Thursday, July 7, 2011
The Modern Meaning of Flowers
Carnations: "I knew I had to buy you flowers, but I didn’t think you were worth spending a lot of money on."
Daisies: "I think you’re innocent, like an eight-year-old girl, and that’s what I’m attracted to in a woman."
Orchid: "I want to intimidate you with my fabulous wealth, while discovering whether or not you can keep something alive on your own."
Stargazer Lilies: "I’m not saying your apartment smells like something died in it. I’m just saying you should mask the weird odor in your living room with the same fragrance that funeral homes use to cover up the stench of the dead."
Mums: "I saw these on sale outside KMart and remembered you were middle aged. Damn, you make elastic waistbands look good."
Peonies: "I am a man of breeding and therefore understand the importance of making every other woman in your office jealous of you."
Hydrangeas: "I’m gay."
Calla Lilies: "I saw these and thought of your vagina. Pretty, right?"
Gladiolas: "These will look really nice in your sitting room at the nursing home. Please die soon so I can inherit your 1996 Saturn."
Sunflowers: "I am enraptured by your sunny disposition and how as a hippie you never seem to wear a bra."
Tulips: "I have done something very wrong and I hope that you will never find out about it, because I want to keep putting my thing in your things."
Mixed bunch: "I want you to let me put my thing in your things, but I don’t have a steady job."
A Corsage: "I’m in high school, and I want to put my thing in someone’s things and I guess your things will do. Also, my mom bought this. Can I please put my sweaty hand on your things?"
Meghan O'Keefe is a comedian and writer living in New York City. She likes to get peach colored roses, because they're like less-aggressive red roses.
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In Defense of Prudes
by Maria Bustillos There is little refuge from the explicit for today's prude. What with the ever-increasing gross-out quotient of TV and movies, and the unending barrage of sordid "news" about the private lives of public figures, nearly everywhere you look you're seeing something that makes you want to leap right out of your skin. It's asking for trouble even to admit to being a prude, of course, but if a prude is a person who is like to die of embarrassment about something or other almost all day long, then definitely I am one. And if I were to say further that modesty ought to be reconsidered as the virtue it is, I would be letting myself in for all kinds of grief. Still, though. Modesty ought to be reconsidered as the virtue it is.
If we really value all this open-mindedness and tolerance like we say we do, presumably people just get to be a total square, shy and reserved without fear of censure. They don't, of course. Maybe they don't want to see the Apatow movie, maybe the very idea of The Human Centipede sends them shrieking into the next room, maybe they don't like to go to the strip club. In practice, though, this kind of reluctance is liable to be treated as inferior, defective even, plus politically incorrect because if you say that you don't like to go to the strip club, this might easily be taken to mean that you're stuck up and narrow-minded and don't have respect for sex workers, plus probably you will be told that you're so inhibited personally that sleeping with you must really be some kind of ordeal. On balance it's often easier to just go along to the heinous performance art or endure all the farting and whatnot in the Apatow movie than it is to deal with the smackdown if you don't. Shyness is a personal thing, not a public one, involving just one person's prefs. for his own surroundings; lots of people just can't help getting the heebie-jeebies, the creeps and/or the willies from half what goes on.
So, I have come to take back the knife on behalf of us prudes, who quite often are only reserved, shy, terribly square people whose native restraint and weak knees are, in fact, generally accompanied by a deep love of personal freedom and diversity of opinion. Prudery comes in for a lot of flak because people imagine that the prudes want to impose limitations on the behavior of others, but they particularly, especially do not. The wimpy and yikes-prone, far from wishing to restrict or even to express an opinion regarding anyone else's private practices, are in reality possessed of a fervent, if doomed, desire to know as little about them as possible.
