The “Fox” in Fox News, a 24-hour House Un-American Activities Committee sponsored by Bush’s Baked Beans, is taken from the surname of pioneering film producer William Fox, whether he would be happy with the contemporary association or not.
One of Fox’s great innovations was the launching, in 1929, of the Embassy Newsreel Theatre in Manhattan, as a showcase of continuous non-fiction fare, presaging around-the-clock cable by many decades. Newsreels–or “film newspapers“–had been popular since the beginning of cinema, but until Fox they were secondary to the main attraction in the United States. He redefined them as the attraction.
By 1930, the proprietor had lost control of his film company and theaters, having been knocked out by a near-fatal automobile crash and the stock-market collapse. This reversal was followed by legal problems, a commission of perjury and a prison stint. Fox died in 1952, largely forgotten by the media he helped define. Text follows of a brief, understated article from the November 4, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, unwittingly announcing the moment when news in America–or something resembling it–became an infinite loop.
Being great at one thing doesn’t necessarily mean you possess any general genius (e.g., Ben Carson, neurosurgeon). Michael Bloomberg believed the financial sector needed a certain type of information terminal and he created it with a ridiculous $10 million golden parachute he was handed after getting shitcanned by Salomon Brothers. About the terminals, he was right. It made him one of the richest people in the world, but his wealth should never have been taken as a sign of competence or rectitude.
As Mayor of New York, he did some great things and bungled major projects like Build It Back. He was tone deaf enough to want to proceed with the marathon in the wake of Hurricane Sandy turning New York City into a necropolis. Crime was kept low but policing got out of hand on his watch. The poorer people he claimed to champion often did worse. His paternalism knew no bounds, often seeming petty. He even scammed a third term, writing his own law in a back-office deal with another billionaire, voters be damned.
As a businessperson, Bloomberg is likewise a mixed bag. Unencumbered with the mayoralty, he’s returned to his namesake business, slicing and dicing his way through the journalistic side, an area for which he holds no great regard. All the while, those terminals keep updating, making general rightness or wrongness seem almost irrelevant on a large scale but often troubling on the micro one.
Visitors to the building could be forgiven for thinking that the heyday of journalism was still ongoing. Staff exit the elevator into a light-filled foyer that feels like the lobby of a designer hotel. The eye is drawn to orange sofas and white lacquered counters, upon which rest bowls stuffed with apples, oranges and diced melon. There are carrot sticks and broccoli, as well as fresh roasted coffees that would put any Starbucks to shame. The employees scurrying by can help themselves free of charge. Bloomberg wants his people to be comfortable.
But his paternalism can at times seem condescending. The potato chip bags are free, but they’re only available in the smallest size possible. Bloomberg would like his people to eat healthily. And the elevators don’t stop on each of the building’s 25 floors — only on those marked with a white circle — forcing employees to take the stairs.
In nearly every Bloomberg bureau around the world there is at least one saltwater aquarium with purple and yellow fish and corals — to foster relaxation, Bloomberg says. Those who work for him should be proud of their job. One of his favorite sentences is: “The best for us.”
‘Scientology on Speed’
Those who jump ship, though, get a taste of his colder side. Bloomberg once confessed that he doesn’t attend going-away parties out of principle, saying that he couldn’t wish departing employees all the best. “That just wouldn’t be honest of me,” he said. Whoever turns his or her back on the company is no longer one of us, but one of “them.” Bloomberg’s employees must enter a binding contractual agreement to not divulge company secrets, including a clause that permits the company to scan an employee’s e-mails even after that person has left. The microcosm of Mike Bloomberg is a whimsical world of good and evil, one with its own unique — some might say sect-like — view of things. An insider jokingly refers to it as “Scientology on speed.”•
The future often happens sooner than seems possible but not as soon as we might hope, and I think nano-engineering fits into that category. I wouldn’t expect to see “living” architecture that morphs and modifies in my lifetime, not in any profound way, but there’s nothing theoretically impossible to prevent it happening at some indeterminate point. In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke, working from the theories of Richard Feynman, imagined a future full of buildings built and endlessly rebuilt by molecular engineering. From Darran Anderson’s excellent essay on the topic at Aeon:
Let’s elaborate Arthur C Clarke’s prophecy a little. Nanobots would create a programmable architecture that would change shape, function and style at command, in anticipation or even independently. Imagine an apartment where furniture fluidly morphs from the walls and floor, adapting to the inhabitants, an apartment that physically mutates into a Sukiya-zukuri tea-room or an Ottoman pleasure palace or something as yet unseen, while outside the entire skyline is continually rearranging itself. Architecture might become an art available to all.
