Trade

by Simon Rich

Josh always knew, on some level, that it was possible for him to get traded. He’d seen it happen to dozens of guys over the years, including some of his closest friends. It was part of the game. Still, he had never been traded himself, and he was having some trouble accepting it. He kept expecting someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him the whole thing was a joke.

“Here’s your stuff,” Kate said, dropping a duffelbag at his feet. “Goodbye.”

Josh stared at her for a moment, expecting some kind of encouragement or sympathy. But Kate just stood there, her eyelids fluttering with impatience.

“So that’s it, then,” Josh said. “After three and a half years.”

“What do you want me to say?” Kate snapped.

He picked up the bag and slung it wearily over his shoulder. There was nothing he could do. When your girlfriend decides to trade you, you’re through.

“I just don’t get it!” Josh shouted, over the din of the jukebox. “I thought things were going really well.”

“They weren’t,” his brother Craig said. “The writing was on the wall.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Your record’s been sinking all year. You told me yourself you had a five-argument losing streak. And then there were all those errors.”

Josh nodded ruefully. There had been a lot of errors this year. Forty-five Missed Compliments, three Forgotten Events, twelve Accidental Insults—he’d been playing like a rookie.

Craig squeezed his little brother’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Josh,” he said. “Believe me, I know what you’re going through. Remember in ’04-’05? When Zoe traded me?”

Josh nodded. They’d come to the same bar then.

“I was devastated,” Craig said. “I’d just taken her to Henry’s Inn for her birthday—you know, that fancy place with all the candles? Got her a steak, gave her a necklace, took her to a show, massaged her feet . . .”

“You hit for the cycle?”

“Uh-huh. Then I wake up the next day and she’s giving me my marching orders. Tells me she needs to ‘shake things up’ if she wants to remain a contender.”

“Unbelievable.”

“It was right before Valentine’s Day.”

“Of course,” Josh said. “The Trade Deadline.”

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Basta Bunga Bunga

by Ariel Levy

In 2008, during his fourth campaign to become Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Meno male che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s about to erupt into carnality. The finale depicts a passionate young swimming instructor singing to a pool full of women in bathing suits: “Say it with the strength possessed only by those who have a pure mind: Presidente, we are with you!”

These days, you would have to possess an unusually pure mind to look at that pool full of young women without picturing the pool at Berlusconi’s estate, Arcore, just outside Milan. Along with the basement disco and the upstairs bedrooms, the pool is featured almost daily in Italian newspapers as one of the sites where the Presidente reportedly hosted scores of orgies—or, as they have become known around the world, Bunga Bungas. (There is heated debate about the origin of the term. Some say Berlusconi picked it up from Muammar Qaddafi—his friend, until recently. Others cite an off-color joke set in Africa.) The Bunga Bungas are a source of humiliation for many Italians, and of humor for others, including the Presidente, as Berlusconi is called. Not long ago, he told a convention of the Movement for National Responsibility, upon hearing its theme song, “My compliments on your anthem. I will use it as one of my songs for a Bunga Bunga!”

Berlusconi has always seemed pleased with himself. In 2006, he offered some advice to Italians living below the poverty line: “Do it my way and earn more money!” (His net worth is estimated at nine billion dollars.) He has described himself as “the best in the world—all the other world leaders wish they could be as good as I am.” Lately, however, his bravado has sounded increasingly misplaced. The Italian economy is stalled, and unemployment is at 8.4 per cent. In 2009, he was lambasted for his inadequate response to earthquakes in Abruzzo, which killed more than three hundred people and left seventy thousand homeless. Last July, Gianfranco Fini, the president of the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, who had been a crucial ally for sixteen years, broke away to form his own party. And then came Ruby.

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photo: markk

Mexico City

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A Billion Wicked Thoughts

by Maia Szalavitz

What internet searches reveal about human desire.

Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway.

For their new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other — at least sexually. I spoke recently with Ogas.

Why did you decide to analyze online porn searches?

I'm a computational neuroscientist. I view the mind as software. Most computational neuroscientists study higher functions like memory, language and vision. We wanted to apply the same techniques to a lower part of the brain, the sexual part.

So is "Rule 34" true — that if you can imagine it, there's porn of it?

When we first started, Rule 34 was almost a guiding idea. The Internet has every kind of imaginable porn; searches are going to reflect immense diversity. We quickly realized that [the data] didn't really support that.

