Skateboarding Past a Midlife Crisis

A grinding sound, somewhere between a rattle and a rumble, erupted over the suburban New Jersey hill. The figures, clad in motorcycle leathers and helmets, started to appear, one, two, three, until there were almost 20, crouched on skateboards, like a squadron of roller-villains.

One by one, the skaters rounded a turn, dropping a gloved hand to the asphalt as they scraped their wheels in a slide, taking care that nobody crossed into oncoming traffic and found themselves splattered across the grill of a Buick.

At the bottom of the hill, the leader of the Bergen County Bombers, as this gang of skateboarders is known, wrestled the black motorcycle helmet from his head, revealing a mortgage broker with gray flecks in his beard and the crow’s feet that come from decades in the white-collar trenches.

“It’s a total midlife crisis,” said the group’s leader, Tom Barnhart, 47, of Cresskill, N.J., who started skateboarding two years ago for the first time since the Carter administration. His life, he said, had been in a rut. “My kids grew old, so I got a dog. My dog grew old, so I got a skateboard.”

“That was what knocked the cobwebs out of my head,” he added.

Forget the little red sports car: the new symbol for midlife crisis is the skateboard. Graying members of Generation X, and even their older brothers, are reclaiming their youth and rebellious streak by hopping back on a skate deck. Some are even showing off old tricks in the skate park.

It’s the latest gasp for a generation of perma-dudes who listen to Black Flag in their BMWs and trade high-fives in client meetings. It’s a bid to escape the corporate grind, beat back their flagging vigor and even make good on a generational cliché: to extend their adolescence until their federal prescription-drug benefit kicks in.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Tony Cenicola

Beach Boys

A cappella
When Memory Sings Harmony - NY Times (May, 2012)

Tom Wesselmann, Bedroom Painting #76, (1984-93). Oil on canvas on board with working tv.
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Too Much Information

We all know there’s a whole lot more information in our worlds than there used to be. As to how much more, well, most of of us are pretty clueless.

Here’s a priceless nugget about all that info, compliments of Dave Turek, the guy in charge of supercomputer development at IBM: From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated, according to IBM’s calculations, five exabytes–that’s five billion gigabytes–of information. By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days. By next year, predicts Turek, we’ll be doing it every 10 minutes.

But how is this possible? How did data become such digital kudzu? Put simply, every time your cell phone sends out its GPS location, every time you buy something online, every time you click the Like button on Facebook, you’re putting another digital message in a bottle. And now the oceans are pretty much covered with them.

And that’s only part of the story. Text messages, customer records, ATM transactions, security camera images…the list goes on and on. The buzzword to describe this is “Big Data,” though that hardly does justice to the scale of the monster we’ve created.

It’s the latest example of technology outracing our capacity to use it. In this case, we haven’t begun to catch up with our ability to capture information, which is why a favorite trope of management pundits these days is that the future belongs to companies and governments that can make sense of all the data they’re collecting, preferably in real time.

by Randy Reiland, Smithsonian |  Read more:
Photo courtesy of Flickr user mrflip

Papercraft Seasons by Lizzie Thomas
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Bathers in the Sea
Henri Lebasque
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Holding Transcripts Hostage

Students traditionally have a soft spot for their alma maters. But as growing numbers of students run up debt in the high five and even six figures to pay for college, that may change. Especially when they discover their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree.

That's what increasing numbers of students are finding when they try to obtain an official transcript to send to potential employers or graduate admissions offices.  (...)

It turns out many colleges and universities refuse to issue these critical documents if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind.

It's no accident that colleges are using the withholding of official transcripts to punish students behind in their loan payments. It turns out the federal government encourages the practice. Schools are not required by law to withhold transcripts, but a spokeswoman at the Department of Education confirmed that the department "encourages" them to use the draconian tactic, saying that the policy "has resulted in numerous loan repayments."

It is a strange position for colleges to take, however, since the schools themselves are not owed any money. Student loan funds come from private banks or the federal government. For federal Perkins loans, schools get a pool of federal money to apply to students' financial aid, and if students don't pay, that pool gets smaller. But the creditor is still the government, not the college. And in the case of so-called Stafford loans, schools are not on the hook in any way; they are simply acting as collection agencies, and in fact may get paid for their efforts at collection.  (...)

