and left her in a closet."
In 2011, Drnaso took a class taught by Brunetti. When Brunetti asked his students to draw someone they remembered from childhood, Drnaso surprised himself by attempting to capture, in ink on paper, his assailant, and what he had done to him a decade earlier. "I tried to make the drawings kind of cute," he recalled. "Even the guy at the center of the story is this kid with a goofy smile and braces." The details of the abuse were not depicted; Drnaso showed only a closed bathroom door. At the time of the assignment, his attacker had just been arrested for soliciting sex from underage girls on Facebook, and the final panel was a drawing of the man's mug shot. (The man later pleaded guilty to one count and spent three years in prison.) Drnaso gave a photocopy of the cartoon to Brunetti, and asked him to destroy it after reading. Brunetti, stunned by its content, quietly disobeyed, folding it up and storing it someplace secret. (He still has it.)
At one point, Brunetti, hoping that the shy Drnaso would feel emboldened by seeing his work in print, invited him to contribute to a student anthology. In response, his student drew a twelve-panel comic, in his then frenetic counterculture style, about a businessman who barely catches a flight, only to die a few panels later, when the plane crashes. But as he worked on the project he realized that there was something else he needed to draw. Earlier that week, he had been taking a cigarette break outside the school, and had failed to help a fellow-student whose wheelchair was rolling off the sidewalk and into a busy street. "I just froze," he recalled to me. A parking-garage attendant nearby rescued the girl. To commemorate what Drnaso calls the "shitty thing I did," without giving away that the cartoon was about him, he improvised a new visual language. He cut out from a magazine banal images, some of them depicting kindhearted acts—a man opening a bus door for a woman, Mickey Mouse sharing a meal with Minnie Mouse on an airplane—traced them, colored them in, and accompanied them with a regret-filled monologue. He was pleased with the result: he had found a way to express his hot shame beneath a chilly veneer. He told me, "That just kind of changed what I thought about what I wanted to do."
By the end of college, Drnaso knew that he wanted to record the world around him, rather than satirize it. Brunetti encouraged the shift. "I remember telling him he was funnier when he wasn't funny," he said. Drnaso was also finding inspiration in the work of other cartoonists, among them Julie Doucet, the Canadian graphic artist, whose deftly drawn autobiographical stories showed Drnaso that even dislikable people are, as he put it to me, "worthy of some dignity." Although Drnaso was consumed by drawing, he told me that he did not particularly hope to become a full-time cartoonist, noting, "Having a hump job during the day and having this private thing at night was kind of a life style I could live with." One of his role models was Henry Darger, the Chicago outsider artist, who worked as a janitor for most of his life and never tried to present his work to the public. Darger's "In the Realms of the Unreal," a fifteen-thousand-page work that ravishingly, and disturbingly, depicts erotic fantasies about girls, was discovered by his landlord after his death.
Most young cartoonists focus on either the far away (fantasy) or the immediately at hand (memoir). Drnaso was unusual in being attracted to the subject of the traditional realist novel: imaginary people experiencing the small conflicts and successes of ordinary life. He was also deeply interested in the working-class and middle-income world he came from. His father, who is retired, worked for a cable-TV company; his mother is a teacher's aide; his brother works in a warehouse, and sometimes drives for Uber. Drnaso has held jobs ever since he was a teen-ager, and finds stability and gratification in manual labor. He told me that, in 2012, soon after graduating from college, he was asked to paint a mural for an art opening in Chicago. That month, as a member of a maintenance crew at a local concert arena, he was also staining a fence. He finished the two jobs on the same day, he told me, recalling, "The feeling of satisfaction was exactly the same between when I looked at the finished fence and when I looked at the mural."
Few of Drnaso's hump jobs have paid well, and he has often lived paycheck to paycheck. One reason he wasn't angrier when we were rear-ended was that he'd bought his car, a used Nissan Versa, with money from an insurance settlement: a driver had hit him while he was biking. The impact sent him to the emergency room in an ambulance, with a broken clavicle, but the upshot was that he got a car he could not otherwise have afforded. "So all things considered it was a good experience," he told me.
While working on the arena maintenance crew, Drnaso told me, he found his attention drawn to an "oddball" co-worker, and wrote a story, "The Grassy Knoll," about a young man on a maintenance team who ostracizes a colleague with a creepy grin. The story seems to capture Drnaso's lingering sense of distrust: how could you tell if someone was just peculiar or a potential predator? The story never resolves whether the rejection is deserved.
Five other stories of shame and frustration followed, and in 2016 Drnaso published them in his first book, "Beverly." In another story, "Pudding," a girl tries to get a female friend to acknowledge a past moment of sexual intimacy between them, but the friend angrily denies the experience. "The Lil' King" is the story of a middle-aged couple on vacation with their teen-age daughter, Cara, and their silent son, Tyler, who is a tangle of longing and anger. Nothing dramatic happens to the boy, but Drnaso interweaves the ordinary details of a family trip with half a dozen panels in which Tyler fantasizes scenes of brutal revenge and outlandish orgies. Drnaso told me that he was proud of the technical achievement of "The Lil' King," explaining, "I read too many online comments, and stuff where people say, 'Why did this have to be a comic book?' With that story, I remember feeling like I had married words with pictures in a way I wasn't able to do before."
"Beverly" can be completed in half an hour, but it rewards more careful reading. The stories are delicately tethered to one another, in the manner of Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad": a character in one story appears, a decade older, in another story. After the gay young woman in "Pudding" has her unhappy encounter with her friend, she comes across a terrible car crash; one of the victims has a role in "The Lil' King." Chris Ware, whom Brunetti introduced to Drnaso's work, has described "Beverly" as "chilled-windowpane views into the fogged American psyche." The Los Angeles Times named it the best graphic novel or comic of 2016.
Soon after high school, Drnaso had had a serious girlfriend, but after they broke up he avoided anything that might lead to rejection or a date. "I sequestered myself," he told me. "I was just very numb." In 2012, he left his concert-arena job to work as a janitor at the Whole Foods in Lincoln Park. One day, a young woman who cut the store's fresh flowers, Sarah Leitten, spotted him reading "Alias the Cat," a graphic novel by Kim Deitch. Drnaso, in turn, noticed that Leitten was reading John Porcellino's "Perfect Example," which chronicles the cartoonist's final discontent summer in a suburban Illinois town. They began to chat, and Leitten noted that she liked to draw.
She asked him to go to the movies, and they went to see "Cremaster 3," a queasy three-hour art film by Matthew Barney. They also exchanged their own comics. Leitten, who had trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art, gave him a zine, "Discovery Tales," which included "Custard's Last Sit," a one-panel gag depicting an ice-cream cone, on a chair, melting in the sun. It was an example of the "dumb stoner humor" that she enjoyed. His gift was eight pages long and included a twelve-panel comic called "Ax to Grind," about a spooky co-worker. Leitten told me that, until then, she had gone out only with musicians, "mostly all assholes," and was immediately taken with Drnaso's thoughtful reserve. Drnaso was excited to meet someone so cheerful and candid. She soon told him that she had been abused as a child, but he did not reveal what had happened to him. Soon, they were seriously dating.
The relationship brought Drnaso joy but also worry. He spent his days drawing in his apartment office—a bedroom closet—and he'd become dependent on knowing that he'd see Leitten when he was done. He remembers feeling that his reliance on her had become "cowardly." And what if disaster struck? How would he manage without her? "There was just this black cloud that hung over it—that something terrible could happen," he told me. Partly in an effort to sublimate these fears, he began working on a story about a young man whose girlfriend, named Sabrina, vanishes while walking home from work.
