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Nature, Published online: 22 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05820-3
Analysis of messenger RNA splicing in a large cohort of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumours identifies differential splicing correlating with disease progression, associated with the the splicing regulator RBFOX2.Nature, Published online: 22 March 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00504-4
Light-sensitive proteins called rhodopsins in the vertebrate eye initiate the cellular processes of vision. Leading-edge crystallography experiments have revealed the molecular mechanism by which light activates these proteins.
The third series of BBC police drama Happy Valley marked the end of a beloved programme, and the end of Sergeant Catherine Cawood’s career navigating Yorkshire’s criminal underworld. Cawood’s age and gender is not ignored in the show. Throughout, she faces misogyny from criminals she encounters on the job, as well as her own colleagues.
While police forces themselves are currently addressing the fallout from decades of endemic sexism, women police officers – whether in fiction or reality – senior or rookie, regularly face sexist criticism of their appearance and abilities.
Online abuse has become a common occurrence in public-facing occupations. I conducted 50 in-depth interviews with women working in the public sector, including politicians, journalists and police officers. All the women I spoke to had been on the receiving end of gendered abuse, which occurred whenever they spoke publicly about their work. This abuse was widespread, and took place across all social media platforms.
The nature of this abuse differed by occupation. Politicians and journalists were most likely to receive physical threats. But police officers were more likely to receive negative comments regarding their appearance, age and competence.
Read more: Analysis shows horrifying extent of abuse sent to women MPs via Twitter
Worryingly, the women police officers I spoke to explained how a significant amount of abuse came from people who described themselves as current or retired police officers. This is reflective of wider occupational police culture, which has historically been resistant to the presence of women.
With some exceptions, the data shows that women in policing struggle to be promoted to the top positions. Although there is evidence that this is changing: 40% of the UK’s 49 chief constables are women, 19 – as opposed to just four in 2019.
But overall, men are over-represented in the higher echelons of most police forces. Research published in 2021 reported that 89% of police forces in the UK have a higher proportion of men at senior levels (chief inspector and above) than within their force overall. This is up from 76% of forces in 2020.
And, even when they do make it to the top, they aren’t exempt from abuse. Earlier research has found that sexual harassment within police forces often stems from a male-dominated workplace culture that encourages resentment of women who get promoted.
Read more: Cressida Dick has resigned but the Met police’s problems are bigger than one person
Much of the abuse that women police officers receive online focuses on their physical characteristics. As two senior police officers told me:
It’s just an obsession with commentating on how you look all the time. I have a group of trolls, who are really obsessed with my teeth. Every time I post anything, they zoom in on my teeth and comment on them. It’s really quite bizarre.
People comment on your looks … the clothes that you’re wearing, your hair, your eyes. There’ll come a point when we all decide to come off social media.
In some cases, officers reported receiving comments that appeared to have more malevolent intent beyond trolling:
There’s been some real vitriol, when I look around some of the real high profile things that have happened … It’s often around someone’s competence linked to their gender, and very much how they look.
A complaint was made about me to the police and crime commissioner, saying I had no standards, and I was letting the police down by the way I was dressed.
Officers also said their online abusers focused on their age to insult them.
You rarely see abuse directed at men. If there was a senior policeman who was grey and wrinkly, it doesn’t get mentioned. Yet women who are in senior positions, it seems ok to either go, “cor, she’s hot stuff”, at one end of the spectrum, or at the other end, to give whatever amount of abuse you want to dish out, as to how somebody looks as they get older.
Comments like this are not just the purview of anonymous online commentators. After a press conference about the search for missing Lancashire woman Nicola Bulley, journalist Amanda Platell criticised the lead detective for wearing a dress and having straightened hair, tweeting “is she auditioning for Love Island for midlifers.” Many people came to the detective’s defence, including other top police officers.
But comments like this are all too frequent online.
Addressing the causes of such misogynistic online abuse is crucial if change in the attitudes, behaviour and language used towards women police officers is to be achieved. But this is easier said than done. To make real change, transformation must occur at three levels: individually, in the force, and in wider society.
Police officers should be helped to manage their online presence in a safer way. Simple techniques such as blocking, muting and reporting, could become part of police training, to provide a buffer between the officer and the abuser. While these tactics don’t address misogyny in culture, they allow women to continue taking part in the online discussion without having to trawl through abuse.
At an organisational level, all the women I spoke to emphasised the need for greater regulation of online platforms – something that would be handed to Ofcom if the online safety bill ever completes its passage into law. The entire police service needs to become much more aware of the level and danger of online abuse their officers face, and reminded that their duty of care for staff extends into the online space.