The Terrazzo Jungle
Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same.*By Malcolm Gladwell
Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and eyebrows like unpruned hedgerows. According to a profile in Fortune (and people loved to profile Victor Gruen), he was a “torrential talker with eyes as bright as mica and a mind as fast as mercury.” In the office, he was famous for keeping two or three secretaries working full time, as he moved from one to the next, dictating non-stop in his thick Viennese accent. He grew up in the well-to-do world of prewar Jewish Vienna, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts—the same school that, a few years previously, had turned down a fledgling artist named Adolf Hitler. At night, he performed satirical cabaret theatre in smoke-filled cafés. He emigrated in 1938, the same week as Freud, when one of his theatre friends dressed up as a Nazi Storm Trooper and drove him and his wife to the airport. They took the first plane they could catch to Zurich, made their way to England, and then boarded the S.S. Statendam for New York, landing, as Gruen later remembered, “with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.” On the voyage over, he was told by an American to set his sights high—“don’t try to wash dishes or be a waiter, we have millions of them”—but Gruen scarcely needed the advice. He got together with some other German émigrés and formed the Refugee Artists Group. George S. Kaufman’s wife was their biggest fan. Richard Rodgers and Al Jolson gave them money. Irving Berlin helped them with their music. Gruen got on the train to Princeton and came back with a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein. By the summer of 1939, the group was on Broadway, playing eleven weeks at the Music Box. Then, as M. Jeffrey Hartwick recounts in “Mall Maker,” his new biography of Gruen, one day he went for a walk in midtown and ran into an old friend from Vienna, Ludwig Lederer, who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Victor agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway, roughly seventeen by fifteen feet: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling. It was a “customer trap.” This was a brand-new idea in American retail design, particularly on Fifth Avenue, where all the carriage-trade storefronts were flush with the street. The critics raved. Gruen designed Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the California clothing chain Grayson’s. In the early fifties, he designed an outdoor shopping center called Northland outside Detroit for J. L. Hudson’s. It covered a hundred and sixty-three acres and had nearly ten thousand parking spaces. This was little more than a decade and a half since he stepped off the boat, and when Gruen watched the bulldozers break ground he turned to his partner and said, “My God but we’ve got a lot of nerve.”
But Gruen’s most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. He began work on it almost exactly fifty years ago. It was called Southdale. It cost twenty million dollars, and had seventy-two stores and two anchor department-store tenants, Donaldson’s and Dayton’s. Until then, most shopping centers had been what architects like to call “extroverted,” meaning that store windows and entrances faced both the parking area and the interior pedestrian walkways. Southdale was introverted: the exterior walls were blank, and all the activity was focussed on the inside. Suburban shopping centers had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the idea of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning for the summer and heat for the winter. Almost every other major shopping center had been built on a single level, which made for punishingly long walks. Gruen put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two-tiered parking. In the middle he put a kind of town square, a “garden court” under a skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with bright-colored birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a café. The result, Hardwick writes, was a sensation:
Journalists from all of the country’s top magazines came for the Minneapolis shopping center’s opening. Life, Fortune, Time, Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Times, Business Week and Newsweek all covered the event. The national and local press wore out superlatives attempting to capture the feeling of Southdale. “The Splashiest Center in the U. S.,” Life sang. The glossy weekly praised the incongruous combination of a “goldfish pond, birds, art and 10 acres of stores all . . . under one Minnesota roof.” A “pleasure-dome-with-parking,” Time cheered. One journalist announced that overnight Southdale had become an integral “part of the American Way.”
Southdale Mall still exists. It is situated off I-494, south of downtown Minneapolis and west of the airport—a big concrete box in a sea of parking. The anchor tenants are now J. C. Penney and Marshall Field’s, and there is an Ann Taylor and a Sunglass Hut and a Foot Locker and just about every other chain store that you’ve ever seen in a mall. It does not seem like a historic building, which is precisely why it is one. Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. For a decade, he gave speeches about it and wrote books and met with one developer after another and waved his hands in the air excitedly, and over the past half century that archetype has been reproduced so faithfully on so many thousands of occasions that today virtually every suburban American goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month. Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.
