Excerpts

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“His U.S. Publicity Blitz In The Few Weeks After His Release Has Reasserted Him As A Celebrity First, Convicted Killer Second”

June 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some people who should know better are perplexingly treating that murderer Michael Alig like he’s a cute celebrity with some gossip to dish–you know, a reality star who just so happens to be clutching a bloody knife and a bottle of Drano–rather than a narcissistic murderer who dismembered another human being. These college-educated geniuses send out happy tweets about Alig’s post-prison menu and such. One meshuganah at the Huffington Post who interviewed the killer referred to him as a “rehabilitated citizen,” as if he would actually know. Emma Brockes of the Guardian is the latest to unfortunately interview Alig, but at least she gets to the heart of the new abnormal while analyzing a lowlife who thinks he’s something else. An excerpt:

“For a year or so before he left prison, Michael Alig was phoning in tweets to a friend on the outside, who updated his account with aperçus from the exercise yard and cute observations about daytime TV. How did Justin Bieber get his hair to stand up like that? Why was everyone so mean to Madonna? After almost two decades inside, Alig’s persona seemed little changed from the 1990s, when his fame as the king of the New York club scene rested on a combination of low humour, high camp and the laboriously outrageous (one of his signature moves was to urinate in people’s drinks). ‘I just look ADORABLE in my mess-hall whites & hair-net,’ ran a typical tweet from earlier this year. ‘Where are the paparazzi when you need them?’

Since the 48-year-old’s release last month, it’s a tone that has jarred with expectations of what remorse looks like, and Alig has had to temper his adorableness with lots of qualifiers about how sorry he is, an effort undermined by those of his friends who turned up at the prison gates to greet him. As the media waited, and Alig emerged looking slight and sober, a group of ageing ex-club kids giddy on Red Bull and vodka bounced around laughing and screaming, as if serving 17 years for manslaughter were just another of Alig’s inventive, satirical breaks with convention. ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d have thrown them out,’ he says now, ‘but they probably weren’t people I would have invited.’ He does his best to look chastened.

No matter how disagreeable the crime or the perpetrator, a celebrity felon is protected from the full force of public condemnation by the buffer of his fame. Someone who has it all and squanders it should, if anything, incur less sympathy than a regular criminal, but they don’t. The height of the fall is so great, and the public humiliation so widespread, that any show of contrition is received as the satisfying end to a well-wrought story (I’m thinking primarily of Jonathan Aitken here).

And so it has been with Alig, whose US publicity blitz in the few weeks after his release has reasserted him as a celebrity first, convicted killer second.”

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“The Menu Of Ailments And Paranoid Fantasies Escalates”

June 23, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In a 1988 New York Times book review of a biography about writer Jean Stafford, Joyce Carol Oates diagnosed, fairly early, the mainstreaming of pathology as entertainment in America, before real addictions and faux marriages became a selling point–something to behold. An excerpt:

“Instead of granting Stafford the singularity of her achievement – the highly regarded novels Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion and The Catherine Wheel and some two dozen superbly crafted short stories – the biographer chooses to sound, from virtually his first page, the clarion call of failed promise; his claim is that ‘the causes of Stafford’s decline are several and elusive’ and that ‘for all the excuses she loved to make, at the deepest level she knew that she had no one to blame but herself.’ Thus pathography’s unmistakable slant, emphasis, tone.

Never considering that early praise lavished upon Jean Stafford on the occasion of her first novel, Boston Adventure, in 1944, might have been journalistic hyperbole – Life magazine excitedly heralded the 28-year-old author as the ‘most brilliant of the new fiction writers’ – Mr. Roberts judges most of Stafford’s adult life in terms of its ‘decline’ and grants to her 20-odd years of alcoholic crises as much weight as the earlier, productive years. Surely this is unfair? And surely wrong-headed? Where a judicious biography might diplomatically round off a consideration of its subject’s career when the career is more or less over, summarizing years of fitful dissolution in a brief space, the pathography shifts into high gear, becoming a repository of illnesses and disasters and disappointments, primarily because evidence – letters, documents, witnesses’ testimonies – is abundantly available.

Admirers of Jean Stafford’s writing will be dismayed at the demeaning images this biography yields: Stafford in various stages of public and private drunkenness; Stafford in Payne Whitney Clinic and other parts of New York Hospital 34 times; Stafford tripping over her cat and falling downstairs drunk; or vomiting into her purse; or glimpsed through a window by a friend, passed out cold; Stafford hallucinating in Grand Central Station; Stafford as a ‘fag hag’ in East Hampton; Stafford as a ‘battered, bruised, drunken old woman’ of whom, in the mid-1970’s, one of her oldest friends declares: ‘I was very happy to turn my back on her.’ Yet more offensively, the biographer claims to detect a thread of syphilitic infection through most of Stafford’s life, speculating upon circumstantial evidence that she contracted the disease in 1936, while studying in Heidelberg, and that the disease radically affected her entire life. Suicidal moments are duly noted; cruel, unsparing testimony by numerous witnesses is provided. The menu of ailments and paranoid fantasies escalates, ending finally, mercifully, in death by cardiac arrest at the age of 63, after a severe stroke had left Stafford aphasic. Is there no defense, no way of eluding such protracted exposure? As Oscar Wilde once observed, the prospect of biography ‘adds to death a new terror.'”