Two of the first panels he drew were of the young man, Teddy, in closeup. Teddy was being driven by his friend Calvin, a cybersecurity specialist in the Air Force, to Calvin's home, in Colorado Springs. Teddy's eyes were slits of pain, and his heavily furrowed brow further telegraphed his agony. Drnaso wasn't happy with the drawing. "I was obviously trying to leap into the heartache on page 1," he told me. "It just looked forced and melodramatic." He moved the panel to later in the book and streamlined the figures' expressions. "Adding more detail to make someone seem more human isn't necessarily effective," he said. Teddy's nose became a line, his eyes dots. Worry was now an affectless despair. Drnaso also severely restricted his color palette. Some panels in "Beverly" evoked David Hockney; now every hue was dull. The blue sky that originally accompanied Teddy and Calvin on their drive through Colorado Springs became the toxic yellow of a washed-out sunset. The only characters who had vivid features were those shown in news clips or online, as if people came to life only onscreen. Drnaso even subjected his backdrops to this ethic of subtraction: "If there is a gas station in a comic, usually you see four cars. In 'Sabrina,' there are no cars."
Drnaso wasn't certain where "Sabrina" would end, but he completed two to three pages a week—a good clip for him. He felt excited by his visual choices. He loved populating the book with men in camouflage—"little green Army men," he calls them—because their uniforms stood out against the drab background of the air base where Calvin works. "I liked the contrast of the white austere office building and their wearing these fatigues that you associate with heroism and combat," he told me. He based his drawings of Calvin's house—nondescript furniture, dunes of laundry—on photographs he had taken while visiting the house of a friend who works at Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado Springs. Drnaso had to imagine the inside of the air base, because he wasn't allowed to visit. He is obsessed with getting visual details right, and he was disappointed, after publication, when his friend told him that no self-respecting airman would have a tattoo with his branch's insignia, as Calvin has in the book.
Because Drnaso avoids visual clutter in "Sabrina," any object that he includes feels freighted with import. An attuned reader will notice that, in a corridor at the base where Calvin has a confrontation with a scheming colleague, there is a tiny gray square where a wall meets the ceiling. "That's the one place where the security cameras are pronounced," Drnaso told me. "It's a suggestion that they're not the only two people in that corridor."
In 2014, Drnaso had watched videos that Elliot Rodger had recorded before going on a shooting rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Drnaso told me, "I guess you can't really blame people's curiosity in wanting to understand the life of the person who committed the heinous act more than the people who happened to just fall victim." That tension felt unique to this moment in history, and gave him another idea for his story. He decided that Sabrina would be murdered by someone like Rodger: a men's-rights activist and a misogynist.
Drnaso had also followed the Sandy Hook massacre and the appalling conspiracy theories it had spawned—in particular, the idea that the shooting was a fake event concocted by gun-control activists. In the book, the pain felt by Teddy and by Sabrina's family gets repeatedly lanced by strangers online who refuse to acknowledge that her killing really happened. As part of Drnaso's research for "Sabrina," he listened to podcasts of "Infowars," the extremist radio show hosted by Alex Jones. The words of Jones and his guests were repellent, but they told a story, and he could imagine how even their distorted world views could provide listeners with a perverse consolation. In one of the more arresting turns in "Sabrina," Teddy wanders around Calvin's house, looking for a way to kill himself, and comes across a radio; he begins listening to an "Infowars"-style broadcast. He is strangely comforted by the host's heartless speculation about Sabrina's death—it mirrors his own numbness.
Drnaso finished his draft in the spring of 2017. He had created a comic whose drab tonalities and deliberate slowness challenged a genre that leans toward the overheated. Reading "Sabrina" feels almost like an antidote to the hectic Web sites its characters are so immersed in: some pages are simply panels of a character getting wordlessly into his car and going from one undistinguished place to another. Most of the panels have only one character in them, and are subtle in their virtuosity. One scene is presented from the point of view of laptop cameras, as Calvin and his daughter, who is in Florida, have a video chat. Calvin's unspoken hope for connection is expressed by the way he grows larger from one panel to the next—he is leaning into his screen. When his daughter loses interest and walks away, Calvin sits back, and looks literally deflated. Effects like these impressed Drnaso's fellow-cartoonists. Roz Chast told me that he "gets across a mood that's very unsettling, in a way that I've never quite come across before, at least in graphic novels."
Like the best fiction, "Sabrina" makes you do the work of understanding the story. Sometimes it takes several pages before you apprehend how a new section fits with those which came before. It never condescends to its characters—to their unfashionable haircuts, soft bodies, and modest ambitions. When Calvin praises a microbrew for its "cool packaging" or suggests to his devastated friend that he might consider a law-enforcement career, as a way to turn "grief into something positive," the tone is sincere.
Drnaso was ready to send the completed "Sabrina" to Drawn & Quarterly. But he suddenly became overwhelmed by the thought that the story was irredeemably lurid. He had recently come back from a writing retreat—his first time without Sarah in more than three years—and felt destabilized. Donald Trump had just taken office, and the grotesque elements of "Sabrina" felt different. Drnaso told me, "I began to think that there was no point in putting something like this out in a world that's drowning in negative subject matter."
He had depicted the murder as a four-page sequence. In the first three pages, the men's-rights activist rants about how society has wronged him. On the fourth page, the man methodically stabs Sabrina to death, with a detachment consistent with the rest of the book. Drnaso had been able to draw Sabrina's murder only after getting drunk. He wondered if reading these pages would be any different from going online and watching an isis murder video or, as he had once done, looking at forensic photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. As a teen-ager, he had watched "Faces of Death"—a video compilation of beheadings and electrocutions—at a friend's house, and he had never forgotten it. Now, with "Sabrina," he concluded that he had created a poisonous book out of our poisoned times. "It's not going to be healthy for anyone to read this," he told himself. He e-mailed his editor and said that he did not want "Sabrina" to be read by the public.
"I made the decision not to publish," Drnaso remembers. "And then really sunk." He stopped drawing. He resumed smoking. His domestic happiness felt false. He said, "I had this thought that Sarah would do better without me, that I was not going to be a good presence in her life, and that I should probably just make a clean break."
During this period, his memories of being molested came flooding back, overwhelming him. The fact that his parents had been kind and nurturing made it somehow harder to face the truth—he didn't want his childhood to be defined by abuse. He contemplated suicide. "It was just me wanting to unplug," he recalled. "As if I could cryogenically freeze my body for a few years and block it all out." Leitten was patient with him. "I was dealing with so much self-loathing," Drnaso recalled. "I didn't want to be the wounded animal. I just sat there and ruminated for eighteen hours a day, and she just waited it out." Leitten sat with him on the couch and comforted and hugged him. "I would just sit quietly and be present with him," she said. "There was a lot of that."
Drnaso's internist sent him to an in-patient facility, but when he got there he refused to go in. Finally, he went to a therapist. He had no health insurance, and so after his Medicaid ran out she gave him a discounted rate. He started taking the antidepressant citalopram, and began to feel more stable. Drnaso finally told Sarah and his parents about the abuse. They were all supportive.
His crisis lasted more than a month. During that time, he saw the isolation and the shame of his characters in a more autobiographical light. Tyler, the boy in "The Lil' King," with his rage and self-doubt, now reminded him of his younger self. Drnaso revisited "Sabrina," and decided that he could publish the book after all, if he removed the murder scene and added small moments of grace—including several panels in which Sabrina's sister talks about her trauma, at an open-mike night in a café. Drnaso decided to give his royalties from the first printing to a few charities, including Camfed, a nonprofit that provides education to girls in rural sub-Saharan Africa. (Tracy Hurren, his editor at Drawn & Quarterly, recalled that she wasn't entirely comfortable with this plan, because "we knew he needed the money.") Drnaso also made a few changes to his drawings. He had never liked the way he'd drawn the face of Sabrina in the first panel of the story—she looked absent-mindedly content. He modified the curve of her mouth and gave her eyes an alert look, so that she seemed more like a deer sniffing danger.
