Because I’m not privy to the inner workings of the Browser, that great blog, I’m not quite sure why the Five Books Interviews are being moved to a discrete site, though I hope it means those folks can be profitable and continue doing such wonderful work. Via the Browser, a passage from a great Telegraph obituary of Jungleyes Love, who made his way for 56 years as a fruitarian with a taste for psychedelics:
“Descended from privateers, Charles Gibaut Bissell-Thomas was born in Jersey on March 13 1956. He shed his given name while a teenager, changing it several times, first to Charlight Utang, then Soma Love, then (by deed poll) to Jungleyes Cism Love. More recently he called himself Jarl Love.
During assembly at primary school, he questioned his orthodox Christian headmistress about why the school was not also worshipping the Devil. Later, at Harrow, he contacted the Chinese Embassy and persuaded staff there to send 725 complimentary copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which were promptly returned by the school authorities.
Several terms later his mother received a call from his housemaster stating that he was being sent home in the middle of term, not because he had been expelled but because he contacted the headmaster of Latymer School, Hammersmith, and had secured himself a place.
After entering Latymer he would never cut his hair again, and from his mid-20s no longer brushed or combed it. While perhaps hoping to achieve a neat Rasta-dread style, he ended up with a matted construction which was later long enough to use as a cushion while waiting at bus stops.
After graduating in Neurobiology at the University of Sussex he travelled extensively in Asia, spending several years with a witch doctor (or dukun) in Indonesia called Waktu Lemak (Fat Time).”
We know so little about the tools we depend on every day. When I was a child, I was surprised that no one expected me to learn how to build a TV even though I watched a TV. But, no, I was just expected to process the surface of the box’s form and function, not to understand the inner workings. Throughout life, we use analogies and signs and symbols to make sense of things we constantly consume but don’t truly understand. Our processing of these basics is not unlike a computer’s process. Marvin Minsky wrote brilliantly on this topic in an Afterword of a 1984 Vernor Vinge novel. An excerpt:
“Let’s return to the question about how much a simulated life inside a world inside a machine could resemble our real life ‘out here.’ My answer, as you know by now, is that it could be very much the same––since we, ourselves, already exist as processes imprisoned in machines inside machines! Our mental worlds are already filled with wondrous, magical, symbol–signs, which add to every thing we ‘see’ its ‘meaning’ and ‘significance.’ In fact, all educated people have already learned how different are our mental worlds than the ‘real worlds’ that our scientists know.
Consider the table in your dining room; your conscious mind sees it as having familiar functions, forms, and purposes. A table is ‘a thing to put things on.’ However, our science tells us that this is only in the mind; the only thing that’s ‘really there’ is a society of countless molecules. That table seems to hold its shape only because some of those molecules are constrained to vibrate near one another, because of certain properties of force-fields that keep them from pursuing independent trajectories. Similarly, when you hear a spoken word, your mind attributes sense and meaning to that sound––whereas, in physics, the word is merely a fluctuating pressure on your ear, caused by the collisions of myriads of molecules of air––that is, of particles whose distances are so much less constrained.
And so––let’s face it now, once and for all: each one of us already has experienced what it is like to be simulated by a computer!”
The entire two-person, electric Urbee is to be printed. Not just the skin but the bones as well. From Leslie Brooks Suzukamo at Twin Cities.com:“You can produce a lot of things on 3-D printers nowadays — fantasy figurines from World of Warcraft, prototypes for implantable medical devices, jewelry, replacement joints, precision tools, swimwear, a replica of King Tut’s mummy.
Jim Kor is printing a car.
Kor, an engineer and entrepreneur from Winnipeg, Manitoba, has designed a two-passenger hybrid car of the future dubbed the Urbee. The ultra-sleek three-wheel vehicle will have a metal internal combustion engine, electric motor and frame.”
Sometimes, for medical reasons, I need to make my brain bleed, so I read something Peggy Noonan has written. Her blend of insipidness and dishonesty always does the trick. Nonnan is one of those Republicans who clings to false narratives, of an America that never quite existed. She does so in the face of overwhelming facts, despite her party losing almost every battleground state in the last Presidential election.
