TaskRabbit

 

by Alexia Tsotsis

Genius, as Thomas Edison famously declared, may owe far more to perspiration than to inspiration, but Leah Busque’s revolutionary startup was born in a moment of profound laziness. It was a wintry night in February 2008, when Busque, a 28-year-old engineer at IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that she needed dog food for her yellow lab, Kobe. She wanted nothing more than to get someone else to trudge outside in the snow. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go,” she says. “A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”

Inspired, she quit her job four months later and started a company, originally called RunMyErrand, with money from angel investors and an incubator. The site launched in September 2008, and by the following March, its roughly 100 registered “runners” had performed hundreds of tasks. Today the site, since renamed TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month—everything from assembling IKEA furniture to making a beer run.

Think of TaskRabbit as an eBay for real-world labor. When users, called senders, post a task, they also invisibly declare the maximum amount they’d pay to have it completed. Runners then bid on the task by declaring the minimum amount they would accept. Unlike on eBay, though, senders can choose freely from among the bids, since the reviews and experience levels of runners can vary significantly: Highly rated runners—or those who happen to be available immediately for a rush job—can command significant premiums. Tasks range from courier assignments that can take just a little while to jobs like moving help that can take hours and are often scheduled up to a week in advance. TaskRabbit takes a 12 to 30 percent cut of each transaction; the higher percentages are deducted from lower-value jobs. Customers pay by credit card, and the runner’s share gets deposited into a TaskRabbit account, with checks cut every Friday.

To keep the rabbits scampering, the site employs some serious game mechanics. A leaderboard ranks the top runners, displaying the level that each has achieved and their average customer review. The runners also see a videogame-style progress bar showing the number of additional points they need to jump to the next level. Points are awarded for everything from bidding accurately on a task (15 points for being within 15 percent of the sender’s maximum price) to bidding quickly (15 points for bidding within the task’s first 30 minutes) to emailing friends and urging them to join TaskRabbit (three points per email). The level system is exponential: Moving from level 0 to level 1 takes only 60 points, while going from level 20 to 21 requires adding roughly 1,700 points to your tally. The highest level reached so far is 23, achieved only by a 58-year-old former military officer in San Francisco named Alex K. (All the runners are known by their first name and last initial.)

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Pat Metheny

[ed.  Another Pat video.  Watching this and other performances the amazing thing is that he doesn't appear to be a particularly fluid player - he really grips that fretboard - but his tone, technique and phrasing are always exquisite.  There's a lot going on beneath those fingertips.]

Char Siu Pork or Ribs

I love the "barbecued" pork and ribs in Chinatown. They have a distinct pork flavor, a glossy sheen that implies the sweet glaze beneath, and a glowing red-pink color that penetrates the surface (that's barbecue pork loin above, not ribs).

Unlike traditional Southern American low and slow smoke roasted barbecue, there is no smoke flavor, even though there is a pink ring beneath the surface of the meat. How do they do it?

Well, it turns out that Char Siu, even though it sounds like charcoal, is not grilled or smoked. It is roasted in a special oven, usually gas fired. And most of the time it gets its ruddy tone from red food coloring (some chefs use a red bean paste, but that's not common). Sigh.

But it still tastes great. You can buy Char Siu sauce in Chinese specialty stores, and it makes a fine glaze, but it doesn't make ribs that taste like Chinese restaurant ribs. That's because you need to marinate the meat first. I've worked on this recipe for a while and I think I've finally nailed the technique for making Chinatown Char Siu Ribs at home in the oven or on the grill. Here's how to do this dizzingly delicious favorite. 

Recipe

Serves. 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes to make the marinade, 3 to 12 hours to marinate
Cooking time. About 90 minutes

The meat
2 slabs of baby back ribs, cut in half lengthwise, or 4 pounds pork loin cut into strips about 1" wide, 1" tall, and 6" long

The marinade
1/2 cup hoisin sauce
1/2 cup brandy (or rum or bourbon)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons hot sauce such as Tabasco
2 tablespoons powdered ginger
1 tablespoon powdered garlic
1 tablespoon five spice powder
2 tablespoons powdered onion
2 teaspoons red food coloring

The glaze
About 1/4 cup of honey or Char Siu sauce

About the meat. Many Chinese restaurants use spareribs that are chopped into 3-4" riblets with a cleaver. If you want, your butcher can make you riblets with her band saw. If not, you can do them whole. I like baby backs for this recipe because they are a bit meathier.