The advantages of nanomaterials are already becoming apparent; consider the strength of graphene, the insulation of aerogel. The idea of a self-repairing, pollutant-neutralising, climate-adapting ‘living’ architecture no longer seems the preserve of fiction. Resistance to the idea of buildings that could grow (as in John Johansen’sforms) or liquefy (like William Katavolos’sdesigns) is almost as much a question of our conservatism as of technical limitations. But as the materials scientist Rachel Armstrong hasobserved, this vision of the city as a biological or ecological manifestation is not so much a leap into the unknown as a maturation of ancient Vitruvian ideals.
Every advance will have repercussions. The idea of walking through walls that simultaneously scan us for illnesses might sound promising – but what else will they monitor? Who will they answer to? What will it mean for human creativity, let alone employment, when there are buildings that can build themselves?•
Donald Trump, an airborne pathogen lodged in America’s small intestine continually forcing the country to violently go No. 2 in its pants, is apparently popular in the bellwether Vigo County of Indiana, at least based on research conducted by Adam Wren of Politico. The Terre Haute community is a place with eerily prescient abilities for selecting American Presidents Republican or Democrat, Dubya or Obama. According to the article, the county’s unbridled passion for the fascist fathead is based almost entirely on false assumptions about the GOP candidate. Trump as a good business person? Trump the self-made man? Holy fuck.
If the people in Vigo really think the country is a disaster, which they seem to, it might behoove them to realize that since they’ve almost always picked the winning candidate, they’re as much to blame as anyone.
An excerpt:
The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters. They were the kind of people who scuttled their Thursday night plans to come to a two-hour event organized by a low-key Republican county chairman. And if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily.
Take Dick and Jane Ames, both 72, for example. The retired air traffic controller and insurance agent who met when they were in high school here are sold on Trump. “He said what I want to hear, and I believe him,” Jane said. “He’s such a good business person, and we need that.” (She did admit, though, that Rubio has a “a cute smile.”)
Dick said he’s not afraid to vote for a Democrat. He voted for Kennedy, after all.
“He voted for Jackie,” Jane said.
“I did,” Dick said.
But for Dick, 2016 is different. “Democrats don’t have anybody. One’s a communist, and Clinton should be in jail.”
And then there was 17-year-old Jared Potts, who wore gray contacts that turned his pupils into pinholes, who will turn 18 next September, and plans to vote for Trump in his first election in November. “He speaks his mind, and I think that might be what the country needs,” he said. “A lot of the presidents don’t really enforce what needs to happen, they just do whatever the country feels like. Other countries just say, ‘do this, do that.’ Trump is just like, ‘no, I want this.’ He doesn’t owe anybody anything. Marco Rubio is paid for. Donald Trump is a self-made person.”•
The problem of widespread technological unemployment is, economically speaking, one of distribution, not scarcity, but a Universal Basic Income is far from a sure thing in America (to be implemented or to work), and not every last person canteach Zumba. What way forward then if the jobs run out? In aPacific•Standard piece, a slate of technologists, academics and journalists assess the challenge of income by the year 2035. The opening:
DEAN BAKER “The corruption of United States politics may be so great that corporations will be able to use new technologies to undermine labor laws on an ever-larger scale as the government pursues macroeconomic policies that are intended to leave much of the labor force unemployed and most of the employed with little bargaining power. This is indeed a very bleak scenario for the future, but it is silly to blame the robots.” —Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
ANDREW SCHRANK “When I think about the ‘jobless future’ predicted by so many observers, I’m reminded of the late Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, who famously quipped that ‘the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.’ … One can thus envision a more auspicious future in which an increasingly educated and empowered global workforce confronts a somewhat chastened corporate elite on democratic terrain that is more favorable to the former.” —Andrew Schrank is a professor of sociology at Brown University•
Midway through COP21 in Paris, it might be instructive to look back 41 years to Scottish landscape architect and planner Ian McHarg sounding all sorts of alarms about the environment to Joan Oliver in a 1974 People magazine piece. McHarg, who died in 2001, didn’t at all appreciate the greening effects of cities, but he certainly understood the fragility of our species and the desperate straits we were putting ourselves in.
An excerpt:
Question:
What’s happening to the environment these days?