Addressing societal misogyny is more complicated. Online abuse needs to be both legally prohibited and culturally unacceptable. A starting point is both men and women working to identify, call out and report abusive behaviour.
If the police are to have any hope of addressing the misogynistic culture that is now in the spotlight, these changes are vital to recruit and retain a female workforce, and to ensure that the focus in high profile investigations remains on the facts of the case.
Susan Watson received funding for this work from the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant ES/P000746/1.
Nature, Published online: 21 February 2023; doi:10.1038/d41586-023-00507-1
Presidential candidates pay lip service to the role of science and technology in solving Nigeria’s problems — researchers must come together to be heard.With recent reports suggesting there has been an increase in fatal dog attacks in the UK, it’s clear the status quo isn’t working. Records indicate that in an average year there would be three dog fatalities. But in 2022 there were nine.
The reasons why records show an increase are complex but already in 2023 there have been two tragic incidents, one a dog walker who died from bites to the neck. The other attack, which is still being investigated, involved the death of a four-year-old girl.
In 1987, the UK government discontinued its dog licensing system as politicians felt the old licence scheme cost too much for the limited benefits it gave. It was replaced by dog controls in the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. But people told my research team that most dog bites are preventable, meaning the system is letting down both dogs and humans.
One idea researchers have discussed is that when an owner has a problem with an out-of-control dog they should have to take training, similar to the kind of “speed awareness” courses for drivers in the UK.
Veterinary experts in the Netherlands already do something like this. They have researched aggression in dogs and found training can help prevent it, especially training of both the owner and the dog. Training can help owners recognise potential behaviour issues and reduce it through proper socialisation, which training can help with too.
In some other countries, including Spain, where potentially dangerous dogs must be licensed before you can become a dog owner, you have to show that you are a “fit and proper person” to do so. Our previous research didn’t specifically call for dog licences. But it did find knowledge of dog behaviour before and during ownership of a dog was desirable. So too was compulsory dog training following a dog attack.
The problem with the old licence scheme was that it was almost impossible to enforce. The UK government estimated only around 50% of dog owners complied with the old scheme and registered their dogs.
You still need a licence to own a dog in Northern Ireland, where a licence costs £12.50 and lasts for 12 months. But it is thought that less than 40% of owners register their dogs.
UK law makes microchipping of dogs mandatory. Although government figures suggest 95% of dogs are chipped, it is doubtful every dog owner has done this.
In the UK there are laws that deal with dog fouling, stray dogs and dogs that are dangerously out of control, whether in public or private. But dog attacks continue.
We don’t know exactly how many dog attacks there are each year in the UK. A figure often used by the media is that over 7,000 people go to hospital each year for dog bite treatment.
But research suggests this figure may be too low. One study of a community in Cheshire, England, found only a third of dog bites needed medical treatment and just 0.6% resulted in a hospital admission.
After dog attacks the people affected often call for more action to deal with dangerous dogs or say dog licences should be brought back. By itself, dog licensing would not solve everything.
For our 2021 research paper on dangerous dogs and responsible dog ownership we spoke to charities, local authorities, police and dog experts. We found the main issue was people could get a dog without knowing how to train or look after it.
Even with new measures like Lucy’s Law to tackle puppy farms and the 2019 licensing for breeders, dogs are still sold to people without checks on whether they can properly care for their new pet.
If an owner is trained to spot the early signs of problem behaviour or situations that might trigger an incident, simple things like keeping dogs on a lead or using a muzzle in busy public places could prevent attacks or make them less serious.
If we are serious about addressing dog control problems we should think about how to deal with the fact dogs often end up in the hands of people who are unable to care for them and deal with behaviour issues.
We aren’t the only ones who think this. Many members of the public understand the importance of prevention: a petition launched in 2022 to change dog laws to focus on early intervention attracted over 100,000 signatures.
No scheme or law will eliminate all dog control or attack issues. But the old style of paper dog licence was really just a tax on dog owners. Instead, it may be time for a form of registration or certificate that requires knowledge of dogs before a person can have one and that imposes ownership conditions, such as a suitable home, understanding of the duty of animal welfare that already exists in law, and a requirement for training when something goes wrong.
Registration should accompany sale and also be linked to the existing microchipping requirements. A new registration scheme would need resources to properly enforce, a big ask in a time of rising living costs and government austerity measures. But even if we can’t afford a new enforcement scheme, encouraging dog owners to develop the skills they need would be a good start.
Angus Nurse has previously received funding from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for research into dangerous dogs and responsible dog ownership. That funded research is referred to in this article.
