Thursday, November 10, 2011
Confidence Game
by Dean Starkman, CJR
“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”—Clay Shirky
“The whole notion of ‘long-form journalism’ is writer-centered, not public-centered.”—Jeff Jarvis
“As a journalist, I’ve long taken it for granted that, for example, my readers know more than I do—and it’s liberating.”—Dan Gillmor
“As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and that value is about zero.”—John Paton
“The story is the thing.”—S. S. McClure
{excerpt}
No one reading this magazine needs to be told that we have crossed over into a new era. Industrial-age journalism has failed, we are told, and even if it hasn’t failed, it is over. Newspaper company stocks are trading for less than $1 a share. Great newsrooms have been cut down like so many sheaves of wheat. Where quasi-monopolies once reigned over whole metropolitan areas, we have conversation and communities, but also chaos and confusion.
A vanguard of journalism thinkers steps forward to explain things, and we should be grateful that they are here. If they weren’t, we’d have to invent them. Someone has to help us figure this out. Most prominent are Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, whose ideas we’ll focus on here, along with Dan Gillmor, John Paton, and others. Together their ideas form what I will call the future-of-news (FON) consensus.
According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
At its heart, the FON consensus is anti-institutional. It believes that old institutions must wither to make way for the networked future. “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society,” Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 popularization of network theory. “As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.” If this vision of the future does not square with your particular news preferences, well, as they might say on Twitter, #youmaybeSOL.
And let’s face it, in the debate over journalism’s future, the FON crowd has had the upper hand. The establishment is gloomy and old; the FON consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals.
The blossoming of new voices, the explosion of conversation, has in fact been breathtaking, a modern marvel. News outlets have been forced to step down from their pedestals, and that’s mostly a good thing. The idea of communities reporting on themselves, pooling knowledge in service of journalism, is indeed attractive. But if the FON consensus is right, then the public has a problem. You can call it the Ida Tarbell problem, or you can call it the Nick Davies problem. The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. Public-interest reporting isn’t just another tab on the home page. It is a core value, the thing that builds trust, sets agendas, clarifies public understanding, challenges powerful institutions, and generates reform. It is, in the end, the point.
Read more:
“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”—Clay Shirky
“The whole notion of ‘long-form journalism’ is writer-centered, not public-centered.”—Jeff Jarvis
“As a journalist, I’ve long taken it for granted that, for example, my readers know more than I do—and it’s liberating.”—Dan Gillmor
“As career journalists and managers we have entered a new era where what we know and what we traditionally do has finally found its value in the marketplace, and that value is about zero.”—John Paton
“The story is the thing.”—S. S. McClure
{excerpt}
No one reading this magazine needs to be told that we have crossed over into a new era. Industrial-age journalism has failed, we are told, and even if it hasn’t failed, it is over. Newspaper company stocks are trading for less than $1 a share. Great newsrooms have been cut down like so many sheaves of wheat. Where quasi-monopolies once reigned over whole metropolitan areas, we have conversation and communities, but also chaos and confusion.
A vanguard of journalism thinkers steps forward to explain things, and we should be grateful that they are here. If they weren’t, we’d have to invent them. Someone has to help us figure this out. Most prominent are Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, whose ideas we’ll focus on here, along with Dan Gillmor, John Paton, and others. Together their ideas form what I will call the future-of-news (FON) consensus.
According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
At its heart, the FON consensus is anti-institutional. It believes that old institutions must wither to make way for the networked future. “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society,” Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 popularization of network theory. “As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.” If this vision of the future does not square with your particular news preferences, well, as they might say on Twitter, #youmaybeSOL.
And let’s face it, in the debate over journalism’s future, the FON crowd has had the upper hand. The establishment is gloomy and old; the FON consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals.
The blossoming of new voices, the explosion of conversation, has in fact been breathtaking, a modern marvel. News outlets have been forced to step down from their pedestals, and that’s mostly a good thing. The idea of communities reporting on themselves, pooling knowledge in service of journalism, is indeed attractive. But if the FON consensus is right, then the public has a problem. You can call it the Ida Tarbell problem, or you can call it the Nick Davies problem. The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. Public-interest reporting isn’t just another tab on the home page. It is a core value, the thing that builds trust, sets agendas, clarifies public understanding, challenges powerful institutions, and generates reform. It is, in the end, the point.