Finally, he created a flowery back cover in a palette that is much brighter than the rest of the book. For Drnaso, the image is both a memorial to Sabrina and a tribute to Leitten, who by this time was working at a local flower shop. (In 2018, she became its co-owner.) The back-cover image was a painting on glass, which takes much longer than an ordinary panel to create. Leitten remembers Drnaso's work on the glass painting as one of the key points in his recovery. "I think it was really good for him," she said. Drnaso told me, "It felt like a sense of finality—to paint this thing that was so far removed from the content of the book."
Last June, Drnaso and Leitten got married in his parents' back yard, in Palos Hills. Three months later, they threw a pizza party at their apartment, in Old Irving Park, in northwest Chicago. The event had the feel of a follow-up celebration—some of the guests hadn't seen them since the wedding. A wedding present from Brunetti hung on a wall by the bathroom: a pen-and-ink homage to Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Portrait," with Leitten and Drnaso as the bride and groom. Brunetti had chosen the van Eyck as a visual reference not only because it depicts matrimony but also because the stiffness of some Renaissance gesture reminded him of Drnaso. "I tend to think of Nick as bottled in and coiled," Brunetti told me. "But I also get the sense he's observing—withholding judgment in the moment."
The cats prowled on the furniture, and year-round Christmas lights were on, lending a merry glow to Leitten's collection of vintage Pez dispensers. Nearly all the guests were cartoonists. Brunetti and Chris Ware were the oldest; Drnaso and Leitten had also invited a large millennial contingent. Chicago has a remarkable number of working cartoonists, maybe because it's relatively inexpensive, or maybe because, as Ware more imaginatively suggested, "it's halfway between New York City, where it's about reading, and Los Angeles, where it's about seeing."
The guests talked to one another about couch-crashing, acupuncture, and universal basic income. Fiction writers often know one another through the M.F.A. programs where they study or teach, but cartoonists have scrappier lives. "Except for Chris Ware, no one here makes a living off of comics," Drnaso explained to me. "We have to make our rent another way." Drnaso, Leitten, the surrealist Margot Ferrick, and the absurdist sci-fi cartoonist Lane Milburn had all been employed at the Whole Foods in Lincoln Park. And Drnaso and several other guests had been part-time workers at the Busy Beaver Button Company, in Logan Square. Drnaso has been doing shifts at the factory's button-pressing machine for years. "I probably earn a few pennies per piece," he told me. "But then you do twenty-five hundred buttons in a shift, and it ends up being pretty good money. You can make like ninety bucks in five hours."
Before the party, Leitten had made batches of blueberry-pineapple and apple-nectarine jam. Her flower shop is flourishing, but she also continues to publish cartoons in the Chicago alternative press, and she maintains a studio in the apartment. Drnaso draws at a drafting table in their bedroom; he likes the setup because Leitten can't help but see his work when she comes home from the shop.
Ware and Drnaso began discussing their love of Charles Schulz, whose work Ware considers seminal in its depiction of cartoon characters with inner lives. At one point, Drnaso led Ware to his drafting table, to show him a page from his next book. Brunetti had already seen some panels, and he told me that the new work was amazing. "He's stepped up his game," he said, adding, "I hate that metaphor."
Earlier that day, I had joined Drnaso as he worked in the bedroom. He was "inking" a page from the new book—using a pen to trace over lines that he had drawn in pencil the previous day. Inking is dull work, so he didn't mind the company. It takes most cartoonists several days to complete a page that a reader can consume in under thirty seconds. Many of the cartoonists I spoke to mentioned this ratio as a way of explaining the extreme personalities who are attracted to the form.
In the manner of a movie director, Drnaso draws from a script: the words and the plot come first, then the images. The scene he was working on that day portrayed some sort of encounter group. The participants were engaged in a role-playing exercise in which a woman pretended to fire a man. If you looked carefully at the pages, you could see small details change as the scene developed. In the first panels, the two characters were sitting on folding chairs against the blank background of a performance space. A few panels later, the woman appeared to be at a desk, the man in an office chair; Drnaso had drawn a sad, small office plant behind her. This morphing, Drnaso said, signalled to the reader that the characters were getting deeper and deeper into their role-playing. It was another opportunity to smudge the border between the real and the imagined.
Next, he showed me a face that he kept redrawing. He flipped the page over and put it on a light box that he uses to check his work. "It's easier to spot a wonky eye or a misshapen head from a different perspective," he explained. He often repeatedly adjusts a drawing of a face, raising or lowering the tilt of the mouth or changing the arch of the eyebrows. "It's so nitpicky, but I draw with so few lines that every line counts," he said.
Inevitably, Drnaso had fallen out of love again with "Sabrina." (He told me later, "I fucking hate that book. I don't ever want to look at it again. It was a mistake, and I shouldn't have done it.") I asked him what his new book was about. "It's going to be about religion and identity and having a sense of purpose, but also about being emotionally manipulated in some way," he said, and added, "There's still a lot to be figured out."
He let me leaf through a printout of the twenty or so pages he'd finished so far. The constricted look of "Sabrina" was retreating. The palette was brighter. The white people were no longer all the same color. Many panels had three or more figures in them. "This story won't be so limited, you know, the way 'Sabrina' is really just hopelesslygrounded," Drnaso promised. His characters, however, would still be united by their "emotional ineptitude." He expected that he would fold in some betrayals as he went along, but for the moment he was pleased that, in the early pages, the characters seemed to be making real connections with one another. Some of them even had mouths, and were using them to smile. "It's funny," Drnaso said. "When you're drawing people, you kind of emote with the expression you're trying to create. I think I'm enjoying the process more this time."


text:
automobile racing
automobile racing, sport in which specially designed or modified automobiles race on any of various courses. Automobile racing originated in France in 1894 and appeared in the United States the following year. It is now one of the most popular spectator sports in the world. Of many different types of competition, the most prestigious have traditionally involved Formula One (Grand Prix) or
automobiles, both cars with low-slung bodies capable of speeds greater than 230 mph (370 kph). Their design and maintenance require full-time racing teams and large corporate investment. A number of countries sponsor Grand Prix races, which contribute to the designation of a world champion driver. The Grands Prix of Monaco, France, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia are among the best known.
America's famous Indianapolis 500 (begun 1911) is the best known of a series of races in which drivers compete for a series championship, organized by the United States Auto Club (USAC) and overseen from 1979 to 1996 by Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART). In 1996 CART began a competing series, leaving the Indy 500 and several other races in the hands of the Indy Racing League (IRL). The Indianapolis 500 attracts over 500,000 spectators annually, making it the nation's largest paid-admission sporting event. Many top drivers compete in both Formula One and Indy-type races, and some also drive in the two major endurance races for sports cars, the 24 Hours at Daytona (Daytona Beach, Fla.) and the 24 Hours at LeMans (France; officially the LeMans Grand Prix d'Endurance, held since 1923).
Enormously popular in the United States are the races of the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing (NASCAR) circuit, in which standard, or stock, cars with special equipment race at speeds that can average close to 200 mph (320 kph). The major races of the NASCAR circuit include the Daytona 500 and the Talladega 500. Midget racing originated in the 1940s among enthusiasts unable to afford Indy cars. Originally held on dirt tracks at fairgrounds, midget races have yielded their popularity to sprint cars, larger versions of the midgets that travel half-mile tracks at 100 mph (161 kph) or more. Drag racing, which grew out of the often illegal sprints held among American teenagers during the 1950s, involves acceleration tests among extremely powerful cars over .25-mi (.4025-km) courses at speeds exceeding 300 mph (483 kph). Hill climbing, done by cars of various classes against the clock, is popular in Europe, but has never attained more than regional popularity in the United States.
