Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
some asshole stole my iphone and I’m selling my appendix, i figured i have no use for it so might as well sell it. im 21 young and beautiful, so my appendix is healthy and in great condition. we can also do a trade off, my appendix for your iphone 4s…the phone has to be in a good condition, im not taking a crappy phone for my beautiful and healthy appendix.
Even in death, Tex Rickard knew how to give them a show. The “them” in this case would be the admiring public who showed up in the tens of thousands to the wake of the boxing promoter, which was held in the ring area of Madison Square Garden. He was most famous for being the honest fight promoter who wouldn’t allow fixes or mismatches, whose affiliation with Jack Dempsey helped create the first million-dollar gates and who, in 1921, brought boxing to American radio audiences for the first time, introducing sports to mass media. But Rickard’s life went far beyond organized fisticuffs. He built both MSG (the third iteration) and Boston Gardens, he was a Texas marshal, an Alaska gold prospector, a gambling hall and bar proprietor, a longtime friend of Wyatt Earp, and the founder and first owner of the NHL’s New York Rangers. The grand man was sadly felled by an appendectomy gone bad a few days after his fifty-ninth birthday.
From the January 9, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about his final “show”:
“In the center of the great arena of Madison Square Garden, that Tex Rickard’s showmanship built, the body of the fight promoter lay in state today while the thousands who had admired him in life filed by in silence for a final view of Tex Rickard in death.
Seventy-five or more a minute they passed the bronze casket under a blanket of red and white flowers. One line to the left and one to the right. One from the 49th St. entrance and the other from 50th St. Five thousand passed and looked in the first hour, 10,000 by noon, some 30,000 before the funeral service began at 2 p.m. The Rev. Caleb Moor, pastor of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church, officiated. The burial was to follow in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx.
Actresses in sable coats, longshoremen, washwomen, policemen, bankers, lawyers, children in arms, millionaires, paupers, racetrack touts, Broadway hangers-on, ministers of the Gospel…it was a strange double procession that turned out toward the 8th Ave. exit or melted away in silence among the seats there to wait for the formal services later on.
Never before had this Madison Square Garden, Rickard’s own ‘temple of sports,’ seen such a phenomenon, and no doubt will never again.
Here had been skeptical crowds, enthusiastic crowds, cheering crowds, savage crowds that snarled and called for blood. Here had been lights and gongs sounding, jazz orchestras playing, the thud of leather against human jaws, the clink of skates on the hockey ice, the whirl of six-day bicycle racers. Today dim lights pierced the shadows up there near the roof, and from the tiny windows came streaks of shadowy daylight that only added to the dark.
$15,000 Casket
The body of Rickard, in immaculate evening clothes, lay in the $15,000 bronze casket on a slightly raised platform in the very center of what had been the prize fighting ring, the rink of the hockey players. From the shoulders down nothing was visible but the roses–roses, red and white. At the casket’s head stood Sgt. Timothy Murphy, longtime friend of the promoter, at a straight and stern attention, without moving muscle as the hours dragged by. Motionless as Rickard himself.
Clustered palms formed a sort of green cathedral nave around the altar on which were the remains of the man who had risen from Texas cow puncher to a world figure. And in dimness nothing else was visible except the spot of green, the dull, motley moving files, the flowers, the somber purple and the black splotches of crepe and here and there the bright blue uniform of a Garden attendant.
And for sound, only the shuffling feet of thousands of silent mourners.
Outside the crowd grew and grew. There had been perhaps 5,000 when the doors were thrown open shortly after 10 a.m. A bit of unruliness developed then when the mounted police in an effort to line the mourners up in twos rode up on the sidewalks. Soon this quieted down. By twos and twos they formed thereafter, beginning at the side entrances and extending gradually out to 8th Ave., to 9th and to 10th. Shortly after midday some 15,000 were waiting to follow those who had already entered.
Earlier in the morning the young Mrs. Rickard had come in with Jack Dempsey and Walter Field, assistant and close friend of the dead man. They sat down beside the casket. For a brief interval there, alone with these two men in the amphitheater, Mrs. Rickard wept over her dead. There was a gigantic piece of carnations and forget-me-nots from the employees of the Garden. The New York Rangers, Rickard’s own hockey team, sent a huge wreath, and their rivals, the Americans, offered another. … Many of the big dealers in New York found themselves stripped of flowers before midnight as a steady stream of orders poured in. Smaller dealers were asked to contribute and did. And all night long, even into this morning, huge pieces of floral offerings were being carried into the cavernlike old Garden, which had suddenly become a glimmering, brilliant bed of beauty.