Even though you can find an instance of any kind of porn you can imagine, people search for and spend money and time on 20 sexual interests, which account for 80% of all porn. The top five are youth, gays, [sexy mothers], breasts and cheating wives.

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The Long Weekend

by Alex Balk

What are you doing this weekend? Drinking, sure. Maybe you will attend some kind of "barbecue" or "cookout" with "friends" or "family," during which you will probably eat some charred animal flesh, unless you are a vegan, in which case you will stand there with an impossibly smug look on your face but will be secretly angry inside because all you've had to eat all day are chips and salsa and possibly carrots if they served some kind of vegetable platter. Maybe you'll stay in and blast the A/C and watch six seasons of whatever show you always wanted to get into that is now streaming on Netflix. Maybe you're sad and alone and you have no one to share the weekend with, in which case you'll probably spend most of your time sleeping or crying. There is a world of possibilities out there! But know this for sure: Because the Internet has completely rewired your brain and jacked up the level of stimulus you now constantly require, there will come a point at which you are completely bored and want something to read, but you will not want to turn on your computer because it's a three-day weekend and you feel like turning your computer says something bad about your ability to disconnect. Well, good news! Here are a few of the longer pieces we've run over the last six months or so. Print them out now and take them with you, wherever you go. When the urge strikes, pull 'em out and read 'em. It'll be just like being online, without the guilty feeling that actually being online provides. Enjoy! And have as good a time as you can. It's going to be Tuesday soon enough.

• Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert
• My Two Days as a Russian Tabloid Sensation
• The Last Two Veterans of World War I
• When Your Shrink Dies
• Chris Kanyon's Doomed Quest To Be Wrestling's First Openly Gay Star
• Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters
• Humanity's Endless Quest to Invent a Death Ray: A History
• Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun
• Gordon Likes to Think He is the Most Underrated of All Mythical Heroes
• A Q&A With A Vacuum Cleaner Salesman

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Photo by Niklas Hellerstedt, from Flickr.

The Truth About the American Economy

By Robert Reich

The U.S. economy continues to stagnate. It’s growing at the rate of 1.8 percent, which is barely growing at all. Consumer spending is down.

It’s vital that we understand the truth about the American economy.

How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?

The Great Prosperity

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward.

During these three decades everyone’s wages grew — not just those at or near the top.

Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.

The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent).

Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family’s income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched.

The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it.

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Textbooks Go the iTunes Route

[ed.  I've been out of college for a while.  Can an introductory biology text really cost $185?  What kind of pricing methodology justifies a figure like that?  No wonder students and families are drowning in debt.]

by  Ben Wieder

The high cost of textbooks is a rising student complaint. It inspired recent federal legislation calling on colleges to list the cost of required reading. When courses use only a portion of expensive books, it only makes matters worse.

"Sometimes a professor only assigns five chapters out of a whole book," says Jennie A. Dexter, who just graduated from Oklahoma State University at Tulsa with a degree in marketing and management.

Now textbook publishers are offering an experimental form of price relief: The option to buy book chapters instead of the whole thing, in electronic versions with lower prices.

McGraw-Hill and Pearson Education are among the investors in the San Francisco-based start-up Inkling, which offers multimedia-rich iPad versions of several publishers' textbooks by the chapter or by the book. Cengage Learning also offers students the opportunity to buy chapters of various books in a PDF format, through its Web site.

For students accustomed to purchasing individual songs from Apple's iTunes store, the chapters option may seem like a logical step. Whether it actually saves students money depends on how many chapters from a book they are assigned, when they're given that assignment, and, in the case of Inkling titles, whether they were already planning to spend the $500 or more to purchase an iPad.

The 10th edition of Sylvia S. Mader's Biology textbook, published by McGraw-Hill, is one of Inkling's introductory-biology offerings. The book has 47 chapters, and Inkling sells each one for $3.99, with one chapter thrown in free. The company sells the entire iPad version for $129.99, and McGraw-Hill's hardcover version retails for $185. So students assigned 33 or fewer chapters would save money buying by the chapter rather than by the book.

Of course, such savings are only possible if a professor assigns just a portion of the book. Of 33 publicly available course syllabi that use the textbook, retrieved through a Google search, only two had more than 30 chapters assigned, meaning that students in the other 31 classes would have been better off buying by the chapter. But that is far from a wide-ranging or representative sample of courses.