Andrew Ross, an NYU professor who helped spark the Occupy Student Debt movement in November, says of the no-transcript tactic: "It's worse than indentured servitude. With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture."

by Dave Lindorff, LA Times |  Read more:
Photo: LA Times

To the Class of 2012

[ed. Must be that time of year again - the annual lecture.]

Dear Class of 2012:

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern from West Point. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises in which she kept a bulletproof vest on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing as she is accomplished. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn't.

Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you're nothing like her. And since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts.

Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in history.

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president.

Pop quiz, Class of '12: Do you?

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

by Bret Stephens, WSJ |  Read more:

It was only

the thin thread of a cloud,
almost transparent,
leading me along the way
like an ancient sacred song

Yosano Akiko

From River of Stars - tr. Sam Hamill & Keiko Matsui Gibson
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Current Events: US Attack Kills 5 Afghan Kids

Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:

(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.

(2) Yesterday — a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen — the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet “using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009.” American media outlets — especially its cable news networks — erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. (...)

Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world — including repeatedly in Yemen — was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation — why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? – is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business — trying to enjoy our Freedoms — and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon |  Read more:

Géza Faragó, Slim Woman with a Cat, 1913.
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Too Much Information

[ed. If you've read this blog for a while you know I'm an unabashed DFW fan, and so, please excuse another review of his postumous book The Pale King, which I somehow managed to miss the first time around.]

One of the few detectable lies in David Foster Wallace's books occurs in his essay on the obscure '90s-era American tennis prodigy Michael Joyce, included in Wallace's first nonfiction anthology, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Apart from some pages in his fiction, it's the best thing he wrote about tennis—better even than his justly praised but disproportionately famous piece on Roger Federer—precisely because Joyce was a journeyman, an unknown, and so offered Wallace's mind a white canvas. Wallace had almost nothing to work with on that assignment: ambiguous access to the qualifying rounds of a Canadian tournament, a handful of hours staring through chain link at a subject who was both too nice to be entertaining and not especially articulate. Faced with what for most writers would be a disastrous lack of material, Wallace looses his uncanny observational powers on the tennis complex, drawing partly on his knowledge of the game but mainly on his sheer ability to consider a situation, to revolve it in his mental fingers like a jewel whose integrity he doubts. In the mostly empty stadium he studies the players between matches. "They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies," he writes, "the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions." He hears the "authoritative pang" of tour-tight racket strings and sees ball boys "reconfigure complexly." He hits the practice courts and watches players warm up, their bodies "moving with the compact nonchalance I've since come to recognize in pros when they're working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear."

The lie comes at the start of the piece, when Wallace points out a potential irony of what he's getting ready to do, namely write about people we've never heard of, who are culturally marginal, yet are among the best in the world at a chosen pursuit. "You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something," Wallace says. "At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

What's strange is that this was written in 1996—by then, Wallace had completed his genre-impacting second novel, Infinite Jest, as well as the stories, a couple already considered classic, in the collection Girl with Curious Hair. It's hard to believe he didn't know that he was indeed among the hundred best at a particular thing, namely imaginative prose, and that there were serious people ready to put him among an even smaller number. Perhaps we should assume that, being human, he knew it sometimes and at other times feared it wasn't true. Either way, the false modesty—asking us to accept the idea that he'd never thought of himself as so good and had proposed the experiment naively—can't help reading as odd. Which may itself be deliberate. Not much happens by accident in Wallace's stuff; his profound obsessive streak precluded it. So could it be there's something multilayered going on with sport as a metaphor for writing—even more layers than we expect? It does seem curious that Wallace chose, of all the players, one named Joyce, whose "ethnic" Irishness Wallace goes out of his way to emphasize, thereby alluding to an artist whose own fixation on technical mastery made him a kind of grotesque, dazzling but isolated from healthful, human narrative concerns. Certainly Wallace played textual games on that level.

Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow. ···

It's hard to do the traditional bio-style paragraph about Wallace for readers who, in this oversaturated mediascape, don't know who he was or why he mattered, because you keep flashing on his story "Death Is Not the End," in which he parodies the practice of writing the traditional bio-style paragraph about writers, listing all their honors and whatnot, his list becoming inexplicably ridiculous as he keeps naming the prizes, and you get that he's digging into the frequent self-congratulating silliness of the American literary world, "a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, [...] a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters...a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation." Wallace himself had many of the awards on the list, including "a 'Genius Grant' from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation." Three novels, three story collections, two books of essays, the Roy E. Disney Professorship of Creative Writing at Pomona College...