Noonan contnues to traffic in the usual bullshit ofnot accepting that her extremist, racist party wants nothing to do with the leadership of an African-American Democratic President, that the modern GOP is about disqualifying anyone who isn’t one of them.
“We are living in the age of emergency—the economy, the Mideast, North Korea, Iran. The president has an utter and historic inability to forge a relationship with Congress.”
Why have you repeatedly turned down the friendly overtures of Mitch McConell, Mr. President? He wants to be close. And when they scream at you during the State of the Union Address, it’s dinner invitations they’re offering. The problem is the Republican-controlled Congress is the result of extreme gerrymandering. They’re not just out of step with the President, they’re out of step with the country. Hence, they’re incredibly low approval ratings. Those numbers are truly historic.
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But far more troubling in the same column is Noonan’s embrace of Dodge’s “So God Made a Farmer” ad which ran during the Super Bowl. It’s an impressive spot, until you stop to think about it–if you stop to think about it. It’s largely a paean to the work ethic of white people that conveniently forgets that farms and plantations in this country had much of their toil done by non-white slaves and non-white migrant workers. (Was there a Mexican face in that commercial?) What’s even more appalling is that Noonan wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, whose policies were devastating to small farmers. Wreck them and then use them as a metaphor. That’s been the GOP playbook for more than three decades and cling they still do even though the decentralization of communications and shifting demographics have put their ridiculous narratives to bed.
Peggy explains why she loves the ad so much:
“• Because it spoke un-self-consciously in praise of certain virtues—commitment, compassion, hard work, a sense of local responsibility. The most moving reference, to me, was when Harvey has the farmer get up before dawn, work all day, and ‘then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.’ Notice the old word ‘town,’ not ‘community’—that blight of a word that is used more and more as it means less and less.
• Because it explicitly put God as maker of life and governor of reality, again un-self-consciously, and with a tone that anticipated no pushback. God, you could say anything in Paul Harvey’s day.
• Because it was Paul Harvey, a great broadcaster and a clear, clean writer for the ear, who knew exactly what he was saying and why, and who was confident of the values he asserted. He wasn’t a hidden person, he wasn’t smuggling an agenda, he was conservative and Christian and made these things clear through the virtues and values he praised and the things he criticized.
•You could like him or not, but you understood that by his lights he was giving it to you straight as he could.”
As straight as he could wasn’t very straight at all. It was a false myth, one that was exclusionary and meant to flatter a certain segment of the population that wanted to cling to power. Peggy Noonan is one of those people.•
From an obituary of John Karlin by the excellent New York Times writer Margalit Fox, a passage about the psychologist who brought behavioral sciences to product design during his tenure at Bell Labs:
“By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.
But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.
It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.
‘He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,’ Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.”
Odd that Facebook co-founder and initial Obama online guru Chris Hughes has made the move to print, purchasing a controlling interest in the New Republic and naming himself Editor-in-Chief. Certainly it won’t be a print product much longer, though that hardly matters if Hughes is able to turn out the great reportage he plans. From a new Financial Times interviewwith him conducted by Anna Fifield:
“Then almost a year ago, Hughes moved on to The New Republic and took a majority stake for an undisclosed amount. Like many other magazines, it was hemorrhaging readers, owners, editors and money. Its circulation had fallen to 34,000 from a peak of more than 100,000 two decades ago.
In an age when it can seem that journalism is increasingly conducted in 140 characters, it seemed like a counter-cultural step: here was a new-media sensation moving to a traditional magazine committed to publishing 10,000-word essays on paper and delivered to readers by post.
While admitting that Zuckerberg ‘absolutely’ thinks it’s weird that he’s moving into old media, Hughes argues that people of his age in this Twitter era are still readers. ‘A Pew [Research Center] report recently found that people under 30 are reading more books than they were 10 years ago – not much more, but more – and are as likely to have read them on their phone as in print,’ he says. ‘It’s crazy.’
He should know. He admits that he has read whole chapters of War and Peace on his iPhone, although he also read parts on old-fashioned paper. (Over Christmas, he tells me, he read DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and he is now reading George Saunders’ new collection of short stories on his iPad.)”