Ian McHarg:
We are still screwing it up at a helluva rate. But we’re also diminishing our own lives, which is much the most important thing. I don’t think we have to worry about nature. The worst we could do—have an atomic cataclysm and wipe out mankind—would not wipe out all bacteria, viruses, plants. They would start again. But man is a different story. Man is ephemeral, unlikely and precarious.
…
Question:
Suppose we used intelligence in dealing with this business of energy. Far too much to hope for, but let’s operate on this assumption. What we ought to do is maximize energy sources which neither stress the environment nor stress human beings.
Ian McHarg:
Say we’ll get as much energy as we can by using solar power alone. It involves no new technology. The simplest scheme would be a bloody great water tank and glass on the roof. You could get all the heat you want in almost any part of the United States from direct sunlight, shining through glass panels into water which is circulated through the house. But besides heat we also would like to have television and other amenities which use electric power. So we simply cheapen NASA’s photovoltaic cells which transform sunlight into direct current. They’ve developed them for space, where you can’t send up an electrician to change a fitting. Why can’t we have a version that everybody can put on their roof?
Question:
Could this technique be put into production right away?
Ian McHarg:
Absolutely. If we could only get a lobby. You see our problem is that we have lobbies for oil, for coal, for gas and for the Atomic Energy Commission. We don’t have a lobby for solar energy. We need one. Also, where is our lobby for methane? For chicken dung?
…
Question:
What is your “grand plan”—your “National Ecological Inventory”?
Ian McHarg:
We’d like to find for every person, every institution, every industry the best environment. There should be a national environmental center with a group of scientists who represent all the sciences necessary to understand the total environment of the United States. They’d be required to make a model of that system so they could predict: if you put an atomic reactor here, if you do offshore drilling there, then these are the consequences. I would like to be part of such a dream.
Question:
Do you think America is ready for such visionary proposals?
Ian McHarg:
This sense of man apart from nature—this sense that he’s got to exercise dominion, subjugate—is a deep, deep sickness that’s got to be eradicated somehow. I am horrified by the assumption that the greatness of America is measured by commodity—by automobiles, or the amount of electricity consumed, or whether people jet all over the world. As far as I’m concerned, greatness is measured by compassion, by courage, by gentleness.•
In an interesting Guardian article, Nicola Davis and Rachel David survey a large number of the smart-home technologies currently gestating in the hopes that they may one day quantify you within an inch of your life. The home of the future, even if a few of these tools should come to fruition, is a very helpful and very invasive thing. An excerpt about the bathroom of tomorrow:
Morning ablutions might seem a private affair, but that could all change as technology finds its way into the smallest room in the house.
Among those vying to keep an eye on your vital statistics is Withings, whose “Smart Body Analyzer” makes your old nemesis – the bathroom scales – look positively friendly. Claiming to measure your weight, body fat, heart rate and BMI, it will not only terrorise your tiled floor, but take to your phone: an accompanying app tracks your activity and adjusts your calorie budget for the day to meet your health goals. Think that teatime biscuit looks good? Think again.
Even that most benign of bathroom essentials, the humble loo, is in for an upgrade. Smart toilets have already hit the stores, withAmerican firm DXVanticipating what it somewhat alarmingly terms a “contemporary movement” through its heated seats, night lights and remote controls. But alternatives are already in the offing that can monitor your bodily extrusions better than an over-competitive parent. Japanese company Toto has unveiled itsFlowskytoilet that keeps tabs on your rate of gush, whileMIT SENSEeable City Labis working on a loo that can not only recognise the be-throned, but analyse their excrement to shed light on the state of their health and microbiome.
The bathroom might well become the domain of Big Mother. Water-wasters will be chivvied by warning lights thanks to devices like Drop from Qonserve Technologiesthat displays a red light when the taps have been left running, while bathroom hoggers will be ousted by“water pebbles” that can be programmed to flash red when bathtime’s up. Baths and showers too will be cleaning up their act, withOrbital Systems developing filtersto recycle water as it is used andNebiaoffering a water-saving shower based on an intense mist of water rather than a traditional deluge. And our towels might even be cleaned without H2O: designerLeobardo Armentaenvisages a nifty device that eschews the washing machine for a doughnut-like contraption with a fan to dry the towel and UV light to kill bacteria.•
_______________________________
In 1967, Walter Cronkite looks at the living room, kitchen and home office of the future.
What interests me most about human consciousness is how we’re prone to extreme apostasies, completely abandoning one belief system (or narrative) for another that’s even dicier: cults, terrorist organizations, etc. While a single person can completely lose the thread of reality, two people can seemingly drive each other even further, and a tribe or state or nation further still.
