“We’re Very Idealistic, Sometimes Impractical”

January 20, 2014 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

A vinyl rarity to be sure, here’s the audio of David Frost Talks to Bobby Kennedy, an LP recording of the British host interviewing the Presidential hopeful just prior to the latter’s 1968 assassination. It’s difficult to understand in retrospect why Frost was considered so suspect when he was preparing to interview the post-resignation Richard Nixon in 1977; he had always been deeply involved in American politics of the era, even convincing Nixon to insinuate himself into a high-stakes 1972 Cold War chess match.

Amusing to note that even a deeply thoughtful politician like Kennedy fell for the myth that the “real America” is located in less-urban small towns. Rubbish. We’re all America, each of us.

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“Even She Hadn’t Expected The Cash To Make Much Difference”

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

Cherokee reservation, North Carolina, 1939.

Did you grow up sort of poor? I did. Not on food stamps but close. Not in the projects but a couple of buildings away. It leaves a mark. The general theory of poverty has long been that if a poor person received a windfall of cash, it wouldn’t matter because the poverty resides within them. They would be back to square one and in need in no time. A study by Duke epidemiologist Jane Costello about casino money being dispensed to previously poor Cherokee Indians pushed back at that idea to an extent that surprised even the academic herself. From Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s New York Times op-ed, “What Happen When the Poor Receive a Stipend?“:

“When the casino opened, Professor Costello had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half.

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

When Professor Costello published her first study, in 2003, the field of mental health remained on the fence over whether poverty caused psychiatric problems, or psychiatric problems led to poverty. So she was surprised by the results. Even she hadn’t expected the cash to make much difference. ‘The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,’ she told me. ‘This one had quite large effects.’

She and her colleagues kept following the children. Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.”

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“Press 1 To Yaw And Press 3 To Claw Grab”

January 20, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Placing an image from a commercial for Pele’s Soccer Atari video game in a post yesterday reminded of the gag game, George Plimpton’s Video Falconry, a faux ColecoVision cartridge that was hatched in the wonderfully odd mind of John Hodgman a few years ago. What makes the joke so special is that while it’s a ridiculous concept, it feels like it could be real because it plays on truths of both Plimpton (who was a wonderfully wooden Intellivision pitchman) and ’80s gaming (which wasn’t directed only by market research but by hunches, sometimes awful hunches). You have to be of a certain age and culture to get it, but if you are, it may be the most brilliantly specific joke ever. 

It was all over the web in 2011, so many of you are probably familiar with Tom Fulp’s realization of Hodgman’s joke, but have a look at this video in case you missed it or want to relive it.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 19, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Where are you getting this shit?"

“Where are you getting this shit?”

I hate my drug dealer (Brooklyn)

I wish I never fucking met you. When I went to buy from you the first time, I couldn’t believe how cheap your prices were and how you were willing to meet anywhere, anytime. This is surely a bust, I thought. At least another rip-off maybe. But, no. You’re always up, willing to meet and in supply with low prices. Where are you getting this shit? Don’t you have a life? You’re ruining mine. 

“Yes, I Am A Brain Surgeon”

January 19, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is insane. Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman, on the set of Young Frankenstein in 1974, being interviewed really badly for Spanish TV.

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Old Print Article: “Squallers–The Baby Show At Midget Hall,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1877)

January 19, 2014 in Old Print Articles | Permalink

"The dog baby barks when it wants food."

“The dog baby barks when it wants food.”

A misbegotten Manhattan baby show was held, appropriately, at Midget Hall, in 1877. An amazing eyewitness account of the horror was published in the November 26 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:

“At ten o’clock this morning the great National Baby Show at Midget Hall, corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, New York, was opened. There are four hundred babies entered, and about half that number were in their places this morning. The show occupies two floors of the building, and around the sides of the rooms, on raised platforms, are the babies, with their mothers or nurses. At least one hundred and eighty of the two hundred babies spent the greater portion of the morning crying. The women vainly endeavored to pacify their youngsters, but it seemed as if there was a tacit understanding between the infants that they were not allowed themselves to be bulldozed. Nearly every child had a bottle of milk, and after they exhausted their power of suction and filled their infantile stomachs, they yelled. Dolls and other toys were thrown away on the babies, and many ladies endeavored to stop up the children’s throats by stuffing them with gum drops.

There will be distributed $1000 in prizes ranging from $10 to $150, the highest prize being given to the handsomest mother and child. The mothers, with the exception of two, are not handsome. There are many babies, children of rich New Yorkers, who are entered by their nurses. The majority of the mothers are German, and among the Germans there are a fair sprinkling of Hebrews. There are also Russian babies, Icelandic babies, Polish babies, Norwegian babies, English babies, Irish babies and one Chinese infant named Wee Boo. Many of the infants are positively hideous looking, yet their fond mothers think their offsprings the handsomest in the show. There is one baby that resembles a monkey and another with long ears and jaw, that is called the dog baby. The dog baby barks when it wants food.

