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Saturday Night Mix

[ed.  SNM will be going on a brief hiatus for the summer.  I'll try to post individual videos when I come across something interesting; in the mean time here are some Flight of the Conchords.]

Ukulele Songs

A few weeks ago, Eddie Vedder released a video for the song “Longing to Belong” from his new album, a second solo full-length, Ukulele Songs. The video fittingly captures Eddie amidst a Hawaiian landscape, of which he spends quite a bit of his time (I would know this because I ran into him at a hotel there and my stalker husband gained that intel from one of the hotel staff).

Anyway, if you head over to NPR, you can listen to Ukulele Songs in full, for free, as NPR is wont to do.

The songs found on Vedder’s new album are selections from more than a decade of writing on the instrument. While the majority of the album is a calm, nostalgic, melody-inspired affair, the album does open up with Pearl Jam’s propulsive “Can’t Keep.” Either way, the overall sound of Ukulele Songs shows us a softer Eddie Vedder, featuring songs drenched in sadness about the breakup of his first marriage, while others speak to the joy and serenity of his second one.

And just when you think an entire album of songs featuring Eddie Vedder and his ukulele might be just a bit too spare, we get some backup vocals from the likes of Glen Hansard on “Sleepless Nights” and Cat Power on 1920′s-inspired “Tonight You Belong to Me.”

You could probably buy your mom this record for her summer layouts by the pool. Or you could buy it for yourself, because it’s actually quite lovely.

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Courtney Comes Clean

[ed.  Wow.  You don't read many interviews like this.  Sounds like there's still a lot of denial going on.]

by  Maer Roshan

Last September Courtney Love was scheduled to headline a large concert to benefit the recovery community. Intrigued by the prospect of her performing before thousands of recovering addicts and drunks, I asked her if she'd agree to an interview about her hard-won sobriety. Much to my surprise, she did.

Love was scheduled to perform at Randall's Island Park at 11 a.m. Much to the consternation of the event’s organizers, she showed up three hours late. Apparently her hairdresser was tardy, her make-up artist was a mess, and she needed a jacuzzi dip to calm her frayed nerves. She then spent an hour and a half picking out an appropriate outfit and trying on dozens of shoes. So by the time her car arrived at the park, the crowd of 10,000 had thinned out to about 50 stragglers and die-hard fans, one of whom suffered a heart attack at the exact moment Love emerged from her limo. (Courtney has that kind of effect on people.) As an ambulance rushed over to save the stricken fan, the singer trekked blithely across the expansive grass lawn. “Where is everybody?” she shrieked, trying to stay balanced on her sharp stiletto heels. “Wasn't this supposed to be some massive event!”

Informed that most of the audience had long departed, she smiled sadly and beckoned the remnants of the crowd into a make-shift V.I.P. tent backstage. There, for well over an hour, she delivered a flawless performance, capped off by a rollicking cover of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. Afterwards she patiently signed autographs and sat for an hour-long interview with a documentary team to discuss her struggle with recovery. As she was leaving, a teenage boy who had nearly died of a heroin overdose months earlier approached her for a few private words. She wrapped her arms around him and talked to him for 20 minutes. When she left she was almost in tears.

That, in a nutshell, is Courtney Love—a mad, maddening presence who has managed, through sheer will and raw talent, to stake out a place at the forefront of pop culture for over two decades. At an age (46) when many of her contemporaries are playing reunion shows, she has managed to remain as raucous and relevant as ever, a multi-talented performer who has made impressive inroads in movies, fashion and music.

The following interview links a series of taped conversations that occurred over the past eight months. No doubt many will shudder at the notion of a recovery-oriented website prominently featuring a celebrity who has been a poster girl for drug abuse. But for all that, she may be a perfect poster child for recovery as well. There is something undeniably admirable about her free-wheeling honesty about her struggle with sobriety, and her determined optimism after every fall that this time things will turn out differently. Role model or not, her rocky road to recovery should resonate with many of our readers. We're sure you'll let us know, either way.

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Why Not Let the Dead Pay for Medicare?

by  Kevin Drum

So here's an idea: why not reform Medicare by means testing it? Conservatives should love this idea.

Here's how it works. Basically, we leave Medicare alone. Oh, we can still go ahead with some of the obvious reforms. Comparative effectiveness research is a no-brainer for anyone who's not part of the Republican leadership. Ditto for some of the delivery reforms on the table. Or allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices. It would be great if that stuff works. But if it doesn't, then people will need to pay more for their care. So why not have dead people pay? They don't need the money any more, after all.