One of Gruen’s contemporaries in the early days of the mall was a man named A. Alfred Taubman, who also started out as a store designer. In 1950, when Taubman was still in his twenties, he borrowed five thousand dollars, founded his own development firm, and, three years later, put up a twenty-six-store open-air shopping center in Flint, Michigan. A few years after that, inspired by Gruen, he matched Southdale with an enclosed mall of his own in Hayward, California, and over the next half century Taubman put together what is widely considered one of the finest collections of shopping malls in the world. The average American mall has annual sales of around three hundred and forty dollars per square foot. Taubman’s malls average sales close to five hundred dollars per square foot. If Victor Gruen invented the mall, Alfred Taubman perfected it. One day not long ago, I asked Taubman to take me to one of his shopping centers and explain whatever it was that first drew people like him and Victor Gruen to the enclosed mall fifty years ago.
Hemingway's Bulls
by Steve King
On this day the running of the bulls begins in Pamplona, on the first morning of the nine-day Feast of San Fermin. Hemingway first went eighty-five years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old writer still a month away from his first, small book (Three Stories and Ten Poems), and so still filing stories for the Toronto Star: "Then they came in sight. Eight bulls galloping along, full tilt, heavy set, black, glistening, sinister, their horns bare, tossing their heads...." His first wife, Hadley was with him; they had semi-joked that the bullfights would be a "stalwart" influence on the baby she was carrying. He would be named "John Hadley Nicanor," the last coming from one of the bullfighters they were most impressed with on the trip, Nicanor Villalta.
On his second Pamplona trip, in July of '24, Hemingway jumped in the amateur bullring -- he never ran before the bulls-and did so again on his visit in '25. The people and events of this trip would become The Sun Also Rises, the first episodes of which he began to write by the end of that July. It was on this '25 trip that he saw the teenaged sensation Cayetano Ordonez, the novel's Pedro Romero:
- Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a fake look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let his horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness.... Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.
And so the "grace under pressure" ideal was born, providing a measure for the mess which the other characters seemed unable to prevent in their lives, and for all that Hemingway would live, write, and perhaps die by.
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Watches Are Rediscovered by the Cellphone Generation
by Alex Williams
Tyler Thoreson, the head of men’s editorial for Gilt Man, the flash sale Web site, often kept his forgettable watches stashed in a drawer.
And Eddy Chai, an owner of Odin New York, a downtown men’s boutique, gave up wearing watches regularly in his mid-20s, when he outgrew his Casio.
But after going watch-free for much of the last decade, the three men — all in their 30s and considered style influencers — are turning back time. Mr. Thoreson, 38, is shopping for a vintage gold IWC with a white dial or a Rolex GMT-Master. Mr. Chai, 38, has been wearing a vintage Rolex, loosely dangling around his wrist, “not as a timepiece, but as a piece of jewelry,” he said.
And Mr. Williams, 32, splurged on three watches: an IWC Portuguese, a Rolex GMT-Master II and an Omega Speedmaster, also known as the “moon watch,” since that is what Apollo astronauts wore.
“The men’s-wear set has recently rediscovered the joy of proper mechanical timepieces,” Mr. Williams said. “Right now there is no clearer indication of cool than wearing a watch. If it was your grandfather’s bubbleback Rolex, even better.” As recently as a half-decade ago, time seemed to be running out for the wristwatch. With cellphones, iPods and other clock-equipped devices becoming ubiquitous, armchair sociologists were writing off the wristwatch as an antique, joining VHS tapes, Walkman players and pocket calculators on the slag heap of outmoded gadgets.
The wristwatch “may be going the way of the abacus,” declared a news article in The Sacramento Bee in 2006. The Times of London had it “going the same way as the sundial.” The Boston Globe, in a 2005 lifestyle feature, was more definitive: “Anyone who needs to know the time these days would be wise to ask someone over the age of 30. To most young people, the wristwatch is an obsolete artifact.”
Or, not.
The “sundial” of the wrist is experiencing an uptick among members of the supposed lost generation, particularly by heritage-macho types in their 20s and 30s who are drawn to the wristwatch’s retro appeal, just as they have seized on straight razors, selvedge denim and vintage vinyl.
"It’s an understated statement about your station in life, your taste level,” Mr. Thoreson said.