Among the novelties are a set of quartets which are promised, but have not yet arrived, and a baby who attempted suicide. The suicidal youngster tried to drown himself in a bath tub. There is another baby that claims attention because it is said that baby was born ten minutes after its mother died. A two year old baby that swallowed a fork, laughed and crowed while it endeavored to bite off the end of its mother’s nose. An elfish looking baby, seventeen months old, is said to weigh less than six pounds, and its mother was proud of it. It was advertised that a baby thirteen months old, without hair or nails, would be exhibited, but the hairless youngster did not make its appearance today.”

“After A Miserable Year, Obama’s Presidency Is On The Clock”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

I’m there whenever David Remnick focuses on politics or boxing or writers. Other topics also, but those three in particular. The New Yorker EIC touches on that trio of subjects in a piece about President Obama, who is trying to sprint to the finish line rather than run out the clock. Three quick clips from the early stages of the article follow.

____________________

Obama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane, in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins–Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn’t feel at all ambivalent about following the sport. He didn’t.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”

____________________

When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.’

Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

____________________

Obama’s advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don’t find a way to attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. “There were times in our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.”•

 

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“The Company May Even Go So Far As To Load Products Onto Trucks And Have Them ‘Speculatively Shipped To A Physical Address'”

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

Considering that predictive searching is within reach of our fingertips at all times, and Amazon’s warehouses are data-rich operations, I assumed the “anticipatory ordering” was already a highly developed thing–that the company moved products around the country (and the world) based on prognostications made by previous ordering patterns. But apparently it’s only the newest thing, and it may ultimately go a very aggressive step further than I thought it would. From Kwame Opam at the Verge:

“Drawing on its massive store of customer data, Amazon plans on shipping you items it thinks you’ll like before you click the purchase button. The company today gained a new patent for ‘anticipatory shipping,’ a system that allows Amazon to send items to shipping hubs in areas where it believes said item will sell well. This new scheme will potentially cut delivery times down, and put the online vendor ahead of its real-world counterparts.

Amazon plans to box and ship products it expects customers to buy preemptively, based on previous searches and purchases, wish lists, and how long the user’s cursor hovers over an item online. The company may even go so far as to load products onto trucks and have them ‘speculatively shipped to a physical address’ without having a full addressee. Such a scenario might lead to unwanted deliveries and even returns, but Amazon seems willing to take the hit.”

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“They Are Scientists Dissecting The World’s Most Popular Game”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In 1977, the year the Apple II was introduced, Tom Landry, coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was the focus of a People magazine article due to his forward-thinking reliance on computer data. Today the other kind of football (soccer) has joined, in earnest, the information revolution. And that makes a lot of sense. I’m not enough of a fan of the world’s game to say this with complete assuredness, but I think it’s likely that because of the size of the field and ball and the pace of the game, final scores are often as influenced by luck as by skill. (Chris Anderson and David Sally agree.) And single- or double-elimination tournaments seem particularly meaningless statistically, so it’s best to grasp whatever edge you can. From “The Winning Formula,” Joao Medeiros’ Wired UK piece about data’s entry into the Premier League, a passage about one coach who was an early adapter:

“Some managers, however, did get it — and one in particular was Clive Woodward. He had been the coach of England’s World Cup-winning rugby team in 2003, and in 2005 had been offered a one-year contract to serve as Southampton’s director of football. He had been the first coach to adapt Prozone to rugby, installing it at Twickenham four years before the World Cup, which allowed him to collect data on how England and its opponents played. ‘When I first saw it I was fascinated because I’d never seen a game where you’re looking down and just see dots and data and movement,’ Woodward says. ‘It removed a lot of the preconceived notions we had about how other teams played. It made a big difference when we started to see them as data, as opposed to teams we had never beaten before.’ Once, after his players insisted that there was no space on the field to run into, Woodward took a printout of a Prozone freeze-frame taken 24 seconds into a match against France. It showed both teams around the ball in a small area on the pitch and acres of unoccupied space everywhere else. He stuck it on board with the message: ‘The space is the green stuff.’

‘Clive would challenge me at every level,’ says Wilson about Woodward’s time at Southampton. ‘He would ask questions about every aspect of the game: why do we spend so much time working out how to score goals and not how to stop them? I would try to explain to him what they’re doing and he’d just keep asking why.’ Woodward and Wilson tried things such as filming players striking the ball, to study technique from a biomechanical perspective. Those initiatives, however, never had much impact. Redknapp left before the end of the year and Woodward departed at the end of his contract. Wilson had left the club shortly before Woodward, convinced that there was a better way of running a club. ‘Woodward believed that evidence, be it video or statistics or any kind of data, was fundamental to how you prepare a team,’ Wilson says. Woodward remains his biggest influence. ‘He taught me that we didn’t have to do things just because they had always been done in a certain way.’

Today, 19 of the 20 Premier League teams use Prozone. Each has its own team of performance analysts and data scientists looking for the indicators that quantify player performance, the events that determine matches and trends that characterise seasons. They are scientists dissecting the world’s most popular game, looking at data from Prozone and other sources to understand what dictates the difference between winning and losing. In the environment of the multimillion-pound Premier League, clubs don’t just want a competitive advantage, they need it.”