About the Chinese ingredients. There are no substitutes for hoisin sauce, five spice powder, or sesame oil. They are responsible for most of what we think of as the flavor of Chinese food. Five spice powder is easy to make at home, but the others are not easily made. Click on the links for more info on these ingredients. If you have trouble finding them in your grocery store, try AsianFoodGrocer.com or Amazon.com.

About the hot sauce. If you have an Asian chili sauce you can use it, but any old hot sauce will work fine in this marinade since it provides more heat than flavor.

About the food coloring. Food coloring is necessary for the authentic color. I am told by readers that you can substitute beet root powder for the red food coloring, but I've never tried it.

Serve with. The classic accompaniments are Chinese beer or jasmine tea. If you can find it, try hibiscus tea or Pinot Grigio from Oregon (most of the California Pinot Grigios are borrrrring).

Do this

1) Mix the marinade thoroughly in a bowl. Don't skip the booze. It helps penetrate, and even if you're a teetotaler, don't worry, there isn't any measurable alcohol in the ribs. Yes, I know alcohol can dry meat out, but I just think it works well in this case. If you must skip it, use apple juice or water, but booze is better. You can substitute fresh ginger and garlic for powdered ginger and garlic if you wish.

2) Marinate the meat for at least 3 hours in zipper bags. Overnight is better.

3) As much as I am a fan of outdoor cooking, this meat tastes great cooked in an indoor oven. Either way, heat your grill or oven to about 300°F. If you are grilling, set up in a 2-Zone or Indirect system. Make sure the meat is not directly over the flame on a grill. If necessary, put a pan of water with a rack on top of it under the meat. Roast for about 60 minutes.

4) After about 60 minutes for ribs and about 45 minuted for loin meat, paint one side with a coat of the glaze (honey or Char Siu sauce). Cook for 10 minutes, glaze side up. Turn them over, paint with glaze. Cook another 10 minutes. Remove them, let them sit for 5 minutes, cut ribs into individual bones, and serve. I like to sprinkle them with chopped fresh chives.

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Anime Eyes

From Wikipedia:

Many anime and manga characters feature large eyes. Osamu Tezuka, who is believed to have been the first to use this technique, was inspired by the exaggerated features of American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, and Disney's Bambi.  Tezuka found that large eyes style allowed his characters to show emotions distinctly. When Tezuka began drawing Ribbon no Kishi, the first manga specifically targeted at young girls, Tezuka further exaggerated the size of the characters' eyes. Indeed, through Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka set a stylistic template that later shōjo artists tended to follow.

Coloring is added to give eyes, particularly to the cornea, some depth. The depth is accomplished by applying variable color shading. Generally, a mixture of a light shade, the tone color, and a dark shade is used. Cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn argues that Japanese animators and audiences do not perceive such stylized eyes as inherently more or less foreign.

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Couches in a Pig Barn

by Penelope Trunk

If you ask the Farmer, he would tell you that I was really really nice to him last week while he was in bed, immobile, strung out on six Percocet a day. I made him pies, and French toast, and meat at every meal because there is no amount of Percocet that would make him not want to eat meat.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics.

For those of you who know nothing about Percocet, first of all, if you ever get that many pills prescribed, sell them on the streets of New York City to fund your child’s education. That’s how hard they are to come by.

And there’s a reason: They are highly addictive. I’m linking to some stuff about getting off high dosages of Percocet, but I’m summarizing: You can’t go cold turkey. You have to go slowly or you make yourself crazy.

So the Farmer was crazy and I had to have a drug intervention to tell him he was a total jerk and having withdrawal and he couldn’t tell and he needed to do it more systematically.

I convinced him. But he is not a guy who lays in bed all day. And he had already done it for five days. He wanted to work. On Percocet. I told him we agreed no machinery on Percocet. He told me how it’s not fair that I want him to taper and I want him to not work.

Then we have a screaming match about how life is not fair. That is the first topic. Which slides into:

Me: Don’t scream at me—

The Farmer: No you’re screaming at me—

No. Fuck you.