Nature, Published online: 08 February 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05572-6
We reconstruct the spatial distribution and timing of wetland loss through conversion to seven human land uses between 1700 and 2020, elucidating the magnitude and land-use drivers of global wetland losses to improve assessments of wetland loss impacts.Beta blockers are medications commonly used for treating cardiac problems such as high blood pressure, chest pain, irregular heartbeat and heart failure. In the US, for example, one in five adults aged 60–79 is prescribed a beta blocker.
In a new study, we’ve found the use of beta blockers is associated with lower rates of violence. To explore why this might be, let’s start with some background.
Beta blockers work by blocking the stress hormones and neurotransmitters adrenaline and noradrenaline. These play an important role in our “fight or flight” response. In a stressful situation, adrenaline and noradrenaline mobilise the brain and body for action by increasing the amount of blood the heart pumps out.
Beta blockers prevent the effect of these hormones. This slows the heart rate down, lowers blood pressure, and also decreases tension. For this reason, beta blockers are sometimes used as treatment for common mental health and behavioural problems, like anxiety, depression and aggression.
In recent years, there has been a rise in beta blocker prescriptions for anxiety. They’re also occasionally used in psychiatric clinics and hospitals to manage aggression and violence in patients.
At the same time, there have been concerns that people who use beta blockers could have a higher risk of depression and suicide. But studies have contradicted each other. Some have found that beta blockers reduce mental health and behavioural problems, others have found that they increase them, and some have found no relationship.
The conflicting evidence leaves doctors with difficult treatment decisions. Are beta blockers effective for treating mental health and behavioural problems? Or could they instead increase the risk of serious mental health problems?
Read more: 5 drugs that changed the world (and what went wrong)
To answer this, we studied 1.4 million people in Sweden who had been treated with beta blockers. We followed them over eight years, from 2006 to 2013. We wanted to know whether beta blocker use was associated with mental health problems, violence, suicide attempts and suicide deaths.
We identified beta blocker users by analysing data from Swedish pharmacies and followed people through different healthcare, crime and death registers. This was an observational study, meaning we observed patterns of mental health and behavioural problems by examining these outcomes in the registers.
Typically, in an observational study like this, beta blocker users would be compared to non-users. But the two groups may differ on important features, like psychiatric history. This makes the interpretation of results difficult. Are any differences seen due to the beta blockers? Or do the two groups just have different background risks?
So instead, we used a study design where we compared each person to themselves by contrasting periods when they were taking beta blockers with periods when they were not. This way we could account for the influence of factors that are unique for each person, like family and childhood background or psychiatric history.
We found that when people were taking beta blockers, they had a 13% lower risk of being charged with a violent crime by the police. They also had an 8% lower risk of being hospitalised for mental health problems. There was however an 8% higher risk of being treated for suicide attempts or dying from suicide.
We then carried out secondary analyses where we examined subgroups of beta blocker users, for example those with a history of violence or psychiatric problems. The lower risk of being charged with a violent crime when using beta blockers was consistent across the board.
When we broke down hospitalisations for mental health problems into those for depressive or anxiety disorders, we found a lower risk for hospitalisations for major depressive disorders, but not for anxiety disorders.
We also found the higher risk of suicide attempts and suicide deaths was specific to people with serious heart conditions or a history of psychiatric problems.
We know from previous research that there’s a greater risk of suicide following serious heart problems. People may have pessimistic thoughts, be unsure about the future or concerned about their health. So psychological distress associated with heart problems, rather than the beta blocker treatment, could be the main explanation behind the increased suicide attempts and suicide deaths seen in our study.
Our results on violence align with evidence from small trials on beta blocker treatment. However, we increased the study sample, examined the total general population, and also broadened the outcome to crime.
A possible explanation for our results is that beta blockers help control the body’s fight or flight response to stressful situations, so there is a decrease in the agitation and tension that could lead to violent behaviour.
Read more: Heart disease risk and depression: a new study explores whether the two may be linked
Since this is an observational study, it cannot show that beta blockers cause reductions in violence, only that there is a link between them. To understand the role of beta blockers in aggression and violence, studies that use other designs (such as randomised controlled trials and experimental laboratory studies) are needed.
If these studies confirm our results, beta blockers could be used more widely to manage violence in certain people, particularly those with background risk factors such as serious psychiatric problems. Since evidence-based treatments for violence are limited, this is potentially an important finding.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A significant element of the UK government’s levelling up plan to create thousands of jobs, regenerate more deprived areas and attract overseas investors is the introduction of freeports. These special low-tax trading zones allow all kinds of businesses to trade.
Under the UK model, freeports can encompass two different kinds of sites. On customs sites, authorised businesses will be able to import certain goods with simplified customs documentation and without paying tariffs. Domestic goods can also be held in a customs site and used in any manufacturing process. And on tax sites, authorised businesses will benefit from reduced stamp duty, lower business rates and lower national insurance contributions for new employees.