Read more:
The Resentment Machine
[ed. I've hesitated posting this because I'm not sure I support the generalizations that contribute to the author's central thesis, but I've read enough articles by others in the Millennial generation to believe there must be some relevancy in this argument.]
The immiseration of the digital creative class
by Freddie deboer, New Inquiry
The popular adoption of the internet has brought with it great changes. One of the peculiar aspects of this particular revolution is that it has been historicized in real time—reported accurately, greatly exaggerated, or outright invented, often by those who have embraced the technology most fully. As impressive as the various changes wrought by the exponential growth of internet users were, they never seemed quite impressive enough for those who trumpeted them.
In a strange type of autoethnography, those most taken with the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s spent a considerable amount of their time online talking about what it meant that they were online. In straightforwardly self-aggrandizing narratives, the most dedicated and involved internet users began crafting a pocket mythology of the new reality. Rather than regarding themselves as tech consumers, the most dedicated internet users spoke instead of revolution. Vast, life-altering consequences were predicted for these rising technologies. In much the same way as those speaking about the importance of New York City are often actually speaking about the importance of themselves, so those who crafted the oral history of the internet were often really talking about their own revolutionary potential. Not that this was without benefits; self-obsession became a vehicle for an intricate literature on emergent online technology.
Yet for all the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected human species, one of the most important aspects of internet culture has gone largely unnoticed. The internet has provided tremendous functionality, for facilitating commerce, communication, research, entertainment, and more. Yet for a comparatively small but influential group of its most dedicated users, its most important feature, the killer app, is its power as an all-purpose sorting mechanism, one that separates the worthy from the unworthy—and in doing so, gives some meager semblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposelessness. For the postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers who exert such disproportionate influence over online experience, the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.
The modern American “meritocracy,” the education/employment vehicle, prepares thousands of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actually encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American “success” indoctrinates young people with a competitive vision that most of them never escape. The numbing and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the brightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels from puberty to adulthood. School elections, high school and college athletics, honors societies, finals clubs, dining clubs, the subtler (but no less real) social competitions—all make competition the natural habitus of American youth. Every aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, athletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced to fodder for college applications.
Read more:
Illustration: (Geoff McFetridge, via)
The immiseration of the digital creative class
by Freddie deboer, New Inquiry
In a strange type of autoethnography, those most taken with the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s spent a considerable amount of their time online talking about what it meant that they were online. In straightforwardly self-aggrandizing narratives, the most dedicated and involved internet users began crafting a pocket mythology of the new reality. Rather than regarding themselves as tech consumers, the most dedicated internet users spoke instead of revolution. Vast, life-altering consequences were predicted for these rising technologies. In much the same way as those speaking about the importance of New York City are often actually speaking about the importance of themselves, so those who crafted the oral history of the internet were often really talking about their own revolutionary potential. Not that this was without benefits; self-obsession became a vehicle for an intricate literature on emergent online technology.
Yet for all the endless consideration of the rise of the digitally connected human species, one of the most important aspects of internet culture has gone largely unnoticed. The internet has provided tremendous functionality, for facilitating commerce, communication, research, entertainment, and more. Yet for a comparatively small but influential group of its most dedicated users, its most important feature, the killer app, is its power as an all-purpose sorting mechanism, one that separates the worthy from the unworthy—and in doing so, gives some meager semblance of purpose to generations whose lives are largely defined by purposelessness. For the postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers who exert such disproportionate influence over online experience, the internet is above and beyond all else a resentment machine.
The modern American “meritocracy,” the education/employment vehicle, prepares thousands of upwardly mobile young strivers for everything but the life they will actually encounter. The endlessly grinding wheel of American “success” indoctrinates young people with a competitive vision that most of them never escape. The numbing and frenetic socioacademic sorting mechanism compels most of the best and the brightest adolescents in our middle and upper class to compete for various laurels from puberty to adulthood. School elections, high school and college athletics, honors societies, finals clubs, dining clubs, the subtler (but no less real) social competitions—all make competition the natural habitus of American youth. Every aspect of young adult life is transformed into a status game, as academics, athletics, music and the arts, travel, hobbies, and philanthropy are all reduced to fodder for college applications.
Read more:
Illustration: (Geoff McFetridge, via)
Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs
by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Bloomberg Businessweek
Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.
Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed. (...)
His ex-employees joined an exodus of thousands of immigrant field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, chicken plant employees, and construction workers who have fled Alabama for other states. Like Rhodes, many employers who lost workers followed federal requirements—some even used the E-Verify system—and only found out their workers were illegal when they disappeared.