I told you I don’t like swearing.

I told you I don’t like you being mean.

This did not happen. I mean it did. It has happened so many times that it’s like the bass beat in the background of our everyday life.

So we did that and then he told me he had to work. It was a work emergency.

Here’s what he said: “I have to check cows.”

You might think I know nothing about farming, but I have actually learned a lot precisely for figuring out if the Farmer is BSing me or not.

Me: Your dad can check them.

The Farmer: I don’t want to call him. It’s a masculinity thing.

I swear to God. He said this.

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"Moon Indigo" by Ellen Granter 
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Abbey Road Revisited

Painting by  dubossarsky & vinogradov
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The Trillions of Microbes That Call Us Home

by Michael Tennesen

In the intensive care nursery at Duke University Medical Center, doctors and nurses attend to premature infants in rows of incubators surrounded by ventilators and monitors. As new parents holding packages of breast milk watch their tiny babies, neo­natologist Susan LaTuga makes her rounds, checking vital signs and evaluating how the infants tolerate feeding. She consults with nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists about the course of the day’s treatment for the babies, some of whom weigh as little as one pound and were born as much as 17 weeks early.

At the end of her shift, LaTuga stops at a freezer and inspects stool samples from some of the infants that are at the center of a remarkable new study. Across the Duke campus, technicians are waiting to analyze them with a powerful gene sequencer capable of penetrating the hidden world of the billions of microorganisms growing inside each infant.

LaTuga is one of several medical researchers at Duke working with microbial ecologists to study the development of the human microbiome—the enormous population of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that live in the human body, predominantly in the gut. There are 20 times as many of these microbes as there are cells in the body, up to 200 trillion in an adult, and each of us hosts at least 1,000 different species. Seen through the prism of the microbiome, a person is not so much an individual human body as a superorganism made up of diverse ecosystems, each teeming with microscopic creatures that are essential to our well-being. “Our hope is that if we can understand the normal microbial communities of healthy babies, then we can manipulate unhealthy ones,” LaTuga says.

The Duke study is just one of many projects begun in the past five years that use genetic sequencing to explore how the ­diversity of the microbiome impacts our health. Two of the largest efforts are the Human Microbiome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, and the European Union’s Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract. Although these groups have only just begun to publish their findings, it is already clear that the micro­biome is much more complex and very likely more critical to human health than anyone suspected. Understanding and controlling the 
diversity of our germs, as opposed to assaulting them with anti­biotics, could be the key to a range of future medical treatments.

In-depth analysis of the human body’s microflora has been possible only in the past few years—a by-product of the same new gene sequencing techniques that have allowed scientists to cheaply and accurately identify the DNA of the human genome. “Gene sequencing has opened a huge door to how complex these communities are,” says Patrick Seed, a Duke pediatrician specializing in infectious disease, who with biologist Rob Jackson is a lead investigator of the premature infant study.

Before sequencing was available at a reasonable price, microbes were identified by growing them in a petri dish. But “not all microbes will grow in culture,” LaTuga says. “It identifies only about 20 percent of the microbes in the gut.”

Like a lush rain forest, a healthy microbiome in the human gut is a diverse ecosystem that thrives only when all the interdependent species are healthy too. “In an ecological sense, more diverse communities are healthy on land and in the seas,” Jackson says. “No one species is dominant, and the ecosystem is more productive and resistant to major changes.” The comparison is more than just a convenient analogy. Jackson was studying microbial communities around the world, including in the Amazon, when he realized that the ecological balance in those environments was not so different from the balance present in a healthy human gut. (One of his more counterintuitive findings is that microbial communities are more biodiverse in the American Plains than in the Amazon rain forest.)

Jackson’s work on microbial diversity caught the attention of Seed, who was already interested in the microbiome in the guts of preterm infants but who did not have a background in ecology. He sought out Jackson, and the two decided to collaborate on what they call the Preemie Microbiome Project. The Duke medical researchers and ecologists who have joined that project hope to identify which species flourish in early stages of the human microbiome, how they are influenced by the consumption of breast milk, and what role they play in critical diseases affecting infants as well as in chronic diseases that occur later in life.