A number have already been approved at strategic transport hubs across the UK. These include Solent, Plymouth and South Devon, Liverpool City and Freeport East at the Port of Felixstowe and Harwich International.
On a practical level, a freeport consists of designated buildings and zones within the larger perimeter of an existing port or on a newly developed site. They are designed as a tool for boosting business and the local economy. However, as my research shows, in the absence of usual customs checks, they may also harbour international crime.
The government claims that freeports will boost international trade, innovation and economic growth in areas which need it most. It intends to encourage foreign and local investment by streamlining business processes and lowering tax. According to its latest estimates, the Solent Freeport, for example, is set to provide £1.35 billion in private sector investment alone.
The government also intends to loosen planning reforms for freeports in order to boost construction and infrastructure projects, thereby sustaining high-skilled jobs and growth in the longer term. It says those local council areas neighbouring freeports will be able to keep all the money they make from the business rates to stimulate further growth in the local community.
Many international freeports do point to such economic benefits. The Jebel Ali freeport in the United Arab Emirates employs over 135,000 people and generates the equivalent of £81 billion in wealth. Geneva’s freeport in Switzerland, meanwhile, helped its local economy withstand the impact of 2008’s global financial crisis and contributes some £8.8 million to the surrounding area every year.
Some observers have likened the British model to “Singapore-on-Thames”. They see this freeport plan as a bid to emulate the economic success Singapore has known since independence in 1965 – success helped largely by international trade links, liberal tax and free trade policies.
Research shows that high-tech freeports, such as Dubai Internet City, enable faster economic growth in developing areas. Those with strong marketing plans, like Geneva freeport, succeed better in competitive markets. To be truly successful, the UK freeports will similarly need to invest in tech and marketing, factors which have not been fully addressed so far in the government’s plans.
Without proper technical and logistics infrastructure in place to support wider growth, studies suggest that the UK’s freeports will probably displace jobs – and therefore economic growth – from nearby communities. Firms outside the designated freeport zone might struggle to remain competitive. Support for local businesses, too, has not been adequately outlined.
British economists Leonard Alan Winters and Peter Holmes have warned that freeports may offer little benefit when the UK’s trade tariffs are already low because they do not allow suppliers access to final (end of line) markets without having to pay tax. Further, due to the rules on import duties currently implemented within the UK, these new freeports may not actually result in goods being entirely free from tariffs. Instead that taxation may simply be delayed until the goods arrive at their destination.
Crucially, as a briefing paper from the Royal United Services Institute think tank warns, freeports might facilitate the illegal import of drugs, wildlife and counterfeit or stolen goods. The report points out that the European Parliament has called for the abolition of freeports across the EU. And it highlights the link between freeport trading and a near 6% increase in the value of counterfeit goods being shipped into a country.
Such illegal import activities often involve tax evasion and what global watchdog Financial Action Task Force terms “trade-based money laundering”. This risk of criminals taking advantage of the relaxed regulation in freeports has been highlighted by several studies.
Customs provide crucial scrutiny of goods, processes and documentation. Without similarly robust measures in place, another aspect which has not been fully addressed in the government’s plans, freeports risk harbouring criminal activity and helping criminals evade authorities.
Paul Michael Gilmour does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records.
One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder.
A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.”
I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts.
As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.”
I was pre-verbal during Pavement’s heyday, so a cushion of generational remove mediates my fandom. It is unremarkable, pathological, entirely digitally-based. For those of us who grew up in a cul-de-sac with standard-speed internet—barely sentient for the twilight of the millennium, just learning how to use words like derivative in the pejorative from blogs and message boards—Pavement seemed like shorthand for a precious and preeminent disaffection that had phased out of vogue by the time that rock was no longer the biggest thing on the planet. Fans like me ached for what we imagine we missed out on, and could marvel, in a cool, touristic way, at an Arcadian moment in time in which an artist’s persona was de facto a little brambled and blurry. Now, as a fly-on-the-wall of their reunion tour—a spectacle that brings together past and present by framing Pavement as whole, imperative, immortal—two questions loom: Will it recreate the known or unknown universe as it once was? Or will it all just bum me out?
DAY ONE: SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
I am walking briskly and alone along a highway bridge immediately in front of Saint Paul’s Palace Theatre, with seven hours until showtime. Pavement’s two buses stand out against the plain back entrance of the venue like two long, smooth, sleeping orcas.