“I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Do It, Even If The Equipment Were Free”

June 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal visited the smartest home in America–the Maryland abode of SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson–and came away perplexed by the way the “convenient” gadgets actually complicate the quotidian life. He does, however, see potential for one innovation that may be a problem for the security industry. An excerpt:

“Mr. Hawkinson believes the most compelling application for smart-home technology, at least for now, is home security. Surveys suggest about 80% of Americans might like some kind of security and home-monitoring system. For $300, SmartThings will sell you a kit that fits the bill—while also avoiding the monthly fees associated with traditional home-security systems.

Google apparently agrees with Mr. Hawkinson, as its Nest subsidiary, which started out making a smart thermostat, announced Friday that it’s acquiring Internet-connected video-camera startup Dropcam. What’s a surveillance camera for if not home monitoring and security?

It’s this task-driven approach to selling the idea of the smart home—offering a device or kit that solves a specific problem, rather than an all-in-one solution—that seems most likely to overcome the reluctance of most of us to add complexity to our personal sanctuaries. If you need to monitor a pet, elderly parent or home, why wouldn’t you add a straightforward system to do it?

But frankly, other than people who have very specific reasons to add automation to their homes, I have no idea why anyone would do it, even if the equipment were free. As countless reviewers have noted, including in this newspaper, even when smart-home technology works as advertised, the complexity it adds to everyday life outweighs any convenience it might provide.”

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“He Told His Staff That They Had An Effectively Unlimited Hiring Budget”

June 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gawker Media thinks it can reach 80-million unique visitors a month by the end of 2014, while the New York Times currently boasts 31 million. Gawker clearly doesn’t turn out better content nor does it traffic in eyeball-grabbing gossip nearly as much as it used to. If you want blind items and reveals, you go elsewhere. Those running Gawker are simply better at understanding the new normal (including viral bullshit) and exploiting this knowledge, which is easier for them in many ways because they’re not hidebound to traditional journalistic ethics. The New York Times is certainly doing better, more important and more challenging work, but it’s not doing as well. Here’s my question: Is that because those in charge of the Times don’t understand the terrain, or is it because doing the kind of work the Times does can’t find traction in 2014? I would say the former, but it’s not like any other traditional newspaper company has managed the feat, either. From Peter Sterne at Capital: 

“Gawker has never made a secret of its ambitions as it has risen from Manhattan media troublemaker to a network of niche-focused sites that apply its roguish sensibility to topics ranging from sports to women’s issues. Founder Nick Denton spent the first part of 2014 positioning his company as a sort of anti-Buzzfeed, and there’s his Kinja commenting platform that he hopes will do nothing short of reshape the very nature of online discussion. And while Denton has always seemed to take a particular glee in publicly critiquing and encouraging his own operation (and tweaking the competition) along the way, concrete growth plans at Gawker have been harder to come by.

In order to achieve its goals, [editorial director Joel] Johnson announced plans for the company to increase its editorial staff by the end of the year from 120 full-time staffers to 150 full-time staffers and 24 active members of its ‘recruits’ farm system. A slide accompanying Johnson’s presentation declared that hiring is the site’s number one priority, and he told his staff that they had an effectively unlimited hiring budget.

‘If things go right, we could double our editorial staff by the end of 2015,’ he said.”

 

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“Real Eroticism Is Never Explicit”

June 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Helmut Newton’s sexual fantasies may have differed from yours and mine, but he certainly had a singular vision. This 1989 documentary about his work, Frames From The Edge, was directed by Adrian Maben, who was also behind the 1972 concert film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.

The opening of Newton’s 2004 New York Times obituary by Suzy Menkes: 

“Helmut Newton, the master photographer of sexual perversity and the founding father of androgynous imagery, died Friday at 83 in a way that he might have scripted in his narrative fashion photographs: from an accident in his Cadillac at Chateau Marmont, the star-studded Hollywood hotel. He was wintering there as usual, with his wife of 55 years, June, known as the photographer Alice Springs.

Newton’s penchant in equal measure for glamour and sexual depravity — women crouching in horse saddles and designer boots or maids provocatively available as in a Jean Genet movie — made him the most powerful and most copied fashion photographer of the 20th century. He refracted through his lens the sexual and feminist revolutions, making his women appear as sex objects, yet in control of their destiny.

Alternately scandalizing and titillating, Newton picked up sobriquets like the ‘king of kink’ and the ’35mm Marquis de Sade.’ Yet his work, like his character and his background, was far more complex than appeared in his best-known glossy images from Vogue in the 1960’s or the Yves Saint Laurent image of a woman loitering in a dark alley in a mannish pantsuit — matched to a naked version taken for the photographer’s personal album.”

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“Will Antitrust Authorities Eventually Come To Scrutinize Amazon And Its Market Power?”

June 22, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A passage from Steve Coll’s New York Review of Books piece about Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a title bout Amazon strongarming publishers, which was recently caught in the crossfire of Jeff Bezos’ battle with Hachette:

“Jeff Bezos’s conceit is that Amazon is merely an instrument of an inevitable digital disruption in the book industry, that the company is clearing away the rust and cobwebs created by inefficient analog-era ‘gatekeepers’—i.e., editors, diverse small publishers, independent bookstores, and the writers this system has long supported. In Bezos’s implied argument, Amazon’s catalytic ‘creative destruction,’ in the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase, will clarify who will prosper in an unstoppably faster, more interconnected economy.