See R. Cutter and B. Fendell, Encyclopedia of Auto Racing (1973); A. E. Brown, The History of the American Speedway (1984).

subset: commoncrawl


text:
|Racesafe Adult Pinhead Spot Show Tie
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text:
* * * * *
Depending on the meaning of conservative, it may be that a libertarian should be a conservative, that a libertarian might be a conservative, or that a libertarian should not be a conservative.
A libertarian, I take it, is someone who is for liberty and against aggression. The libertarian doesn't like to be pushed around, and doesn't like to see other people pushed around, either. The libertarian will likely affirm some version of what I will call the libertarian principle, and will have good reason as well to embrace the libertarian ideal.
In its strongest form, the libertarian principle holds that someone may rightly use force against the person or property of another only to prevent or end an unjust attack or to secure compensation for the damage done by such an attack. On weaker versions, the initiation of force, while infrequently permissible, must meet very demanding requirements.
The libertarian ideal calls for real freedom in all aspects of life. The libertarian need not, and likely will not, suppose that just any action that does not involve the misuse of force is morally reasonable. Conduct that is not aggressive can, and frequently does, amount to the mistreatment of others. Often, this mistreatment will reduce their freedom to make choices about their own lives. Someone motivated by the libertarian ideal will challenge such mistreatment even while granting that it may be narrowly consistent with the libertarian principle and may not reasonably be met with the use of force.
Whether a libertarian can or should be a conservative will depend on what a conservative is. I consider ten sorts of conservative here—the traditionalist, the organicist, the fallibilist, the localist, the hierarchicalist, the culturalist, the fundamentalist, the constable, the marketeer, and the warrior.
For the traditionalist, reasoned discourse is embedded in a tradition. We all start somewhere; we're always already on the way. There is no way to avoid beginning with the intellectual inheritance we receive from parents and teachers, friends and neighbors, churches and synagogues, books and films. And there is, in addition, good reason to take it seriously: inherited convictions have already been sifted; there has been considerable opportunity to assess their significance and implications. Being a traditionalist doesn't mean ignoring challenges to tradition, nor does it require the unrealistic assumption that traditions are hermetically sealed and clearly demarcated. The traditionalist can perfectly well engage in potentially transformative critique. But the traditionalist's critique won't proceed from the assumption that intellectual activity can avoid beginning somewhere.
By an organicist, I mean someone who thinks that a society or community is more like an organism than it is like a machine and who is consequently doubtful that societal problems can reasonably be understood as engineering puzzles to be resolved using technical expertise. The organicist is deeply suspicious of the view that deliberate planning is an effective way to promote a community's flourishing, doubting that any rational decision-maker possesses, or could possess, the knowledge and skill required to do a better job at structuring social institutions than the generations of people who have slowly shaped and reshaped those institutions. The organicist maintains that the social world created by the winnowed wisdom of the past deserves far more respect than any utopia constructed by the deracinated intellect of a would-be rational planner.
The fallibilist's emphasis is not on the preservation of hallowed social institutions but on the value of distributed knowledge. The fallibilist doubts that any one actor knows or could know all the things known by all the members of a society. Like the organicist, the fallibilist emphasizes the planner's fallibility—but, in this case, not as a reason to preserve, say, the church or the monarchy, but rather as a reason to leave people's voluntary interactions alone.
For the localist, a sense of place is a vital component of human flourishing. The kind of intimate knowledge of one's roots and one's companions offered by links with a particular place enables one to live a genuinely human life. And local institutions operate on a human scale, permitting people to make decisions about matters they actually have some chance of comprehending and allowing individual voices to be heard and to make a difference.
The hierarchicalist supposes that people flourish in ordered relationships of authority, deference, and mutual responsibility. On the hierarchicalist's view, the existence and maintenance of social rank acknowledges the differences in ability, temperament, and training that actually obtain among people in any society. Everyone benefits when those equipped to command do so and when those suited to be followers understand and accept their places in the order of things.
The culturalist believes in the objective superiority of the intellectual, scientific, literary, æsthetic, and political convictions and products of a particular cultural tradition—practically speaking, almost always his or her own. People in all cultures ought to acknowledge the preeminence of these convictions and products, and attempts to downplay their importance—by arguing for the influence of gender bias on science, urging the inclusion of texts by authors from marginalized groups in the literary canon, or seeking to render educational curricula multicultural—should be rejected as prejudiced attacks on reason and objective value.
The fundamentalist seeks to preserve a set of religiously inspired norms of right conduct. These often concern family, gender, and sexuality, but they may also have to do with criminal punishment, military strength, or existing patterns of ownership which are thought to enjoy divine sanction. From the perspective of the fundamentalist, these norms are worth conserving through the use of force and social pressure because their value has been revealed (and perhaps because respecting them has been commanded) by God (or an equivalent source of supernatural sanction).
The constable is horrified by the sense that the bonds and norms sustaining a civilized society are rapidly dissolving, and thus aggressively supports the maintenance of 'law and order'. Fearing disorder, the constable is quite prepared to use whatever means seem necessary to suppress rioters and the violent, but also those whose unconventional behavior—drug use, say, or sexual non-conformity—seems to threaten established boundaries and practices. The constable rejects as naïve and sentimental the attempt to explain misconduct as the result of social rather than individual pathology and challenges as unfair to actual and potential victims, and to all those supportive of social order, attempts to refashion the criminal justice system in ways that enhance the legal rights of criminal suspects. The constable is suspicious of individual rights of self-defense because they undercut the power of the authorities to maintain order. And the constable insists on the merits of retribution and deterrence as central goals of the legal system.
The marketeer seeks to conserve a sphere of economic life that is free from the intrusion of the state, one in which hard work is rewarded and the strong and capable are acknowledged for their skills and gifts. The marketeer resents the state's incursion into a formerly autonomous region of society and regards much of this incursion not only as inept and restrictive of freedom but as involving the objectionable coddling of the weak and lazy.
The warrior's primary concern is the establishment and maintenance of strong internal and external defenses against threatened attacks by alien forces. The enemies with whom the warrior is concerned may vary: they may be Communists or jihadists, for instance. Whoever they are, however, the warrior is committed both to deterring and defeating them militarily and to preventing their insidious infiltration and subversion from undermining the institutions of the warrior's society. This commitment characteristically entails support not only for substantial military spending by the state (and often the active employment of military force to threaten or attack the foe of the day) but also for the use of heightened surveillance, limitations on the procedural protections available to those suspected of terrorism or espionage, the use of torture, restraints on speech and assembly, and other changes in law and policy the warrior regards as necessary to defeat the enemy.
No doubt one person may be both a localist and a constable, a traditionalist and a warrior. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these categories. But it is useful to distinguish diverse strands of conservatism, some of which are, and some of which are not, compatible with the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal.
The libertarian can quite comfortably identify as a traditionalist. Traditionalism is essentially a thesis about epistemology, and accepting the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal is surely quite compatible with endorsing this thesis: the libertarian can (but need not) maintain without contradiction or tension that a rational argument must begin from within some tradition or other.
The libertarian can also be an organicist. Support for established social institutions can be quite consistent with the libertarian principle, provided they do not maintain themselves using aggression. Whether it is also compatible with the libertarian ideal is another matter. The ideal will obviously be incompatible with support for established institutions that restrict freedom in one way or another without using force—that limit people's employment opportunities because of ethnicity or sexual orientation, that constrain marriage partners on the basis of religion. But it will pose no barrier to accepting others which do not limit freedom or which enhance it.
The libertarian certainly may, and almost certainly should, be a fallibilist. The truth of fallibilism provides one of the strongest arguments for the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal alike.