When they say that he was a generational writer, that he "spoke for a generation," there's a sense in which it's almost scientifically true. Everything we know about the way literature gets made suggests there's some connection between the individual talent and the society that produces it, the social organism. Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen when its old one dies, and it's possible now to see Wallace as one of those. I remember well enough to know it's not a trick of hindsight, hearing about and reading Infinite Jest for the first time, as a 20-year-old, and the immediate sense of: This is it. One of us is going to try it. The "it" being all of it, to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century. Someone had come along with an intellect potentially strong enough to mirror the spectacle and a moral seriousness deep enough to want to in the first place. About none of his contemporaries—even those who in terms of ability could compete with him—can one say that they risked as great a failure as Wallace did.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ |  Read more:

The Aquarium

There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

But how can you possibly ease yourself into the death of your child? For one thing, it is supposed to happen well after your own dissolution into nothingness. Your children are supposed to outlive you by several decades, during the course of which they live their lives, happily devoid of the burden of your presence, and eventually complete the same mortal trajectory as their parents: oblivion, denial, fear, the end. They’re supposed to handle their own mortality, and no help in that regard (other than forcing them to confront death by dying) can come from you—death ain’t a science project. And, even if you could imagine your child’s death, why would you?

But I’d been cursed with a compulsively catastrophic imagination, and had often involuntarily imagined the worst. I used to picture being run over by a car whenever I crossed the street; I could actually see the layers of dirt on the car’s axis as its wheel crushed my skull. When I was stuck on a subway with all the lights out, I’d envision a deluge of fire advancing through the tunnel toward the train. Only after I met Teri did I manage to get my tormentful imagination somewhat under control. And, after our children were born, I learned to quickly delete any vision I had of something horrible happening to them. A few weeks before Isabel’s cancer was diagnosed, I’d noticed that her head seemed large and somewhat asymmetrical, and a question had popped into my mind: What if she has a brain tumor? But I banished the thought almost immediately. Even if you could imagine your child’s grave illness, why would you?

by Aleksandar Hemon, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Guy Billout

I (Robot) Thee Wed

[ed. Companion piece to the Sherry Turkle interview further down the page. While sex is the hook in this article, robots will definitely perform all kinds of social functions in the near future. Is that good or bad, or both?]

It’s hard to think of a more attention-grabbing title than “Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism”—especially in the academic world.

Written by researchers from New Zealand’s University of Wellington and published recently in the journal Futures, the paper predicts that in the decades to come, humans will patronize robot-staffed brothels, freeing them from the guilt associated with visiting a flesh-and-blood prostitute. Perhaps predictably, it sparked a lively conversation about whether the sex industry could be automated—and not a little squeamishness about the whole idea of robot-human relations.

That at least some of us will be having sexual intercourse with robots in the future should be obvious by now. Somebody out there will make love to just about any consumer good that enters the home (and if that’s not the first rule of product design, it should be).

But will our robot-human relations be relegated to the bedroom, or will love enter the equation, too? Is our society headed in a direction that will support this transition? Looking at current trends, I’d say that the answer is a resounding yes.  (...)

In 2007’s Love and Sex With Robots, Dr. David Levy claimed we humans—that’s men and women, so you’re not off the hook, ladies—will become smitten with new breeds of advanced humanoid robots due to arrive within the next half-century.

Many of our social interactions have been reduced to the barebones transfer of information via various online media: text messages, emails, shared videos and pictures, status updates, and, uh, pokes. We routinely create online profiles that distill our lives to a list of data points—much in the way that a role-playing game stat sheet boils down your complex and multi-faceted elvish archer to only his intelligence, dexterity, and charisma. For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost. For better or worse, new modes of interaction are steadily eroding the more “traditional” forms of interaction familiar to older generations. New streamlined interactions between human beings may open the door for machines to join us as social peers and not just sex objects.

by Daniel H. Wilson, Slate |  Read more:
Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP

Machine Turn Quickly by Francis Picabia, 1917
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