‘Amazon is not happening to book selling,’ Bezos once told Charlie Rose. ‘The future is happening to book selling.’ Yet the more Amazon uses its vertically integrated corporate power to squeeze publishers who are also competitors, the more Bezos’s claim looks like a smokescreen. And the more Amazon uses coercion and retaliation as means of negotiation, the more it looks to be restraining competition.

Toward the end of his account, Stone asks the essential question: ‘Will antitrust authorities eventually come to scrutinize Amazon and its market power?’ His answer: ‘Yes, I believe that is likely.’ It is ‘clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small and large,’ in Stone’s judgment.”

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“This Is Not The First Time That A U.K. Government Has Looked To Robots To Boost The Economy”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Thirty years after trying and failing to turn the UK into a hub for robotics, technologists and politicians are having another go at it. From Amir Mizroch in the Wall Street Journal:

“For the past 18 months, everyone who is anyone in the U.K.’s robotics sector has been hard at work on making sure everything goes according to plan, drawing up a strategy paper to determine the future of intelligent, autonomous machines—AKA robots— in Britain.

A final version of the document, written by the 20 experts of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Special Interest Group (RAS-SIG), is to be officially unveiled by Science Minister David Willets on July 1.

According to interviews with two members of the interest group, an external consultant, and a summary of earlier drafts, the strategy rests on several key pillars.  Legislators will make the U.K. the world’s most welcoming place for robotics research, testing and development. It won’t be just about creating robots, but also about creating standards and regulations that allow for easier testing of autonomous machines. Areas of industry will be created to tackle some of the country’s most challenging problems, like the decommissioning of nuclear sites, opening up farming productivity, and robotic monitoring of sewage pipes and offshore gas and oil rigs.

Government will deploy robots to build schools, roads and hospitals, and care for the elderly. It will help fund robotics research at schools and universities to raise the number of people who can make and work with robots.  New technologies that improve the ability of humans to control multiple robots simultaneously will be highlighted. Culturally, there will be an emphasis on explaining that automation does not cost people their jobs, but actually creates more opportunities and opens possibilities.

This is not the first time that a U.K. government has looked to robots to boost the economy. Mired in recession, the Thatcher government launched a campaign in 1985 to increase the number of robots in industry. According to the British Automation and Robot Association, in 1982 only 100 robots out of 439 installed in the country were built by U.K. engineers. Most of the robots were installed in the auto industry sector. Thirty years later, the number of new robots working in the U.K. in 2012 alone was 2,447—none of them were manufactured in the U.K.“

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“I Don’t Know That People Are Going To Be Printing Guns Around The World”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Shane Hickey’s Guardian article about Chuck Hull, father of 3D printing, who says he isn’t sure if people will use the machines to make guns, which they most assuredly will:

“When Hull originally came up with his invention, he told his wife that it would take between 25 and 30 years before the technology would find its way into the home. That prediction proved correct as the realistic prospect of widespread commercial 3D printers has only emerged in recent years.

The possibilities appear endless – from home-printed food and pharmaceuticals to suggestions that pictures of ceramics will be able to be taken in shops and then recreated using plans downloaded from the internet.

Hull, an unassuming man who has 93 patents to his name in the US and 20 in Europe, says he is ‘humbled’ by the possibilities but stops short of predicting what his technology could eventually deliver, although he is confident printers could soon be in every home.

‘It’s nice to get some recognition, it was a lot of hard work but other than that I just keep working,’ he said last week in Berlin, where he received a European Inventor Award.

Controversy has arisen with the possibility that guns will be able to be produced using 3D printing, again using blueprints downloaded from the internet. A group called Defense Distributed last year successfully tested a 3D printed gun in Texas. Hull said: ‘My first thought is that people messing with that – I hope they don’t hurt themselves. Building and testing guns of that nature could be dangerous. I think the people doing that were trying to make a point.

‘I don’t know that people are going to be printing guns around the world but in any case our company, we are not the government or the police agencies. It is more their business and all technology, the governments and the police have to be aware [of], it is not just 3D printing.'”

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“Viewers Would Record Their Opinions By Marking Computer Cards, Which They Would Mail To Regional Tabulating Centers”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of “Perot’s Vision: Consensus By Computer,” a New York Times article from that year by the late Michael Kelly:

WASHINGTON, June 5— Twenty-three years ago, Ross Perot had a simple idea.

The nation was splintered by the great and painful issues of the day. There had been years of disorder and disunity, and lately, terrible riots in Los Angeles and other cities. People talked of an America in crisis. The Government seemed to many to be ineffectual and out of touch.

What this country needed, Mr. Perot thought, was a good, long talk with itself.

The information age was dawning, and Mr. Perot, then building what would become one of the world’s largest computer-processing companies, saw in its glow the answer to everything. One Hour, One Issue

Every week, Mr. Perot proposed, the television networks would broadcast an hourlong program in which one issue would be discussed. Viewers would record their opinions by marking computer cards, which they would mail to regional tabulating centers. Consensus would be reached, and the leaders would know what the people wanted.

Mr. Perot gave his idea a name that draped the old dream of pure democracy with the glossy promise of technology: ‘the electronic town hall.’

Today, Mr. Perot’s idea, essentially unchanged from 1969, is at the core of his ‘We the People’ drive for the Presidency, and of his theory for governing.

