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Another Crash

by Mina Kimes

You have to see it from Bob Rodriguez's perspective. Twice he has spotted an approaching storm. Twice he has warned the world. Twice he has been pooh-poohed and seen investors abandon the two mutual funds he managed. Twice he has taken steps to shield his clients from the coming crisis.

And twice -- first with Internet stocks in the 1990s, and then with the financial crisis of 2008 -- Rodriguez has been right.

As the latter cataclysm unfolded, the man once mocked for missing out on the hottest markets of his lifetime was anointed as a seer. The Wall Street Journal pronounced Rodriguez one of the "doomsayers who got it right." Barron's labeled him a "prophet." MarketWatch described him as one of the "four horsemen of the market."

Rodriguez, the CEO of $16 billion money management firm First Pacific Advisors, isn't the type to be satisfied with being right (though he's certainly not above that particular pleasure). He's seemingly compelled to share the hard truth. It's as if he has this terrible gift, and with that comes the obligation to tell the world when calamity is on the horizon.

So when he was invited to address more than 1,000 mutual fund managers at a conference held by Morningstar in May 2009 -- just when it looked as if the crisis had finally abated -- Rodriguez gave himself only a brief pat on the back. Then he launched into a tirade, ripping into all of the parties involved in the meltdown. Fund managers, he said, had "stunk." The federal stimulus programs were foolish and shortsighted, and regulators had lost all credibility. Worst of all, he said, was the ballooning U.S. debt, which had prompted him to stop buying long-term bonds from the "irresponsible and fiscally inept government."

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In Search of the True Self

by Joshua Knobe

Mark Pierpont used to be an important figure in the evangelical Christian effort to help “cure” gay people of their homosexual desires. He started out just printing up tracts and handing them out in gay bars, but his ministry grew over time, and eventually he was traveling the world and speaking to crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. There was just one problem. Mark Pierpont himself was gay. He continued to feel sexual desires toward other men and was constantly engaged in an effort to suppress them. In the documentary film “Protagonist,” Pierpont movingly describes his inner conflict, saying that he sometimes felt an almost physical revulsion at his own desires and would then think: “Good. I hate this.  I hate sin, just like God hates sin.”

Faced with a case like this one, we might be tempted to give Pierpont some simple advice.  We might tell him that what he really needs to do is just look deep within and be true to himself. Indeed, this advice has become a ubiquitous refrain.  It can be found in high art and literature (Polonius’s “To thine own self be true”), in catchy pop songs (Madonna’s “Express Yourself”) and in endless advertisements for self-help programs and yoga retreats (“Unlock your soul; become your authentic self”).  It is, perhaps, one of the distinctive ideals of modern life.

Yet, though there is a great deal of consensus on the importance of this ideal, there is far less agreement about what it actually tells us to do in any concrete situation.  Consider again the case of Mark Pierpont.  One person might look at his predicament and say: “Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden.  If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is.”

But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: “Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values.  If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is.”

Each of these perspectives seems like a reasonable one, at least worthy of serious consideration.  So it seems that we are faced with a difficult philosophical question.  How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

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New Birth Control for Men

A new birth control method for men has been developed by scientists in India that has proven to be 100% effective. The injection, called RISUG (Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance) works for 10 years with no side effects and is reversible with another injection. It works by injecting a non-toxic, positively charged polymer into the man’s body which makes them unable to fertilize an egg.

Phase III trials are starting in India, the last step before it is available for the public to use, and a private foundation called Parsemus is working to get it approved in the United States.

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NY Times Diner's Journal - What We're Reading Now

A collection of links by the reporters and editors of the Dining section.