In their wake are thousands of vacant positions and hundreds of angry business owners staring at unpicked tomatoes, uncleaned fish, and unmade beds. “Somebody has to figure this out. The immigrants aren’t coming back to Alabama—they’re gone,” Rhodes says. “I have 158 jobs, and I need to give them to somebody.”
There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.
Read more:
Photo: Peter van Agtmael
Scholarly Research Papers: 30 Key, Free Websites
by Roddy MacLeod
Below, I’ve listed 30 freely available websites and services that help anyone find details of new scholarly research. These are services which link directly to research papers or reports or conference papers or pre-prints or theses which have appeared in journals or subject/institutional repositories, or elsewhere; and especially services which produce RSS feeds, because I’m always interested in RSS, as RSS can be an excellent facility for keeping up-to-date.
These are not services which only allow you to Search, but rather ones which let you browse, or which provide lists of, or information about, new research output, with links to the actual papers.
The first few sites showcase, in various ways, new research:
1. AlphaGalileo calls itself “…the world’s independent source of research news.” This service distribute news releases and other information from science, health, technology, the arts, humanities, social sciences and business to the world’s media. As well as News releases, they also have Publication announcements which link to new scholarly books and journal articles. The news releases and publication announcements can be read by anyone, however there are subscription rates for organisations to post news. Over 1,700 research organisations use the service – mostly organisations and the larger publishers, rather than individual researchers. There are RSS feeds for broad subject areas, regions and countries. For example, this is the feed for Applied Science.
2. ScienceDaily offers readers news, on a subject basis, about the latest scientific discoveries. It is freely accessible with no subscription fees. It contains over 65,000 articles – here’s one example, entitled Emulating Nature for Better Engineering, which covers how UK researchers describe a novel approach to making porous materials, solid foams, more like their counterparts in the natural world, including bone and wood in the new issue of the International Journal of Design Engineering. That particular story was reprinted by ScienceDaily from materials provided by Inderscience, via AlphaGalileo (see above). Other articles are produced from materials provided by institutions, organisations and others directly to ScienceDaily or through press release services. ScienceDaily also has RSS feeds, for example Electronic News.
3. Futurity aggregates research news produced by a consortium of participating universities, on a broad subject basis (Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, and Society & Culture). Sometimes, the news items link to published articles, and sometimes they link to research centres or groups. The university partners are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Russell Group, and the Group of Eight. There are currently 62 universities in the consortium, which includes the following UK universities: Cardiff University, King’s College London, University College London, University of Leeds, University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, and the University of Warwick. Futurity has RSS feeds, e.g. Science & Technology.
Read more:
Below, I’ve listed 30 freely available websites and services that help anyone find details of new scholarly research. These are services which link directly to research papers or reports or conference papers or pre-prints or theses which have appeared in journals or subject/institutional repositories, or elsewhere; and especially services which produce RSS feeds, because I’m always interested in RSS, as RSS can be an excellent facility for keeping up-to-date.
These are not services which only allow you to Search, but rather ones which let you browse, or which provide lists of, or information about, new research output, with links to the actual papers.
The first few sites showcase, in various ways, new research:
1. AlphaGalileo calls itself “…the world’s independent source of research news.” This service distribute news releases and other information from science, health, technology, the arts, humanities, social sciences and business to the world’s media. As well as News releases, they also have Publication announcements which link to new scholarly books and journal articles. The news releases and publication announcements can be read by anyone, however there are subscription rates for organisations to post news. Over 1,700 research organisations use the service – mostly organisations and the larger publishers, rather than individual researchers. There are RSS feeds for broad subject areas, regions and countries. For example, this is the feed for Applied Science.
2. ScienceDaily offers readers news, on a subject basis, about the latest scientific discoveries. It is freely accessible with no subscription fees. It contains over 65,000 articles – here’s one example, entitled Emulating Nature for Better Engineering, which covers how UK researchers describe a novel approach to making porous materials, solid foams, more like their counterparts in the natural world, including bone and wood in the new issue of the International Journal of Design Engineering. That particular story was reprinted by ScienceDaily from materials provided by Inderscience, via AlphaGalileo (see above). Other articles are produced from materials provided by institutions, organisations and others directly to ScienceDaily or through press release services. ScienceDaily also has RSS feeds, for example Electronic News.