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“There’s Risk In Everything We Do In Life”

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

While it seems a stretch that the Mars One project will actually deliver a handful of earthlings to our neighboring planet by 2023, more than 150,000 people, even very young ones, have applied to “die on Mars.” Whether the colony becomes a reality or not, it still makes for a fascinating experiment in psychology. From a Guardian interview with ready-to-launch 20-year-old student Ryan Macdonald:

“Guardian:

Why did you sign up?

Ryan Macdonald:

The main reason for me is that I think that on Mars I can accomplish more than I could on Earth. In three weeks, a single person on the surface of Mars could accomplish all of the science that all of the rovers over the past five years have already managed to achieve. If we want to ever prove definitively whether there is life on Mars, we will have to send someone there.

Guardian:

What are your expectations for the Mars One project?

Ryan Macdonald:

The real thing that encourages me is the inspiration factor: what the impact would be back on Earth of my going to Mars. Remember, the Apollo programme is what inspired the generation of scientists and engineers back on Earth who developed computers and smartphones and all the technology that improved our lives. Similarly, a mission to Mars would inspire a whole new generation of scientists on Earth, which would make life better for everyone.

Guardian:

What are you expecting when you first land on Mars?

 Ryan Macdonald:

Survival will have to be the first priority. Initially for the first year or so, it’ll mainly be construction; linking everything together, establishing the equipment, maintaining the solar panels, and things like that. We’ll be bringing some basic canned food to keep us going until we start actually growing our own food. In the long term it’ll be hydroponically grown vegetables and insects for protein. Potentially, later on you could bring some frozen fish eggs and start a little pond. I’d like to find a way to grow some tea on Mars. I think that’s very important for the sanity of all the people there. Once the tea is sorted out, the science would then begin properly.

Guardian:

Are you worried or scared at all?

Ryan Macdonald:

There’s risk in everything we do in life. I say I’ve applied to go to live on Mars, not to go to die on Mars. We all die eventually, of course. Actually the fact is that because things are going to be so strictly controlled, for example the diet of the people who go and the air they breathe, assuming that there is no major equipment failure, people will live longer on Mars than on Earth.”•

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“Albert Einstein Was A Pretty Cool Guy”

January 19, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In order to promote The Monuments Men, which has received a coveted February release date, Bill Murray, a complicated man, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

If you could go back in time and have a conversation with one person, who would it be and why?

Bill Murray:

That’s a grand question, golly.

I kind of like scientists, in a funny way. Albert Einstein was a pretty cool guy. The thing about Einstein was that he was a theoretical physicist, so they were all theories. He was just a smart guy. I’m kind of interested in genetics though. I think I would have liked to have met Gregor Mendel.

Because he was a monk who just sort of figured this stuff out on his own. That’s a higher mind, that’s a mind that’s connected. They have a vision, and they just sort of see it because they are so connected intellectually and mechanically and spiritually, they can access a higher mind. Mendel was a guy so long ago that I don’t necessarily know very much about him, but I know that Einstein did his work in the mountains in Switzerland. I think the altitude had an effect on the way they spoke and thought.

But I would like to know about Mendel, because i remember going to the Philippines and thinking ‘this is like Mendel’s garden’ because it had been invaded by so many different countries over the years, and you could see the children shared the genetic traits of all their invaders over the years, and it made for this beautiful varietal garden.”

__________________________

Question:

Do you still talk to your deaf/mute assistant? If so, does he pretend like he can understand what you’re saying?

Bill Murray:

Well, we didn’t part well. I don’t communicate with her, she was a she. I was sort of ambitious thinking that I could hire someone that had the intelligence to do a job but didn’t have necessarily speech or couldn’t quite hear or spoke in sign language. She was a bright person and witty but she had never been away from her home before and even though I tried to accommodate more than I understood when I first hired her, she was very young in her emotional self and the emotional component of being away from her home was lacking. I tried my best, but I was working all day. She was lovely and very smart, but there’s a lot of frustration when you meet people who can’t speak well. Being completely disabled in that area causes a great amount of frustration, and this was going back 30 years or so before ether were the educational components that there are today. It didn’t go particularly well for me, but for a few weeks she really was a light and had a real spirit to her. She was like one of your own kids that never had a job, and then they get a job and realize that certain things are expected, and you can’t react to everything you don’t like or care about. So the first time you have a job and someone says ‘you have to do this’ – it was more complicated than she imagined. We were both optimistic, but it was harder than either of us expected to make it work.

__________________________

Bill Murray:

Someone asked “what movie was the most fun to act in” and deleted their comment, so here goes:

Well, I did a film with Jim Jarmusch called Broken Flowers, but I really enjoyed that movie. I enjoyed the script that he wrote. He asked me if I could do a movie, and I said ‘I gotta stay home, but if you make a movie that i could shoot within one hour of my house, I’ll do it.’

So he found those locations. And I did the movie.

And when it was done, I thought “this movie is so good, I thought I should stop.” I didn’t think I could do any better than Broken Flowers, it’s a film that is completely realized, and beautiful, and I thought I had done all I could do to it as an actor. And then 6-7 months later someone asked me to work again, so I worked again, but for a few months I thought I couldn’t do any better than that.

__________________________

Question:

What do you think of the current SNL cast?