But even on the granular level, even if we don’t go too far to recover and are only casually and temporarily abandoning minute pieces of our world view, we can be conned. Why? Because we want to believe, we want things to improve, we want to be better ourselves and we’d like the same out of others. In that sense, we’d all like to join a cult, different the one we’re already a part of, and those good intentions can end disastrously.
Before humans learned how to make tools, how to farm or how to write, they were telling stories with a deeper purpose. The man who caught the beast wasn’t just strong. The spirit of the hunt was smiling. The rivers were plentiful because the river king was benevolent. In society after society, religious belief, in one form or another, has arisen spontaneously. Anything that cannot immediately be explained must be explained all the same, and the explanation often lies in something bigger than oneself.
The often-expressed view of modern science is that God resides in the cracks between knowledge. That is, as more of the world is explained — and ends up being not so divine after all — the gaps in what we know are where faith resides. Its home may have shrunk, but it will always exist so there will always be room for things that have to be taken on faith — and for faith itself.
Nobody thinks they are joining a cult, David Sullivan explains. “They join a group that’s going to promote peace and freedom throughout the world or that’s going to save animals, or they’re going to help orphans or something. But nobody joins a cult.” We don’t knowingly embraces false beliefs. We embrace something we think is as true as it gets. We don’t set out to be conned. We set out to become, in some way, better than we were before.
That is the true power of belief. It gives us hope.•
Jack Dempsey, boxing champion nearly a century ago, was not a fan of machines, except when they benefited him. The heavyweight fancied himself a John Henry, ready to reduce robots to so many buttons and bolts. In his own way, he was an Ur-Kasparov, believing no “mechanical man” could conquer him, and by extension, humanity. They were both fooling themselves, of course.
Dempsey was outraged that in the Industrial Age, work in mining and blacksmithing had been taken from humans by machines, supposedly softening men, making it impossible to nurture great fighters. He railed against “gymnasium” pugilists, though, of course, those establishments turned out better boxers than the coal industry ever did.
It was funny because Dempsey himself was dandified and softened by the rise of the machines, the recipient of a new nose courtesy of cosmetic surgery, which was intended to make his face more presentable to Hollywood’s motion picture cameras. In the dotage of his association with the sport, when he entered the ring as a celebrity referee rather than a principal, Dempsey voiced his bitter feelings to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in an article on September 26, 1933.
A lot of things that could happen don’t, not if the economics don’t makes sense. Since the 1960s, we’ve known how to automate fast-casual meals, but the cost has been prohibitive (though that seems to be changing now). So when I read that Japan could have half its jobs performed by robots in 20 years, that means it’s theoretically possible, not much more. Of course, with a graying and homogenous population desperately in need of labor replacement, Japan is a culture strongly incentivized to make the transition.
Data analystsNomura Research Institute(NRI), led by researcher Yumi Wakao, figure that within the next 20 years, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be accomplished by robots. Working with Professor Michael Osborne from Oxford University, who hadpreviously investigated the same matterin both the US and UK, the NRI team examined more than 600 jobs and found that “up to 49 percent of jobs could be replaced by computer systems,” according to Wakao.
The team looked at how likely each position could be automated, based on the degree of creativity required.•
It was nearly three years ago that then-Barnes & Noble CEO Mitchell Klipper (now retired) announced the chain would only have 450-500 stores in a decade, and coffee come flying out of my mouth and nose. Now there was an optimistic fellow.
B&N’s current meshuganeh idea for survival in the face of megapower Amazon is to deemphasize books as its main mission and become a “lifestyle brand,” focusing on personal growth or something. Unfortunately, I believe Bezos’ operation also stocks some of those games, toys and electronics new CEO Ron Boire is banking on, except Amazon has cheaper prices and far greater stock.
Mr. Boire, 54, the former chief executive of Sears Canada and a retail veteran who has worked at Brookstone, Best Buy and Toys “R” Us, is under pressure to reverse the fortunes of the beleaguered bookstore chain, which has been stung in recent years by the rise of Amazon, steep losses from its Nook e-reader division and a string of store closings.
To that end, Mr. Boire is leading a push to rebrand Barnes & Noble as more than just a bookstore by expanding its offerings of toys, games, gadgets and other gifts and reshaping the nation’s largest bookstore chain into a “lifestyle brand.”
“Everything we do around learning, personal growth and development fits our brand,” Mr. Boire said. “There’s a lot of opportunity.”