3. Futurity aggregates research news produced by a consortium of participating universities, on a broad subject basis (Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, and Society & Culture). Sometimes, the news items link to published articles, and sometimes they link to research centres or groups. The university partners are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Russell Group, and the Group of Eight. There are currently 62 universities in the consortium, which includes the following UK universities: Cardiff University, King’s College London, University College London, University of Leeds, University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, and the University of Warwick. Futurity has RSS feeds, e.g. Science & Technology.
Read more:
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Current Events: Contagion
by Steven Erlanger, NY Times
Since the start of the euro crisis two years ago, the big fear has been contagion, that market unease about the high debt and slow growth in Europe’s southern rim would infect the core. On Wednesday, contagion arrived with brute force.
Italy, a central member of the euro zone and its third-largest economy, struggled to find a new government as anxious investors drove Italian bond rates well above 7 percent and the markets tumbled worldwide. And although critics have warned of just such an escalation for months, European leaders again were caught without a convincing response.
Unappeased by the imminent resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, investors appeared to have focused on the political gridlock in Italy that seemed likely to follow his departure from office, and the unenviable task awaiting a successor: restoring growth in a country that has seen almost none in a decade, and financing $2.57 trillion in debt. Italy, unlike Greece, is seen as too big to default and too big for Europe to bail out.
Only days after the Group of 20 meeting in Cannes, France, where President Obama and other world leaders urged European officials to take bolder action, they appeared frozen in past positions. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met with her kitchen cabinet of economic “wise ones.” They proposed the creation of a 2.3 trillion euro debt repayment fund that would pool and jointly finance debts of all 17 members of the euro zone in return for some conditions like legal debt limits and collateral.
But Mrs. Merkel effectively dismissed the idea, saying that it could be studied and would in any case require major treaty changes, which would take time. She instead emphasized that deep economic changes were required in some member states and that Europe needed to restore fiscal discipline.
“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe,” Mrs. Merkel said. “A community that says, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world, that it can never again change its ground rules, that community simply can’t survive.”
But the German prescription of austerity is not popular. It is Berlin, citing the very treaties that it now wants to adjust, that has resisted the boldest answer to the euro crisis — using the European Central Bank as the euro zone’s lender of last resort. Berlin does not even want to sanction American-style quantitative easing to promote economic growth, one recipe to stoking growth and reducing the debt burden.
“Contagion is alive and well,” said Rebecca Patterson, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Unlike Greece, she said, Italy could pose “systemic” risks to the global economy, accounting for 20 percent of the gross domestic product of the euro zone. “People are wondering if we’ve moved to a new level of the crisis.”
Read more:
photo: Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency
The Coming Death Shortage
by Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic {excerpt}
The scientists' argument is circuitous but not complex. In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists' projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.
Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."
Critics regard such claims as wildly premature. In March ten respected researchers predicted in the New England Journal of Medicine that "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end," because rising levels of obesity are making people sicker. The research team leader, S. Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois School of Public Health, also worries about the "potential impact of infectious disease." Believing that medicine can and will overcome these problems, his "cautious and I think defensibly optimistic estimate" is that the average lifespan will reach eighty-five or ninety—in 2100. Even this relatively slow rate of increase, he says, will radically alter the underpinnings of human existence. "Pushing the outer limits of lifespan" will force the world to confront a situation no society has ever faced before: an acute shortage of dead people.
The twentieth-century jump in life expectancy transformed society. Fifty years ago senior citizens were not a force in electoral politics. Now the AARP is widely said to be the most powerful organization in Washington. Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer's, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra—increasing longevity is entangled in every one. Momentous as these changes have been, though, they will pale before what is coming next.
From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.
Read more:
The scientists' argument is circuitous but not complex. In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists' projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.
Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."
Critics regard such claims as wildly premature. In March ten respected researchers predicted in the New England Journal of Medicine that "the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end," because rising levels of obesity are making people sicker. The research team leader, S. Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois School of Public Health, also worries about the "potential impact of infectious disease." Believing that medicine can and will overcome these problems, his "cautious and I think defensibly optimistic estimate" is that the average lifespan will reach eighty-five or ninety—in 2100. Even this relatively slow rate of increase, he says, will radically alter the underpinnings of human existence. "Pushing the outer limits of lifespan" will force the world to confront a situation no society has ever faced before: an acute shortage of dead people.