Bill Murray:

They’re good. I don’t know them as well as I knew the previous one. But i really feel like the previous cast, that was the best group since the original group. They were my favorite group. Some really talented people that were all comedians of some kind or another. You think about Dana Carvey, Will, Hartman, all these wonderful funny guys. But the last group with Kristen Wiig and those characters, they were a bunch of actors and their stuff was just different. It’s all about the writing, the writing is such a challenge and you are trying to write backwards to fit 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and the airing. And sometimes the writers don’t get the whole thing figured out, it’s not like a play where you can rehearse it several times. So good actors – and those were really good actors, and there are some great actors in this current group as well I might add – they seem to be able to solve writing problems, improvisational actors, can solve them on their feet. They can solve it during the performance, and make a scene work. It’s not like we were improvising when we made the shows, but you could feel ways to make things better. And when you get into the third dimension, as opposed to the printed page, you can see ways to solve things and write things live that other sorts of professionals don’t necessarily have. And that’s why I like that previous group. So this group, there are definitely some actors in this group, I see them working in the same way and making scenes go. They really roll very nicely, they have great momentum, and it seems like they are calm in the moment.

__________________________

Question:

How do you feel about recreational marijuana?

Bill Murray:

Well that’s a large question, isn’t it? Because you’re talking about recreation, which everyone is in favor of. You are also talking about something that has been illegal for so many years, and marijuana is responsible for such a large part of the prison population, for the crime of self-medication. And it takes millions and billions of dollars by incarcerating people for this crime against oneself as best can be determined. People are realizing that the war on drugs is a failure, that the amount of money spent, you could have bought all the drugs with that much money rather than create this army of people and incarcerated people. I think the terror of marijuana was probably overstated. I don’t think people are really concerned about it the way they once were. Now that we have crack and crystal and whatnot, people don’t even think about marijuana anymore, it’s like someone watching too many videogames in comparison. The fact that states are passing laws allowing it means that its threat has been over-exaggerated. Psychologists recommend smoking marijuana rather than drinking if you are in a stressful situation. These are ancient remedies, alcohol and smoking, and they only started passing laws against them 100 years ago.

__________________________

Question:

What was the oddest experience you had in Japan?

Bill Murray:

The oddest… well, I was eating at a sushi bar. I would go to sushi bars with a book I had called “Making out in Japanese.” it was a small paperback book, with questions like “can we get into the back seal?” “do your parents know about me?” “do you have a curfew?”

And I would say to the sushi chef ‘Do you have a curfew? Do your parents know about us? And can we get into the back seat?’

And I would always have a lot of fun with that, but that one particular day, he said “would you like some fresh eel?” and I said “yes I would.” so he came back with a fresh eel, a live eel, and then he walked back behind a screen and came back in 10 seconds with a no-longer-alive eel. It was the freshest thing I had ever eaten in my life. It was such a funny moment to see something that was alive that no longer was alive, that was my food, in 30 seconds.•

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“This Machine Is Capable Of Quite Impressive Feats”

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

In the 1960s, long before Boston Dynamics was creating robotic men and their best friends for the military (and now for Google), GE offered up an elephantine machinery to the Army. It could do some heavy lifting but was a cumbersome thing and not autonomous as an operator was required in the carriage.

From “They’re Robots? They’re Beasts!” Scott Kirsner’s 2004 New York Times article which shows just how much investment in the sector has grown in a decade:

“Replicating biology isn’t a breeze, and some think that despite the well-publicized introduction of Sony’s toy dog, Aibo, in 1999, useful biomimetic robots may still be many years off.

‘What has been a surprise to me is how hard it has been to make progress,’ said Shankar Sastry, a professor at the University of California who has been helping to design robotic flies, fish and the wall-climbing gecko.

Another challenge is the sporadic nature of project financing, which predominantly originates with government agencies like the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa.

‘I hate to gripe, but funding is hard to get these days,’ said Dr. [Howie] Choset, designer of snakebots that can slither up stairways or down drainage pipes.”

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“I Am Not Sure If I Consider Any One Book My Most Important”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I read a lot of Thomas Mann in school and really enjoyed most of it, though I will acknowledge that Doctor Faustus sailed right over my teenaged head. Does anyone now write like Mann or, say, Nabakov? Should they? Theirs was a denser type of literature that seems mostly absent now. Those complexities are found more in visual culture today. The opening of a 1955 interview Frederic Morton of the New York Times did with Mann just two months before the writer died:

Travemuende, Germany — Thomas Mann’s eightieth birthday–June 6–might suggest an aged Olympian gazing distantly upon the world from his Lake Zurich retreat. The picture, however, is not entirely accurate. Before meeting this writer, for example, the Nobel prize winner had just delivered speeches on Schiller in Stuttgart and Weimar, negotiated possible film sales of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain in Goettingen and spoken on the North German radio. Soon after the interview he was to receive Honorary Citizenship of his native city (Luebeck), be the object of a number of official birthday fêtes in Zurich, launch a lecture tour in Holland and, last not least, complete his Felix Krull, which recently appeared (442 pages strong and briskly subtitled “First Volume of the Memoirs”) to a volley of German critical huzzahs.