I recall Russell Baker, who can craft a sentence as well as anyone, once saying that the old, rigid copy-editing policies at the New York Times in his day used to make him drink and cry. Something like that. In his New York Review of Books piece on Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars, Baker writes about how technology and policy have led to a remarkable resurgence in forests and wildlife in America, one which may have gone too far. An excerpt:
“During America’s first 250 years, early settlers cleared away some 250 million acres of forest. Yet the forest comes back fast. By the 1950s, one half to two thirds of the landscape was reforested. Most of us now ‘live in the woods,’ Sterba writes. ‘We are essentially forest dwellers.’ The new forests ‘grew back right under the noses of several generations of Americans. The regrowth began in such fits and starts that most people didn’t see it happening.’
Why did it happen? For one thing, because oil, gas, and coal replaced wood as the major fuel for heating and cooking. Because new building techniques and materials reduced wood’s importance to the construction trades. And because the family farm began to vanish, leaving the abandoned acreage to follow earth’s natural impulse, which is to produce wild grasses, weeds, bushes, shrubs, and small trees that turn into big trees.
Then, of course, even the bleakest urban areas may yield to a civic impulse to primp a bit with touches of greenery, as in New York where 24 percent of the city’s area is now covered by a canopy of 5.2 million trees. Nationally, Sterba reports, tree canopy covers about 27 percent of the urban landscape.”
An 18-year-old in Arizona was arrested for a DUI and wound up in Joe Arpaio’s Tent City jail compound, the Sheriff’s self-described “concentration camp” for those awaiting trial, many of of whom are made to wear pink underwear and all of whom sweat it out in desert heat. The teen just did anAsk Me Anythingon Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
Tent City, what’s that?
Answer:
It’s jail, but you’re outside in these big military style tents with bunk beds. In Phoenix, and I was there in the summer; So needless to say it gets pretty toasty. They pay more for their dog food than they do for their inmate food apparently.
Answer:
Question:
Did you wear the pink underwear?
Answer:
Nope!
There’s two totally separate areas. The “N-yard” which is for the inmates who committed more serious crimes and were there for longer. They had the striped jumpsuit and pink underwear, etc. They had to change in front of everyone on the processing in as well (get naked in front of like 20 dudes).
Luckily, being my first offense and I “had a job” (work for myself, Judge was pretty lenient since it was a first offense..ever.. for me), I got what’s called Work Release.
Work Release means on the weekdays, I got to leave at 7am and had to be be back by 7pm to spend the night there. You had to spend the whole weekends there as well (60 hours total). But you also got to wear your civilian clothes, and that alone was quite awesome. Thank god.
The above classic photograph depicts Babe Ruth in the year he became a New York Yankee and tried on the pinstripes for the first time. The sale of his contract from the Boston Red Sox (for $125,000) stunned observers of the game. Truth be told, there weren’t a lot of great players in organized baseball’s early decades (because of the color line, among other reasons), so someone truly gifted like Ruth could have a massive impact on an organization. Fans in both Boston and New York were wise to that fact (for the most part), and this trade set off what would become a nearly hundred-year war between the clubs. From a January 7, 1920 New York Times article in the immediate aftermath of the deal:
“Babe Ruth, the Colossus of Swat, has signed his name to a document promising to play with the Yankees next season. Manager Miller Huggins, who went to Los Angeles to sign the player, wired President Jacob Ruppert yesterday that the home run slugger had signed an agreement to play here. Manager Huggins’s message also said that Ruth was very much pleased with the transfer that brought him to New York and would be delighted to play here next Summer. Huggins left California last night for New York.
Just what agreement Ruth has signed is not known by the officials of the New York club. That he has not yet signed a contract is certain from Huggins’s telegram. It is believed to be a tentative agreement that he will sign a contract at a certain time. Ruth expects to leave for the East next Monday. and his new contract will probably be signed in New York. He demanded a contract calling for $20,000 a year from Boston and this figure will undoubtedly be the basis of the new contract which the Yankees will give him. According to Huggins’s message, however, there is no question that Ruth is pleased with the change and glad to join the New York club.