Most of the team is present on the band bus, either making cereal or padding around in search of the other half of a broken tambourine. There’s percussionist Bob Nastanovich, bassist Mark Ibold, and lead Stephen Malkmus, all dressed like normal adult men, which is to say in jeans, ballcaps, and interesting sneakers. The bus’s interior has a sort of upmarket beauty, with everything stained a uniform tone of peanut butter, cabinets made of a gleaming lacquered composite wood, and a hydraulic magic button in the main lounge that extends the room out four or so feet when the bus is parked. Under the glaze of the growing sun, we look like we could be on the bottom deck of a rental yacht.
Scott Kannberg, the second songwriter and guitarist, whom everyone refers to as “Spiral,” diminutive of “Spiral Stairs,” is notably absent, squeezing in a full eighteen holes of golf on a course somewhere in greater Minneapolis. (Steve West, their drummer, later tells me he wanted to caddy for him, “but Spiral wouldn’t let me get away with it. He’s got men all over this country willing to carry his golf clubs.”) Rebecca Clay Cole—the band’s overqualified keyboardist, and the only other consistent female presence on the bus—is already out too, roaming around Saint Paul in search of a museum. Bob is busily wrestling a jumbo drum of spring water onto the countertop. A pre-show morning is defined by its bumbling. “We’re in need of a sanity-type situation,” Ibold announces just as Bob leaves to hunt for a screwdriver to stab the jug with, so he and Malkmus and I hail a cab to the town’s Little Mekong district.
Tour is always part-ritual and part-obligation, but it’s particularly taxing for men who’ve all crossed the threshold of fifty and have been off the road for years. They’ve had more than eighty songs to learn, some for the very first time; the venues are the largest and toniest they’ve ever played; their label’s fuss is greater; the audience is bigger by several orders of magnitude, and every member of the band can fill a notebook with fresh anecdotes on the newfound virtues of diet, hydration, and sleep. “This is definitely the most demanding tour I’ve ever been on,” says Ibold once we sit down at an empty Cambodian restaurant, eating a shrimp cake the size of a domino. “Not just musically, but psychologically.” Ibold—who has a day job as a bartender in Williamsburg and was working a shift the day before he left—is sixty. If history repeats itself, the next reunion tour will happen in 2034, when he’s seventy-two. “We have no plans to tour like the Pixies,” Malkmus says, even before I ask. This does seem like the last of things.
This time around, Pavement will move athletically across the United States, then to bits of Europe, with an average of thirty-three hours of rest in between each show. I would be surprised if nobody in the band reaches a point of crisis by the time they get to the Australian stretch in a few months. “You tell yourself it’ll be more fun than doing the dishes at home,” Malkmus says. “But I’m just old, man.” I have to ask—what’s the point of all this, then? A new car? Karmic debt? Not nostalgia? “Sure, all of that,” he says, “but there’s something else in there.”
Though this has been obsessively documented, I’m still taken aback by the degree to which Malkmus is very clearly the nucleus of Pavement, the band and the idea. He is its principal singer-songwriter, a blindingly good guitarist, and now shaggier and more silvery than he was in 1994 when Courtney Love called him “the Grace Kelly of rock” but retains a boyish, shitkicking quality about him. He can be remarkably feline, charmingly chilly, and has a voice that permanently suggests that he is unspecifically but thoroughly over it. He is, in many senses, responsible for granting Pavement their near-universal designation as a “slacker” band, which accounts for the general slouch of the band’s posture and reifies the archetypal Gen X attitude of rather dying than surrendering any emotional investment. “You know why I’m doing this,” he says, suddenly. “I’m really playing for the fans that are like, I just really fucking like these songs. And these guys were special to me—they made me feel safe. I’m safe here at this show.” He doesn’t look at me while saying this. “I know what you mean,” I reply, soothingly. “You know what I mean,” he sighs.
By the time we get back to the Palace Theatre, the stage is ready for our opening act. A blast of organic and inorganic smells fill the building: buttered popcorn from a choke point in the lobby, a damp pigeony scent from the door that opens out onto the alley where everyone smokes, and a strong mixed waft from the green room, where a routine order has been delivered. (Their rider: Gouda, tubs of chicken salad, whiskeys and hummuses, slabs of sourdough, diet root beers, regular beers.) Like the sound of a great, muffled gong, the doors open. Two hours to go.
BEFORE THE SHOW:
—After checking in with their dog’s caretaker, who was very sorry to let them know that their cardigan welsh corgi has been having diarrhea all day, Bob is rubbing his wife Whitney’s shoulders backstage, watching the opener perform.
—Rebecca is warming up her voice in a rear atrium of the basement by blowing loud raspberries.She’s been brought on tour to make the music sound “about as close to the album as we can humanly get it,” as West notes, adding that she’s “probably the only member of the band that can actually read music.” “I’ve approached this about as devotedly as a person can,” she tells me. “Even before I was approached to tour with them, I’d known that there were piano parts on, you know, a few songs, but all the old albums have these sneaky, crunchy keys and organs all over them. It’s deceptively tough jinglejangle jazz.”