Travemuende, the Baltic Sea resort in which this writer cornered the octogenarian, was supposed to provide a brief lull for the Herr Doktor. (In Germany, where every solvent person with spectacles is presumed to possess a Ph.D., Thomas Mann goes by the title of the Herr Doktor.) His hotel suite, though, could have been the opening-night dressing room of Mary Martin. Flowers, telephone calls, telegrams and she whom even Miss Martin could never boast of, namely Katja Mann. For to interview Herr Doktor means invariably also to interview Frau Doktor, his attractive and most vivacious wife, whose conversational impulses have a wonderful way of advancing, instead of interrupting, a causerie. On this visit she wore a smart (one is almost tempted to say snappy) turquoise velvet jacket with embroidered sleeves. During the talk she directed traffic between a messenger boy, a hotel official, the interviewer and a maid pouring tea.

In the midst of it all, the master. Clad in business gray, hands factually folded, he looked about fifteen years younger than his age and much more (there’s no help for the word) bourgeois than even his photographs. In fact, he resembled a Hanseatic grain merchant pondering, in the solitude of his office, wheat futures on the Hamburg bourse. His actual problem, just put to him by the visitor, was a little different.

“I am not sure if I consider any one book my most important,” he said in his precise but measuredly cadenced High German. “The longest and, to my mind, richest work is the Joseph tetralogy, but perhaps–” the Mann smile like the Mann phrase often has a decorous ambiguity, regretful and self-ironical at the same time “–perhaps I like ‘Joseph’ best by way of overcompensation. Because of its size it is the last read of my major works, you know.” He turned to light a cigar. “Then of course there is the Faustus which put the heaviest strain on my resources and in that sense is closest to me. And there is ‘Tonio Kroeger’; it is the most private and emotionally most autobiographical thing that I have ever done.”•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 18, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. the conversation gene hackman 1974
  2. i’d like to kick kris jenner in the balls so she can’t have more children
  3. rolling stone article about marshal tito by sterling hayden
  4. craigslist used vibrator for sale
  5. the dead body and the living brain oriana fallaci
  6. which group led the super bowl 3 pledge of allegiance?
  7. jim garrison interviewed by johnny carson
  8. jack nicholson on lsd
  9. anyone who ever had a heart they wouldn’t turn around and break it
  10. morganna the kissing bandit

 

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 18, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Thinking it's suspicious that so many celebrities in their 80s are dying, as if someone with a vested interest wanted to eliminate them before they reached 90.

Afflictor: Thinking it’s suspicious that so many celebrities in their 80s are dying, as if someone with a vested interest wanted to eliminate them before they reached 90.

  • Mae Young, lady wrestler, just nut-punched St. Peter at heaven’s gate.
  • Daniel Ellsberg argues that everyone should fear government surveillance.
  • Valley Fever, that mysterious ailment, is spreading through regions of the U.S.
  • Technology, no matter how awesome, is evolution, not revolution.
  • Jeffrey Wright, brilliant actor, is also a “radical capitalist.”

“The Gold Deposits At The Site He And Jibila Were Discussing May Be Worth Billions Of Dollars”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

For the past six years or so, Jeffrey Wright, one of the best actors on the planet, has been trying to extract precious minerals from the earth in Sierra Leone, hoping to aid the impoverished region. It’s an uncommon, perhaps quixotic, quest. It’s real life and it’s a movie. The opening of “Jeffrey Wright’s Gold Mine,” an article in the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner:

“‘This is a relationship that could bring us all the things we desire,’ Jeffrey Wright said. He was sitting with Samuel Jibila under an awning rigged from rusty metal sheets in front of Jibila’s decrepit house in Sierra Leone. Jibila is the traditional ruler — the paramount chief — of Penguia, a little domain of jungly hills and dusty villages 250 miles from the capital. Wright is an actor who lives in Brooklyn. He has won a Tony, an Emmy and a Golden Globe and most recently appeared as Beetee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And for the last decade, he has been traveling to this isolated area near the Guinea border to run his small gold-exploration company, Taia Lion Resources. He wanted to maintain Jibila’s faith in his company, in his plans, but Jibila, who was surrounded by lesser chiefs in glossy robes, wasn’t feeling faithful.

Since 2003, Wright has brought in geologists to sample Penguia’s soil and streams. He leases the exploration rights here from the national government. The gold deposits at the site he and Jibila were discussing may be worth billions of dollars. He says that mining will be a boon to everyone; that the operation will put many hundreds of people to work, not counting the small shops and other businesses that will bloom; that company employees will have a real chance to rise; that paved roads will replace cratered tracks. Transformation will come to a territory so undeveloped that when the rare vehicle needs to cross a river not far from Jibila’s home, the driver pulls onto a raft and ferrymen tug the vessel across with a rope.

But despite this vision and these promises, no metamorphosis has come to Penguia.”

 

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“It Took Her That Long To Fully Regain Her Consciousness”

January 17, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I guess if I could truly know one thing that seems presently unknowable it would be why a person can believe something that is extreme–even completely untrue–and then that same person can believe, at a different time, something that is completely opposed to the original thought. How can we be programmed, deprogrammed and then programmed again? We may now the chemistry behind it, but why are some people more prone to these reactions than others? Why are we more susceptible at certain stages of our lives? Memory isn’t elastic for most of us, but it seems like the part of the brain that governs belief systems is. When I think about those questions it feels to me like AI that truly operates with the understanding of a human being is so far away. It seems that though we know more than nothing, we only know very little.