“The classical view of infectious disease is that a single organism invades and produces an infection,” Seed says. “But then we found that certain diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, seem to be caused by imbalances in the organisms that communicate with the host. So then people asked, ‘Why is this not the case for many other states of human health?’ ” Preliminary work by other groups, similarly made up of both biomedical researchers and microbial ecologists, suggests that imbalances in the microbiome might also be linked to allergies, diabetes, and obesity.

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Cinemagraphs

by Elizabeth Flock

It’s somewhere between a photo and a video, a piece of artwork that seeks to perfectly capture a fleeting moment in time.

New York City-based photographer Jamie Beck and Web designer Kevin Burg “hand-stitch” together her photos and his Web design to make animated gifs they now call “cinemagraphs.”

Beck and Burg first started making cinemagraphs at Fashion Week in New York earlier this year, spending a day or two to capture Vogue magazine’s Anna Wintour examining the catwalk, or the fluttering of a fashion model’s hair. People loved their work so much that Beck and Burg soon expanded to longer narratives, about how Dogfish Brewey makes its beer (below), or profiles that captured a moment in the life of a couple in love in Brooklyn (above). Companies even asked their help in making food come alive.

“It’s taken over our whole lives,” Beck says.

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Digital Meltdown

by Tracy Mayor

I am not cool. My husband is not cool. But like a pair of nags that has somehow managed to produce thoroughbreds, we have cool children. So cool, in fact, that the older one managed to secure for himself an invitation to Google+ -- Google's new social networking space and would-be Facebook killer -- on the first day it launched.

Because we have taught him to be compassionate and take pity on the uncool, he shared a Google+ invitation with me. The moment was the digital equivalent of his preschool days, when he'd arrive home to proudly gift me with a handmade object of unknown utility. "This is lovely," I'd say, my heart swelling as I considered the lump carefully, trying to figure if it looked more like a candy dish or a paper clip holder. "What's it for?"

When I ask the 17-year-old version of that boy what Google+ is for, he says -- texts, actually -- "its pretty sick, there're a lot of cool features thatll be awesome once more people get on. like better chatting and you can really control who sees what."

Alrighty then. Feeling positively hip, I head over, activate my invitation, upload a good-hair-day picture and type in a few simple words for my profile that seem to fit well with the spare, airy Google interface: "Writer, editor, public school advocate, parent, lover, friend, walker of dog." So far, so good.

I click "Circles" and a lovely row of them appears for me to populate -- Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Following and one helpfully left blank for me to label (Frenemies? Mean Girls? Former Crushes?) -- along with a phrase in red awaiting my click: "Find and Invite (560)."

Whoa, Google+ wants to find and invite 560 of my contacts? Hold up. Even though my son would tell me, with eyes rolling, that only losers click on "find all" menu options like that, it's a potent reminder that I'm starting down the slippery slope of adding yet another social medium into my already overwhelmed digital life.

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We’re Spent

by David Leonhardt

There is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.

But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.

If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.

Earlier this year, Charles M. Holley Jr., the chief financial officer of Wal-Mart, said that his company had noticed consumers were often buying smaller packages toward the end of the month, just before many households receive their next paychecks. “You see customers that are running out of money at the end of the month,” Mr. Holley said.

In past years, many of those customers could have relied on debt, often a home-equity line of credit or a credit card, to tide them over. Debt soared in the late 1980s, 1990s and the last decade, which allowed spending to grow faster than incomes and helped cushion every recession in that period.

Now, the economic version of the law of gravity is reasserting itself. We are feeling the deferred pain from 25 years of excess, as people try to rebuild their depleted savings. This pattern is a classic one. The definitive book about financial crises has become “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” published in 2009 with exquisite timing, by Carmen M. Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, of Harvard.

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Charlie Hunter

The Beekeeper's Lament

by Maggie Koerth-Baker

What's killing the bees? After reading The Beekeeper's Lament —Hannah Nordhaus' lyrical, haunting book about the complicated lives and deaths of America's honeybees—my question has shifted more towards, "Good lord, what doesn't kill bees?"