—Spiral has returned from tee time and is now on a long and desperate quest for antacids. After ten minutes, he secures half of a lucky old roll of Tums from our tour manager Mike’s pocket. Later, he shows me a text from his wife, who’s presently somewhere in California dining with their daughter. The photo shows off their spread (pasta, white wine) and her new haircut (blonde bob). “Hott,” his text replies.
When Pavement goes on, I wonder—are all old bands haunted? The show is a pilgrimage for men who look like they indulge in a good microbrew every once in a while. Those with pleading ankles and spongy knees sit; those still without stand at the front. Some audience members chuck beer cans, shriek, make out, weep. The reports that I’d heard earlier—that a couple was kicked out for having sex at a San Diego show a few days prior—seem totally conceivable, even if this was some of the least horny music on earth. “It’s so funny to see them here,” says a seated patron wearing a Guided By Voices shirt. “This is the nicest venue I’ve ever been in, and it’s like going to a cathedral and seeing a bunch of guys make a sandwich.”
DAY TWO: CHICAGO
“Shit,” says a voice beyond my bunk’s curtain. Then comes the clang of a dropped tambourine. Since clambering into my top bunk around 6 A.M., sticking a socked foot onto Malkmus’s pillow to hoist myself up, I’d slept like a rock until 11.
After seeing the sunrise with drivers Jason and Jeff—barreling southeastward, fighting highway rumble strips—we’d all arrived and parked in front of the handsome Chicago Theatre, where the band was gearing up for two back-to-back sold-out nights. The interior of the Chicago Theatre earlyish on a Thursday looks like your usual swank venue: high-ceilinged interiors with good acoustics, baroque festoonery along the walls, and a tangle of pedals and cables littering the stage like noodles. Dozens of men and women unload the two trailers, rhythmically decanting small plastic tubs from larger plastic tubs, proving David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s claim that touring “is mostly about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other.” I watch as one tech lugs the giant, silent, theater-screen-sized video rig that the band plays in front of throughout each show, which is both a showcase for some surprisingly good juvenilia from Malkmus’s old lyric notebooks and, according to crew members, a huge logistical pain in the ass. The stage clears for soundcheck, and, now seated as the only audience member up on the prow of the balcony, I had time to study the band at their rawest.
If you’ve ever listened passively to a single Pavement song, you’ll catch shambly, wooly guitarwork and jammy bass and drum patterns; if you listen closely, you’ll notice that any given Pavement song is filled with total nonsense. In 1995, the New York Times made sense of this by calling the band among “rock’s most notorious nihilists: disaffected, disenchanted, and distanced.” An especially haunting indictment came in an episode of Beavis and Butt-head from that same year, where the two cartoon morons groan at a music video for a track titled “Rattled by the Rush.” “It’s like they’re not even trying,” says Beavis.
But if Beavis were to see “Rattled” as I see it practiced here before me—Ibold elated, Spiral hardly paying attention, Malkmus shredding while staring at the ceiling—he might notice that it’s not just a performance of ennui: the laziness is also creatively contrived, built into the music. Their tracks are crammed with odd voicings, alternate tunings, a constant sense of tonal ambiguity, slightly uncomfortable intervals. There’s hardly an ordinary sentence or ungenerative thought across their whole catalog. There are few vaguely placeable themes in their lyrics, and the vulnerability behind them—if you can find it at all—always seems like it comes at the end of a bong rip. (Verse 2 of “Rattled” goes: “Pants I wear so well, cross your t’s—shirt smells / Worse than your lying, caught my dad crying.) It sounds like rock, but rock rejiggered by modest, unshowy surrealists—always seemingly noncommittal but irrationally graceful in the end.
After any obligatory soundchecking or set-erecting, the band and crew basically tool around for indeterminate stretches of time. I find our stalwart tour techs asleep in folding chairs—seated upright, snoring, mouths agape—just off the side of the stage not thirty minutes after soundcheck was over. West has his head down on a desk in the basement. Our tour manager Mike is on an errand: Bob has asked him to buy ping pong balls from Walgreens so that he can chuck signed ones into the audience while he plays. (Ideas for other projectiles—eggs, tennis balls, shot glasses—were dismissed.) Showtime takes forever to come until it suddenly doesn’t.
OVERHEARD FROM CREW MEMBERS WHO WERE OUT OF EYESHOT:
Voice 1: “We’re gonna need some tea for the team before they go on. Herbal tea is heated between 180 and 200 degrees. Black teas, you’re gonna want them between 200 and 220 degrees.”