An example: To the Manson Family members, it seemed perfectly reasonable to follow the orders of a pathetic little man who wanted them to invade homes, murder the occupants in brutal fashion and scrawl horrifying messages on the walls using their victims’ blood. These were the children of good homes who, if circumstances were different, if they came of age in a less-turbulent time, probably would have been filing law-school applications or joining the Peace Corps. Sure, there was a ton of drug use that threw their chemistry out of whack, but plenty of people who haven’t used drugs join cults and or accept cultures with preposterous rules and structures. They enter into a delusion and embrace it. The human brain is such a complex and mysterious thing that it staggers me. I feel bankrupt when trying to comprehend it.

In 1976, former Manson acolyte Susan Atkins, a murderer who died in prison in 2009, who threw her life away and took the lives of others for no good reason, discussed the horrors she’d committed. She had changed her mind by then, but it was far too late.

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“The Car Has A Cockpit Wide Enough Only For The Driver”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

No old technologies were harmed in the making of Elio Motors’ $6,800, three-wheel car, an automobile that uses pre-existing tech but is able to get 84 MPG (highway) because of its unique design and size. It’s set to reach the market in 2015. From Rob Lever at Yahoo! News:

“An engineer by training, [Paul] Elio began the firm in 2008 and recently took over an abandoned General Motors plant in Louisiana — one which had been producing the gas-guzzling Hummer.

In order to deliver the best fuel economy, the car has a cockpit wide enough only for the driver, with a passenger seat in the rear. It has two wheels in front and tapers in the rear to a single wheel.

‘Front-to-back seating, that’s the key to mileage,’ Elio told AFP.

This makes it principally a one-person car, but Elio said the vehicle is a good solution for the millions who drive along to work or leisure events.

Elio readily admits there is no special technology in the car — it has a three-cylinder internal combustion gasoline engine, power windows, air conditioning and anti-lock brakes. While it does not have some of the on-board electronic gadgety found in other vehicles, drivers can connect their smartphones for navigation, apps and more.”

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“They Were Known As Lady Wrestlers, And Many People Found Them Hard Not To Watch”

January 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I interviewed the now-deceased lady wrestler The Fabulous Moolah some years ago, and I was glad it was a phoner so she couldn’t gouge my eyes. I was fascinated by someone who did what was then considered a very unladylike thing beginning in the harsh years of the Great Depression, though I knew going in that her stories would largely be bullshit. Wrestlers who came of age when the entertainment still had one foot inside the carnival tent never really told the truth because they were so committed to selling a ruse–that something fake was real. They were actors who never exited that stage. The things she did say that were true, however, were stranger than fiction. For instance: “When I was known as ‘Slave Girl,’ I managed the wrestler Elephant Boy, and he’s a priest in Ohio now, you know?” No, I did not know. This was new information.

I asked Moolah (real name: Lillian Ellison) if she considered herself a feminist, and she got a little flustered–perhaps annoyed. It occurred to me later that she thought I was asking her if she was a lesbian. I quickly explained what “feminist” meant, and things moved forward again. Moolah’s close friend, housemate and fellow ferocious wrestler Johnnie Mae Young just passed away at 90. From her obituary by William Yardley in the New York Times:

“Before thongs and silicone and spray tans made women’s wrestling the overtly sexualized spectacle that is now orchestrated by W.W.E., Ms. Young was among the most famous in a colorful cast of women who first rose to prominence in the 1940s, in part because World War II reduced the number of men who wrestled professionally. They were known as lady wrestlers, and many people found them hard not to watch.

‘When I first started wrestling professionally, the men didn’t like the girls,’ Ms. Young said, ‘because we would go out and steal the show.’

Crowds loved to hate her. Organizers sometimes shielded the ring with chicken wire to help protect her from the rotten eggs and vegetables people would throw. Other wrestlers were intimidated by her techniques and her titles.

By the late 1960s, she had become the National Wrestling Alliance’s first national women’s champion. In the late 1990s, W.W.E. hired her and her longtime friend Lillian Ellison, better known as the Fabulous Moolah, whom she had trained.

Ms. Young fought much younger wrestlers and starred in campy skits with young male wrestlers that suggested that her prowess went beyond the ring. Some of her older opponents said the work tainted the legacy of women in wrestling. Ms. Young paid no attention.”

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“There Is No Vaccine To Protect Against It And, In The Most Severe Cases, No Cure”

January 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mets first baseman Ike Davis caught Valley Fever in Arizona two years ago during the offseason, and he hasn’t been the same player since, though that may have more to do with a long swing than a lung illness. But those in the West who don’t have to worry about hitting a slider are also catching the fungal disease, in increasingly scary numbers, and the sinister spores have compromised not just their job performances but their very lives. From “Death Dust,” an article by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker, a description of a disease aided in its spread by real-estate development and changes in demographics:

“Cocci is endemic to the desert Southwest—California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas—and to the semi-arid parts of Central and South America. Digging—building, drilling, tilling, clearing—stirs it up, and dry, hot, windy conditions, a regional feature intensified by climate change, disperse it. In recent years, infections have risen dramatically. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 1998 to 2011 there was a tenfold increase in reported cases; officials there call it a ‘silent epidemic,’ far more destructive than had been previously recognized. Its circumscribed range has made it easy for policymakers to ignore. Though it sickens many times more people than West Nile virus, which affects much of the country, including the Northeast, it has received only a small fraction of the funding for research. ‘The impact of valley fever on its endemic populations is equal to the impact of polio or chicken pox before the vaccines,’ John Galgiani, an infectious-disease physician who directs the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says. ‘But chicken pox and polio were worldwide.’