Draped in Beauty
The Garden entrance was draped in black. Inside there were patches of black. Inside, however, were the flowers, and all the somberness of the crepe could not take away their brilliance. They said that even the Valentino funeral, which brought thousands of floral pieces, did not approach the Rickard ceremony.”
Tags: Jack Dempsey, Rev. Caleb Moor, Sgt. Timothy Murphy, Tex Rickard
From “Reading in a Connected Age,” Neil Levy’s Practical Ethics post which argues that the surfeit of information on the Internet isn’t ending literacy but actually changing it in a necessary way:
“Here I want to consider one potential negative effect of the internet. In a recent blog post, Tim Parks argues that the constant availability of the temptations of the internet has led to a decline in the capacity to focus for long periods, and therefore in the capacity to consume big serious books. Big serious books are still written and read, he notes, but ‘the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,’ Their prose has a ‘battering ram quality,’ which enables readers to consume them through frequent interruptions.
But of course one would expect – fervently hope – that books written in the 21st century are radically different from those written 100 years ago. After all, if you want to read Dickens and Dostoevsky and the like, there is plentiful quality literature from that period surviving: why would a contemporary writer add to those stocks? Its worth noting, as Francesca Segal points out, that Dickens’ own work was originally published in serial form: that is, in the bite-size chunks that Parks think characterise the contemporary novel in an age of reduced concentration spans.
Perhaps there is something to Parks’ hypothesis that the way the novel has changed reflects changes in the capacities of contemporary readers, but making that claim is going to take careful study. You can’t make it from the armchair. Without proper data and proper controls, we are vulnerable to the confirmation bias, where we attend to evidence that supports our hypothesis and overlook evidence that doesn’t, and many other biases that make these kinds of anecdotal reports useless as evidence.
Here is what may be happening to Parks. He is finding himself aware of a loss of focus more than he used to be. But is that evidence that he is actually losing focus more often than previously?”
Tags: Neil Levy
From Eric Mack at Forbes, comments from Elon Musk about his ambition to establish a city on Mars within a dozen years:
“‘I’m hopeful that the first people can be taken to Mars in 10-12 years,’ Musk said on CNBC this week. ‘I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur.’
But just getting to the red planet is not nearly enough for Musk, who says it’s more important to have ‘a self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life multi-planetary.’
He says if humans fail to become a multi-planet species, we will inevitably just hang out here on Earth until some sort of extinction-level event occurs.
But figuring out how we get to Mars and set up shop there is just the beginning of Musk’s grandiose vision. In the past, he’s also said that we may need to figure out ways to bio-engineer our food and even ourselves to make Mars work for us.”
Daniel Keyes, the brain-centric novelist who wrote Flowers for Algernon, just passed away. I would suppose the story will take on even greater resonance as we move closer to genuine cognitive enhancement. The origin story behind his most famous novel, from Daniel E. Slotnik in the New York Times:
“The premise underlying Mr. Keyes’s best-known novel struck him while he waited for an elevated train to take him from Brooklyn to New York University in 1945.
‘I thought: My education is driving a wedge between me and the people I love,’ he wrote in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie and I (1999). ‘And then I wondered: What would happen if it were possible to increase a person’s intelligence?’
After 15 years that thought grew into the novella Flowers for Algernon, which was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959 and won the Hugo Award for best short fiction in 1960.
By 1966 Mr. Keyes had expanded the story into a novel with the same title, which tied for the Nebula Award for best novel that year. The film, for which Mr. Robertson won the Academy Award for best actor, was released in 1968.
Flowers for Algernon went on to sell more than five million copies and to become a staple of English classes.”
Tags: Daniel E. Slotnik, Daniel Keyes
In his Foreign Affairs essay, “The Age Of Entropy,” Randall L. Schweller takes the appreciation for creative destruction to strange new heights, arguing that world wars–you know, those things that killed tens of millions–had their good side, too, helping to create lasting peace. Yeesh. Not only is it abhorrent from a humanistic viewpoint, but it’s historically incorrect. WWI and its aftermath actually helped create another devastating war just two decades later. From Schweller:
‘CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
How did we get here? The shift began in the twentieth century, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the spread of economic globalization, which together have made war among the great powers unthinkable. As many scholars have pointed out, the world has enjoyed the longest period of relative peace in recorded history. The absence of cataclysmic wars among great powers has obviously been a great boon. But it has also come at a real cost. For the past several centuries, wars between the extant power in the international system and the rising challenger or challengers have occurred every hundred years or so, crowning a new leading power, which is responsible for organizing international politics and shouldering the burdens of global leadership.