The purchase of Ruth for the record price of $125,000 was the topic of the conversation along Broadway yesterday and baseball fans of all ages and sizes already see a chance for the Yankees to land the 1920 pennant. Manhattan’s fondest dream of having a world series at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Yankees now becomes a tangible thing and that is the big event which New York fans will be rooting for all Summer.
The two Colonels–Ruppert and Huston–were praised on all sides for their aggressiveness and liberality in landing baseball’s greatest attraction. If the club, strengthened by Ruth and by other players the owners have in mind, does not carry off the flag, it will not be the fault of the owners.
Boston is duly shocked at the sale of Ruth and there is a wide difference of opinion about its effect on the game in the Hub. The newspapers yesterday had cartoons showing a ‘For Sale’ sign on the Boston Public Library and on the Boston Common. They also picture Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, in darkness, with a sign ‘Building Lots for Sale.’
Two Bostonians prominent in Hub baseball in the past, Fred Tenney and Hugh Duffy, are quoted as saying that the sale of Ruth is a good thing for the Red Sox and that it will be a better club without him.”
The problem I have with otherwise thoughtful people (like David Brooks, for instance) who seem to think that wealth inequality in America is fueled by sheer meritocracy is that Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are not our best and brightest. While America strives for a level playing field in many ways, financial rewards often go to the worst among us or the plain lucky. And this issue of inequality has always existed and likely always will, so it needs to be addressed with policy. From “Return of the Oppressed,” Peter Turchin’s new Aeon essay:
“What, then, explains the rapid growth of top fortunes in the US over the past 30 years? Why did the wages of unskilled workers stagnate or decline? What accounts for the bitterness of election rhetoric in the US, the growing legislative gridlock, the rampant political polarisation? My answer is that all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous. Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change. Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.
Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.
Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020. In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.”
As the United States Postal Service cuts down to five days of mail delivery per week and some wonder what life would be like without the USPS, Foreign Policy (using an Oxford Strategic Consulting survey) ranked it the best in the world. Take that, Bhutan postal service! Fuck you! From FP‘s rankings:
“1. The United States Postal Service
Efficiency may not be the first word that comes to mind when Americans think of the USPS, but U.S. mail carriers are better at using their limited resources than any of their counterparts, according to OSC’s study. In one year, America’s mailmen and women delivered 268,894 letters and 2,633 parcels per carrier — more than any other country — to 151 million addresses. All told, the USPS accounts for 40 percent of the world’s mail volume (yes, that figure counts your Victoria’s Secret catalogues). And despite complaints about customer service, when researchers in a different study tested 159 countries’ post offices on how fast an average letter sent to a fake address would be returned, the United States also came in first.
The Oxford authors acknowledge that the situation is in flux due to the rapidly declining demand for the post office’s services. The United States already lags behind other countries in 12th place on ‘provision of access’ — which measures the number of citizens per post office — and would likely worsen if the USPS follows through on its retrenchment plans.
The biggest obstacle to a more efficient post office may be the U.S. Congress, which has failed to approve reform efforts such as setting up retail outlets in post offices, raising prices, shuttering less-used offices, and ending six-day delivery. (As part of its new cost-saving measures, the USPS has managed to circumvent Congress by keeping only parcel service on Saturdays so that, technically, there’s still some service six days a week.)
And in case you American declinists were wondering, China ranks last on the survey.”
I think I could have put up with being in Jack Kerouac’s presence for about five minutes without screaming, but this 1959 clip of him on Steve Allen’s show is fun. The Beat writer even interrupts his discomfort and self-mythologizing, bullshit answers to read from On the Road.
From John Clellon Holmes’ 1952 New York Times Magazine piece, “This Is the Beat Generation,” which introduced the movement to the masses: “Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality which demands an adjective … The origins of the word ‘beat’ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth.
Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and USO’s, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the home town invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedon, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later.
It is a postwar generation, and, in a world which seems to mark its cycles by its wars, it is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself ‘lost’. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the ‘orgiastic future’ or escaping from the ‘puritanical past.’ Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desperate frivolity best expressed by the line: ‘Tennis, anyone?’ It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lostness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.
But the wild boys of today are not lost. Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, do not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to ‘come down’ or to ‘get high,’ not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiousity, not disillusionment.”