Voice 2: “No problem. But I really don’t think you know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Finally, lights go on, and the show is a goofy revelation. Spiral is tonight’s quiet hero. They play a fizzy, relatively deep cut called “Date w/Ikea,” where he takes lead—legs akimbo as in a yoga stretch—and then later leaves the stage, mid-song, mid-set. (“I had to piss,” he explains after the show.) The audience loses their mind. Fans and friends throw trucker hats emblazoned with his name onstage like bouquets.
Tonight’s encore is also uncommonly touching because it includes a marriage proposal. The band jogs out after the compulsory caesura—the audience roars like white noise when they return—and Malkmus nearly ruins the whole thing by telling the crowd that “we’ve got some folks who are about to get married.” But the pageant goes smoothly: Chris, the groom-to-be, ushers his girlfriend Ramona onstage (they are thirty-four and thirty years old, respectively) and twirl around to a sweetish, woozy number called “We Dance.” At the end of the song, Chris gets down on one knee. They are, and it is, a perfectly Pavementian affair: fumbly, lightly lackadaisical, flannel-clad. She says yes.
Rapt in the tender human awkwardness of it all, we migrate to a totally characterless bar across the street from the hotel where the band and the crew will stay the night. I find our drummer, Steve West, reclining with a Guinness. Bargoers flock to shake his hand, making him sit down and stand up, stand up and sit down. “I’m the most off-the-grid guy here for sure,” he says, swishing the beer around in his mouth like mouthwash. West is now a stonemason in West Virginia with the granite disposition to match. “When this thing started, all of a sudden there were a bunch of dudes from the label emailing me while I’d be out behind my house digging holes. I’m about as good at this band to-do as a head of wilted lettuce.”
West has belonged to legions of bands prior to this one, but it was his work with the Silver Jews that ushered him Pavementward. The Silver Jews are something of a cousin band to Pavement—West and Malkmus played on some of their albums, Malkmus passed along the Jews’s debut to their first label, and where Pavement stands firmly on the soil of “indie rock,” the Jews err more toward country-flecked, plainspoken poetry—but their legacies have been entwined and underscored since the suicide of David Berman, the Jews’s frontman, in 2019. His life is a subject of delicate love and introspection. “Dave told Malkmus,” goes West, “‘A drummer’s replaceable—we’re all replaceable—but it’s the personalities that you can’t replace.’ So when Pavement needed a new drummer, he offered me up.” He is reverential about David, as all who knew him and didn’t know him seem to be, but his vantage is especially matchless.
“Artists have always gotten used up and spat out,” West says, leaning back on his stool. “It’s just the way that all of this works. I just hope that everyone remembers how talented he was. I don’t know what took him away from us—I just know that he understood something big about this world. I’m just lucky to have known him at all.” There is a long, terrible grip of silence, then a mangled sound in his voice as he looks away from me. “I loved him,” he says, awfully. “He was my best friend.”
DAY THREE: CHICAGO
I wake up to a group text among Ibold, West, and their soundman, Remko Schouten. “Down for Italian beef excursion? Be in front of the hotel by 11:15.”
The sandwiches from a place called Johnnie’s are pulpy potpourris of 80/20 ground beef and bell pepper and come prepared in ‘‘half-dip,”full-dip,” or austere “no dip” levels of oily jus. Digesting the whole affair alfresco, I get to know Remko, a wizardly Dutchman who’s been Pavement’s sound engineer since 1992, and is the sort of guy who’ll be working the board and time his edibles to kick in halfway through an hours-long set just to make things more interesting for himself. (This is exactly what happens later that night.)
The conversation makes its way through reminiscences (“Ibold once had to fish out his shit from the tour bus toilet in 1992”) and re-evaluations (“Their first drummer, Gary—he would throw garbage into the crowd while we played, which ultimately became a problem”), but it becomes apparent how valuable his constancy is for a band always in flux—through the coming and going of members, shifting affiliations with record labels, spats and tiffs and breakups. “We run on an absurd machine,” Remko says, which is a nice précis of thirty collected years of writing on the band. “Take Bob, for instance,” he suggests wisely. “The fact that he’s here should tell you a lot about this whole thing.”
Bob is a selcouth blend of audience motivator and whatever’s-in-the-percussion-room player who feels like the id of the group built on a shambolic sort of peculiarity. Most videos of the band online have at least one top-rated comment that reads something to the extent of “What is Bob’s purpose?” The night before, the newly-engaged Chris had offered an answer to the unspoken question outside of the bar. “Bob,” Chris declared, like he was sharing a commandment, “is the secret glue that keeps everything in place.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bob says to me as he unloads his laundry back in the basement of the Chicago Theatre upon our return. “I really don’t have the skills to play music, I’ll be the first to tell you that. But having Rebecca here really shows you how much more vital we can be when we can actually play the songs. God knows I can’t sing. It’s really fucking embarrassing. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve seen my band wince. Even people in the crowd have covered their ears.”