Domesticated bees turn out to be some amazingly fragile creatures. In fact, Nordhaus writes, bees were delicate even before the modern age of industrial farming. It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that humans were able to reliably domesticate bees. Even then, beekeeping was anything but a stable business to be in. But in the last decade, the job has gotten harder, and the bee deaths have piled up faster. Bees are killed by moths and mites, bacteria and viruses, heat and cold. They're killed by the pesticides used on the plants they pollinate, and by the other pesticides used to protect them from murderous insects. And they're killed by the almond crop, which draws millions of bees from all over the nation to one small region of California, where they join in an orgy of pollination and another of disease sharing.

None of this negates the seriousness of Colony Collapse Disorder, that still-mysterious ailment that reduced more than 1/3 of America's healthy beehives to empty boxes in 2007. But what Nordhaus does (and does well) is put those famous losses into a broader context. Colony Collapse Disorder is a problem. But it isn't the problem. Instead, it's just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn't just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along. In the years since 2007, Nordhaus writes, bees have died at a rate higher than the expected and "acceptable" 15% annual loss, but the majority of those deaths weren't always caused by CCD.

The picture of bee maladies that Nordhaus paints isn't a pretty one. The bees continue to be extremely important to our national food system, and they continue to die in numbers that are far more vast than the normally high death rates beekeepers have always dealt with. Worse, there's no easy answer. At least not one that scientific evidence has been able to pin down yet. If you're looking for a simple solution—if you want somebody to justify your pet explanation, whether pesticides, or GMOs, or totally natural causes that have nothing to do with modern farming practices—then you probably won't like what Nordhaus has to say.

But if you're interested in the real complexity behind the headlines, you're in luck. There's so much going on in this book, details that are vitally important to understanding how modern beekeeping works and what happens when it fails, and which almost never make it into the short articles and TV segments. Nordhaus doesn't even really start talking about Colony Collapse Disorder in an in-depth way until chapter 6. And that's a good thing. By the time you get to that chapter, it's clear that she couldn't have written about it any sooner. There's too much context that you need to understand before you can really make sense of that hot-button issue.

Better yet, Nordhaus manages to wrap all that nuance up in some of the best narrative and storytelling I've had the pleasure of reading since Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Like Skloot, Nordhaus owes some of the credit to the fact that her primary source is a fabulous character to hang a story on. John Miller, the professional beekeeper whose work and adventures set the stage for Nordhaus' reporting, is curmudgeonly and charming, hard-headed and hilarious. He's a conservative farmer who likes fast cars, loves his bees, and writes Nordhaus emails that read like Zen koans. Even when it's clear that some of the practices that keep people like Miller in business are also hurting the bee populations, it's hard not to root for him, as a person.

Nordhaus puts the bee panic into perspective, and Miller puts a human face on the complexities and contradictions behind it. Before you build a beehive, before you post another Internet forum message about what absolutely just has to be killing the bees, you must read this book.

The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus

Image: Return of the Bee, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from mightyboybrian's photostream

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Pat Metheny

From his new acoustic album, What's It All About.

Ali Now

by Cal Fussman

MUHAMMAD ALI came through the double doors into the living room of his hotel suite on slow, tender steps. I held out my hand. He opened his arms. Ali lowered himself into a wide, soft chair, and I sat on an adjacent sofa. "I've come," I said, "to ask about the wisdom you've taken from all you've been through." Ali seemed preoccupied with his right hand, which was trembling over his right thigh, and he did not speak. "George Foreman told me that you were the most important man in the world. When I asked him why, he said that when you walked into a room, it didn't matter who was there--presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, movie stars--everybody turned toward you. The most famous person in that room was wondering, Should I go to meet him? Or stay here? He said you were the most important man in the world because you made everybody else's heart beat faster."

The shaking in Ali's right hand seemed to creep above his elbow. Both of his arms were quivering now, and his breaths were short and quick.

I leaned in awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do. Half a minute passed in silence. I wondered if I should call for his wife.

Ali stooped over, and now his whole body was trembling and his breaths were almost gasps.

"Champ! You okay? You okay?"

Ali's head lifted and slowly turned to me with the smile of an eight-year-old.

"Scared ya, huh?" he said.

Ali was in Dublin for the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics. A van pulled up outside the hotel, and it was with much effort that he slowly lifted himself into the front seat. And yet as soon as the driver pulled out onto the road, the left-hand side of the road, Ali was waving his arms in a childish portent of doom and gasping, "Head-on collision! Head-on collision!"