Matt, a line of yours is lodged in my head: “Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” Unfortunately, while the animosity of Occupy Wall Street is still strong in early 2013, the disorganization of the movement might be even stronger.
So, if you were in charge of Occupy Wall Street, what single achievable goal would you (re)organize the movement around?
Answer:
Again, to repeat, breaking up the banks is the big thing. That should be the Holy Grail of activist goals. Everything flows from the Too Big To Fail problem. If that can be accomplished, we’re off and running. And it’s not far-fetched. There are a lot of people even in DC coming around to the idea.
____________________________
Question:
Matt, you lived in Russia for a while and wrote about and did a lot of interesting and intense things, like messing with the mob, checking out Siberian prisons, and partying pretty hard. Russia is a place where they kill journalists for merely existing, so my question is: how did you not die?
Answer:
Purely by accident. Honestly, there were some close calls. A lot of bad decisions while I was there, many of them under the influence. One very funny story I’ve never told: I once worked with a Russian paper called “Stringer” to wiretap Alexander Voloshin, Putin’s chief of staff. We published a week of his phone calls. I was so afraid of the consequences, I stayed out of the country when we published. Upon my return I was detained at the airport for 10 hours. I thought I was going to jail for life. In fact, the Russians were simply concerned that the lamination on my passport was coming up in one corner. They thought my passport was fake. Once they reached the embassy, they let me go. But that was one scary 10 hours.
____________________________
Question:
Did you ever meet Hunter S. Thompson?
Answer:
Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I was asked by a book publishing company to edit an anthology of “Gonzo Journalism.” Not long into the project I realized there was no such thing as “Gonzo Journalism” as a genre per se, it just meant “written by Hunter Thompson.” But I was broke and needed the job. So I called Hunter to ask him what he thought. He said, “That’s a shitty assignment.” I told him I probably agreed. He said, “How badly do you need the money?” I said, “Badly.” He said, “Well, good luck, but I’m not going to help you with it. No offense.” I said none taken and that was it. That was the only time I ever talked to Hunter. It was a funny call, though.
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Question:
Did you really throw your coffee at Vanity Fair’s James Verini when he said he didn’t like your book?
Answer:
I absolutely did throw coffee at James Verini, and it had nothing to do with him not liking my book. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’ll tell the full story someday.
Two of the heroes in New York City’s ongoing struggle against poverty are Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem’s Children Zone and George McDonald of the Doe Fund. The opening of Hamilton Nolan’s excellent Gawker post about the latter organization, a homelessness-ending program started by McDonald, who is running a quixotic candidacy to be New York’s next mayor:
“The next mayor of New York City will not be George McDonald, though George McDonald is running for mayor. That’s OK. George McDonald is already better than any mayor has ever been at addressing the most obstinate social problems in this city’s modern history.
Homelessness. Poverty. Unemployment. These problems are usually seen as intractable, overwhelming, and hopelessly complex. They certainly can be, for those suffering their effects. But solving these problems is not a mystery at all. There is a nonprofit group in New York City called The Doe Fund that has developed perhaps the single most effective formula in existence for moving people from the streets to productive society.
Here is what they do: They take in homeless people, referred to them by places like Bellevue Hospital. Many of these people are fresh out of prison, with little safety net. They house them. They ensure they’re sober and make them abide by a schedule. They give them a job for starters—cleaning up trash around the city, for a month. The men in all-blue jumpsuits you see pushing brooms and emptying trash cans throughout New York are Doe Funders.
After that, the fund gives them classes in life skills and specific job training (they can choose between pest control, catering, building maintenance, and other specialties) for the next six months or so. There are mock job interviews, to get the pitch right. Then they send each one out to pound the pavement and find a job. When they find a job, they find them a place to live. By the time a year is up, the Doe Fund has transformed a homeless person into an employed person with a place to live.”
The opening of Kevin Kelly’s recent (and worthwhile) Wired cover story about the future of workplace robotization, “Better Than Human,” which I only now got around to reading:
“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.
It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.”