In 2012, valley fever was the second-most-reported disease in Arizona; two-thirds of the country’s cases occur in the state. There is no vaccine to protect against it and, in the most severe cases, no cure. The population of Phoenix has grown by ten per cent in the past decade, and newcomers have no acquired immunity. The elderly and the immune-compromised—including pregnant women—are most susceptible; for unknown reasons, otherwise healthy African-Americans and Filipinos are disproportionately vulnerable to severe and life-threatening forms of the disease. (In one early study, Filipino men were estimated to be a hundred and seventy-five times as likely as white men to get sick from cocci, and a hundred and ninety-two times as likely to die from it.) But, as one specialist told me, ‘if you breathe and you’re warm-blooded, you can get this.'”

A Brief Note From 1909 About Flying Bicycles

January 16, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 26, 1909 New York Times:

“Paris–Jules Bois believes that motor cars will in a hundred years be things of the past, and that a kind of flying bicycle will have been invented which will enable everybody to traverse the air at will, far above the earth. Hardly any one will remain in the cities at night. They will be places of business only. People of every class will reside in the country or in garden towns at considerable distances fron the populous centres. Pneumatic railways and flying cars and many other means of quick transit will be so developed that the question of time will enter but little into one’s choice of a home. Transportation will be immensely cheaper than it is at present. As there will be less crowding, realty values and rentals will less exorbitant.”

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“Government Is Necessary. The Tools Of Policy Are Indispensable.”

January 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jeffrey Sachs is depicted by some as a dependency-creating subsidizer and by others as an extreme free-marketer–neither seems particularly apt. In a Reddit AMA to promote a free online course on sustainable development, the Columbia professor answers some critics (Angus Deaton, Naomi Klein, Dambisa Moyo) and questions about the global war on poverty.

_____________________

Question:

I’m fascinated by the new environmental technologies like billboards pulling drinking water from the air, or Mexico City’s smog eating paint. What technology do you look at as having great potential?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Probably the single most important breakthrough in recent years has been the dramatic decline in price of photovoltaics, which have fallen by a factor of 100X since 1977. 1 Watt of PV now costs less than $1 dollar. This will make possible an enormous upscaling of solar power in many parts of the world.

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Question:

I read The End of Poverty and I have to say, I am a huge fan of that book. I often cite your work to support ideas like that sweat-shops aren’t necessarily the evil they’re portrayed to be. Since the book, how much, in your eyes, has changed in the world? Do you feel like leaders sat up and took notice? 

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

The most important thing that’s happened since 2005 is that the idea of ending extreme poverty has actually begun to take hold. People see the success of China in ending poverty, the start of real poverty reduction in Africa, and the power of the new ICT technologies. Because of this optimism, the World Bank Development Committee voted in April to take on the goal of ending extreme poverty globally by 2030. So the idea is there, step by step.

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Question:

I’ve always argued that if agricultural subsidies were cut around the world it would be more effective in lifting people from poverty than all aid combined. It seems that lately developing countries have also gotten into the ag subsidy trap. Is it possible we’ve reached a point where reducing global ag subsidies might hurt the poor more than it helps them?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Ending AG subsidies, while generally a good idea, won’t solve as much as one might think, because the main beneficiaries will be large food-exporting countries, such as Brazil, not the poorest countries. Still, it’s typically a good thing to do. The subsidies are rarely fair or effective.

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Question:

When the government or culture in an area does not support elimination of poverty, have you seen other ways to make substantial progress, or is the government/leadership really the key to success or failure?

Jeffrey D. Sachs:

Government is necessary. The tools of policy (taxes, regulation, public subsidies of science, public investment) are indispensable. They are not the only things that matter, but without government, broad-based and sustained development is not really possible. Of course, governments do not need to be perfect. Thank goodness!!!•

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“I Believe In Heaven, And I Believe In Hell”

January 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Billy James Hargis was a twentieth-century American evangelical entrepreneur writ large: charismatic, ultra-conservative, segregationist, anti-communist, anti-feminist, anti-gay, McCarthy supporter, charged with abusing tax-exempt status, accused of sexual misconduct by male and female students at the Christian college he founded, etc. He sat for an interview with Tom Snyder in the late 1970s to address a number of topics, including his sex scandal. A polished TV presenter, the “hillbilly preacher” comes across well despite everything. During the conversation, the two refer to Pat Robertson as the “Johnny Carson of Evangelism.”