Facing spiraling losses from store closings, Barnes & Noble is searching for ways to increase foot traffic and drive sales. Last month, the chain held a coloring event at stores around the country, where it doled out sample sheets from coloring books and art supplies. It also recently held a national Mini Maker Faire promoting technology literacy at its stores, with coding and 3-D printing workshops.•
Big Auto certainly still maintains a gigantic present advantage over Silicon Valley car companies in the marketplace, as do fossil fuels over electric and human-operated over driverless. But things change. Over the next few decades, these competitions are going to alter the industry in a grand way, and it’ll be interesting to see where the edge ultimately rests. One point to keep in mind: 3D printers could play a big role in the race, possibly making it so that software startups in garages could become automobile startups there, which would be very fitting.
Perhaps the most significant shifting of the automotive tectonic plates is the move to software. The future of the automobile will largely be built by software developers. Yes, existing combustion engine cars have embedded systems with lots of code in them to handle everything from HVAC to automatic transmissions. In fact, the complexity in integrating these many layers of software together is causinglots of consternationat the traditional car companies, given this is not their main areas of expertise. In addition to this, future cars will utilize software in profoundly different ways.
Of course we know that Tesla (currently) and Apple (future) are trying to re-imagine the interface between the driver and car, and their dashboards are (likely to be) gorgeous and vastly improved over the mostly superfluous dials and gauges car manufacturers think we need to see (when was the last time you had to check your RPMs or engine temperature?). Good hardware, software and UX designers will be behind all of that. But future vehicles equipped with ADAS systems and eventually autonomous capabilities will need to make trillions of driving decisions based on lots of sensory data. Vision, LiDAR, sonor and other sensors will combine with real-time streams from the internet, from other vehicles and even from municipal environmental data sources (our portfolio companyINRIXis one such data supplier). These inputs are analyzed in real-time, likely with a combination of local on-board and cloud-based compute resources to make driving decisions. Such complex AI systems will be adaptable machine learning systems which continuously refine their decision-making models.
Understanding this makes it less of a surprise that Google leads the way in autonomous vehicle development today. Google’s search engine is an at-scale example of just such a system and much of Google’s core development expertise is in cloud-based predictive systems.•
The New York Times taken as a whole is an awesome thing, but it’s also special on a granular scale when you find certain writers there who you recognize are doing especially superlative work. I think about the first time I read the late, great David Carr and the brilliant obituarist Margalit Fox, how cool it was to “find” reporters turning out such copy.
The crime writer Michael Wilson is another Times journalist operating on that special level. His last column was a fascinating piece about an otherwise bright man taken to the cleaners by psychics, when, of course, he should have known better, but we all should know better about so many things. Wilson follows that up with an amazing posthumous profile of jaw-dropping con man Michael Forman, a Zelig on the make, who crossed paths with Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger and Annie Leibovitz, among others, while committing crimes, lots of crimes. It’s a beauty.
The opening:
The woman on the telephone had news. Michael Forman was dead. She asked a reporter if there was any known next of kin.
Mr. Forman was a career criminal and con artist who had been in and out of prisons and jails as recently as last year at age 73. The woman, calling this month from the Brooklyn Center care facility, had come acrosscolumns about himin this space in her search for relatives, and asked if the reporter had known Mr. Forman very well.
No. But peeling back the layers of his life last week raised another question: Did anyone? Not his ex-wife and two children. Not his fellow admen of the 1960s. Not the promoters of Woodstock, working with him behind the scenes before the concert. Not scores of jailers. Not the woman whose picture he carried in recent years, telling friends and relatives she was his Russian ballerina girlfriend, less than half his age. Not his neighbors, near the end, in the Manhattan flophouse he called home.
To take a pass at something like a life story of Michael Stephen Forman is to sift through a mix of strange-but-true fact and preposterous fiction, each constantly seeking to upstage the other. His journey from suburban executive to swindler is told by those close to him at one time or another, men and women alternately charmed and repulsed by the born salesman and, in their words, sociopath.•
Last week, Jeb Bush, the willing strangler of Baby Hitler, said this: “Perhaps the most ludicrous comment I’ve ever heard is that climate change is a bigger threat to our country than radical Islamic terrorism.” You would think such utter wrong-mindedness would catapult him to the top of the GOP polls in this clown car of an election season, but apparently even ludicrousness can’t save Jeb from himself.
In a smart Conversation piece, Christopher Grainger calls for a Space Race initiative to combat climate change. He’s not the first to do so, but it clearly needs repeating. While a carbon tax is a very necessary measure, the writer doesn’t think it will necessarily birth solutions as much as contain badness. I think it might do some of both, the tax perhaps leading corporations and inventors to innovate to preclude paying the tax. Either way, it would be great to find out.