From “Red Obsessions,” a feature article by Lars Olav-Beier in Spiegel about Asia trying to supplant Hollywood as the global Dream Factory:
“Not just China, but also South Korea and Russia have become more important in the film business in recent years. The Russian market grew by almost 20 percent in 2012, with a film like Ice Age 4 earning $50 million there, or more than half of its budget.
‘We can no longer risk making an expensive film with a star who isn’t popular in Asia,’ says Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean). While American films earned up to two-thirds of their revenues in North America in the 1980s, today it averages only about one third.
Hollywood has been beset by fears of a sellout, ever since Indian investment firm Reliance acquired the majority of the DreamWorks film studio and a Chinese company bought the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States. Finally, in mid-January the Chinese electronics company TLC bought the naming rights to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in the heart of Hollywood, one of the most famous movie theaters in the United States. It seems only a matter of time before the Chinese buy their first Hollywood studio.
It’s happened once before, now more than 20 years ago, that Asians, specifically Japanese companies like Sony, acquired a number of studios. ‘China wants something different from Hollywood than what Japan wanted at the time,’ says American industry expert Thomas Plate. ‘It isn’t as much about money as it is about know-how.’
Of course, money isn’t the only issue for Hollywood, either. America sees cinema as its very own art form, tailor-made for telling the world American stories and celebrating American values. ‘We’ll still be making movies about American football in the future,’ says Bruckheimer, ‘but with much smaller budgets. That’s because it’s almost exclusively American viewers who are interested in football.’ Bruckheimer exhorts his screenwriters to think internationally and write roles for Asian stars into films.”
The choice for the best word of 2012 from the committee at the Australian dictionary, the Macquarie:
phantom vibration syndrome
noun a syndrome characterised by constant anxiety in relation to one’s mobile phone and an obsessional conviction that the phone has vibrated in response to an incoming call when in fact it hasn’t.
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And the people’s choice:
First World problem
noun a problem that relates to the affluent lifestyle associated with the First World, and that would never arise in the poverty-stricken circumstances of the Third World, as having to settle for plunger coffee when one’s espresso machine is not functioning.
Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, two great figures of their age, never shook hands or spoke despite their often close proximity, which was made all the closer as a result of the poet volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War. From Jamie Stiehm at the New York Times’ Disunion blog, a passage about their “relationship”:
“Above all, Whitman studied the stars and waves of Lincoln’s mercurial character the way a great sculptor might gaze at his craggy countenance or larger-than-life hands. The poet came to know the routes of the president’s carriage. When he saw it passing by, he stood with hat in hand. He kept a lookout in the summer months, when Lincoln rode daily along Seventh Street out to a peaceful family retreat at the Soldiers Home, three miles away from crush of his callers. Whitman was once inside the executive mansion to see John Hay, the president’s secretary. He was standing close to Lincoln, who was animatedly engaged in another conversation, but went on his way, loath to interrupt him.
As Whitman later recounted, he exchanged nods, bows and waves with Lincoln several times over a few years and saw the president shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands at a party. But not Whitman’s. In one of American history’s closest calls, the two never spoke a word to each other. (Though it is believed that Lincoln, 10 years older, read some of the poet’s work aloud back in Springfield, Ill.)
Whitman nevertheless felt he got a good fix on Lincoln. ‘I love the president personally,’ he declared. Well he might, because years earlier he had imagined a bearded president from the prairie, the West who was ‘heroic, shrewd, fully informed.’ Lincoln was nothing if not a shrewd, strong outsider, which helped make him the one man alive capable of settling the old sectional divide sundering the nation.”
In 1978, Soviet geologists were stunned while exploring the remote Siberian taiga when they happened across a deeply religious family that had retreated 40 years earlier from their country’s attempts at modernization, as well as all outside human contact and communication. They were so isolated that they were blissfully unaware of that horror known as World War II. From Mike Dash at the Smithsonian site:
“Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer—a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and ‘the anti-Christ in human form’—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly ‘chopping off the beards of Christians.’ But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods [940 pounds] of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.
Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.
Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize the Russia of the early 18th century found a focal point in a campaign to end the wearing of beards. Facial hair was taxed and non-payers were compulsorily shaved—anathema to Karp Lykov and the Old Believers.