The twentieth-century jump in life expectancy transformed society. Fifty years ago senior citizens were not a force in electoral politics. Now the AARP is widely said to be the most powerful organization in Washington. Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer's, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra—increasing longevity is entangled in every one. Momentous as these changes have been, though, they will pale before what is coming next.
From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.
Read more:
Winning the Battle, But Looking for a Job
by Ian Shapira, Washington Post
In her basement apartment near Eastern Market, Molly Katchpole, the 22-year-old underemployed college grad who ignited a nationwide movement against Bank of America, scrolled through her e-mail inbox. The “urgent” interview requests from various news outlets didn’t much interest her anymore. What intrigued Katchpole, who makes $400 a week as a part-time worker, were the invitations for job interviews at lefty nonprofit organizations.
Surrounded by labor history and anarchy books, thrift-store furniture and a male pet rabbit named Mrs. Crackers, Katchpole noticed an e-mail from an outfit called SumOfUs and read it aloud.
“ ‘Do you want a campaigner job taking on multinational corporations?’ ” Katchpole recited one afternoon last week. She turned away from her laptop. “People keep asking me what I am going to do next. I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not much of a policy wonk. But I am absolutely an activist at heart.”
Ever since Katchpole launched an online petition railing against Bank of America’s proposed debit card fees, the bushy-haired, tattooed member of the millennial generation has become a favorite among TV news show bookers and a hero among netizens. After Bank of America aborted its plan Tuesday to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards, Katchpole is now coping with the come-down. She finds herself ambivalent about all the attention and the David vs. Goliath story line. She also has more urgent worries emblematic of her generation: Starting in December, the art and architectural history major has to figure out a way to start paying off her student loans, which she says will require payments of at least $200 a month.
Read more:
In her basement apartment near Eastern Market, Molly Katchpole, the 22-year-old underemployed college grad who ignited a nationwide movement against Bank of America, scrolled through her e-mail inbox. The “urgent” interview requests from various news outlets didn’t much interest her anymore. What intrigued Katchpole, who makes $400 a week as a part-time worker, were the invitations for job interviews at lefty nonprofit organizations.Surrounded by labor history and anarchy books, thrift-store furniture and a male pet rabbit named Mrs. Crackers, Katchpole noticed an e-mail from an outfit called SumOfUs and read it aloud.
“ ‘Do you want a campaigner job taking on multinational corporations?’ ” Katchpole recited one afternoon last week. She turned away from her laptop. “People keep asking me what I am going to do next. I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not much of a policy wonk. But I am absolutely an activist at heart.”
Ever since Katchpole launched an online petition railing against Bank of America’s proposed debit card fees, the bushy-haired, tattooed member of the millennial generation has become a favorite among TV news show bookers and a hero among netizens. After Bank of America aborted its plan Tuesday to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards, Katchpole is now coping with the come-down. She finds herself ambivalent about all the attention and the David vs. Goliath story line. She also has more urgent worries emblematic of her generation: Starting in December, the art and architectural history major has to figure out a way to start paying off her student loans, which she says will require payments of at least $200 a month.
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Going Coconuts
by Seth Stevenson, Slate
Strolling around New York this past summer, I found it impossible to escape the giant, redheaded visage of Rihanna—often staring out at me from the side of a bus barreling through a crowded intersection. The singer had temporarily eschewed her punk warrior aesthetic in favor of a frilly white frock and a tropical beach idyll. In her hand: a Tetra Pak full of Vita Coco coconut water. “Hydrate naturally, from a tree, not a lab,” the ad copy implored.
I’d always thought of coconut water as a treat only encountered when traveling. Sold from a roadside cement-block hut in Vietnam. Sipped from a wrinkled plastic bag pierced with a straw. But the product (which is simply the juice of a young, hacked-open coconut) has suddenly flooded the U.S. market. It’s ubiquitous in Manhattan bodegas, shoving aside the 24 oz. aluminum cans of Modelo. Category leader Vita Coco reports 2009 sales volume of $20 million, 2010 sales of $40 million, and expected 2011 sales of $100 million. Competitors boast similar growth rates. What’s driving this specialty beverage boomlet? And how long can it last?
The most important trend in the refreshment business—going on for more than a decade—is the flight away from sugary, carbonated soft drinks like Coke and Fanta (CSDs in industry parlance) and toward drinks perceived as healthier, more natural choices. The decline of the soda stems in part from the aging of our population; 60-year-old baby boomers are less likely than they once might have been to guzzle down a fizzy Mountain Dew. But there is also a general movement toward something the trend spotters call “wellness.” Achieving wellness, as best I understand it, involves cultivating a keen awareness of nutritional concepts, meditative techniques, and which brand of yoga pants make your butt look awesome.