Not the case on our last night in Chicago. It is not the most flawless show, but the most rabid—everywhere the eye lands seems to be a fan shouting every non sequitur lyric. Like all good concerts, it’s convivial and conspiratorial, but there is an urgency in the audience tonight, a sort of disorienting attentiveness bordering on the religious. It seems everyone knows this will likely be the last time they’ll see Pavement together ever again. “Listening to this band makes me feel like the guy I was in college,” says a patron next to me, arms draped like a shawl around a woman beside him. “Sometime between then and now I became an old man, and I’m not sure how that happened.”
After the encore, Ibold and Malkmus dawdle for a few perfunctory hi-byes before swiftly exiting out the back door for a bar called the Empty Bottle, where a band called Wand is playing. Wand is signed to Drag City, the Chicago-based indie label responsible for springboarding Pavement to fame. Drag City’s founder, Dan Koretzky, whom Malkmus has excitedly been calling “Papa” all evening, greets them, beaming to see friends inside the humid dive. “Didn’t think you’d make it,” he says. Ibold, gazing into the audience—which seems to gaze back at him—adjusts his glasses. “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” he responds.
On our way in, Ibold and Malkmus are honked, gawked, shouted at. (There’s a Great show, guys! and an I love you! and then a Marry me!) When we get inside, they part the sea. Two men individually buy me a shot of Fernet when they see me passing lagers to their indie rock saints. Standing there—as a band sort of in apex and sort of in twilight, alongside a younger band who are perhaps on the road to their own sort of apex—I can only imagine that all of this is striking a note that they could’ve only dreamed of striking years ago.
NEW YORK CITY: THE END
My version of tour ends not on the midwestern road but back in New York, at the Pavement Museum, a four-day pop-up event in SoHo billed as a course through the band’s “real and imagined history.” It turns out the room is a shrine to Pavement in a way that feels half like an exhibition, half like pornography for ultrafans. Contemporary acts—Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Bully and Sad13—performed Pavement’s splashier hits on a makeshift stage. Old music videos play on loop on tube TVs with built-in VCRs; lyric sheets are strewn around and encased like curios; there are communiques with record labels, lyrics on napkins, old show programs, the suit that Malkmus wore when he worked as a security guard at the Whitney Museum. I see Spiral there and ask him if it all feels a little like a mausoleum. “That’s really nice of you to say,” he replies.
It’s important to note that a significant amount of the ephemera inside the room is totally fabricated. There are tour posters for lineups and dates that never existed; there are T-shirts for real past tours that were created (and knifed to look roughed-up) precisely for the museum; immortalized in a box, there is a pair of handcuffs that Malkmus brandished during a 1999 show, announcing to the audience that they symbolized “what it’s like being in a band.” The placard next to it reads “These are the original handcuffs.” They are not. They were purchased from a sex shop a few days prior. Same goes for another shadow box, encasing a lone brown toenail that allegedly once belonged to their original drummer, Gary Young (again, no: it was clipped off of the foot of the set’s art director), and for a poster of Malkmus starring in an Apple “Think Different” ad “from 1996” that he absolutely wasn’t a part of. “I have no say in this whatsoever,” said Malkmus earlier that week, of both the museum and the upcoming film. “We’ve all sent them some stuff, but I really don’t even pay attention to what these guys are doing. None of us do.”
All the ersatz stuff is not subterfuge or sinisterism or deepfakery; this is–to explain the joke–a joke, in keeping with the arch “who-gives-a-shit” quality at the core of the band’s brio. A keen-to-rabid fan could plausibly discern between most bits of artifact and artifice but a casual one (which, more often than not, means a younger one) might accept them all, reasonably, as patent bits of reality. One had to admire it. All this puckish stuff made clear how little it matters what’s real: it’s Pavement not only for a generation already seduced by its apocrypha, but also for the present one, familiar with reenactments and revivals, and possessed of its own breed of absurdity. There’s probably also something to be said about how my own relationship to Pavement—private, greedy, and up until recently, comfortably unilateral —might have made the whole hall-of-mirrors scenario unfolding before me feel a little stupid and perverse. It did, but fandom demands a certain level of delusion. It is dumb and blind to real or invented ironies. To press a band into legacy and lucite before they’re gone is a pure and selfish impulse–and it makes it so they can’t ever die.
Mina Tavakoli is a writer from Virginia. She has written for Bookforum, The Nation, The Washington Post, and NPR, among others.
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