The New York Times: Is that really cod or swordfish or tuna on your plate? A new study suggests widespread fraud in how fish is labeled at markets and restaurants.
— Sam Sifton

The Betty Crocker Project: The blogger Annie Shannon is cooking a vegan version of every recipe in the classic “big red” Betty Crocker cookbook. — Julia Moskin

Details: And the food revolution marches on: Summer rock festivals are now serving elevated grub. — Jeff Gordinier

The New York Times: Where you’ll want to go: Claudio’s Clam Bar in Greenport, N.Y. — Nick Fox

Fast Company: A French-born artist (Cyprien Gaillard) builds a grand pyramid of 72,000 bottles of Efes Turkish beer in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Museumgoers are invited to empty same — by drinking them. Done. (Before and after pictures.) It’s art, y’all! But it’s also a protest against the importation of the Pergamon Altar from Turkey to Germany. — Glenn Collins

Gourmet: Back when Gourmet.com was a print magazine, it ran this recipe with a cover line suggesting it might be for the Best Burger Ever. That well may be true. Make it this weekend and see. — Sam Sifton

The East Hampton Star: A good report from Russell Drumm on a quiet trend in the striped bass fishery up and down the East Coast: fewer fish. Overfishing may not be to blame. — Sam Sifton

The Wall Street Journal: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan picks up some weekend cookout tips from the chef Anita Lo, and they nick a good recipe from Zarela Martinez in the process. — Sam Sifton

The San Francisco Chronicle: Michael Bauer remembers Barbara Tropp, the Alice Waters of Chinese food. — Nick Fox

Westchester Magazine: How Joe Bastianich slimmed down. (And what Mario Batali once did with vegetable trimmings that had been tossed in the trash.)
– Jeff Gordinier

Elizabeth Minchilli in Rome: Hey, does New York have a Florentine tripe truck yet? (And if not, why not?) — Jeff Gordinier

Poetry Foundation: Robin Robertson’s vibrant, gleaming translation of Pablo Neruda’s poem about a tuna in the marketplace. — Jeff Gordinier

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Going, Going, Gone: Who Killed the Internet Auction?

by James Surowiecki

In 1846, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart opened a store in New York City unlike any that Americans had seen before. Located downtown, on the east side of Broadway, what became known as the Marble Dry Goods Palace was a huge emporium that offered luxury and everyday items alike. Stewart’s innovations as a retailer were numerous: He introduced what are believed to have been the first in-store fashion shows in America. He lavishly appointed his interiors, in striking contrast to the merely functional look of shops up to that point. And he was the first in the nation to use the street-level plate-glass windows as a display for merchandise.

Then there was A. T. Stewart’s most important innovation: His products came with price tags. At that time, in most stores, prices were set by haggling. The result was a frustrating dance between customer and salesperson, who parried back and forth until they managed to arrive at (in the words of one retail historian) “a price which neither party to the transaction considered robbery.” Stewart saw that this experience left buyers feeling taken advantage of, and it encouraged salespeople to squeeze the most from every transaction rather than build long-term relationships with customers. So he marked each product with a fixed price.

Customers embraced the new “no haggling” policy, and the Marble Palace became an enormous success. Sixteen years after the store’s debut, Stewart opened an even bigger one, the Cast Iron Palace at Broadway and 10th Street, which occupied a full city block and at the time was reputedly the largest retail establishment in the world. Stewart’s success—and his idea—did not go unnoticed by other merchants, and soon a plethora of other large stores, from Gimbels to Macy’s to Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, abandoned haggling and adopted fixed prices. Within a generation, the price tag became ubiquitous; by the late 19th century, fixed prices seemed inseparable from the retail experience.

Almost a century and a half after Stewart’s innovation, a man named Pierre Omidyar opened another store unlike any that Americans had seen before. eBay, in Omidyar’s vision, was to be the world’s biggest open market: a democratic agora where small sellers could compete with huge corporations, where shoppers of all kinds could find products they’d never dreamed of being able to buy. As with the Marble Palace, though, eBay’s greatest innovation was in pricing: It replaced fixed prices with auctions. In line with the site’s democratic ethos, there would be no corporate central planner assigning value to goods. Instead, prices would be determined organically, by the ever-changing flow of supply and demand.

Again customers responded, making eBay an enormous success. Other auction sites sprang up, but network effects—the more buyers eBay had, the more sellers it attracted, which in turn attracted more buyers, and so on—made the company difficult to beat. After the dotcom boom collapsed, eBay was one of the few companies to weather the storm, expanding its business briskly during the recession of 2001. The following year a business book declared it the most important company in ecommerce, anointing it as “the perfect store.”