That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, ‘was for everyone to recount their dreams.'”
You mention how we’re not going to have policing in public spaces anytime soon —
Paul Barrett:
I said a ‘police state.’ We, of course, have plenty of policing of public spaces. We have public spaces that are basically locked down. You can’t get into a federal courthouse without getting thoroughly searched. It would be very, very difficult to get in there with a firearm. You can’t get past security in an American airport without being pretty thoroughly searched. We have lots of security in lots of situations.
I think that security does deter crime in general and mass killings in particular. With this debate about what we do about schools, the proposal [by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre] that has been lampooned by a lot of people, I personally think is a very reasonable proposal.
Shaun Randol:
Please elaborate.
Paul Barrett:
I’ve written about this for Businessweek. We have grown accustomed, in this country, to having a fair amount of security in many kinds of public and private venues where a lot of people gather. There is security in the building that you and I are sitting in right now. Not just anyone can walk in.
When you go to Yankee Stadium to see a baseball game, you can’t just walk into Yankee Stadium. They channel you through certain entranceways and, if you’re carrying a bag, they’re going to search your bag. The guys who take your tickets are there to also look you over, and there’s both uniformed and plainclothes security throughout the stadium.
I think all of those steps are rational steps. I don’t think they’re perfect, but I do think they do deter crime and they would deter a mass suicide-killing episode in those venues. Therefore, if you are truly anxious about securing schools, I can’t see the serious argument against having armed security at schools. It doesn’t seem to me to be a distraction. It doesn’t seem to me to be a panacea, either. It’s not perfect, but few social policies are perfect.”
An ingenious learning tool, the Lernstift pen vibrates when the user misspells a word or makes a grammatical error. If only we still used pens! From Wired UK:
“Currently a test prototype, the electronic pen is programmed to recognise movements associated with each letter form. In calligraphy mode it can buzz the user when the letter shape is being created oddly, while in orthography mode it can be used to pick up spelling or grammar mistakes — one buzz for spelling errors and two for grammar.
Creators Falk and Mandy Wolsky (an inventor and an education specialist, respectively) explain on their website that the invention was inspired by their son’s early writing attempts –‘From the very first words there were errors.’
By issuing corrections without a time delay and without the need for an instructor to be present at all times, the learning pen could cut down on the time taken to learn to write.”
Drones are scary as hell, but they do keep boots off the ground, which is what leads to quagmires and tens of thousands of deaths. Still, it’s a scary precedent we’re setting.
In a wide-ranging Geuernica interview, Martin Amis offers his take on drones as well as health care and the history of American slavery. An excerpt:
“Guernica:
In May 2009, in an interview with Prospect magazine, you discussed your enthusiasm for the possibilities of the Obama presidency. What are your thoughts on his first term and on what might come in the next four years?
Martin Amis:
It’s often said of American politics that it’s a huge juggernaut and the president can change the direction by two or three degrees in either direction, but not much more. In fact, I think the president’s power is limited, much more than the prime minister in England. So, I’m not too disappointed, although I didn’t like his deportations, and I’m not sure about the drones. It’s very aggressive. I’m not sure that if Bush Jr. were doing it I would say the same. It’s better than having troops on the ground, and it’s horrifying for the terrorists. I mean they’re all sitting there waiting.
I haven’t liked him during the campaign. He hasn’t been above the fray. I guess you can’t afford to do it. If you are going to get reelected you have to make some of the usual noises: You don’t talk about global warming, and you don’t talk about gun control. He hasn’t been the great exception.
I also think there’s been another resurgence of racism. All that rejection from Republicans has a bit of a racist element. It was very necessary to have a black president, and it’s been a great thing. It will help, in the end, to ease the trauma of slavery and civil war. The war against slavery cost almost 800,000 American lives—that’s how strongly they felt about it. And it’s not going to go away in a century.
Obama will have a bit of capital for a year or two. Even his imperfect health reform was a tremendous step in the right direction—the direction of sanity and equity. Just to give up this enterprise health system and adopt government health care like in Canada is cheaper and fairer. But the key part about that is that no American will accept that some of his tax money is going to pay for people who smoke. It’s horrible for them: ‘Some low-life bum taking advantage of the state.’ They just have to get over it.”