There were four of us in the back: Ali's wife, Lonnie, who is fourteen years younger than Ali and who grew up across the street from his childhood home in Louisville; his best friend, Howard Bingham, a photographer he met in 1962 and who's snapped more pictures of Ali than anyone has ever taken of anybody; and a businessman named Harlan Werner, who's organized public appearances for Ali during the last sixteen years.
Jet lag had come to dinner with all of us as we took our table near a flower-filled courtyard at Ernie's Restaurant. Ali asked for a felt-tipped pen, and while the rest of us talked he pushed his plate and silverware out of the way, spread out his cloth napkin, and began to draw on it. First he sketched a boxing ring, then two stick figures, one of which he labeled "Ali" in a cartoon bubble and the other "Frazier." Then he began to set in the crowd around the ring in the form of dots. Tens of dots, then hundreds of dots, then thousands, his right hand driving the pen down again and again as if to say: And he saw it! And he saw it! And she saw it! And he saw it!

Occasionally, Ali would stop, examine his canvas for empty space, and then go on, jackhammering in more dots. It must have taken him more than twenty minutes to squeeze all of humanity onto the napkin. Then he signed his name inside a huge heart and handed it to me.

"Thank you," I said.

"That'll be ten dollars, please," he whispered.

And that was the way it was with Ali. You just couldn't help laughing, even when you knew he'd play that same line off the next hundred people. No matter how many times he told a fresh face, "You ain't as dumb as you look," it worked.

But watching him eat was awkward. His right hand picked up a piece of lamb and trembled as he tried to bring it to his lips. He did not eat very much. His sciatic nerve was paining him, he was tired, and it was best to go back to the hotel.

On the way to the door, the diners at the other tables--every one of them--stood and applauded. Ali moved gingerly, almost painfully, and then, all of a sudden, he bit his bottom lip, took a mock swing at one of the applauding men, and the restaurant roared with laughter.

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That Stalling Feeling

by Nouriel Roubini

NEW YORK – Despite the series of low-probability, high-impact events that have hit the global economy in 2011, financial markets continued to rise happily until a month or so ago. The year began with rising food, oil, and commodity prices, giving rise to the specter of high inflation. Then massive turmoil erupted in the Middle East, further ratcheting up oil prices. Then came Japan’s terrible earthquake, which severely damaged both its economy and global supply chains. And then Greece, Ireland, and Portugal lost access to credit markets, requiring bailout packages from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

But that was not the end of it. Although Greece was bailed out a year ago, Plan A has now clearly failed. Greece will require another official bailout – or a bail-in of private creditors, an option that is fueling heated disagreement among European policymakers.

Lately, concerns about America’s unsustainable fiscal deficits have, likewise, resulted in ugly political infighting, almost leading to a government shutdown. A similar battle is now brewing about America’s “debt ceiling,” which, if unresolved, introduces the risk of a “technical” default on US public debt.

Until recently, markets seemed to discount these shocks; apart from a few days when panic about Japan or the Middle East caused a correction, they continued their upward march. But, since the end of April, a more persistent correction in global equity markets has set in, driven by worries that economic growth in the United States and worldwide may be slowing sharply.

Data from the US, the United Kingdom, the periphery of the eurozone, Japan, and even emerging-market economies is signaling that part of the global economy – especially advanced economies – may be stalling, if not dropping into a double-dip recession. Global risk-aversion has also increased, as the option of further “extend and pretend” or “delay and pray” on Greece is becoming less desirable, and the specter of a disorderly workout is becoming more likely.

Optimists argue that the global economy has merely hit a “soft patch.” Firms and consumers reacted to this year’s shocks by “temporarily” slowing consumption, capital spending, and job creation. As long as the shocks don’t worsen (and as some become less acute), confidence and growth will recover in the second half of the year, and stock markets will rally again.

But there are good reasons to believe that we are experiencing a more persistent slump. First, the problems of the eurozone periphery are in some cases problems of actual insolvency, not illiquidity: large and rising public and private deficits and debt; damaged financial systems that need to be cleaned up and recapitalized; massive loss of competitiveness; lack of economic growth; and rising unemployment. It is no longer possible to deny that public and/or private debts in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal will need to be restructured.

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