Localism is certainly consistent with both the libertarian principle and the libertarian ideal. There is nothing about supporting geographically localized institutions and communities that violates the principle. And support for such institutions and communities need not run counter to the ideal—indeed, it can help to foster freedom by safeguarding and extending structures that make it easier for people to control their own lives. But a larger, more cosmopolitan, anonymous environment may offer some people much greater freedom to shape their own identities and relationships than a relatively self-contained community in which behavior is closely monitored and conformity is enforced. The libertarian ideal does not rule out localism, but it disposes the libertarian who embraces it to regard some varieties of localism, which value small-scale communities precisely because they can (or without regard to the fact that they do) enforce conformity and exclude or regulate various sorts of minority groups, with well-deserved suspicion.
Purely voluntary social hierarchies are narrowly compatible with the libertarian principle: if people want to defer to others, the libertarian will say, no one has any business using force to stop them from doing so. But preserving the constraints on freedom created by hierarchies will be inconsistent with the libertarian ideal; people who own this ideal cannot be hierarchicalists.
In addition, though it does not justify regarding genuinely voluntary hierarchies themselves as unjust, the libertarian principle will certainly provide good reason to challenge injustices that leave people with few choices in the real world apart from the acceptance of hierarchical conditions. The violent dispossession of smallholders and the arbitrary use of state power to provide land grants to hierarchs or their ancestors create conditions in which force may or may not currently be necessary to sustain hierarchical institutions and behavior patterns; but the forcible nature of the events making possible those institutions and patterns clearly calls into question the justice of current conditions, and thus their compatibility with the libertarian principle. Of course, it is doubtful that many, if any, actually existing hierarchical societies are even currently voluntary: the threat of state and private violence clearly helps to maintain deferential attitudes and behaviors; the libertarian principle certainly calls for libertarians to reject hierarchicalism in these societies.
The libertarian principle is compatible in principle with culturalism. Libertarians are not cultural relativists, and they rightly emphasize the significance of particular cultural traditions for the emergence of libertarian ideas in the West. On the other hand, while the libertarian principle might permit someone to be a culturalist, libertarians could have good reasons for questioning culturalism, including evidence for the independent emergence of libertarian ideas elsewhere. And the libertarian ideal will prompt the libertarian to resist varieties of culturalism that not only challenge particular ideas but that also lead to the effective silencing and exclusion of particular people—or, indeed, that seem in some way to legitimate aggression against them. Culturalism need not be racist or sexist, but the libertarian, aware of its potential to be both, will embrace it tentatively at best.
To the extent that the fundamentalist employs state power—as through the criminal law—to punish (say) the sexual non-conformist, the libertarian must clearly object: such a use of force is paradigmatically aggressive, undoubtedly in violation of the libertarian principle. And even when the fundamentalist does not employ force to suppress dissent, but uses less overt varieties of social pressure to penalize harmless behavior, the libertarian ideal must surely lead libertarians to disapprove. Libertarians may certainly be religious; but it is hard to see how they could be fundamentalists in the sense considered here.
The libertarian has every reason to value the security of person and property. But the constable often appears to favor the use of force to maintain established social boundaries and conventions, and to value order more than liberty; conflicts with the libertarian principle are almost inevitable. The constable's dismissal of procedural safeguards for criminal suspects may not itself be aggressive, and need not be inconsistent with the libertarian principle. However, the libertarian, instinctively suspicious that state power can be abused, will be inclined to favor its persistent limitation. Certainly, the libertarian principle will rule out the use of the 'third degree' and of torture in the course of interrogating prisoners.
While the libertarian will surely welcome the deterrent effects of the legal consequences suffered by those who harm others, the libertarian principle likely rules out deterrence as an independent justification for the imposition of those consequences. Whether retribution is consistent with the libertarian principle is subject to debate, but it is clear that libertarians have often tended to regard the tort law system as providing a more satisfactory means of dealing with harm to others than the criminal law, not least because the former, unlike the latter, can impose liability only when real harm has occurred and must (ordinarily) proportion damages to the actual extent of the harm. By contrast, the criminal law the constable seeks to enforce can penalize people for conduct whether or not it involves demonstrable harm and whether or not the penalties the law imposes reflect the magnitude of any actually occurring harm.
The libertarian principle is clearly inconsistent with imposing criminal penalties on people for the victimless offense of keeping and using weapons to defend themselves and others. And the constable's concern to maintain the capacity of the authorities forcibly to secure order seems inconsistent with the libertarian ideal; the libertarian as such has no brief for the preservation of existing structures of authority. Finally, the defence of social order which the constable sees as a crucial objective will often appear to the advocate of liberty as a means of suppressing welcome variety and of enforcing conformity with arbitrary norms. The consistent libertarian will have little or no reason to regard being a constable as appropriate or desirable.
The libertarian is, of course, an enthusiast for markets. For an authentically free market is a prime example of a pattern of social interaction characterized by the absence of aggression. So the libertarian will often have good reason to make common cause with the marketeer. At the same time, however, the libertarian will want to emphasize that in no political environment in today's world is there anything remotely like a free market. This is both because of ongoing state intervention on behalf of privileged elites and other favored groups and because the conditions of the playing field on which economic actors meet reflect the effects of past injustices that have consistently and violently benefited some groups of people at the expense of others.
The marketeer will often resist interference with the current distribution of property rights in a given society, whatever its origin; but the libertarian will be much more likely to favor potentially radical measures designed to rectify past injustices. In addition, the libertarian has no particular reason to endorse the marketeer's moralizing about market conditions; and the libertarian who acknowledges the libertarian ideal as an essential component of libertarianism will surely want to emphasize that some economic conditions that do not involve the misuse of force are nonetheless objectionable because they minimize freedom and reduce people's effective capacities for responsible action. The libertarian will sometimes find the marketeer a useful ally; but the libertarian should not, I think, want to be a marketeer except when being a marketeer does not involve accepting naïve beliefs about the origin or dynamics of actually existing markets.
The libertarian certainly need not be a pacifist. But the libertarian principle counts very strongly against participation in or support for almost all of the wars in which states engage, because they are frequently pursued for unjust ends and are almost always conducted using unjust means. The libertarian principle also counts against torture and interference with civil liberties. And the libertarian ideal militates against the endorsement of a stance whose underlying purpose seems often to be to maintain the power and prestige of the state.
In some cases, libertarians should be conservatives; in others, they may be; in others, they should not be. Libertarians should be fallibilists. And doubtless they should be traditionalists if traditionalism makes sense philosophically. They ought to embrace truly free markets, but they should be marketeers only if doing so is compatible with rejecting assumptions that some marketeers embrace. They may, but need not, be organicists or localists—provided they reject approaches to social life that enforce conformity and suppress dissent. They might be culturalists, but they should be thoroughly wary about some of culturalism's associations. They have good reasons not to be hierarchicalists, and overwhelming reasons not to be constables, fundamentalists, or warriors.


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In humans as in chickens, certain bacteria such as Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria are absolutely essential for intestinal development. These microbes are normally taken up from the environment. The most important factors for microbe uptake by chickens are the hatcheries, the henhouses, and the feed and water taken up.