In crowning new kings, these hegemonic wars also obliterated the old orders, wiping the institutional slate clean so that a new global architecture, better suited to the times, could be built from scratch. The wars were thus a good thing in some sense, because they replenished the international system with new energy in service of world order and lasting peace. In their absence, we no longer have a force of ‘creative destruction’ capable of resetting the world. And just as seas become foul without the blowing of the winds, prolonged peace allows inertia and decay to set in.”
Tags: Randall L. Schweller
A passage from one of the most infamous TV interviews ever, Stanley Siegel questioning a seriously inebriated Truman Capote in 1978, a time before the commodification of dysfunction was prevalent.
Tags: Stanley Siegel, Truman Capote
From the June 17, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Greeley, Col.–After lying in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy for probably more than a thousand years, ten grains of wheat sent to a Greeley farmer and planted west of here, germinated. From it eight stalks of wheat have grown and this promises a variety of wheat superior to any growing in this country.”
In 1990, during the mercifully short-lived Deborah Norville era of the Today Show, Michael Crichton stops by to discuss his just-published novel, Jurassic Park.
Tags: Deborah Norville, Michael Crichton
Scarcity is a reason but not the only reason why an 1856 1¢ stamp is about to sell for who knows how many millions of dollars. The opening of an explanation from the Economist:
“ON JUNE 17th the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp, the only surviving example of a penny issue printed in the South American British colony in 1856, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, a large auction house, in New York. Each of the three times it has previously been sold at auction it has set a new record for a single stamp, and the expectation this time is that it will do so again by a very wide margin. Pre-auction estimates are that it will fetch in the region of $20m, almost ten times as much as the price achieved by the current record-holder, the Treskilling Yellow, in 1996. That would make it the most valuable human artefact (by weight) ever sold, says the auction house. Why have prices for very rare stamps risen so high?
The broad reason is that number of extremely wealthy people in the world has soared in recent years.”
The (relative) mania surrounding Thomas Piketty and his unlikely bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has stretched from spring to summer. From a report of his sold-out lecture on Monday in London by the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries:
“Piketty wants us to realise that the 20th century was unusual: rapid, unrepeatable population increases that helped accelerate growth, combined with shocks (two world wars, the Great Depression) that reduced the value of capital and so kept inequalities low. These are exceptions in human history rather than the rules. The 21st century won’t be like the 20th, the professor predicts. If we don’t act, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the very few will resemble the norms in the early 19th or 18th centuries.
Someone asks Piketty if what Margaret Thatcher proposed in the 1980s was right, namely that if you reduce inequality you reduce growth. ‘I have no problem with inequality per se,’ he replies. ‘Up to a point it can be a motivation for growth. When inequalities grow more extreme, it can be no good for growth. It leads to the perpetuation of inequality. Over time that stops mobility from happening.'”
Tags: Stuart Jeffries, Thomas Piketty
For all the flak the government takes–even by plenty of those in the government–its record of research investment is pretty spectacular. We’re not talking about only the Internet but the transistor itself, among many other innovations. As the anti-government forces have chipped away at such state-sponsored R&D, larger tech companies are trying to birth their own Bell Labs. From Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:
“Silicon Valley, where toddler-aged companies regularly sell for billions, may be the most vibrant sector of the U.S. economy, fueling a boom in markets from housing to high-end toast (how many $4-a-slice artisanal bread bars does a place really need?). But as recent innovations — apps that summon cabs, say, or algorithms that make people click on ads — have been less than world-changing, there is a fear that the idea machine is slowing down. And while Silicon Valley mythology may suggest that modern-day innovation happens in garages and college dorm rooms, its own foundations were laid, in large part, through government research. But during the recession, government funding began to dwindle. The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.