From Grainger:
Many influential economists such as Yale’sWilliam Nordhausor Harvard’sGregory Mankiw, want to fight climate change with a carbon tax. The problem is taxes do a better job of preventing bad things than encouraging better replacements.
Standard economics simply considers greenhouse gas emissions as an “externality” – an economic consequence experienced by a party who did not choose to incur it. Negative side effects such as pollution can be addressed by putting a price on them and forcing those responsible to pay – if your factory produces emissions, it’ll cost you. This is the idea behind carbon taxes. It is assumed that, by making polluting technologies relatively more expensive, the market will adjust, generating low-carbon innovations.
But innovation isn’t as simple as this. In particular, the development and spread of new technologies depends on what has gone before and you can’t simply expect a jump into renewable energy, for instance, when everything is geared towards fossil fuels. This idea of “path dependence” is fundamental to understanding technological change.•
Kevin Kelly is correct when his says that our tools and technologies have historically not gone extinct, even when replaced by better ones they just experience an enduring obsolescence. I would guess this ultimately won’t be true, it just seems to be a permanent situation because we don’t mark our time in long enough swaths.
Decades ago the bold and bleeding-edge left behind the manual and pioneered the digital. Now that the “land” has been surveyed, overpopulated, some are retreating from the smartphone to the typewriter, partly driven by surveillance concerns but not solely for the reason. I wouldn’t expect the withdrawal to be much more than a physical and philosophical niche, but it’s a pretty normal reaction.
At theMiami Book Fair earlier this month,Richard Polt arrived equipped with both a PowerPoint presentation and a Groma Kolibri, his vintage “laptop typewriter” made in East Germany in 1956. The antique machine – incidentally, the same model preferred by the writer Will Self – is stylish and durable, less of a prop than a symbol of an insurgency aided and abetted by Polt, author ofThe Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century.
You’d never guess that the mild-mannered professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a radical. Yet, his book opens with a manifesto that asserts the right to “resist the paradigm” and “escape the data stream.”
Polt typed that original declaration in 2012, motivated by an irritation with digital life and the knowledge that lots of young people were doing interesting things with typewriters. “The fact is that they’re turning to something non-digital for something that’s usually done digitally,” he pointed out during an interview prior to the book fair.
Having collected typewriters for more than 20 years, Polt decided to join the “typosphere” and start “typecasting”. Simply put, he uses a typewriter to capture his thoughts, then scans the page and uploads it to his blog. (He maintains two websites:The Classic TypewriterandThe Typewriter Revolution.)
He also began attending and hosting type-ins, which he describes in his book as “public acts of typewriting.”•
Anyone who watches Silkwood at a formative age, seeing Meryl Streep furiously scrubbed and showered, might think nuclear power plants are the devil. And there certainly is the devil in their details: An accident or purposeful act of destruction can not only kill swaths of people but also “salt the earth.” Even in the best-case, calamity-free scenario, the waste will be on our hands for an awful long time.
In a NYT op-ed, Peter Thiel argues in favor of going nuclear to combat climate change, pointing out that it was only human error that brought about horrors like Chernobyl. Sure, but human error (and the machine kind) aren’t going away. Neither are earthquakes or other natural disasters which can overwhelm fail-safe measures.It’s not a flawless solution that won’t make us pay in some painful way. The best argument in its favor is that its costs are far more easily absorbed than are those of rising sea levels.
Knowing that a species-wide catastrophe will certainly result from continued carbon emissions does make it clear that our previous weighing of coal and atomic energy were off-kilter.
An excerpt:
The need for energy alternatives was already clear to investors a decade ago, which is why they poured funding into clean technology during the early 2000s. But while the money was there, the technology wasn’t: The result was a series of bankruptcies and the scandal of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer in California that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a federal guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars. Wind and solar together provide less than 2 percent of the world’s energy, and they aren’t growing anywhere near fast enough to replace fossil fuels.
What’s especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie The China Syndrome, about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled. If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.
Werner Erhard, the shouting est salesman, is still working it, though opinions will vary on what it is.
When you’re born John Rosenberg, rechristen yourself after a Nazi rocketeer (misspelling it!), and unabashedly tell people that you’re a hero, you may be questionable. Nonetheless, the profane self-help peddler who came to wide prominence in the 1970s, with the aid of apostles in entertainment and intellectual circles, from John Denver to Buckminster Fuller, continues apace at 80 and has reinvented himself yet again, after nearly being permanently knocked from his pedestal by health issues, an IRS imbroglio, a shattering 60 Minutes profile and ongoing gamesmanship with Scientologists.