Here, though, is where the two stories diverge. A. T. Stewart’s fixed prices touched off an enduring revolution, but Pierre Omidyar’s big idea hasn’t stuck. Today, auctions are a smaller portion of ecommerce than they were in 2001, and even on eBay they are a dwindling, if still important, part of the business: They now account for just 31 percent of all sales on the site and are no longer at the heart of the company’s business model. Dane Glasgow, vice president of global product management at eBay, told me that “eBay does not have a selling format of choice. We’re indifferent to format.” This creates, to be sure, something of a dilemma for the company, since customers very much associate it with auctions. But as a corporation, eBay is now remarkably diversified, making money through its ticket reseller, StubHub; its bargain deals site, Half.com; and especially through PayPal, the preeminent online-payments system that last year posted a staggering $3.4 billion in revenue and is expected to do twice that by 2013. And on the eBay site itself, where tens of billions of dollars in goods change hands every year, the majority are sold through Buy It Now, a button that makes an eBay transaction similar to a purchase from Amazon.com or any other online store—with a fixed price that would make A. T. Stewart proud.

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The 30 Year Pandemic

by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

At first it seemed an oddity: a scattering of reports in the spring and early summer of 1981 that young gay men in New York and California were ill with forms of pneumonia and cancer usually seen only in people with severely weakened immune systems.

In hindsight, of course, these announcements were the first official harbingers of AIDS — the catastrophic pandemic that would infect more than 60 million people (and counting) worldwide, killing at least half that number.

But at the time, we had little idea what we were dealing with — didn’t know that AIDS was a distinct disease, what caused it, how it could be contracted, or even what to call it.

As AIDS has become entrenched in the United States and elsewhere, a new generation has grown up with little if any knowledge of those dark early days. But they are worth recalling, as a cautionary tale about the effects of the bafflement and fear that can surround an unknown disease and as a reminder of the sweeping changes in medical practice that the epidemic has brought about.

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Dog Sense

by  Kerry Lauerman

It's news that should shock and delight dog owners, scolded for decades by trainers and dog whisperers that they must relentlessly assert their dominance over their dogs: Yes, it's perfectly acceptable to let Fido sleep in your bed.

You can also let him enter a room before you, and you can let him win at a game of tug of war, all without fearing that you will somehow signal that you are the submissive one and he is in charge. Contrary to long-cherished theories, dogs aren't competing with us for position in the pack, but are largely performing for our approval. And that -- no matter what the Cesar Millans of the world would have you believe -- is because much of what we've been led to be believe about dogs' hard-wired behavior has been totally wrong.

In his densely illuminating new book, "Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet,"  John Bradshaw explains how our understanding has been skewed by deeply flawed research, and exploited by a sensationalized media. In place of the rigid, often violent, alpha-led wolf societies we once believed produced the modern dog were actually cooperative, familial groups. And in place of the choke-chain school of negative reinforcement should be a training program based primarily on the positive.

Bradshaw, the Waltham director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol, articulates a revolutionary change in thinking in "Dog Sense" that should liberate both dog and owner from what had so often been portrayed as an adversarial relationship. He spoke with Salon recently by phone.

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Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

[ed.  There was quite a bit of interest in the Marlon Brando piece posted recently, so I thought I'd add another classic.] 

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra -- his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on -- and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

By Gay Talese

FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra -- A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel -- only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.

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Jessy

[ed.  Despite the negative tone in the post following this one, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game still attracts and retains excellent staff biologists like Jessy, who are grounded in the challenges of the job and maintain an abiding appreciation and respect for the resources they manage.]

Jessy Coltrane, the Anchorage-area wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, pulled her big white pickup onto Tudor Road and headed for one of the city's worst bear-problem neighborhoods: Muldoon.

The cab of her truck was packed with gun cases and rain gear. The bed held a dog kennel to haul moose calves and one very large net.

Each summer has a similar, chaotic tempo, she said. The bear calls begin in May. Then the moose start giving birth, and that goes on all of June while the bear calls keep ramping up. Mostly it's black bears scaring up trouble in neighborhoods. Occasionally, there's more serious trouble with a brown bear. The wildlife crescendo comes at the end of July and then things drop off once berry season starts and bears get more interested in blueberries than old pizza boxes, she said.