Perhaps more crucial, the invention of much of the stuff that really created jobs and energized the economy — the Internet, the mouse, smartphones, among countless other ideas — was institutionalized. Old-fashioned innovation factories, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were financed by large companies and operated under the premise that scientists should be given large budgets, a supercomputer or two and plenty of time to make discoveries and work out the kinks of their quixotic creations. Back then, after all, Xerox and AT&T, their parent companies, made so much money that few shareholders cared about the cost. ‘It’s the unique ingredient of the U.S. business model — not just smart scientists in universities, but a critical mass of very smart scientists working in the neighborhood of commercial businesses,’ says Adrian Slywotzky, a partner at Oliver Wyman, the global management consulting firm. ‘Then that investment was cut way back.’ By the ’80s, AT&T was being taken apart by the government; Xerox PARC, like other labs, was diminished by impatient shareholders and, in some cases, the very technology it helped create.
Most of the insurgent tech companies, with their razor focus on advancing the Internet, were too preoccupied to set up their own innovation labs. They didn’t have much of an incentive either. Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired. ‘M. and A. is the new R. and D.’ became a popular catchphrase.
But in the past few years, the thinking has changed, and tech companies have begun looking to the past for answers. In 2010, Google opened Google X, where it is building driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, balloons that deliver the Internet and other things straight out of science fiction.”
When earthlings start traveling to Mars, stratospheric surgery will become a necessity. From “Robotic Surgery in Space” at the Medical Bag:
“Traditional surgery in space would be a perilous exercise. Besides the difficulty of performing delicate procedures using multiple tools floating around in zero gravity, the possibility that bodily fluids could escape, float away, and contaminate equipment would be disastrous. The use of a small robot that could perform procedures in vivo would lessen these dangers. This robotic device is designed to enter the body all at once through a specialized port that would avoid loss of insufflation and reduce complexity. It would be programmed to facilitate multiple minimally invasive surgical procedures, including appendectomies, cholecystectomies, and the repair of gastric ulcer perforations and intra-abdominal bleeding due to trauma. Upon completion of the procedure, the robot can be removed easily, along with any retrieved specimens.
Currently, the device is designed to be controlled remotely by a surgeon on Earth, who would manipulate the robot inside a patient in low-Earth orbit, such as on the International Space Station. “
As if the millions upon millions of fatalities caused by World War I and the Great Pandemic of 1918 wasn’t awful enough, that concurrence of tragedies struck another blow to humanity, thinning out the applicants for American circus freak shows. But sideshow scout Nicholas Sally trudged on bravely, armed with dubious knowledge about genetics, as he looked for fresh talent in Europe. At journey’s end, he provided details of his findings to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for an insane article in the February 20, 1921 edition. The story:
“Berlin–Nicholas Sally, freak hunter for the Dreamland sideshows at Coney Island and the Ringling Circus, has discovered one family in Berlin that did not suffer for lack of food during the war. It is made up of four brothers and two sisters, all of whom are under 23 years of age and weigh nearly 50 pounds each. Sally has arranged to take one of the brothers to America, along with a dozen other freaks he has picked up in various European countries, for exhibition during the coming season.
‘They have been hard to find this season,’ he said, ‘for a great many died during the war. Human skeletons are the scarcest of all. I have combed Hungary, Austria, Poland and Germany, which head the list of so-called poverty-stricken countries, but have not found a single skeleton.’
A man with a revolving head from Austria, a little woman who has fins instead of arms and two giants from Germany, a pair of midgets from Hungary, an English dwarf and a dog-faced man from Poland are the headliners of the collection of freaks that will start for America as soon as passport difficulties are cleared up.
‘Europe is the place to come for the special sideshow attractions,’ said Sally, who believes that the intermingling of races and intermarriages within families here are partly responsible for their great abundance. They plead for a chance to go to America for a year, and possibly longer if they make good, and get passage paid both ways, but demand much higher wages than they are paid here, for they believe the United States is a land where gold flows freely. Some of the freaks will be exhibited in Philadelphia and New York until the circus and Coney Island seasons open.
E.T. Benson also is in Germany making arrangements to ship to the United States the animals and trainers John Ringling obtained from the Hagenbeck Menagerie at Hamburg a few weeks ago.”
Tags: E.T. Benson, Nicholas Sally
I’m trying to get over a fear of tarantulas and I was hoping a tarantula owner might let me visit with their 8-legged friend. I don’t need much time, just 15 minutes or so to hear about your tarantula and pet/hold it. I know it’s a strange request, but I’d really like to get over this fear asap. Willing to travel to NJ.
Thanks!
“Willing to travel to N.J.”
Wilt Chamberlain was a remarkable athlete (basketball, volleyball, track and field), but it’s probably a good thing he never realized his dream to fight Muhammad Ali. Howard Cosell presides over the ridiculousness, as he often did.