Ms. Dexter says she would welcome the option to buy only the chapters assigned for class. "It's totally cost-effective," she says. A fellow recent graduate of Oklahoma State, Brent M. Fitzgerald, says most people he knows don't like paying for material they don't use. "Students read what they have to, that's it," he says.

And that's just what worries David S. Berg, a psychology professor at the Community College of Philadelphia. He likes the technology—he leads faculty workshops on using the iPhone and iPad in teaching and encourages students to buy digital textbooks. But he doesn't like what he calls the increasing "disarticulation" of the course model.

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Seaweed

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Go for What Hurts

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.

I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

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Hacking in the U.S.A

[ed.  Government definitions of cyber terrorism here:]

by Kim Zetter

If you want to see a top Pentagon official squirm, tune into CNBC’s cyberwar documentary Thursday night, and watch Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn face an uncomfortably direct question about the Stuxnet worm.

In “CodeWars: America’s Cyber Threat,” correspondent Melissa Lee asks Lynn outright: “Was the U.S. involved in any way in the development of Stuxnet?”

Lynn’s response is long enough that an inattentive viewer might not notice that it doesn’t answer the question.

“The challenges of Stuxnet, as I said, what it shows you is the difficulty of any, any attribution and it’s something that we’re still looking at, it’s hard to get into any kind of comment on that until we’ve finished our examination,” Lynn replies.

“But sir, I’m not asking you if you think another country was involved,” Lee presses. “I’m asking you if the U.S. was involved. If the Department of Defense was involved.”

“And this is not something that we’re going to be able to answer at this point,” Lynn finally says.

The sophisticated Stuxnet worm was released on systems in Iran in June 2009 and again in March and April 2010, and was designed to specifically target programmable logic controllers used in industrial control systems made by Siemens. The worm was programmed to launch its attack only on Siemens systems that had a specific configuration — a configuration believed to exist at Iran’s Natanz plant, where weapons-grade uranium is being enriched.

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Solar Farms of Le Mées, France

The energy company Efinity opened two new solar-power farms in Le Mées in north-central France this month. They're huge. Together they occupy 89 acres, generating enough electricity for 9,000 families. They were also designed with the landscape in mind. The panels were installed without concrete foundations, which means when their 20-year lifespan is over and they're removed, there will be healthy land left behind, and grasses are being planted so sheep can graze among them.

But what's most remarkable about these solar farms is that they're really aesthetically pleasing. Set on the rolling hills, they look like some sort of Frank Gehry installation. Carbon aside, they're just much nicer to look at than a coal plant.

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Pieces of a Man

by James Fallows

The music I most associate with my first stage of living in Washington, in the Watergate era of the 1970s when I was working for the Washington Monthly, was the voice and poetry of Gil Scott-Heron, who was then in his early-/mid-20s. When I think of sitting and sweating in the non-airconditioned Washington Monthly office late on stifling DC nights, I think as well of Gil Scott-Heron's immediately recognizable voice in the background, on the radio. To me it was the theme music of that time. Of course this was a voice you stopped and listened to, rather than half-noticing as background effect.

He really was a beautiful singer, in addition to his poetry -- and his political influence, which has been most discussed on the occasion of his death. The only drawback of his being so well known for 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' is that his singing doesn't sound so great on that song. I preferred ones like this, which certainly is political in its own way:

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Girlie-Man

by Lawrence Bush

Long-term marriages rank with fools, barflies and traveling salesmen as a classic butt of American jokes.

I married her 60 years ago, and right away I knew it was a mistake!

Their punch lines testify to nagging, sniping, dissatisfaction and the loss of romance. Their baseline assumption is that a lengthy marriage is sexless or, at best, sexually worn out.

Darling, do you remember the first time we made love?
-- Hell, I can't remember the last time!

These days, there's a new rack of clever, grim headlines for comedians to invent:

"Maria & Arnold: Terminated!"

"IMF head sits in jail, waiting for a bail-out"

Meanwhile, I'm sitting at home, practicing my punditry and wondering why it is that after 36 years with the same woman -- with whom I have made love more than 3,000 times -- there's nothing I'd like better right now than to go into the next room to strip off her clothes.

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