The increasing efforts in the field of production hygiene are restricting the pathways to uptake of important bacteria ever further. Hatcheries are almost sterile, henhouses are disinfected before the chicks are installed, and the feed is being treated ever more in order to avoid pathogenic germs as far as possible. However, parallel with this the microbes necessary for development of the birds are being increasingly killed off. This now leads to a situation in which poultry is restricted in its growth potential as certain stimuli necessary for development can no longer be provided. This can be observed in particular among parents for broilers, as contrary to their genetics these animals are fed restrictively in order to increase their fertility. All this is done with very high hygiene measures, which leads to a particularly difficult situation regarding the development status of the fowl. Non-specific clinical pictures among the parents are frequent, and in many cases then also lead to losses in the rearing of the parents.
lt has been proved that essential microbes can be added to the feed in order to allow normal growth of the poultry. Recently, however, there has been increasing discussion on whether the bacteria necessary for the development of the poultry have to be fed live, or whether it is possible to administer them in killed form in order to achieve the same or even better effect. In this connection the following factors should be considered: many stimuli in the development of the chicken are structural, in other words the surface of the probiotic bacteria leads to an influence on the immune system. The bacterium need not necessarily be alive for this. On the other hand the colonisation resistance is often cited - this concerns which bacterium first colonises a certain niche in the digestive tract and thus forestalls colonisation by other bacteria, even if the microbes essential for development possibly do not directly prevent pathogenic bacteria. Despite this colonisation by pathogenic germs is thus prevented, provided that the essential microbes can colonise the intestinal wall first. lf the probiotic added in the feed is inactivated, this effect is limited. Receptors in the intestinal wall can admittedly be occupied, but permanent colonisation by live pathogenic germs cannot be prevented to the same extent, as these can move around. Only live Lactobacilli produce lactic acid, which in turn is available as nutrition to other essential microbes, such as Bifidobacteria, and at the same time leads to local acidification. Counterpart opponents such as Escherichia coli, which can occupy the same receptors as the colonising Lactobacilli, prefer to grow in neutral or alkaline surroundings. On the other hand, living organisms have maintenance needs. Consequently ifwe provide probiotic bacteria necessary for development specifically via the feed, they will also use a part of the feed energy for their own growth. Naturally there are also quite practical advantages and disadvantages in the use of bacteria in feeds. Essential microorganisms that have already been killed are more durable as a product and in feedstuffs and can be pelletized without problems. This is naturally a benefit for the producers of additives as weil, as no live detection is possible. Probiotic Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria are specialists in the digestive tract, but generally not very stable in storage and cannot be pelletized without sufficient encapsulation.
The right strategy in poultry production
What benefits me most as a poultry producer? In two scientific experiments with broilers conducted over 40 and 42 days, either 500 g/kg or 1000 g/kg PoultryStar® was tested in the feed, with the probiotic bacteria being administered once live and once inactivated. In the case of 500 g/kg administration of the live product, increased early growth was observed in the first week of life, which was not the case with the inactivated product. In contrast, feed conversion was improved by comparison with the control animals in both treatments with live and killed product. In the trial with a dose of 1000 g/t feed PoultryStar®, the effect of the killed product was more uniform throughout the entire duration of the study. On the other hand, the effects of the live and killed product were improved over a control without supplements (see Figures 1 and 2).
Figure 1. Growth and feed uptake in broilers, a comparison between a control group, broilers fed feed supplemented with 1000 g/t PoultryStar® with active bacteria, and a group fed with the same quantity of PoultryStar® with inactivated strains.
Figure 2. Feed conversion in broilers, a comparison between a control group, broilers fed feed supplemented with 1000 g/t PoultryStar® with active bacteria, and a group fed with the same quantity of PoultryStar® with inactivated strains.
lnterestingly enough, in the case of administration of the inactivated product, however, improved digestibility of the dry matter and the crude protein fed to the birds was observed by comparison with the trial groups with the live probiotic and the control group. Here it can be suspected that a part of the dry matter and the protein in the live probiotic group was transformed into bacterial biomass, which was not the case with the inactivated bacteria administered or the control group. As there was no significant difference in growth performance between the birds with live bacteria in the feed by comparison with those with killed bacteria in the feed, it can be shown that the live bacteria supplemented do not compete with the broilers for nutrients in the intestine, as otherwise there would have been differences in growth. In the cecal tonsils, the largest accumulation of lymph cells in the hen gut, the expression of the inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) gene was lowered in both cases (see Figure 3), which confirms the immunomodulating effect of the bacteria, both live and inactivated. Macrophages produce nitric oxides with iNOS to kill off bacterial cells. Lower secretion could indicate improved selectivity of these immune cells in both cases.
Figure 3. Secretion of the iNOS gene in ceca/ tonsils in broilers, in a comparison between a control group, broilers fed feed supplemented with 1000 g/t PoultryStar® with active bacteria, and a group fed with the same quantity of PoultryStar® with inactivated strains.
Based on these studies, it was possible to show an effect of inactivated bacteria essential for poultry development which leads to the same production results in a controlled feeding experiment. This also represents advantages for practical use, as it documents that inactivated bacterial strains too have positive effects that may be comparable with those of live strains. However, it should be considered that both experiments were tested under optimal trial conditions -under field conditions the pathogenic germ pressure is much higher in the course of production than in the trial. Here it is questionable whether the inactivated form of the bacterial strains can have the same effect at the same concentration.
This article was first published in FeedMagazine/Kraftfutter (Issue 1-2/2017).


text:
by Kiley Oram
Giving a great blow job is easy, not to mention sexy and fun for both giver and receiver. Fellatio is a versatile sex act, too — you can do it almost anywhere!
- Be prepared with some sexy goods. Have the Blow Job Expert Kit on hand and you'll find that the BabeLicious flavored lubricant, lickable oil, and accompanying vibrator will help tranform you from a novice into an oral sex master. (Plus you save 25% when you purchase all the toys together!)
- Study up. In addition to these blow job techniques, you'll find great oral sex tips in the DVD Tristan Taormino's Expert Guide to Fellatio and in the book The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio.
BabeLicious flavored lubricant
- Get comfortable. A blow job is much more fun without a sore neck. Find a position that works best for both of you, depending on where you are (you can't really lounge comfortably in an elevator, you know) and the angle of the cock you're dealing with (work with the natural downward angle of your throat). Kneel before your man with him standing if you're in a confined area, or when you want to strike a pose that's really hot. Other positions: seat your partner and crouch between their legs (slide a pillow under your knees if you're not on a soft surface), or lay down and let your partner thrust into your mouth, (harder to control the depth, but good for you lazy types). If you're in a car, your partner can lay down lengthwise in the back.
- If you're using a condom, put it on now. Try a Trustex flavored condom if you don't like the taste of plain latex. A sexy way to set the scene is to use your mouth to put the condom on before you get busy.
- Give us a kiss. If you're dealing with a soft penis, you don't have to wait until it's hard to start the show. Put it in your mouth when it's soft (or semi-hard) to get acquainted. Kiss it. Lick it. You can sweeten things up by applying an edible lube/gel like BabeLicious flavored lubricant or Sliquid Green Apple, which won rave reviews in Men's Health magazine.
- Mouth off. Slide your lips gently over your teeth for smooth sailing. Most fellatio recipients like lots of spit, but others prefer a drier job, so check in with your partner. Asking quick yes or no questions like "want it dryer?" or "more spit?" can be helpful and hot. Despite your amazing oral sex technique, you aren't a mind-reader, so watch your partner for body language cues.
- Experiment. You can do more wonderful stuff with your mouth than just suck (and remember — the harder you suck doesn't necessarily mean the better it feels). Mix it up by licking the sensitive underside of the shaft, the nerve-ending-loaded head of the penis, and the testicles. Blow softly on the moistened areas; the combination of sensations will feel incredible.
- Hands-on. Give your blow job a hand. Grip the cock around the base and slide it up and down, hand-job style, in tandem with your mouth. (Some folks like a tight squeeze, while others may not, so check in.) This is great because you can cover a lot of the shaft this way without worrying about taking the whole cock in your mouth. You can concentrate on the super-sensitive head and suck as hard or softly as you and your partner like. Use lube for extra slipperiness. A silicone lube like BabeLube Silicone is great for blow jobs: it's concentrated so you only need a tiny bit, it's long-lasting so you won't need to keep stopping to reload, and it doesn't have a distracting taste or smell.
- Deep throat. Deep-throating — the act of taking the entire shaft into your mouth and throat — can be cool, but you can give a perfectly stellar blow job without doing so. The key to deep throat is to relax your jaw and throat muscles as much as you can. Otherwise, you trigger the gag reflex.