So Medicare stays roughly the same, but every time you receive medical care you also get a bill. You don't have to pay it, though. It's just there for accounting purposes. When you die, the bill gets paid out of your estate. If your estate is small or nonexistent, you've gotten lots of free medical care. If it's large, you'll pay for it all. If you're somewhere in between, you'll end up paying for part of the care you've received.

Obviously this gives people incentives to spend all their money before they die. That's fine. I suspect they wouldn't end up spending as much as you'd think. What it does mean, though, is that Medicare has first claim on their estate, not their kids. But that seems fair, doesn't it?

Do you want to make sure to credit estates with all the Medicare taxes that have been paid over the years? Fine. Do you want to exempt a certain smallish amount to account for genuine family heirlooms? Fine. Do you want to pass laws making sure that estates can't be transferred to other people or trusts in order to evade this rule? Or regulate the use of reverse mortgages? Or make special rules for heirs who are minors? Fine, fine, and fine. Whatever.

But I'll bet this would raise a fair amount of money. What's more, that Medicare bill, with its continuously increasing grand total, would give people a pretty good sense of just how much medical care they're really getting. And it wouldn't impoverish the elderly with means testing while they were living. It would come solely from dead people, who have taken advantage of Medicare while they were alive and have no use for their money after they're dead. So what's not to like?

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Grindr: Welcome to the World’s Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar

by Matt Kapp

A smart, attractive, chronically single friend of mine had been feverishly fidgeting with his iPhone for half a dozen blocks, somehow navigating the crowded sidewalks without once lifting his gaze from the screen. “Here’s one … 1,127 feet,” he muttered. And then, “Oh, 413 feet!” Sensing my annoyance, he showed me his phone: dozens of little thumbnail pictures of guys, with little blurbs about themselves, organized from top to bottom in order of proximity. Suddenly, it became clear to me what his excitement was about. Could this crude little iPhone app be every single gay man’s dream: to be able to cruise anywhere, anytime? Shopping? Why not! Meet me in Aisle C! Killing time at the airport? I’m sitting at Gate 17. At the gym? A no-brainer. Even at gay bars: cruising within cruising.

Grindr claims its app has more than a million users in more than 180 countries, including Sri Lanka, Djibouti, Haiti, Iraq, and Iran, places where being gay can get you killed. But nowhere is Grindr more popular than in the U.K., where there are more than 160,000 users, which means, after adjusting for population, almost twice as many gay Brits use Grindr as gay Americans do. London tops the list of cities, with 62,000 Grindr users, which the company proudly points out is “1 in every 60 male Londoners.” Users spend an average of 1.3 hours a day logged on. Openly gay celebrity jack-of-all-trades and devout technophile Stephen Fry introduced Grindr to British television viewers on the BBC’s hit show Top Gear, which is about the rather heterosexual subject of cars. “This one may not be quite so up your strata,” he warned Top Gear’s host, Jeremy Clarkson. “It’s called Grindr.” As Fry showed off the app, Clarkson’s incredulity shifted to enthusiasm. “You can find the nearest cruising homosexual with one of those?,” he marveled. “Imagine in traffic jams!” Grindr downloads spiked by 30,000 in the days after Fry’s appearance on the show.

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Branding America

By Naomi Klein

In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No ­Label". The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters."

A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks" (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called "a community personality." Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: "inspired by Starbucks". Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, "This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realised why while reading William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the buttons on her Levi's jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar affliction. As a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to brands. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture – four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns.

Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.

The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and protect it and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergised platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line . . .) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).

Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada's new superstore and towards the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. "But aren't you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really crap one."

Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place. The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers – the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labour to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token "youth columnist", I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces – schools, museums, parks – while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.

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Gil Scott-Heron ( April 1, 1949 -- May 27, 2011)

by Alec Wilkinson

Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the “godfather of rap,” which is an epithet he doesn’t really care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him famous.

Scott-Heron calls himself a bluesologist. He is sixty-one, tall and scrawny, and he lives in Harlem, in a ground-floor apartment that he doesn’t often leave. It is long and narrow, and there’s a bedspread covering a sliding glass door to a patio, so no light enters, making the place seem like a monk’s cell or a cave. Once, when I thought he was away, I called to convey a message, and he answered and said, “I’m here. Where else would a caveman be but in his cave?”