It forms the basis of Mr. Perot’s pitch, in which he presents himself, not as a politician running for President, but as a patriot willing to be drafted ‘as a servant of the people’ to take on the ‘dirty, thankless’ job of rescuing America from ‘the Establishment,’ and running it.

In set speeches and interviews, the Texas billionaire describes the electronic town hall as the principal tool of governance in a Perot Presidency, and he makes grand claims: ‘If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues, you’ll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage getting it done in unison.’

Although Mr. Perot has repeatedly said he would not try to use the electronic town hall as a direct decision-making body, he has on other occasions suggested placing a startling degree of power in the hands of the television audience.

He has proposed at least twice — in an interview with David Frost broadcast on April 24 and in a March 18 speech at the National Press Club — passing a constitutional amendment that would strip Congress of its authority to levy taxes, and place that power directly in the hands of the people, in a debate and referendum orchestrated through an electronic town hall.•

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“Andre Recalled That They Mostly Talked About Cricket”

June 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

This Open Culture post about Samuel Beckett driving a young Andre the Giant to school nearly made my brain may explode. An excerpt:

“In 1958, when 12-year-old André’s acromegaly prevented him from taking the school bus, the author of Waiting for Godot, whom he knew as his dad’s card buddy and neighbor in rural Moulien, France, volunteered for transport duty. It was a standing gig, with no other passengers. André recalled that they mostly talked about cricket, but surely they discussed other topics, too, right? Right!?”

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“When He Writes A Novel, He Writes A Best-Seller”

June 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Erich Segal was smart and successful, but he didn’t always mix the two. A Yale classics professor with a taste for Hollywood, he wrote Love Story, the novel and screenplay, and was met with runaway success in both mediums for his tale of young love doomed by cruel biology, despite the coffee-mug-ready writing and Boomer narcissism. (Or perhaps because of those blights.) While I don’t think it says anything good about us that every American generation seems to need its story of a pristine girl claimed by cancer–The Fault in Our Stars being the current one–the trope is amazingly resilient.

The opening of a 1970 Life article about Segal as he was nearing apotheosis in the popular culture:

“He looks almost too wispy to walk the 26 miles of the annual Boston Marathon, much less run all that way, even with a six-time Playboy fold-out waiting to greet him at the finish line. But Erich Segal doesn’t fool around. When he runs, he runs 26 miles (once a year, anyway–10 miles a day, other days), when he teaches classics he teaches at Yale (and gets top ratings from both colleagues and students), when he writes a novel he writes a best-seller. Love Story was published by Harper & Row in February and quickly hit the list. With his customary thoroughness Segal was ready: he had simultaneously written a screenplay of the story, and promptly sold it for $100,000. A bachelor (‘with intermittent qualms’), Segal has spent his 32 years juggling so many careers that it worries his friends. Even before Love Story he numbered among his accomplishments a scholarly translation of Plautus and part credit for the script of Yellow Submarine. At this rate, if his wind holds out, he may even win the Boston Marathon.

Love Story is Professor Segal’s first try at fiction, and when on publication day two months ago his editor at Harper & Row called up and said simply, ‘It broke,’ Segal remembers wondering whether he was talking about his neck or his sanity.”

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“The Prediction Of The Theory Would Be That Apple Won’t Succeed With The iPhone”

June 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My main objection to the 10,000-hour rule is that it cherry-picks particular pieces of research that provide a nice round number for a narrative attempting to make sharp an old saw (“Practice Makes Perfect”). It tells a macro story that doesn’t gibe with the micro, trying to pitch a camping tent over an entire city, stretching the fabric beyond its capacity for coverage.

The cult of Disruption is not dissimilar in how it goes about building its case. In the business world and beyond, radical innovation and its ability to replenish is revered, sometimes to a jaw-dropping extent. In one of my favorite non-fiction articles of the year, “The Disruption Machine,” Jill Lepore of the New Yorker takes apart the bible behind the idea, Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which like the 10,000-hour rule, builds its case very selectively and not necessarily accurately. An excerpt:

“The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive. On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent. In 2007, Christensen told Business Week that ‘the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone,’ adding, ‘History speaks pretty loudly on that.’ In its first five years, the iPhone generated a hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue. In the preface to the 2011 edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen reports that, since the book’s publication, in 1997, ‘the theory of disruption continues to yield predictions that are quite accurate.’ This is less because people have used his model to make accurate predictions about things that haven’t happened yet than because disruption has been sold as advice, and because much that happened between 1997 and 2011 looks, in retrospect, disruptive. Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact. History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what you want it to say. The popular incarnation of the theory tends to disavow history altogether. ‘Predicting the future based on the past is like betting on a football team simply because it won the Super Bowl a decade ago,’ Josh Linkner writes in The Road to Reinvention. His first principle: ‘Let go of the past.’ It has nothing to tell you. But, unless you already believe in disruption, many of the successes that have been labelled disruptive innovation look like something else, and many of the failures that are often seen to have resulted from failing to embrace disruptive innovation look like bad management.

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation.”

 

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“Ideally, Helpful Organisms Would Eat Things We Don’t Need”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Susannah Locke’s Vox primer about synthetic biology, which could be both really great and really messy, a few potential uses of these new cellular designs:

“Medicine: Synthetic biology might one day let scientists program cells to precisely detect and kill cancer cells. Or perhaps program cells to self-assemble into spare organs for transplants. Some scientists are already using partially synthetic organisms to manufacture drugs that are otherwise impractical to make.