A really fun New York Times piece by Peter Haldeman looks at the latest Erhard iteration, while offering an alternative version of how the Dale Carnegie of sleep deprivation came to rename himself. The opening:
The silver-haired man dressed like a waiter (dark vest, dark slacks) paced the aisle between rows of desks in a Toronto conference room. “If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me,’” he shouted. “Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!”
He paused to wipe his brow with a wad of paper towels. An assistant stood by with a microphone, but he waved her off. “Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?”
No one in the room had a problem with that. The desks were occupied by 27 name-tagged academics from around the world. And in the course of the day, a number of them would take the mike to pose what their instructor referred to as “yeah buts, how ’bouts or what ifs” in response to his pronouncements — but no one had a problem with them.
In some ways, the three-day workshop, “Creating Class Leaders,” recalled an EST training session. As with that cultural touchstone of the 1970s, there was “sharing” and applause. There were confrontations and hugs. Gnomic declarations hovered in the air like mist: “We need to distinguish distinction”; “There’s no seeing, there’s only the seer”; “There isn’t any is.”
But the event was much more civilized than EST. There were bathroom breaks. No one was called an expletive by the teacher.
This is significant because the teacher was none other than the creator of EST, Werner Erhard.•
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In 1973, Denver, substitute host on the Tonight Show, invited his guru to chat.
Timothy Leary believed we needed to be released from the prisons of our minds, and from depressives to migraine sufferers to the “ideaters” of Silicon Valley, some agree to a degree, as they reportedly take microdoses of LSD to “treat” the brain. There doesn’t seem to be in-depth research into how many are currently dropping small amounts of acid (roughly 10% of a “normal” dosage) or if it truly cleanses the doors of perception, but it’s happening on some indeterminate scale.
James Fadiman’s inbox is stuffed with hundreds of emails from people describing how they’ve conquered anxiety or depression or even things like cluster headaches and painful period cramps. Will the scientific establishment ever begin taking their experiences seriously?
The general idea is based on the long-held belief that acid can help you work through some mental problems and see the world in a different way. But taking a full dose of a hallucinogen isn’t for everyone—my sole experience with LSD ended with me crying and eating frozen fish off the floor of a Barcelona hostel, among several other harrowing experiences during a high that lasted 14 mostly excruciating hours.
With microdosing is to take roughly a tenth of a normal dose (about 10-20 micrograms) every four days and then go about your business. Done correctly, there are no hallucinations, no traumatic experiences, not even any sluggishness. Those who do it correctly, Fadiman says, report having better days, feeling less anxious, and sometimes even conquering long-held mental hangups.
“People do it and they’re eating better, sleeping better, they’re often returning to exercise or yoga or meditation. It’s as if messages are passing through their body more easily,” Fadiman told me.•
The sudden popularity of the Internet beginning in 1995 has an antecedent in the sweeping success of an earlier technology, that of the bicycle, which exploded in America in the 1890s in a way that could not have been comprehended just a decade earlier. From an oddity to a staple just like that. Not an intermittent fad like roller skates (and, later, blades), the bike quickly gained such a foothold that it seemed only the emergence of a dependable, affordable electric version was needed for it to become the primary transportation of the future. That’s not how it worked out, of course, but an article in the June 18, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published when that still seemed possible, even likely. As the piece states, some early versions of motorized bicycles were powered by kerosene, and Edison and Tesla were training their talents on the problem. The article’s opening follows.
Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism, is set to be published in the U.S. in early 2016, so some related work has been preceding it in North America, including a desultoryLondon lecture published on Medium and an interview with Paul Kennedy of the CBC. I’m looking forward to reading the book, and I certainly think capitalism is in for a serious reconfiguration, but Mason is attempting to predict the product of an equation not yet completely written. Not an easy thing to do. Predict turbulence and you will almost always be right; foresee complete collapse and you’ll be wrong nearly every time.
An excerpt from the Kennedy interview:
Paul Kennedy:
Haven’t we heard this message before, that capitalism is failing?
Paul Mason:
Well, for 250 years we have had economists predicting the end of capitalism. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx all discussed the problem of capitalism’s self reproduction. How much longer can it go on reproducing itself?