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Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The Rising Cost of At-Home Tech
A recent rundown we conducted on our monthly bills for communications, home entertainment and digital information was striking. The bill for Cablevision in Connecticut was $232.64, covering cable (including HBO and Showtime) and broadband for our PCs. Our BlackBerrys were another $84.18 and $81.28. The two land lines were a relative bargain at $32.11 and $57.16. The best deal was a phone card for overseas calls (mainly to Beijing) at two cents a minute. Now, there are extenuating circumstances. As a consultant, my wife often works from a home office, and I do a lot of work (this piece, for example) at home also. Except for the cable bill, however, it is hard to separate the purely business from the personal calls and emails in what has become for so many of us a 24/7 rhythm of interaction with friends, families and colleagues. But add it all up and home technology has become a significant item in the household budget. As recently as the mid-1990s, dial-up AOL was about $20, and we probably had basic cable, but television was essentially still free, and cell phones were just for calls and, with a two-year contract, the devices mainly were provided gratis.
All that added technology has also put pressure on electricity bills (ours can run as high $400 a month) and on the power grids that support the added equipment. USA Today reported recently that electric bills are so inflated in part because cable, satellite and other pay-TV boxes are always operating, even when they are not being used. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the 160 million set-top boxes in U.S. homes cost $3 billion to operate, and two-thirds of that power -- costing $2 billion -- was wasted, because, as one NRDC senior scientist told USA Today, they are "energy vampires," drawing a full quota of energy even when they are not on. The cable industry is working with manufacturers on more efficient equipment, a spokesman said, but it will be years before the overwhelming majority of set-tops are replaced.
Chicken, Simmered and Chilled
TRUE confession: I love cold chicken. Cold roast chicken, cold fried chicken, a meaty cold chicken carcass for finger-licking nibbling. And during the long days of summer, I crave cold boiled chicken, brightened with hot pepper, sesame oil and scallions. But not really boiled. The secret to the best-tasting chicken with the loveliest texture is to barely simmer it ever so gently at just under the boil. A number of Chinese recipes describe a whole chicken cooked in this manner. Some even call for dipping a whole bird into a pot of boiling water and essentially turning off the heat, clamping on the lid and waiting. Here I’ve adapted the technique for meaty thighs.
This is an easy dish, put together in minutes and abandoned for an hour on a low flame. If you do it in the morning it will be ready for lunch, but I prefer to cook it a day ahead. Its flavors deepen with a night in the fridge.
Do buy the best chicken you can, even if it costs more (it will). Factory chickens always taste flabby no matter what you do. Choose a free-range bird for the flavor, the food politics and, not least, the muscular thighs.
The recipe in three sentences: Season the thighs with salt and pepper, ginger, star anise and scallions, cover with water and simmer slowly. Remove the chicken, reduce the cooking liquid, then pour it back over the meat. Wait until it’s well chilled.
To serve, sprinkle the ice-cold jelly-clad chicken with sesame oil, scallions, cilantro and jalapeño slices. Give it a squeeze of lime. If you want something extra, add cucumber, avocado and crisp lettuce leaves. Or take off the skin, shred the chicken and have it with cold noodles.
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Drugs and the Meaning of Life
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. There are drugs of extraordinary power and utility, like psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—while drugs like tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum—3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or “Ecstasy”) has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and it appears to be neurotoxic.[1]
One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all biologically active compounds by a single term—“drugs”—and this makes it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical, and legal issues surrounding their use. The poverty of our language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of terms like “psychedelics” to differentiate certain visionary compounds, which can produce extraordinary states of ecstasy and insight, from “narcotics” and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse.
Drug abuse and addiction are real problems, of course—the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the worst drugs of abuse in the United States now appear to be prescription painkillers, like oxycodone. Should these medicines be made illegal? Of course not. People need to be informed about them, and addicts need treatment. And all drugs—including alcohol, cigarettes, and aspirin—must be kept out of the hands of children.