From East Side Boxing:
Springtime, 1971. Inside an office within the Houston Astrodome, a most unusual negotiation is about to take place. Seated at one end of the table is Muhammad Ali, former Heavyweight Champion of the World and self-proclaimed greatest fighter of all time. Next to him: Bob Arum, the former Justice Department attorney turned boxing promoter who had worked with Ali since his 1966 fight with George Chuvalo.
A few minutes later, they are joined by one of the most imposing figures in all of sport, the towering titan of professional basketball Wilt Chamberlain. Ali and Chamberlain knew each other well and had appeared together on numerous occasions in the past, from television talk shows to press conferences addressing civil rights issues. The purpose of this meeting, however, was far different from their previous encounters.
Today no media cameras are present, no reporters scramble for sound bites. The two most famous athletes in the world isolated themselves within the cavernous empty stadium to quietly discuss an event without precedent in the annals of sport. For on this day, Muhammad Ali and Wilt Chamberlain will agree to face each other in a 15-round boxing match, to be held in the Astrodome on July 26, 1971.
For Chamberlain, fighting Ali represented the pinnacle in his quest to conquer not only his own sport, but the entire sporting world.•
One of the Frenchest paragraphs ever, from an Economist article about the nation’s current train-union strike:
“Yet the timing of this strike, reaching into the baccalauréat week, is also a public-relations risk. Every June, as part of a national ritual, over half a million school-leavers sit down to take the first bac exams. For half of them, this involves a four-hour philosophy exam based around a single essay question; this morning’s choices included ‘Do we live in order to be happy?’ The prospect of pupils arriving late due to the train strike has prompted much indignation and an emergency scheme by the SNCF to encourage car-pooling and other alternatives.”
A place where Wish Lists comes true, the Amazon fulfillment center is chiefly guided by intelligence that’s artificial. And that will only become truer with each passing year. From Marcus Wohlsen’s Wired article which peeks inside Bezos’ humming Phoenix warehouse:
“Through the engineering of its fulfillment centers, Amazon has built the world’s most nimble infrastructure for the transfer of things, a logistics platform that dramatically amplifies any one person’s ability to move matter to anyone else. As Amazon expands that capacity to include its own trucks and someday flying drones, the physical reach it can offer other businesses extends even further. Much in the way cloud services and the data centers that house them have become the foundation of doing business online, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have the potential to become the networked hubs of the consumer economy, the biggest of big boxes that free up businesses to focus on making things rather than moving them.
An Overarching Brain
Entering the fulfillment center in Phoenix feels like venturing into a realm where the machines, not the humans, are in charge. Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.
At 1.2 million square feet, PHX6 consists of two fulfillment operations working as mirror images of one another, a redundancy that lets the FC scale up or down in response to rising and falling demand. A central mezzanine provides panoramic views of both sides of the warehouse, the back walls obscured in the distance. An impossible-to-trace web of conveyor belts and rollers shuttle the ubiquitous yellow totes–the basic logistical units of an Amazon FC–from one point to another, filled with goods destined for warehouse shelves or for customers.
Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.”
Tags: Jeff Bezos, Marcus Wohlsen
In “The view From the Year 2000,” a 1971 Life article, Buckminster Fuller, ever the technological positivist, saw skies that were blue and cloudless. Our gadgets have grown much more powerful, but we’re still waiting for his future to arrive. An excerpt:
“A lot of what you’re hearing today is absolute nonsense,” he said. “The population bomb. There is no population bomb! Industrialization is the answer to the population problem. In colonial times, the average American family had 13 children, but now that we can count on the little ones growing up healthy, the average is about two. That’s evolution working–where industrialization occurs, the birth rate simply goes down. Now, of course, you have the environmentalists telling you that you can’t industrialize any further because of pollution, which is more nonsense. Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they’d be collecting.
“Margaret Mead gets quite cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing very important things because they’re so worried and excited and I’m going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we’re dealing with something much bigger than we’re accustomed to understanding, we’re on a very large course, indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there’s no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.