In fact, the successful arrival of coconut water on these shores has more to do with yoga than you might think. The wellness trend has inspired several profitable beverage launches—inspiring massive bottled water brands like Dasani and Aquafina, alternative sports drink concoctions like Vitamin Water, and single-ingredient juices like Pom Wonderful. Both Vita Coco and close competitor Zico were launched in 2004, near the dawn of the current yoga craze, and their early success was built on the (supple, flexible) backs of yoga-loving women.
In South America and Southeast Asia, coconut water is an anytime drink for all sorts of occasions. Vita was born when its founders chatted up a pair of Brazilian women in a Lower East Side bar, getting an earful about how much the gals missed the coconut water that was a daily staple for them back home. Zico came to be when CEO Mark Rampolla, upon returning home from his job as an executive for International Paper in Latin America, found he and his wife couldn’t live without the stuff. But the key to getting the beverage off the ground in the United States turned out to be yoga and pilates fiends who became the brands’ early adopters and first American evangelists.
Read more:
Strolling around New York this past summer, I found it impossible to escape the giant, redheaded visage of Rihanna—often staring out at me from the side of a bus barreling through a crowded intersection. The singer had temporarily eschewed her punk warrior aesthetic in favor of a frilly white frock and a tropical beach idyll. In her hand: a Tetra Pak full of Vita Coco coconut water. “Hydrate naturally, from a tree, not a lab,” the ad copy implored.I’d always thought of coconut water as a treat only encountered when traveling. Sold from a roadside cement-block hut in Vietnam. Sipped from a wrinkled plastic bag pierced with a straw. But the product (which is simply the juice of a young, hacked-open coconut) has suddenly flooded the U.S. market. It’s ubiquitous in Manhattan bodegas, shoving aside the 24 oz. aluminum cans of Modelo. Category leader Vita Coco reports 2009 sales volume of $20 million, 2010 sales of $40 million, and expected 2011 sales of $100 million. Competitors boast similar growth rates. What’s driving this specialty beverage boomlet? And how long can it last?
The most important trend in the refreshment business—going on for more than a decade—is the flight away from sugary, carbonated soft drinks like Coke and Fanta (CSDs in industry parlance) and toward drinks perceived as healthier, more natural choices. The decline of the soda stems in part from the aging of our population; 60-year-old baby boomers are less likely than they once might have been to guzzle down a fizzy Mountain Dew. But there is also a general movement toward something the trend spotters call “wellness.” Achieving wellness, as best I understand it, involves cultivating a keen awareness of nutritional concepts, meditative techniques, and which brand of yoga pants make your butt look awesome.
In fact, the successful arrival of coconut water on these shores has more to do with yoga than you might think. The wellness trend has inspired several profitable beverage launches—inspiring massive bottled water brands like Dasani and Aquafina, alternative sports drink concoctions like Vitamin Water, and single-ingredient juices like Pom Wonderful. Both Vita Coco and close competitor Zico were launched in 2004, near the dawn of the current yoga craze, and their early success was built on the (supple, flexible) backs of yoga-loving women.In South America and Southeast Asia, coconut water is an anytime drink for all sorts of occasions. Vita was born when its founders chatted up a pair of Brazilian women in a Lower East Side bar, getting an earful about how much the gals missed the coconut water that was a daily staple for them back home. Zico came to be when CEO Mark Rampolla, upon returning home from his job as an executive for International Paper in Latin America, found he and his wife couldn’t live without the stuff. But the key to getting the beverage off the ground in the United States turned out to be yoga and pilates fiends who became the brands’ early adopters and first American evangelists.
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The King of Human Error
by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so. (...)
Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, without a single minor-league plate appearance between them, but they had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making. I’d never heard of them, though I soon realized that Tversky’s son had been a student in a seminar I’d taught in the late 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, and while I was busy writing my book about baseball, Kahneman had apparently been busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he wasn’t even an economist. (Tversky had died in 1996, making him ineligible to share the prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) I also soon understood how embarrassed I should be by what I had not known.