Now, my idea is that it can go on reproducing itself for a long time, as long as it can adapt. So every time there is a downturn or any time a societal business model falls apart, what you usually get is a mixture of technological innovation and some changes in the structure of the economy and we’re off again.
Paul Kennedy:
So when did you get the idea that we had come to the end of the line?
Paul Mason:
If you study the old uprisings — the 1840s in Britain, the 1890s, after the Second World War — what you always see is a synthesis of high-value work and high-value production.
The problem is that information technology makes that very difficult, I argue almost impossible, to do. Because information technology strips away value. Information technology allows us to produce things that could be and should be cheap or free.
And so we are not making, as the Victor record company did in 1910 or so, shellac records. We are making mp3 files, and it is very hard to make money out of them.
Paul Kennedy:
What I have been led to believe is that this new information revolution is going to free me up.
Paul Mason:
What has happened is that information allows work and wages to become delinked. It allows work and life to become blurred. We will answer emails from our boss at midnight.•
Donald Trump possesses the realpolitik of Mayor McCheese and the big-picture vision of David Duke.
You certainly don’t want to believe that the majority of Americans would vote for a vicious bigot who’s smeared POWs, women, disabled people, Mexicans, African-Americans and Muslims. But Trump certainly has found a base: Voters who feel like their sense of privilege is under siege. It is, of course, but not the way they think it is, not from terrorists from the Middle East or laborers from south of the border. Globalization, automation and tax codes that favor the wealthy have devastated the American middle class, largely white and now red in the face. The postwar redistribution of wealth through taxes is long gone, given way to loopholes that favor the inheritors, the land grabbers, the Trumps.
“They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans,” writes Molly Ball in a smart and lucidAtlantic piece about the fear of falling and the rise of bigotry, even fascism, in U.S. Presidential politics. An excerpt:
Four months into his crazed foray into presidential politics, Trump is still winning this thing. And what could once be dismissed as a larkish piece of political performance art has seemingly turned into something darker. Pundits, even conservative ones, say that Trump resembles a fascist. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which some hoped would expose Trump’s shallowness, have instead strengthened him by intensifying people’s anger and fear. Trump has falsely claimed that thousands of Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks from rooftops in New Jersey; he has declined to rule out a national database of Muslims. The other day, a reporter asked Trump if the things he was proposing weren’t just like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Trump replied, “You tell me.”
Some observers still think Trump’s support might be soft. Trump has dipped in the polls a couple of times, after a listless debate performance, for example. Perhaps the people who first glommed on to his celebrity got bored and drifted away. But if so, they didn’t find anybody else they liked. And they came back. And now, they are not leaving.
“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”
These people are not confused. They are sticking with Trump, the only candidate who gets it, who is man enough to show the enemy who’s boss.•
Ron Popeil, the American inventor and TV pitchman behind the Pocket Fisherman and so much more crap you never knew you wanted, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit, providing ample opportunity to underemployed smartasses to sass the Ronco entrepreneur. One example:
Question:
It is true you invented the technology to keep heads alive in jars, but just haven’t released it yet?
The Real Ron Popeil:
Still working on it! Send me your address so I can have someone come pick up your head.•
An excerpt from “The Pitchman,” Malcolm Gladwell’s thoroughly enjoyable 2000 New Yorker profile of a guy who is always fishing:
In the last thirty years, Ron has invented a succession of kitchen gadgets, among them the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and the Popeil Automatic Pasta and Sausage Maker, which featured a thrust bearing made of the same material used in bulletproof glass. He works steadily, guided by flashes of inspiration. This past August, for instance, he suddenly realized what product should follow the Showtime Rotisserie. He and his right-hand man, Alan Backus, had been working on a bread-and-batter machine, which would take up to ten pounds of chicken wings or scallops or shrimp or fish fillets and do all the work–combining the eggs, the flour, the breadcrumbs–in a few minutes, without dirtying either the cook’s hands or the machine. “Alan goes to Korea, where we have some big orders coming through,” Ron explained recently over lunch–a hamburger, medium-well, with fries–in the V.I.P. booth by the door in the Polo Lounge, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘I call Alan on the phone. I wake him up. It was two in the morning there. And these are my exact words: “Stop. Do not pursue the bread-and-batter machine. I will pick it up later. This other project needs to come first.” The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch–”a Rube Goldberg kind of thing” that he’d worked on a year earlier–and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. “That chicken was so good that I said to myself”–and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table–”This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life.” He turned to me: “How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked- turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I’m going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d’oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food”–he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis–”but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don’t have a smoker.”•