“These social adjustments we’re witnessing are very big. They are marvelous, the most marvelous part of the whole show. They don’t get done overnight, but they’re actually happening so fast I can’t believe it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a fantastic amount of change, and I know we’re going through something very extraordinary in the history of the world. We’re going through some great flume, and if we will only hold on and have patience and respect the integrity of the universe itself, we’ll make it beautifully together.”•
Tags: Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead
As our society becomes more automated, we can be very productive and wealthy in the aggregate with many people being left behind. Having tens of millions of new Americans with healthcare may help drive jobs in the short run, but diagnostics, like many other areas of current employment, will soon be left to the machines.
In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Aeppel profiles economist frenemies Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, who see our financial future in starkly different ways. The opening:
“EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.
Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.
These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.
The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask.
‘I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster,’ Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades.
‘What’s the evidence of that?’ snapped Mr. Gordon. ‘There isn’t any.’
The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: ‘Extending life without curing Alzheimer’s means people who can walk but can’t think.'”
Tags: Joel Mokyr, Robert Gordon, Timothy Aeppel
Seeing the painful family dispute over Casey Kasem’s dying body reminded me of all the rumors and accusations that surrounded Ted Williams’ death a dozen years ago. The late baseball great’s grieving family experienced a serious rift when two of his children, John-Henry and Claudia, chose to have their patriarch’s remains cryonically frozen despite that action not being outlined in his will. Another child, Bobby-Jo Ferrell, disagreed vehemently with the decision. The family feud was quickly attended by lawyers and a media furor.
Claudia, a nurse, has just published a book to try to address what she believes are misconceptions about the controversy. She recently sat for an interview with ESPN’s Buster Olney, contending that her father had an abiding interest in cryonics, which stemmed in part from his friendship with astronaut John Glenn. Olney asks absolutely zero tough questions, which is disappointing, but here’s a transcript of Claudia Williams’ comments:
“Daddy met John Glenn when he was flying in Korea. He actually was his wingman. Daddy would protect John Glenn wherever he was flying. Dad flew in back because pilots oftentimes can’t see very well behind them, so that was Dad’s responsibility. John Glenn is quoted as saying Dad was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. They forged a friendship during the Korean War, and throughout their whole lives they stayed friends, and when it came time for John Glenn to go back up in space, you know, the two of them got together and started talking, and the stories that they shared are probably one of the reasons we became even more interested than we already were in science. A lot of people don’t realize this but they did an extensive amount of research and tests on John Glenn when he went up in space, and it was all related to aging and reversing the aging process. Now think about that–that’s huge. And Dad became very interested in that, very intrigued, and he kept telling John-Henry, ‘You get on that World Wide Web of yours because I want to know exactly what’s going on with John, I want to know what they’re doing, everything they’re researching.’ … It’s not like we woke up one day and said, ‘You know, we’re all going to get cryogenically preserved.’ No, not at all. It was a journey. It’s a transition that happened through life and life’s painful experiences that we finally got to that point, and especially since you consider, you know, we didn’t grow up with religion, and Dad was such a scientific man.”
Tags: Bobby-Jo Ferrell, Buster Olney, Claudia Williams, John-Henry Williams, Ted Williams
In this post, I used some 1971 photos of Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson playing LPs at his Mulholland Drive house, which were taken by the legendary Los Angeles photojournalist Julian Wasser, who is the Weegee of the West, sure, but also a thing all his own, ably adapting to shifting scenes, from street to crime to Hollywood. Wasser just published a book of his work, The Way We Were. Three more of his images follow.
Roman Polanski, 1969
From “Photo Ops,” Dana Goodyear’s excellent W piece:
Wasser’s first real camera was a Contax, which his father gave him when he was a junior in high school in the 1950s. He got himself a scanning radio and tuned in to the frequency used by the police. The first pictures he sold, while still a student at Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school in Washington, D.C., were of crime scenes. “Crime’s exciting, and it sells,” he says. He got a gig at the Associated Press and met Arthur Fellig, the legendary photographer known as Weegee. “He came in plugging some film,” Wasser continues. “He was my hero.” From Weegee, he learned to use a Speed Graphic. “He was this real gruff, tough, down-to-earth guy, the epitome of a hard-nosed photographer, a street guy on the level of the cops he worked with. He used to beat them to the crime scene.”