Between 1971 and 1984, Kahneman and Tversky had published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. When we are trying to guess which 18-year-old baseball prospect would become a big-league all-star, for example. To a reader who is neither psychologist nor economist (i.e., me), these papers are not easy going, though I am told that compared with other academic papers in their field they are high literature. Still, they are not so much written as constructed, block by block. The moment the psychologists uncover some new kink in the human mind, they bestow a strange and forbidding name on it (“the availability heuristic”). In their most cited paper, cryptically titled “Prospect Theory,” they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).
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Patrick Ecclesine
We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so. (...)Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, without a single minor-league plate appearance between them, but they had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making. I’d never heard of them, though I soon realized that Tversky’s son had been a student in a seminar I’d taught in the late 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, and while I was busy writing my book about baseball, Kahneman had apparently been busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he wasn’t even an economist. (Tversky had died in 1996, making him ineligible to share the prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) I also soon understood how embarrassed I should be by what I had not known.
Between 1971 and 1984, Kahneman and Tversky had published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. When we are trying to guess which 18-year-old baseball prospect would become a big-league all-star, for example. To a reader who is neither psychologist nor economist (i.e., me), these papers are not easy going, though I am told that compared with other academic papers in their field they are high literature. Still, they are not so much written as constructed, block by block. The moment the psychologists uncover some new kink in the human mind, they bestow a strange and forbidding name on it (“the availability heuristic”). In their most cited paper, cryptically titled “Prospect Theory,” they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other “experts” have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).
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Patrick Ecclesine
Are Cookbooks Obsolete?
by Julia Moskin, NY Times
For many cooks, the pleasure of Thanksgiving is in the planning. In early November, the recipe folders come out, along with dreams of learning to perfect a lattice pie crust, and the cookbooks covered with splatters and sticky notes that evoke holidays past.
Fast-forward two weeks, to the sweaty hours when the sticky notes have curled up and blown away, the cookbooks are taking up all the counter space, and the illustrations for cooking a turkey in “Joy of Cooking” are revealed to be no more informative than they were in 1951.
If the people developing cooking apps for tablets have their way, that kind of scene will soon be a relic. And so will the whole notion of recipes that exist only as strings of words. Many early cooking apps were unsatisfying: slow, limited, less than intuitive and confined to tiny phone screens. Even avid cooks showed little interest in actually cooking from them.
But with the boom in tablet technology, recipes have begun to travel with their users from home to the office to the market and, most important, into the kitchen. With features like embedded links, built-in timers, infographics and voice prompts, the richness of some new apps — like Baking With Dorie, from the baking expert Dorie Greenspan; Jamie Oliver’s 20-Minute Meals; and Professional Chef, the vast app released last month by the Culinary Institute of America — hint that books as kitchen tools are on the way out.
“I never thought I would say this, but I don’t go anywhere without my iPad,” said Kristin Young, a collector of cookbooks in Santa Barbara, Calif., who said that even her favorite volumes are gathering dust. “If it’s not on my tablet, it’s just not useful anymore.”
The interface of a tablet offers possibilities to the cook that would be impossible with a laptop, let alone a book. Swiping, tapping and zooming through information presented in multimedia is a good match for the experience of cooking, which involves all the senses and the brain, as well. And when those faculties fail, as often happens in high-stress kitchen scenarios like Thanksgiving, apps can come to the rescue with features like technique videos, embedded glossaries and social media links.
Read more:
illustration: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
For many cooks, the pleasure of Thanksgiving is in the planning. In early November, the recipe folders come out, along with dreams of learning to perfect a lattice pie crust, and the cookbooks covered with splatters and sticky notes that evoke holidays past.
Fast-forward two weeks, to the sweaty hours when the sticky notes have curled up and blown away, the cookbooks are taking up all the counter space, and the illustrations for cooking a turkey in “Joy of Cooking” are revealed to be no more informative than they were in 1951. If the people developing cooking apps for tablets have their way, that kind of scene will soon be a relic. And so will the whole notion of recipes that exist only as strings of words. Many early cooking apps were unsatisfying: slow, limited, less than intuitive and confined to tiny phone screens. Even avid cooks showed little interest in actually cooking from them.
But with the boom in tablet technology, recipes have begun to travel with their users from home to the office to the market and, most important, into the kitchen. With features like embedded links, built-in timers, infographics and voice prompts, the richness of some new apps — like Baking With Dorie, from the baking expert Dorie Greenspan; Jamie Oliver’s 20-Minute Meals; and Professional Chef, the vast app released last month by the Culinary Institute of America — hint that books as kitchen tools are on the way out.