Food and fragrances: In theory, new techniques could allow researchers to design yeast to make the perfect beer or wine. Or create food in the lab more efficiently than growing it on land. ‘We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature,’ biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter told the New York Times.

Already, synthetic biology companies are selling orange and grapefruit flavorings produced by yeast. And the company Evolva makes yeast-generated artificial vanilla flavoring and is working on better tasting sugar substitutes.

Energy and environment: Another possibility is that synthetic biologists could program cells to produce usable fuel. For example, Exxon Mobile has a partnership with Synthetic Genomics (co-founded by Craig Venter) to research fuel from algae. Ideally, helpful organisms would eat things we don’t need, like non-edible plant matter. Even more ideally, they’d eat the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s warming the planet. Or toxic waste or oil from oil spills.

The weird stuff: How about some microbes that live on your skin to prevent you from getting oily and smelly? How about some other ones that secrete the perfume of your choice? How about some that quickly break down cholesterol so it won’t clog people’s arteries?”

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“For The First Time, The Free Will Of A Living Animal Was Taken Over By An External Machine”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his Guardian defense of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Slavoj Žižek takes things to extremes, as is he is wont to do. An excerpt:

“In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms. Whistleblowers do something much more important than stating the obvious by way of denouncing the openly oppressive regimes: they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in which we experience ourselves as free.

Back in May 2002, it was reported that scientists at New York University had attached a computer chip able to transmit elementary signals directly to a rat’s brain – enabling scientists to control the rat’s movements by means of a steering mechanism, as used in a remote-controlled toy car. For the first time, the free will of a living animal was taken over by an external machine.

How did the unfortunate rat experience its movements, which were effectively decided from outside? Was it totally unaware that its movements were being steered? Maybe therein lies the difference between Chinese citizens and us, free citizens of western, liberal countries: the Chinese human rats are at least aware they are controlled, while we are the stupid rats strolling around unaware of how our movements are monitored.”

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“The Cars Themselves Were Regarded As Cheap, Not Very Reliable, Oddballs”

June 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the always fun Delanceyplace, a description of Japan’s initially bumpy entry into the American auto market in the 1950s, from Daniel Yergin’s The Quest:

“An odd and unfamiliar car might have been seen fleetingly on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1950s. It was Toyota’s Toyopet S30 Crown, the first Japanese car to be brought officially to the United States. In Tokyo, Toyopets were used as taxis. But in the United States the Toyopet did not get off to a good start; the first two could not even get over the hills around Los Angeles. It is said that the first car delivered in San Francisco died on the first hill it encountered on the way to inspection. An auto dealer in that city drove it 180 times in reverse around the public library in an effort to promote it, but to no avail. The Toyopet, priced at $1,999, was anything but a hit. Over a four-year period, a total of 1,913 were sold. Other Japanese automakers also started exporting to the United States, but the numbers sold remained exceedingly modest, and the cars themselves were regarded as cheap, not very reliable, oddballs, and starter cars (lacking the vim and panache of what was then the hot import, the Volkswagen Beetle).”

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“Kasem Was The Voice Of A Less Algorithmic Time”

June 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Viewed from inside the airtight world of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, you can almost understand why the host famously melted down for having to do a “goddamn death dedication” after coming out of a “fucking uptempo record.” You see, Casey’s syndicated parallel United States was meant to be a respite from the real and often-confusing society we actually live in, a place where no unsettling sounds could be heard, a program that could turn every living room into a panic room, a sanctuary safer even than the green room at the Charlie Rose show. As the channels decentralized and multiplied, and the vernacular grew franker, he steadfastly refused to say the word “sex” on the radio or play versions of rap records that contained the N-word. And even as the very medium that made him famous collapsed, with digital killing both the radio and video star, Kasem fought to keep the barbarians of the new normal at the gate. From Alex Pappademas’ excellent Grantland postmortem of the man who only counted backwards:

“In 1989, Casey and Jean Kasem entertained Nikki Finke — then a sharp-toothed, young Los Angeles Times reporter — in their seven-room Beverly Wilshire Hotel apartment, from which the Kasems were organizing a housing-crisis march. ‘The boss sits in a marbled-to-the-max kitchen,’ Finke wrote. ‘The boss’s wife toils in a satin moire-draped dressing room. The publicists make phone calls from the exercise gym. And the typists pound their keyboards on a priceless buffet table that seats 12.’ Later, Kasem is described as ‘more likely to be listening to a speech by Malcolm X on his cassette player than music by Miami Sound Machine.’

It’s hard to square the image of Kasem edutaining himself via the words of Brother Malcolm with, say, the story — mentioned in this Washington Post obit  — about Kasem agreeing to change his show’s chart methodology in the early ’90s in order to mollify affiliates who wanted nothing to do with hip-hop even as it became a commercial force. Kasem began basing his list on airplay data from the country’s biggest Top 40 stations rather than the sales chart in Billboard; it was probably a choice he was forced to make, but the truth was he had never sounded entirely comfortable back-announcing ‘O.P.P.’ or ‘Rump Shaker.’ You can only hurdle so many generation gaps before your ankles start to give out.