- Accessorize. Bring some toys into your routine. Experiment with cock rings, butt plugs, or mini vibrators (like the Fukuoku 9000 finger vibe for some attention on the testicles and perineum. Try pressing against his perineum with the flexible vibrating pad of the Jimmyjane Form 3 while you go to town with your mouth. Or try sucking on ice or a breath mint to transmit a tingly sensation to your favorite penis. Again, check in with your partner to see how experimental you should be.
- Get into it. Look at your partner and the ecstacy you have caused! Make eye contact. Show your partner how much you love being down there. Moan, make appreciative noises (a well-placed "MMMM!" can make for some nice vibration, too)... let your partner know how turned on you are. Don't neglect the rest of the body, either — stroke, tickle, scratch the thighs, stomach, butt, and everywhere else you can reach.
- Sucking Silicone. This applies to every cock: silicone, rubber, glass, vegetable and flesh alike. When you're dealing with a dildo, treat it like your partner can feel everything you're doing to it because they can. For more on this topic, see How to Suck Strap-on Cock.
- Finish the Job. It is ultimately your choice whether or not to swallow. Your partner's diet, health, habits and frequency of ejaculation will determine the quantity and taste of the ejaculate. The ejaculate of someone who ingests lots of red meat, caffeine, alcohol or cigarettes, may taste more intense than that of a non-smoking vegetarian. The most ejaculate you might encounter is a teaspoonful or so. You have several choices if you aren't crazy about ejaculate, but don't want to hurt anyone's feelings:
- take it in your mouth and discreetly deposit into a nearby towel
- as your partner approaches climax, withdraw and finish with your hand
- let your partner come on your body and admire the copious amounts of ejaculate
- use a condom for easy cleanup
When you're totally focused on giving head, it can be a lot of fun whether it's for power play (your partner's most precious asset is at your mercy), intimacy, or the pure fun of getting someone off. Remember, you should only be performing fellatio on somebody if you're really into it and are able to focus all of your energy on what you're doing. If you're staring at the clock, waiting for it to end, or worrying about the laundry in the dryer, you won't have a good time and your partner will be able to tell you're not into it, which can be distracting, too!


text:
Road crews in North Texas geared up Monday morning, in case the wintery-mix made the commute slick for drivers.
NTTA workers were ready to roll out if needed. Crews loaded up the trucks with sand all morning and were stationed up and down the Dallas North Tollway.
The snow started falling in Dallas near Royal Lane around 5:25 a.m. and lasted about a half hour.
The latest news from around North Texas.
Some snow did accumulate on the grass, but quickly melted.
The snow didn't pile up on the tollway, however it did makes the roads wet. TX-DOT says the ground temperature stayed warmer than the air temperature and did not make the roads icy.
Crews stocked up with sand and were prepared to treat the interchanges, bridges and overpasses.
This year, the NTTA is using darker sand, which makes it easier for drivers to see.
Crews spread the sand, then put down a liquid chemical. The mixture is more expensive, and why many cities only use sand or a sand-salt mix. TX-DOT says it costs around $40,000 per day to treat highways in Tarrant County with the de-icer, "Meltdown 20" brand magnesium chloride.
NTTA has more than 100 trucks, nine plows, and about four million pounds of sand ready to go.
Snow plows were quite a novelty when they first showed up in North Texas around the 2010 Superbowl, when the area did have some serious snowfall.
NTTA said it's been preparing for snow and ice, since the triple-digit heat of the summer.
Maintenance staff participated in a "snow and ice rodeo" the end of October to prepare for possible upcoming wintry conditions on the NTTA roadways. Classroom training included plan review and equipment training for crews. Crews also drove assigned routes and checked maps for accuracy.
Additional training sessions were scheduled approximately every two weeks.


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Rocky & Apple, longtime friends based in Hillsborough, Ca, are in town as they always are for the Christmas holidays. Busy with their respective families' affairs, we had our usual Christmas dinner together a bit late this year, last night, Friday the 28th December 2012. Catha chose Impressions as the venue since Rocky & Apple hadn't tried it out yet, and because she wanted to try out Cyrille's pithiviers of wild French pigeon since I told her so much about it. It took only a text message or two with Cyrille, and we were all set.
|Amuse bouche
Our 1st course was Cyrille's signature Terrine of Duck Foie Gras & Unagi, Cubes of Aspic Lemon Confit and Red Cabbage Foam in Teriyaki Jam which we enjoyed with a bottle of 2005 Champagne Mailly Grand Cru "L'Air" - a gift from Juan Carlos & Mari de Terry (muchisimas gracias, JC y Mari). This is the first time I've had anything from this producer - a cooperative of grand cru vineyard growers established at the end of the 1920s.
It's fruit (green apple, touches of pear and lemon, bit of underlying ripe grapefruit towards the back and in the finish) is markedly lively, fresh, and pure. The grapefruit emerges past mid-palate and extends through the finish. Its middle shows a vaguely milky pinot noir underbelly. Still very young, but already very enjoyable. Dry and lively, with brisk acidity, it did very well with...
...our excellent 2nd course of Tartine Iodée of Sea Urchin, Scallops and Oysters, Assorted Cress, Sea Urchin Parfait in Cucumber Confit. This, like the 1st course, is on the regular menu. Anyone who likes fresh seafood should try this out with a good, dry champagne. Lovely.
|So good it deserves another close up shot.
The 3rd course is not on the regular menu, but something Cyrille devised earlier that evening and whipped up for us - Seared Scallops with Black Truffle Spears & Chestnut Mousse. As can be seen, the scallops were perfectly seared, with the black truffle spears adding a discreet earthiness and a bit of textural contrast.
With this I paired a bottle of 2001 Louis Jadot Puligny Montrachet 1er Cru Les Combettes - A richer, riper type of Puligny Montrachet, it shows a Meursault-reminiscent nuttiness/beurre noisette to its rigid-backboned, somewhat forward, lightly spiced, ample ripe fruit. Acidity is moderate, sufficient (but not bright enough, to my mind had I paired it with the 1st course or with fresh oysters). The oak is moderate and well-integrated. Quite nice, actually - certainly one of the better 1er cru Puligny Montrachets locally available. Got this at Bacchus Int'l. I shall get more.
Our 4th (and main) course was of fowl - Cyrille's Pithiviers of French Wild Pigeon & Duck Foie Gras with Asparagus Spears, French Morels, Chanterelles, & Truffle Jus. Absolutely wonderful - a showcase of comfort, earthiness, heartiness and commitment to high-quality ingredients. Sublime.
With this earthy masterpiece, I paired a 1981 Vieux Château Certan - Notable depth and somber power in its dark, properly ripe/concentrated midnight plum, dark raspberry and black cherry, bit of smokiness, discreet underlying loam, worn leather, warm asphalt, moist pipe tobacco, cedar, and violets. Dry. Good structure. Quietly full-bodied. Decent length. Quite nice, in good condition at 31 years from vintage, and, I'd guess at its peak. I'll get more of this for short-term consumption/enjoyment.
|Catha, Apple, Cyrille, & Rocky.
|One of two platters of Samplers of Impressions' Signature Desserts.
We chatted until around 10:30pm, and, for Rocky's single malt fix (he's really into single malts these days), proceeded to Bar M, which, unfortunately, was closed. We then moved on to The Blind Pig for nightcaps (where Rocky did get some single malt), calling it a night by around 2:30am. Wonderful evening with longtime friends, excellent food, and fine wine. Until the next!


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Academic Year 2007-2008
page revision: 0, last edited: 09 Jul 2010 16:20
Our objectives are the following:
(a) to study and comprehend the canonical texts of Theravãda Pitaka as approved successively by the Buddhist Councils held in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
(b) to abstain from evil deeds and practice good deeds.