“I never thought I would say this, but I don’t go anywhere without my iPad,” said Kristin Young, a collector of cookbooks in Santa Barbara, Calif., who said that even her favorite volumes are gathering dust. “If it’s not on my tablet, it’s just not useful anymore.”
The interface of a tablet offers possibilities to the cook that would be impossible with a laptop, let alone a book. Swiping, tapping and zooming through information presented in multimedia is a good match for the experience of cooking, which involves all the senses and the brain, as well. And when those faculties fail, as often happens in high-stress kitchen scenarios like Thanksgiving, apps can come to the rescue with features like technique videos, embedded glossaries and social media links.
Read more:
illustration: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Kerry James Marshall (b.1955, USA) - Nude (Spotlight). Acrylic on pvc, 61 1/8 x 72 7/8 x 2 7/8 inches (2009)
via:
Terminator: Attack of the Drone
by Mohsin Hamid, Guardian
Ma doesn't hear it. She's asleep, snorin' like an old brown bear after a dogfight. Don't know how she manages that. 'Cause I can hear it. The whole valley can hear it. The machines are huntin' tonight.
There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now.
Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust.
I slip outside. Omar's there waitin'. "What took ya so long?" he says. He's a boy like me but he's taller so he acts like he's older. "Ya got it?"
"Yeah," I say. I take it out from under my shawl. It's a piece of mirror from the white pickup we found all flattened next to the stream. Truck looked like a giant gone stepped on it. I'd asked Omar how big the machines were and he'd said not that big. Not the ones we had 'round here. But he'd said talk was there be bigger machines out there. Out in the southlands. Machines that could walk. So big each step sound like thunder.
At night I sometimes couldn't sleep 'cause I thought I heard 'em big ones comin'. But they never came. Most likely, there was no such. But my sisters still said if those machines come they surely kill everythin'. They said you'd better run when you hear those machines comin'. But what do they know. They're just girls. They get so scared sometimes they go pee inside when they're supposed be asleep and Ma has to thrash 'em. I only done gone pee inside once, and 'cause I'm the man now Ma ain't thrashed me much that time.
But there's no thunderin' tonight. Tonight there's that other sound. Sound of the machines that fly. That's the kind of machine we get in these parts. You can't see 'em at night. Sometimes you can't see 'em in the day neither. But you hear 'em all the time, huntin'. They'll go away for days. Sometimes weeks'll go by and you ain't heard 'em once. Then they'll be back and there'll be a burial. Ain't no-one never killed a machine in our valley. But Omar and I reckon we've got a chance of it when the sun comes up. Only first we got to get ourselves in position.
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Photograph: Getty
Ma doesn't hear it. She's asleep, snorin' like an old brown bear after a dogfight. Don't know how she manages that. 'Cause I can hear it. The whole valley can hear it. The machines are huntin' tonight.
There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now. Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust.
I slip outside. Omar's there waitin'. "What took ya so long?" he says. He's a boy like me but he's taller so he acts like he's older. "Ya got it?"
"Yeah," I say. I take it out from under my shawl. It's a piece of mirror from the white pickup we found all flattened next to the stream. Truck looked like a giant gone stepped on it. I'd asked Omar how big the machines were and he'd said not that big. Not the ones we had 'round here. But he'd said talk was there be bigger machines out there. Out in the southlands. Machines that could walk. So big each step sound like thunder.
At night I sometimes couldn't sleep 'cause I thought I heard 'em big ones comin'. But they never came. Most likely, there was no such. But my sisters still said if those machines come they surely kill everythin'. They said you'd better run when you hear those machines comin'. But what do they know. They're just girls. They get so scared sometimes they go pee inside when they're supposed be asleep and Ma has to thrash 'em. I only done gone pee inside once, and 'cause I'm the man now Ma ain't thrashed me much that time.
But there's no thunderin' tonight. Tonight there's that other sound. Sound of the machines that fly. That's the kind of machine we get in these parts. You can't see 'em at night. Sometimes you can't see 'em in the day neither. But you hear 'em all the time, huntin'. They'll go away for days. Sometimes weeks'll go by and you ain't heard 'em once. Then they'll be back and there'll be a burial. Ain't no-one never killed a machine in our valley. But Omar and I reckon we've got a chance of it when the sun comes up. Only first we got to get ourselves in position.
Read more:
Photograph: Getty
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