Still, Kasem provided a point of entry to the bewildering world of popular music for a lot of people, and young people in particular, who went on to love music more than he ever did. He was one of the least rock-criticky people who ever played records for a living, but he undoubtedly turned countless people into rock critics, trainspotters, trivia banks, and maintainers of eccentrically ordered personal Hot 100s. What we’re mourning when we mourn him, beyond that, is the passing of a time when a ranked list of popular songs still seemed capable of revealing something about what songs actual people actually liked.

In the time it took me to read one Billboard.com article about Casey Kasem’s now-widow throwing meat at her stepchildren, I watched Jason Derulo’s ‘Wiggle’ dethrone Ed Sheeran’s ‘Afire Love’ onBillboard’s Twitter-powered ‘Trending 140’ chart, which ranks ‘the fastest moving songs shared on Twitter in the U.S., measured by acceleration over the past hour.’ Now that paying money for recordings has become the jury duty of pop-music appreciation, we measure twitches of interest, flicks of the eye, spambot-team efficacy. Kasem was the voice of a less algorithmic time, and that’s a hard thing not to feel a pang about — whether you have kids, or pets, or neither.”

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“The U.S. Is Still Catching Up From Missing The World Cup From 1950 To 1990”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his Priceonomics essay, “Why Are Some Countries Good at Soccer?” Alex Mayyasi lays out some of the reasons why the U.S. doesn’t have a pretty record at the beautiful game without touching on the most obvious one: Our best athletes lack financial incentive to commit to the sport. Imagine our team if Lebron James and Billy Hamilton and Calvin Johnson played only soccer from when they were young. That’s what would happen if they were raised in countries where that sport is king, but it’s not the case in America, where more immediate monetary rewards come from other athletics. While a soccer salary in Europe can be stratospheric, there’s a lot of distance a talented American youth athlete would have to travel, figuratively as well as literally, to secure one. Their odds for winning the lottery are better if they concentrate on sports that are popular domestically. From Mayyasi:

“Current U.S. head coach Jurgen Klinsmann has cited the lack of soccer culture in the United States as an obstacle, saying that ‘One thing is certain: The American kids need hundreds and even thousands more hours to play.’ FiveThirtyEight recently reviewed the work of Stefan Szymanski, author of Soccernomics, which found that the best predictor of a country’s success in the World Cup is the number of games the national team had played. According to Szymanski, this means the U.S. men’s national team not only has less experience, but it has missed out on adapting strategy from the rest of the world by playing significantly fewer games — the U.S. is still catching up from missing the World Cup from 1950 to 1990.

After all, the thesis of the 10,000 hour rule, as debated by psychologists, is not merely that masters need lots of practice, but that the type of practice matters. Klinsmann, the U.S. head coach, has placed  on recruiting Americans who play in European leagues and face ‘the best competition in the world on a daily basis instead of only a few games every few years,’ as is the case for MLS players on the World Cup team.

Similarly, aspects of the U.S. youth soccer system seems to keep young players from engaging in ‘deliberate practice’ as much as their peers elsewhere. In America, young players compete in dozens and even hundreds of games every year — games that crowd out time that European youths spend practicing skills and fundamentals. ‘It’s counterproductive to learning,’ John Hackworth, the former under-17 national team coach, tells the New York Times, ‘and the No. 1 worst thing we do.’ And while foreign teams prioritize development by giving star players extra attention and allowing them to play with older and better players, the American focus on winning and the team keeps youth soccer in America from shaping future stars of the national team.”

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“It’s Almost Like Ancient Ruins”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Suburban American malls, ghost towns of the Digital Age, brick and mortars sacrificed at the altar of progress, were the way we lived until we just stopped. We’re far more efficient now, but what was lost in the transition? From David Uberti at the Guardian:

“It is hard to believe there has ever been any life in this place. Shattered glass crunches under Seph Lawless’s feet as he strides through its dreary corridors. Overhead lights attached to ripped-out electrical wires hang suspended in the stale air and fading wallpaper peels off the walls like dead skin.

Lawless sidesteps debris as he passes from plot to plot in this retail graveyard called Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. The shopping centre closed in 2008, and its largest retailers, which had tried to make it as standalone stores, emptied out by the end of last year. When Lawless stops to overlook a two-storey opening near the mall’s once-bustling core, only an occasional drop of water, dribbling through missing ceiling tiles, breaks the silence.

‘You came, you shopped, you dressed nice – you went to the mall. That’s what people did,’ says Lawless, a pseudonymous photographer who grew up in a suburb of nearby Cleveland. “It was very consumer-driven and kind of had an ugly side, but there was something beautiful about it. There was something there.”

Gazing down at the motionless escalators, dead plants and empty benches below, he adds: ‘It’s still beautiful, though. It’s almost like ancient ruins.’

Dying shopping malls are speckled across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs wrestling with socioeconomic shifts.”

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“Our Best Bet For Avoiding Catastrophic Global Warming Is To Wean Ourselves Off Of Fossil Fuels—Altogether—By 2050”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Brian Merchant’s Vice Motherboard article which argues that the industries most in need of creative destruction have thus far largely been impervious to it:

“Right now, a few decades-old technologies are not-so-slowly but surely consigning the planet to burn—and to melt—and gas-powered cars and coal-fired power plants lead the pack. As the chief contributors to planetary warming, there may never have been technologies in such dire need of ‘disruption’, to deploy the buzzword of our times, ever before.