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Cat Mom Hugs Baby Kitten

[ed.  This seems to be the meme of the week.]

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The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

by Devin Leonard

Phillip Herr looks like many of the men who toil deep within the federal government. He wears blue suits. He keeps his graying hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He has an inoffensively earnest manner. He also has heavy bags under his eyes, which testify to the long hours he spends scrutinizing federal spending for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency where he is Director of Physical Infrastructure Issues. As his title suggests, Herr devotes much of his time to highway programs. But for the past three years he has been diagnosing what ails the U.S. Postal Service.

It's a lonely calling. "Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan," laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. "Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There aren't many."

Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. "It's one of those things that the public just takes for granted," he says. "The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that's it."

He is struck by how many USPS executives started out as letter carriers or clerks. He finds them so consumed with delivering mail that they have been slow to grasp how swiftly the service's financial condition is deteriorating. "We said, 'What's your 10-year plan?' " Herr recalls. "They didn't have one."

Congress gave him until the end of 2011 to report on the USPS's woes. But Herr and his team concluded that the postal service's business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service's survival plan isn't reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving.

The USPS is a wondrous American creation. Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail—40 percent of the entire world's volume. For the price of a 44¢ stamp, you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation's borders. The service will carry it by pack mule to the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Mailmen on snowmobiles take it to the wilds of Alaska. If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth.

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Welcome to the Summer Drinking Season

By Alex Balk

Remember how, back at the outset of last summer, you promised yourself that this time you weren't going to let the season go to waste? How you had such ambitious hopes and schemes? And how, seemingly seconds later, Labor Day rolled around and you were all, "Wait! What? I... d'oh!"

Well, that's alright. Summers are meant to be wasted. They are the disposable months of the year during which expectations are low and performance follows accordingly. You're sweaty, you're listless, you're not trying very hard... and it's okay. It's summer! Relax! And you know what? If you're going to waste your summer, you might as well spend your summer wasted. May I suggest a cocktail?

While some opt for the Dark and Stormy, and others plump for the Negroni (with unfortunate consequences), we take a different libation where I'm from. The Official Balk Family Drink of the Summer is, at heart, a gin and tonic, but with one important addition: a splash of Campari.

Too simple, you say? Ah, my friend, you obviously have not had The Official Balk Family Drink of the Summer. While there's nothing wrong with your basic gin and tonic, the splash of Campari... oh, the difference it makes. It is also an excellent test of manliness (if you are a man), since you have to be comfortable enough with yourself to be holding a pink drink throughout the afternoon and into the evening. I probably do not need to do this, but just in case your brain is as fried as mine is right now, here's how you make a gin and tonic with a splash of Campari:

Cowboys and Pit Crews

Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School.

In his book “The Youngest Science,” the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. “If being in a hospital bed made a difference,” he said, “it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference.”

That didn’t stop the interns from being, as he put it, “frantically busy.” He learned to focus on diagnosis—insuring nothing was missed, especially an illness with an actual, effective treatment. There were only a few. Lobar pneumonia could be treated with antiserum, an injection of rabbit antibodies against the pneumococcus, if the intern identified the subtype correctly. Patients in diabetic coma responded dramatically to animal-extracted insulin and intravenous fluid. Acute heart failure patients could be saved by bleeding away a pint of blood from an arm vein, administering a leaf-preparation of digitalis, and delivering oxygen by tent. Early syphilitic paresis sometimes responded to a mix of mercury, bismuth, and arsenic. Surgery could treat certain tumors and infections. Beyond that, medical capabilities didn’t extend much further.

The distance medicine has travelled in the couple of generations since is almost unfathomable for us today. We now have treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousand of diagnoses and conditions that afflict human beings. We have more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, and you, the clinicians graduating today, will be legally permitted to provide them. Such capabilities cannot guarantee everyone a long and healthy life, but they can make it possible for most.

People worldwide want and deserve the benefits of your capabilities. Many fear they will be denied them, however, whether because of cost, availability, or incompetence of caregivers. We are now witnessing a global societal struggle to assure universal delivery of our know-how. We in medicine, however, have been slow to grasp why this is such a struggle, or how the volume of discovery has changed our work and responsibilities.

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Physics and the Immortality of the Soul

The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.

Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being “firmly agnostic” on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.

Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)

Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.

We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

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