I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith (pp. 158-164), and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers and rapists makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)
I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable, nor, I think, desirable. Someday, I hope she enjoys a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If my daughter drinks alcohol as an adult, as she probably will, I will encourage her to do it safely. If she chooses to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation.[2] Tobacco should be shunned, of course, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer her away from it. Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.
This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, there are people who cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. It has been many years since I have taken psychedelics, in fact, and my abstinence is borne of a healthy respect for the risks involved. However, there was a period in my early 20’s when I found drugs like psilocybin and LSD to be indispensable tools of insight, and some of the most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. I think it quite possible that I might never have discovered that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring without having first pressed this pharmacological advantage.
Specs That See Right Through You
Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk
ROSALIND PICARD'S eyes were wide open. I couldn't blame her. We were sitting in her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and my questions were stunningly incisive. In fact, I began to suspect that I must be one of the savviest journalists she had ever met.
Then Picard handed me a pair of special glasses. The instant I put them on I discovered that I had got it all terribly wrong. That look of admiration, I realised, was actually confusion and disagreement. Worse, she was bored out of her mind. I became privy to this knowledge because a little voice was whispering in my ear through a headphone attached to the glasses. It told me that Picard was "confused" or "disagreeing". All the while, a red light built into the specs was blinking above my right eye to warn me to stop talking. It was as though I had developed an extra sense.The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?
We project many subtle facial expressions that mirror our feelings. In the 1970s, US psychologist Paul Ekman identified a basic set of seven: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt and surprise. They became the foundation for a theory of lie detection, which posited that involuntary micro-expressions can briefly unmask deception before the liar restores a facade of honesty to their face. Though the theory was later debunked, the principle wasn't entirely unsound.
In conversation, we pantomime certain emotions that act as social lubricants. We unconsciously nod to signal that we are following the other person's train of thought, for example, or squint a bit to indicate that we are losing track. Many of these signals can be misinterpreted - sometimes because different cultures have their own specific signals.
More often, we fail to spot them altogether. During a face-to-face conversation, thousands of tiny indicators on a person's face - arching the brow, puckering or parting the lips - add up to a series of non-verbal hints that augment our verbal communication. Blink, and you'll miss them.
The idea that technology could amplify these signals was first explored by Rana el Kaliouby at the University of Cambridge, UK. She wanted to help autistic people, who find it particularly hard to pick up on other people's emotions.
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Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Small Things in Small Packages
I can't believe he's doing this in front of my whole family, I think, nervously accepting it. I can't believe our proposal story is going to be this cheesy and, considering he’s Jewish and I’m half Jewish, so Christmasy.
I hear a sharp intake of breath from my mom that basically says … This is it.
Now let me preface this by saying that I am not someone who grew up dreaming of my wedding day. I grew up dreaming about my book release party, which by the way I just had, with 100 of my closest friends and family and I wore a yellow vintage Fendi dress, I got my hair blown out, I got my make-up done, and we ate cupcakes and drank pink champagne and it was fabulous. But now, I realized looking down at the box I was holding neatly wrapped in a red bow, I was ready to get married. We'd been living together in sin for over two years and we’d even adopted a surrogate child otherwise known as a cat together. By this point we kind of knew what we were signed up for. We knew what the other was going to say before they said a word. We were that annoying couple. Which was why I was a little surprised to unwrap my "Tiffany’s" box and find a shrink-wrapped t-shirt. Like the kind they sell at Muji or the MoMA gift shop. The kind no one ever actually wears.
“Oh my god!” my mom cried. Nearly crying.
“I know, isn't it great?” my boyfriend asked, completely oblivious to the range of ingrained feminine emotions he had just put us through. “Can you believe they fit a t-shirt into a package that size??”
No, we both said.
So I did the only reasonable thing to do in a situation like that: I re-gifted. I rewrapped the t-shirt, put a big fat bow on the top, and gave it to his sister for her birthday. She was psyched because when you're not expecting a gift, a shrink wrapped t-shirt is pretty awesome.
It took another year for my boyfriend and I to take a long overdue break. We're still in relationship limbo.
Bianca Turetsky
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