Yet a new energy report from BP shows that our reliance on the ancient energy tech—’modern’ coal power was developed in the 1880s, and the combustion engine rose to prominence in the decades that followed—is only continuing to rise, at the precise moment we need to phase it out. Coal consumption grew to its largest market share since 1970 last year. Oil remains the world’s leading fuel.

As such, we don’t just need to build newer and improved energy technologies—which we have, in the way of solar, wind, geothermal, etc—we desperately need to subject the old ones to Schumpeter-style creative destruction. The latest critical analysis of climate science says our best bet for avoiding catastrophic global warming is to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels—altogether—by 2050. In other words, we can’t just settle for creating new cleantech; we really, really need it to displace the old. Asap. We need to disrupt.

Yes, disrupt.”

“I Only Wish There Was A Risk Of Boredom In My Present Situation”

June 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Anyone who leaks information about war crimes is useful, but did it have to be Julian Assange? Yeesh. Part Ellsberg and part Polanski, he’s retreated for the past two years from international law to the safe haven of Ecuador’s embassy, a veritable house arrest of his own design, dodging sex-crime charges. Assange just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is your opinion on Edward Snowden? 

Julian Assange:

Edward Snowden performed an intelligent and heroic act. I and others had been calling for exactly this act for years (you can read about that here) co-ordinated his asylum. Our Sarah Harrison kept him secure in his path out of Hong Kong and spent 40 days making sure he was OK in Moscow’s airport. Just last week I co-launched a new international organisation, the Courage Foundation in Berlin. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire and many other great people are involved. 

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Question:

If you had a chance to do this all again, would you, and what changes would you make?

Julian Assange:

Again – definitely; we only live once and every day spent living your principles is a day at liberty. It is clear that history is on our side. Most of our difficult decisions are constrained by resource limits, not ideas. But I was ignorant about the extent of Sweden’s geopolitical reliance with the United States and to some extent the structure of UK society.

__________________________

Question:

In regards to President Obama you were recently quoted as saying, “You must surely, now, start to reflect on what your legacy will be.” How do you think history will remember you, and how do you feel about that?

Julian Assange:

For presidents it is important, but for the rest of us it is more important to get things done and see your legacy in the world. We’re doing well in the more academic or comprehensive histories and outside the worst aspects of the English speaking mainstream press. Smears don’t have much staying power on their own because they deviate from the foundations of reality (what actually happened). They require constant energy from our opponents to keep going. The truth has a habit of reasserting itself.

__________________________

Question:

Hi Julian, I have 2 questions.

First, what do you do to stop yourself going mental with boredom? From my understanding, you cannot leave the embassy or you’ll be arrested, so you’ve basically placed yourself under house arrest. What are you day to day activities?

Second, (and I don’t mean this to sound inflammatory), why did you start a website to leak classified information? Surely you can understand that many things kept confidential are for the reasons of national security, and releasing secret documents puts lives and international relations at risk?

Julian Assange:

1) I only wish there was a risk of boredom in my present situation. Besides being the centre of a pitched, prolonged diplomatic standoff, along with a police encirclement of the building I am in and the attendant surveillance and government investigations against myself and my staff, I am in one of the most populous cities in Europe, and everyone knows my exact location. People visit me nearly every day. I also continue to direct a small multinational organisation, WikiLeaks, which is a serious logistical and occupational endeavour. I barely have time to sleep, let alone become bored.

2) Confidential government documents we have published disclose evidence of war crimes, criminal back-room dealings and sundry abuses. That alone legitimates our publications, and that principally motivates our work. Secrecy was never intended to enable criminality in the highest offices of state. Secrecy is, yes, sometimes necessary, but healthy democracies understand that secrecy is the exception, not the rule. “National security” pretexts for secrecy are routinely used by powerful officials, but seldom justified. If we accept these terms of propaganda, strong national security journalism becomes impossible. Our publications have never jeopardized the “national security” of any nation. When secrecy is a cover-all for endemic official criminality, I suggest to you, it bespeaks a strange set of priorities to ask journalists to justify their own existence.•

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“The Stamp Was Claimed By His Wife As A ‘Deathbed Gift’ From Her Husband Who Had Previously Disowned Her”

June 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you’re interested in a brief history of the one-cent stamp from 1856 that sold for $9.5 million yesterday at Sotheby’s, here’s an excerpt from a Life article about it when it was auctioned off that year for $280,000:

“The one-center was printed in February of the year as an emergency measure when the crown colony of British Guiana found itself suddenly short of proper printed stamps. Fearing its rough appearance would encourage forgeries, postal officials initialed each stamp sold. The initials ‘E.D.W.’ scribbled on the left indicate that Mr. E.D. Wright, an assistant postmaster, was the first man to sell the world’s most valuable stamp, which is postmarked ‘Demerara, Ap. 4, 1856.’

After having been used, most likely, as postage for a newspaper, the stamp surfaced in 1872 when a Demerara schoolboy named L. Vernon Vaughan found it while rummaging through an attic. Vaughan got six shillings for it from Neil R. McKinnon and used the proceeds to buy more brightly colored stamps.