That sensibility—an instinct for drama and the decisive moment, the dab of beauty with a smear of grit—put Wasser in the way of news. He was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and was with the crowd watching as Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker, was taken into custody by police. In 1969, three days after the actress Sharon Tate was murdered, Wasser, on assignment from Life, went to the crime scene on Cielo Drive with Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, a pair of detectives, and a celebrity psychic searching for vibrational clues. (The Manson family hadn’t yet been named as suspects.) Wasser took a picture of Polanski, crouched and grim-faced beside a door smudged with fingerprint dust, where the word pig had been written in Tate’s blood. “I felt so bad for Polanski and for being there photographing it,” Wasser remembers. “He was just shattered.” The psychic, meanwhile, stole Wasser’s Polaroids and sold them to the tabs. Later, during the case brought against Polanski for having sex with a minor at Nicholson’s house on Mulholland, Wasser photographed the judge.•
Bernard Cornfeld, mutual-fund manager, and friends, 1974.
From Cornfield’s 1995 New York Times obituary by Diana B. Henriques:
Born in Istanbul in August 1927, Bernard Cornfeld was the son of a Romanian actor who moved his family to the United States in the early 1930’s. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College. By 1954, he had become a mutual fund salesman, entering the industry just as mutual funds were experiencing their first strong surge of growth since the stock market crash of 1929.
In 1956, he moved to Paris, planning to sell shares of popular American mutual funds, chiefly the Dreyfus Fund, to Americans living abroad. Using his trademark recruiting challenge — “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” — he built Investors Overseas Services. At its peak, it was a far-flung organization that included a vast and intensely loyal sales force, a secretive Swiss bank, an insurance unit, real estate interests and a stable of offshore investment funds operating beyond the reach of any single country’s securities laws.
By 1970, his company had pumped millions of overseas dollars into the American mutual fund industry, initially through its aggressive sales force and then through Mr. Cornfeld’s trailblazing Fund of Funds, an offshore fund that invested in other mutual funds’ shares.
Mr. Cornfeld gave now-famous money managers like Fred Alger their start by selecting them to run funds owned by the Fund of Funds, which at its peak had more than $450 million invested in American mutual funds.
He also acquired enough financial power over American mutual funds and skirted close enough to the edges of Federal securities laws to attract the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 1965 accused him and his company of violating American securities laws.
In 1967, the company settled the commission’s complaint by agreeing to wind up or sell all its American operations. The Fund of Funds also agreed to buy no more than 3 percent of any American mutual fund, the limit imposed by Federal mutual fund law.
After leaving the American market, Mr. Cornfeld continued to live lavishly, and his financial empire appeared strong until early 1970, when it suddenly disclosed that it was short of cash and had substantially overestimated its 1969 profits.•
Farrah Fawcett, 1976.
The opening of “Super-Powered Love,” Lois Armstrong’s 1976 People article:
It would take a network in a ratings crisis to create a six million dollar man, with one telescopic-zoom eye and three nuclear-powered prosthetic limbs—the role Lee Majors plays so stoically on ABC every Sunday night. But, still mercifully, only God can make a Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as Lee’s offscreen wife calls herself. “She’s so gorgeous,” Majors glows, “she’s like a little girl. So cute, so beautiful inside, you wanna…” His natural reticence stifles further elaboration. The whole preposterousness of his series and its success (it shot from the Nielsen cellar last season to No. 5) may also have gotten to his brain and consciousness—which never were exactly “bionic.”
Farrah’s looks are indeed breath-stopping, and her own career is rocketing in commercials (Noxzema, Wella Balsam, Ultra-Brite); TV (as David Janssen’s girl next door on Harry O plus a starring part in a pilot); and film (playing with Michael York in the upcoming Logan’s Run). So, when queried about having children, Farrah replies, yes, but not for a couple of years, and Lee quips, “We already have bids from people who would like to have pick of the litter.”
In the meantime, Majors has begat, if nothing else, a spin-off series premiering Jan. 14 that he calls The Bionic Rip-Off—the official ABC title is The Bionic Woman. Lee’s dubiousness owes to the fear that the new show could dilute the Six Million Dollar Man ratings already perhaps in jeopardy. Part of Majors’ rise can be attributed to this fall’s plop from favor of his CBS competition, Cher, but she is almost certain to make at least a one-week Nielsen rebound next month among viewers curious to see the return of ex-husband Sonny, not to mention the TV premiere of her now gravid midriff. Lee may also begrudge the sweeter contract the bionic female, actress Lindsay Wagner, has chivied out of Universal. She, unlike Majors, negotiated a sizable share of any merchandising royalties—Six Million Dollar Man dolls were supposedly the hottest item in toy biz at Christmas, and he barely collected a pittance. Lindsay was also guaranteed five feature films—which could rankle Lee, because he blames his TV stereotyping for thwarting his own movie career.