Coltrane pulled into a Muldoon neighborhood full of apartment buildings and duplexes pressed up against the wooded foothills of the Chugach Range. Photographer Bob Hallinen and I rode with her down a street that she's been called to dozens of times. It wasn't trash day, but it looked like it. There was trash everywhere.

"Garbage. Garbage. Garbage," Coltrane said, marking the houses with uncovered trash cans in their yards. "There's a bear proof dumpster! But it's open."

Coltrane became the city's area biologist in March after nine summers working with the former area biologist Rick Sinnott, who retired last year. Until an assistant is hired, she's the only Fish and Game person responsible for the entire city, helping guide citizens through human-animal encounters all summer. Coltrane's phone rings constantly with calls from the public and at all hours of the night with calls from city police and state troopers. She can't leave town until fall. She carries her emergency mauling pager at all times.

Political Science

[ed.  The Alaska Department of Fish and Game used to be one of the most respected fish and wildlife agencies in the country, if not the world.  Many excellent biologists continue to work there, but one would be hard pressed to make a case for much exceptionalism today, especially in matters of policy.  Too many years of threatened and actual budget cuts, legislative and administrative agendas, and unqualified political appointments have diminished the independence, innovation and objectivity that once defined the department.] 

A Parnell administration rule that requires state scientists to adhere to official policy and not the principles of independent science when they work outside their agencies continues to fuel debate more than a month after two biologists were removed from a federal beluga whale recovery team.

The state biologists were kicked off the beluga panel because the rule compromised the scientific integrity of the team, federal officials said.

"The situation is unfortunate," said Leslie Cornick, an associate professor of marine biology and policy at Alaska Pacific University. "What you have is the politicians silencing their state-employed biologists, and the politicians, who don't know anything about interpreting scientific data, are interpreting scientific data in a way that fits their agenda."

The policy could have the long-term effect of chilling participation of state scientists in independent research and journal activity that scientists in academia have long enjoyed, said Cornick, who said she was speaking for herself and not her university.

Doug Vincent-Lang, the acting deputy commissioner of Fish and Game and an advocate of the new state rule, said in a recent interview that scientists are encouraged to engage in vigorous debate inside their agencies, but that once a position is established, the state has a right to demand adherence to it.

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Keith Jarrett

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Chilled Double Chocolate Torte: The No-Bake Version

Crust from Healthy Hoggin. Chocolate avocado mousse from my Chilled Double Chocolate Torte.

No Bake Chocolate Crust:

• 2 cups pecans
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 2 tbsp coconut oil (other light taste oil may work)
• 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt

Chocolate Avocado Mousse:

• 2 cups avocado flesh (approx 3 small avocados), pitted and scooped out
• 1/3 cup almond milk 
• 2/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1 tbsp smooth peanut butter (or other nut butter)
• 1 tbsp arrowroot powder
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup + 2 tbsp chocolate chips, melted
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder, sifted if clumpy

Directions:

1. Crust: Oil a 7-10 inch springform pan and line it with a circle of parchment paper. In a food processor, pulse the pecans until crumbly. Be careful not to over process them as you still want them a bit chunky. Now add in the rest of the crust ingredients and pulse until just mixed. Scoop mixture onto prepared pan and press down firmly and evenly with slightly wet fingers or a spatula. Pop into freezer to set while making the mousse.

2. Chocolate mousse: Place all mousse ingredients (except chocolate chips) into food processor. Process until smooth. In a small bowl, melt your chocolate chips in the microwave and scoop melted chocolate into food processor mixture. Process until smooth.

3. Remove crust from freezer and scoop this mousse on top of crust. Smooth out as much as possible and then place in the freezer for 2 hours to firm.

4. Once firm, remove from freezer and allow to sit on the counter for about 5-10 minutes before serving chilled. Place leftover torte in the freezer wrapped and placed in a seal container.

Note that this torte should be served chilled as it gets soft at room temperature.

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Los Lobos - Angels With Dirty Faces

[ed.  Sorry...couldn't find a version with video, still a great song.]