Six years later, McKinnon sold his entire collection for $528 to Thomas Ridpath of Liverpool, who extracted the one-cent and peddled it for $744 to the world’s leading stamp collector, Count Philipp la Renotière von Ferrary, an Austrian nobleman living in France. The French government confiscated his collection as World War I reparations and auctioned off the one-cent in 1923. An agent reportedly representing King George V of England bid furiously, but at $32,5000 lost to Arthur Hind, an American tapestry manufacturer. After Hind’s death in 1933, the stamp was claimed by his wife as a ‘deathbed gift’ from her husband who had previously disowned her for alleged infidelities. She sold it in 1940 for the unheard-of price of almost $45,000 to Fred T. Small, an Australian living in America. Small kept the fact that he owned the stamp a secret and never even told his wife of the treasure he owned until after he made his 700% profit on the recent sale.

The one-cent British Guiana’s ‘provenance’ or historical pedigree has added incalculably to its value.”

 

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“One Would Expect – Fervently Hope – That Books Written In The 21st Century Are Radically Different From Those Written 100 Years Ago”

June 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “Reading in a Connected Age,” Neil Levy’s Practical Ethics post which argues that the surfeit of information on the Internet isn’t ending literacy but actually changing it in a necessary way:

“Here I want to consider one potential negative effect of the internet. In a recent blog post, Tim Parks argues that the constant availability of the temptations of the internet has led to a decline in the capacity to focus for long periods, and therefore in the capacity to consume big serious books. Big serious books are still written and read, he notes, but ‘the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,’ Their prose has a ‘battering ram quality,’ which enables readers to consume them through frequent interruptions.

But of course one would expect – fervently hope – that books written in the 21st century are radically different from those written 100 years ago. After all, if you want to read Dickens and Dostoevsky and the like, there is plentiful quality literature from that period surviving: why would a contemporary writer add to those stocks? Its worth noting, as Francesca Segal points out, that Dickens’ own work was originally published in serial form: that is, in the bite-size chunks that Parks think characterise the contemporary novel in an age of reduced concentration spans.

Perhaps there is something to Parks’ hypothesis that the way the novel has changed reflects changes in the capacities of contemporary readers, but making that claim is going to take careful study. You can’t make it from the armchair. Without proper data and proper controls, we are vulnerable to the confirmation bias, where we attend to evidence that supports our hypothesis and overlook evidence that doesn’t, and many other biases that make these kinds of anecdotal reports useless as evidence.

Here is what may be happening to Parks. He is finding himself aware of a loss of focus more than he used to be. But is that evidence that he is actually losing focus more often than previously?”

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“It’s Important To Have A Self-Sustaining City On Mars”

June 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Eric Mack at Forbes, comments from Elon Musk about his ambition to establish a city on Mars within a dozen years:

“‘I’m hopeful that the first people can be taken to Mars in 10-12 years,’ Musk said on CNBC this week. ‘I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur.’

But just getting to the red planet is not nearly enough for Musk, who says it’s more important to have ‘a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary.’

He says if humans fail to become a multi-planet species, we will inevitably just hang out here on Earth until some sort of extinction-level event occurs.

But figuring out how we get to Mars and set up shop there is just the beginning of Musk’s grandiose vision. In the past, he’s also said that we may need to figure out ways to bio-engineer our food and even ourselves to make Mars work for us.”

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“What Would Happen If It Were Possible To Increase A Person’s Intelligence?”

June 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Daniel Keyes, the brain-centric novelist who wrote Flowers for Algernon, just passed away. I would suppose the story will take on even greater resonance as we move closer to genuine cognitive enhancement. The origin story behind his most famous novel, from Daniel E. Slotnik in the New York Times:

“The premise underlying Mr. Keyes’s best-known novel struck him while he waited for an elevated train to take him from Brooklyn to New York University in 1945.

‘I thought: My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love,’ he wrote in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie and I (1999). ‘And then I wondered: What would happen if it were possible to increase a person’s intelligence?’

After 15 years that thought grew into the novella Flowers for Algernon, which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959 and won the Hugo Award for best short fiction in 1960.

By 1966 Mr. Keyes had expanded the story into a novel with the same title, which tied for the Nebula Award for best novel that year. The film, for which Mr. Robertson won the Academy Award for best actor, was released in 1968.

Flowers for Algernon went on to sell more than five million copies and to become a staple of English classes.”

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“They Replenished The International System With New Energy”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

In his Foreign Affairs essay, “The Age Of Entropy,” Randall L. Schweller takes the appreciation for creative destruction to strange new heights, arguing that world wars–you know, those things that killed tens of millions–had their good side, too, helping to create lasting peace. Yeesh. Not only is it abhorrent from a humanistic viewpoint, but it’s historically incorrect. WWI and its aftermath actually helped create another devastating war just two decades later. From Schweller:

‘CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

How did we get here? The shift began in the twentieth century, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the spread of economic globalization, which together have made war among the great powers unthinkable. As many scholars have pointed out, the world has enjoyed the longest period of relative peace in recorded history. The absence of cataclysmic wars among great powers has obviously been a great boon. But it has also come at a real cost. For the past several centuries, wars between the extant power in the international system and the rising challenger or challengers have occurred every hundred years or so, crowning a new leading power, which is responsible for organizing international politics and shouldering the burdens of global leadership.

In crowning new kings, these hegemonic wars also obliterated the old orders, wiping the institutional slate clean so that a new global architecture, better suited to the times, could be built from scratch. The wars were thus a good thing in some sense, because they replenished the international system with new energy in service of world order and lasting peace. In their absence, we no longer have a force of ‘creative destruction’ capable of resetting the world. And just as seas become foul without the blowing of the winds, prolonged peace allows inertia and decay to set in.”

 

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