(c) to promote the four modes of sublime living (Brahma-vihãra dhamma) which would lead to the establishment of peaceful and prosperous world and
(d) to be trained more missionaries endowed with good morality, to be well-versed in Pitaka literature to have experience in meditation practices.


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Google, Apple and Microsoft -- and Boxee and Roku -- are all in a crowd, trying to decipher and conquer the television experience.
Business Insider astutely points out that, perhaps, this is an experience that is just fine as it is.
Nonetheless, according to ReadWriteWeb, one more Silicon Valley company is primed to move into the fray: Yahoo. And Yahoo could use an uptick in headlines, given that recent ones have been more about strategy, guidance, purpose and job cuts.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Yahoo Connected TV, shown at CES, is an overlay that enhances the viewing experience. It's opt-in, which is the smartest (only?) way to engage viewers.
ReadWriteWeb's first-hand take: "Watching a boxing match? Cast a vote in an online poll on who's going to stay upright and who's hitting the mat. Checking out the shopping channel? Purchase items directly from the comfort of your sofa without pulling out the laptop. Yahoo Connected TV is about to change how we think of Internet TV forever... but is it edgy enough to really lead the pack?"
It's a passive combination of social networking, polling and commerce. Things we do all day at work, anyway.


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Activate Apple ID on mobile phone
Restart mobile phone
Choose ringtone
Back up phone memory to iCloud
Choose network mode
It's important to find out if you can make a call. If you can't make a call, you need to solve this problem first. When the problem is solved, you will most likely also be able to use your mobile phone's internet connection.
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It's Memorial Day Weekend and a time to celebrate and remember those who died in service to our country – over a million men and women who have died since the Civil War protecting our people and democratic values – not "democratic" as in political party, but the big "D" – Democracy – a government in which power is vested in the people – a representative democracy with free elections to affect nationwide policies.
We have so much to learn from the military and how they take care of their families. Just one example, out of many, can be seen in the system of child care for children in military families compared to the system of child care for children in non-military families.
Last month, Child Care Aware® of America released "We Can Do Better: 2013 Update," the 7th in a series of licensing reports scoring and ranking the states based on state child care center licensing policies and oversight. According to the report, states averaged a score of 92 out of 150, a grade of 61 percent – very close to a failing grade. The Department of Defense (DoD) child care system was scored and ranked as well, since it is a system analogous to a state system serving many children throughout the country. The DoD child care system topped the list, outscoring all the state systems, with a strong framework based on safety and child development. How did the remainder of the states fare? The top 10 states earned a "C", another 21 earned a "D," and the remaining 20 states failed.
Military Child Care Policies
A U.S. Senate Committee hearing in 2011 compared the Military Child Care Act (MCCA), which governs the child care policies set by DOD with the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – however, individual state policies vary greatly. Both acts have parental choice in child care settings as a centerpiece. Both acts were passed by Congress to respond to an increase in working women and a greater need to make child care more affordable for working families. But, that is about all the two laws have in common.
The Department of Defense has developed a system of quality child care. Nearly 100 percent of child care centers overseen by the military are nationally accredited compared to less than eight percent of child care centers in civilian communities. The military child care system has minimum protections for children, parents can choose from an array of settings that all meet these minimum protections, and there is accountability for how DoD child care funds are spent.
In contrast, CCDBG has led to a patchwork array of child care settings under different laws in every state. There is no system. There are no minimum protections for children. Parents can choose licensed or unlicensed care. There is little accountability for how public dollars are spent.
The MCCA requires a comprehensive background check (fingerprints against criminal records) for child care providers. In contrast, CCDBG does not require a background check. Do background checks matter? Parent advocate, Elly Lafkin's baby died in a child care program in 2012. A police investigation revealed a history of criminal offenses, which the provider had committed under various aliases, but Elly and her husband didn't know because Virginia doesn't require a fingerprint check so parents aren't aware of offenses an individual with various aliases has committed.
The MCCA requires the Secretary of Defense to establish a uniform training program for child care providers. The act requires, at a minimum, that training shall cover:
- Early childhood development
- Activities and disciplinary techniques appropriate to children of different ages
- Child abuse prevention and detection
- CPR and other emergency medical procedures
As a result, DoD policy establishes a minimum requirement of 40 hours of initial training either before a provider cares for children or early on once hired. Also, DoD requires 24 hours of annual training as follow-up and to reinforce initial learning.
State Child Care Policies
In contrast, CCDBG has no minimum training requirement. State requirements vary greatly. For child care centers,
- Only 21 states require staff training in child development.
- Only 34 states have safe sleep requirements for infants.
- Only 9 states require all staff to learn CPR.
- Only 15 states meet each of the 10 health and safety policies recommended by pediatric experts.
Think a requirement for provider training in safe sleep doesn't matter? Parent advocate, Nathan Salomonis' baby died in a licensed child care center in California where there is no safe sleep requirement to protect infants.
The MCCA requires regular unannounced inspections of child care programs. In contrast, CCDBG has no inspection requirement. Nine states conduct inspections of child care centers less often than once a year. About half the states conduct inspections of family child care homes less frequently than once per year.
Think inspections don't matter? Advocate Vicky Dougherty's toddler son died in a defective crib in a child care program where an inspection may have potentially noted the problem and saved her son's life. But, in Pennsylvania, family child care homes are inspected only once every six years.
There are quality child care programs throughout the country. But, licensing laws vary greatly by state and CCDBG—the federal framework for state laws, contains no requirements for background checks or training for providers and no requirement for regular inspections.
CCDBG has not been reauthorized in 17 years. Earlier this month, HHS Secretary Sebelius announced new proposed rules for child care to better promote the safety and healthy development of children through existing regulatory authority. If you think it's time to provide minimum protections for children in child care, comment today on the regulations.gov web page. If you think it's time for Congress to reauthorize CCDBG and better protect children in child care and promote quality child care programs, act now.
It is great news that our Democracy created child care systems for military and non-military children. But, now it's time to fix the system for non-military children. A Democratic society can and should do better for our families.


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The Simpsons™: Tapped Out v4.16.4 HOW FUN IS IT? LET US COUNT THE WAYS!
1. Simpsons First, you can get it for Tapped free!
2. Make Springfield Out just like you want it.
3. Help Simpsons™: Tapped Out Homer find Marge, Bart, Lisa, and the rest of his family and friends! (Ned Flanders, too.)
4. Complete tasks to earn… mmm, donuts!
5. Make Apu work ridiculously long shifts at Kwik-E-Mart.
6. Grow and harvest Tomacco on Cletus's Farm.
7. Party down with Duffman at Duff Brewery.
8. See how your Indolence, Consumerism,and Gluttony stack up on the Conform-o-meter.
9. Enjoy exclusive animated scenes sure to please fans of TV's longest-running comedy.
10. Visit your friends' Springfields, play pranks, collect cash and earn special rewards with friendship points the only way to measure your friendship.
11. Build up entirely new sections of Springfield from the rides at Krustyland to the performers on the Waterfront!
12. And did we mention… it's free to play?
With HD graphics – you'll get an eyeful of greener greens, yellower yellows, and more.
IS THAT ALL? Of course not! Did you know that you can even play this game in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Thai, Turkish and Brazilian Portuguese?
But who wants to read all this text on a screen? So you should CHECK OUT THE SCREENSHOTS because the screenshots really sell it… even though we really don't have to sell this game… because it's FREE!
**This game downloads additional content on first launch that can be up to 500MB based on device. We recommend connecting to WIFI the first time you play. This game is also supported with regularly occurring content updates that require additional downloads when released. Please be patient while it loads (we promise it's worth the wait).**
The Simpsons™: Tapped Out v4.16.4 (Online) Apk Mod