From Hargis’ 2004 obituary in the Economist: “For four years, starting in 1953, he launched a million hydrogen balloons from West Germany towards the east. They contained verses of Scripture, sent ‘to succour the poor starved captives of communism.’ Rather less lightly, he himself hit the pulpit across America and in ‘foreign lands,’ perfecting his own style of shouting, flailing and sweating with an energy alarming in a man of his girth.

As televangelists do, he also set up courses and centres of learning: the National Anti-Communist Leadership School, the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University and, in Tulsa, the American Christian College. A naive reporter once asked him what was taught there. Why, Mr Hargis answered, ‘anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.’ As if he had needed to ask.

After a while the authorities, stirred up by the Evil One, got interested in him. The Christian Crusade was a supposedly religious charity with tax-exempt status; yet Mr Hargis’s work seemed mostly political. Its purposes were allegedly altruistic; yet Mr Hargis drew a salary of $25,000 from it, besides his utility bills, his house, his clothes, his colour TV, his travelling expenses and his dry-cleaning bills. In 1964 the tax-exemption was withdrawn by the Internal Revenue Service, and his reputation spoiled.

Seven years later, sex reared its head. For Mr Hargis, adopted and brought up in crushing Christian poverty in Texas, fun had meant daily Bible-readings and, once a week, gospel choir. He gave the impression that nothing had ever changed. The targets of his daily wrath were not only homosexuals and women’s libbers but the blatantly sexual pop-gods of the day: ‘When the Beatles thrust their hips forward while holding their guitars and shout, ‘Oh Yeah!!’ who cannot know what they really mean?’

Yet in 1974 both male and female students at the American Christian College, and three male members of the college choir, the All-American Kids, claimed Mr Hargis had deflowered them.”

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“Sen. Dianne Feinstein Says She Once Found A Drone Peeking Into The Window Of Her Home”

January 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Richard Feynman famously asked the seminal nano question: Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin? But the past isn’t the only thing that can get small; the same holds true for what’s unfolding this very day, this very instant. And what will become of us when drones are the size of fleas and you can barely see them, can’t see them at all? From Kathryn A. Wolfe at Politico:

“Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she once found a drone peeking into the window of her home — the kind of cautionary tale she wants lawmakers to consider as they look at allowing commercial drone use.

The California Democrat offered few details about the incident when speaking about it Wednesday afternoon, during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on drone policy at which she appeared as a special witness. But she used the episode to implore lawmakers to ‘proceed with caution.’

Feinstein said she encountered the flying robot while a demonstration was taking place outside her house. She said she went to the window to peek out — and ‘there was a drone right there at the window looking out at me.’

She held her hand inches from her face to indicate how close it was.”

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“Might These ‘Good, Honest Citizens’ With Nothing To Hide Ever Imagine That They Might Feel A Challenge To Be A Whistleblower”

January 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was neither awed nor upset by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaking for a few reasons: 1) From the moment the Patriot Act passed, we had given our government a “by whatever means necessary” standard, 2) I think most Americans have embraced being watched and feel safer that way (though I don’t), 3) The technological tools of today (and certainly those of tomorrow) cannot be controlled by legislation, 4) Technology is a doubled-edged sword, and the government will be spied on as much as it spies. The power has been disseminated and it will be used, if not always well. To paraphrase Chance Gardner: “We like to watch.”

I have a great fear of imprisoning whistleblowers. We need those who will risk themselves to stop Watergates and Abu Ghraibs. And while Snowden may have stated the obvious and ironically ended up living in Russia, the ultimate surveillance state, he wasn’t wrong.

In a new Ask Me Anything at Reddit, Pentagon Papers leaker and staunch Snowden supporter Daniel Ellsberg answers an oft-asked question: Why should those with nothing to hide fear surveillance?

“Question:

I’m curious how you respond when people tell you that ‘they have nothing to hide.’ How do you help them see that this isn’t a valid argument for why they shouldn’t be concerned?

Daniel Ellsberg:

Do they want to live in a democracy, with checks and balances, restraints on Executive power? (They may not feel that they care, though I would say they should; but if they do, it’s relevant to the question that follows). Do they really believe that real democracy is viable, when one branch of government, the Executive, knows or can know every detail of every private communication (or credit card transaction, or movement) of: every journalist; every source to every journalist; every member of Congress and their staffs; every judge, at every level up to the Supreme Court? Do they think that every one of these people ‘has nothing to hide,’ nothing that could be used to blackmail them or manipulate them, or neutralize their dissent to Executive policies, or influence voting behavior? Is investigative journalism, or aggressive Congressional investigation of the Executive, or court restraints on Executive practices, really possible with that amount of transparency to the Executive of their private and professional lives and associations? And without any of those checks, the kind of democracy you have is that of the German Democratic Republic in East Germany, with its Stasi (which had a miniscule fraction of the surveillance capability the NSA has now, but enough to turn a fraction of the population of East Germany into secret Stasi informants).

Might these ‘good, honest citizens’ with nothing to hide ever imagine that they might feel a challenge to be a whistleblower, or a source to a journalist or Congressperson, or engage in associations or parties critical of the current administration? As The Burglary recounts, it was enough to write a letter to a newspaper critical of the FBI to get on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI list for potential detention or more active surveillance. And once on, hard or impossible to get off. (See ‘no fly’ lists today ).”

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