The other day, Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard said he doesn’t think the NFL will exist in 30 years due to these sorts of problems. What do you see happening?
Dave Zirin:
I disagree with Bernard Pollard—I don’t think the game will be appreciably different than it is now. But I think it will be less popular, the same way that boxing is much less popular today. Fifty years ago, if you were the heavyweight champ, you were the most famous athlete in the United States. Now, I bet the overwhelming majority of sports fans couldn’t name who the champion is. It’s just not as popular.
So I think it’ll be less popular, and I also think that the talent pool is going to shrink as more parents keep their kids out of playing. You’ll see the NFL invest millions of dollars in urban infrastructure and youth football leagues, and it’s going to be the poorest kids playing football as a ticket out of poverty. This year, the four best young quarterbacks—Andrew Luck, RGIII, Russell Wilson, and Colin Kaepernick—all four of them excelled at multiple sports and came from stable, middle-class homes. Those are exactly the kind of players who won’t be playing football in 30 years.”
From Emily Esfahani Smith’s new Atlantic article, “The Lovely Hill: Where People Live Longer and Happier,” a passage about the healthy lifestyle of one of the long-lived residents of Loma Linda, California, the 98-year-old surgeon Ellsworth Wareham:
“As a middle-aged man, Wareham spent a lot of time in the operating room cutting into one patient after another who had heart problems. There, he noticed something: patients who were vegetarian mostly had much cleaner and smoother arteries than those who ate meat. The arteries of meat-eaters tended to be full of calcium and plaque.
So he made a choice. He decided to become a vegan. That decision was not too hard to make given the fact that many of the inhabitants of his southern Californian community were already very health conscious. Consider: there is no meat sold at one of the largest grocery stores in town. In fact, as recently as a generation ago, meat was difficult to find in the grocery stores of Loma Linda, as the New York Timesreports. On top of that, smoking is banned in the town; alcohol is scarcely available; and fast food restaurants are hard to come by.
But make no mistake: Loma Linda is not some bohemian enclave of free-spirited vegans. Rather, what makes the community remarkable — and remarkably health conscious — is that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. A conservative denomination of Christianity founded during this country’s Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, the religion advocates a healthy lifestyle as a main tenet of the faith. This is a major reason why Wareham, a Seventh-Day Adventist, takes his health so seriously.”
David Gelernter, a computer genius with perplexing, reductive politics, believes the next wave of our online interconnectedness will see streams largely replace searches, something that has happened already to a certain extent. From his new Wired article, “The End of the Web, Search and Computer As We Know It“:
“Today’s operating systems and browsers — and search models — become obsolete, because people no longer want to be connected to computers or ‘sites’ (they probably never did).
What people really want is to tune in to information. Since many millions of separate lifestreams will exist in the cybersphere soon, our basic software will be the stream-browser: like today’s browsers, but designed to add, subtract, and navigate streams.
Searching content in a time stream is a matter of stream algebra, which is easier than the algebra of space-based structures like today’s web. Add two timestreams and get a third (simply merge the AP news feed and my friend Freeman’s blog streams into time-order); and content search is a matter of stream subtraction (simply subtract all entries that don’t mention ‘cranberries’ to yield all the entries that do). The simple, practical features of stream algebra have one huge benefit: giving us made-to-order information.
Every news source is a lifestream. Stream-browsers will help us tune in to the information we want by implementing a type of custom-coffee blender: We’re offered thousands of different stream ‘flavors,’ we choose the flavors we want, and the blender mixes our streams to order.
Every site’s content is liberated from the confines of space. It becomes part of a universal timestream. Instead of relying on Amazon the site to notify me if there’s a new Cynthia Ozick book or new books on the city of Florence, I can blend together several booksellers’ lifestreams and then apply my search since stream algebra allows any streams to be added (new and used books) and content (Florence, Ozick) to be subtracted.
E-commerce changes drastically. We shouldn’t have to work to find what’s new, yet the way the web is currently architected it’s no different logically than having to visit a thousand separate physical shops. The time-based worldstream lets us sit back instead and watch a single, customized fashion show across sites.”