Majors, 36, professes to be less threatened by his wife’s sudden stardom at 28—as long as it doesn’t interfere with her cooking his nightly supper.•
Tags: Dana Goodyear, Diana B. Henriques, Julian Wasser, Lois Armstrong, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate
Two World Cup-related excerpts from Franklin Foer, New Republic editor and football fanatic. The first is from an Ask Me Anything at Reddit and the second from his excellent TNR article about the mixed legacy of Brazilian soccer, including a largely forgotten chapter in Pele’s life.
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“Question:
Tags: Franklin Foer, Pelé
Atheist crusader Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who lived furiously and died strangely, was right that children should not be forced to pray in public school, but that doesn’t mean she was an ideal parent. O’Hair had dissent in her family that she would not brook: Her eldest son, William, became a religious and social conservative in 1980. His mother, showing characteristic outrage, labeled him a “postnatal abortion” and cut off all communication. From a 1980 People article about the familial rift:
“He traces her atheism to that self-absorption and hubris and to an aggressive antiestablishment streak that led her (with her two sons) into a variety of left-wing causes—even, he claims, to the Soviet embassy in Paris in search of exile. Rejected by Moscow, she retreated angrily back home to Baltimore where, as he puts it, ‘The rebel found a cause in prayer at school.’
As the pawn of her crusade, Bill was excoriated by fellow students, given extra homework by his teachers and baited into schoolyard fights; once, he remembers, some classmates tried to push him in front of a bus. ‘While Madalyn was busy with her rhetoric, newsletters, fund raising and publicity,’ he says, ‘I was fighting for my life.’ At 17, Murray ran afoul of the law. He eloped with a girl despite an injunction won by her parents that prohibited him from seeing her. Police intervened, and both Bill and his mother were charged with assaulting them. (The young woman left Bill and their infant daughter two years later.)
Throughout Bill’s life his mother’s reputation has been a millstone. Drafted a year after his marriage broke up, he was subjected to grueling Army interrogation about Madalyn’s activist causes—and asked to sign a statement repudiating her left-wing politics (he did). After discharge he took a series of jobs in airline management and remembers living in fear that his employers would find out who his mother was and fire him. He complains she even threatened to expose him herself when he balked at giving her discounted airplane tickets that were due him as an employee.
In 1969 he asked Madalyn for his daughter, whom she had kept while he was in the Army. She refused, they fought a custody suit and Madalyn won. Still, in 1974, when her second husband was ailing and the AAC foundering, Bill agreed to come to Austin and help out. He did so with great success—and increasing doubts. He multiplied the AAC’s annual income, which underwrote a flurry of new lawsuits—over church tax exemptions, the words ‘under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ on coins. But Bill says he began to wonder: ‘Why couldn’t we buy a new X-ray machine for a hospital? Why did we have to buy a new Cadillac and mobile home for Madalyn, or sue somebody to prevent prayer in outer space? I started to think it was because my mother was basically negative and destructive.’ He began to drink too much—’diving into the bottle to forget,’ as he describes it. Six months after he came to Austin, Madalyn turned her animus on him once too often. ‘I told her to get f——-,’ he recalls, ‘and got the hell out.’
By that time Bill was an alcoholic. He had a new marriage and a new job as an airline management consultant, but felt his life was falling apart. “
The opening of Tom Meltzer’s new Guardian article about the advent of upwardly mobile robots leaving the assembly line for information-rich jobs:
“Last year, reporters for the Associated Press attempted to figure out which jobs were being lost to new technology. They analysed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed experts, software developers and CEOs. They found that almost all the jobs that had disappeared in the past four years were not low-skilled, low-paid roles, but fairly well-paid positions in traditionally middle-class careers. Software was replacing administrators and travel agents, bookkeepers and secretaries, and at alarming rates.
Economists and futurists know it’s not all doom and gloom, but it is all change. Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne have predicted computerisation could make nearly half of jobs redundant within 10 to 20 years. Office work and service roles, they wrote, were particularly at risk. But almost nothing is impervious to automation. It has swept through shop floors and factories, transformed businesses big and small, and is beginning to revolutionise the professions.
Knowledge-based jobs were supposed to be safe career choices, the years of study it takes to become a lawyer, say, or an architect or accountant, in theory guaranteeing a lifetime of lucrative employment. That is no longer the case. Now even doctors face the looming threat of possible obsolescence.”