Monday, January 16, 2012
Why Black is Addictive
Towards the end of the last century, a friend of mine took a taxi to London Fashion Week. The driver gawped in puzzlement at the moving sea of people dressed head-to-toe in black, and asked: “What’s that, then? Some religious cult?”
He had a point. There is something bordering on the cultish in fashion’s devotion to the colour black—it’s the equivalent of white for Moonies or orange for Hare Krishnas. Since that taxi journey in the 1990s the wardrobes of the stylish have brightened up a bit, but although trends such as colour blocking or floral prints may float by on the surface current, underneath there is a deeper, darker tide that pulls us back towards black. Despite pronouncements at intervals by the fashion industry that red or pink or blue is the new black, the old black is still very much with us.
Visiting eBay, the auction website, confirms this. A search in “Clothes, Shoes and Accessories” for the word “black” yields more than 3m items—that’s twice as many as “blue”, and five or six times as many as “brown” or “grey”. This ratio remains more or less the same in winter and summer, and when you narrow the search to “women’s clothing”. (Black also predominates in men’s clothing, though there’s slightly more blue.) A pedant might argue that these are the clothes that people are trying to get rid of—certainly if they were all thrown away we’d be left with a very large, black mountain. But the website of the upmarket fashion retailer Net-a-Porter tells the same story, with black significantly more dominant in its wares, be it January or June.
What is it about, this infatuation with black? It’s a question I am often asked, since I wear black most of the time, and therefore one upon which I have spent much time reflecting. My friends and colleagues might say I wear little else, though it doesn’t feel like that to me—I wear colours sometimes, particularly in summer, but black is what I feel most comfortable in. Putting on black in the morning feels as natural as breathing. If I enter a clothes shop, I am drawn towards the rails of black. I will happily wear black to weddings as well as funerals. I own black sandals and black sundresses. I even wore black when I was nine months pregnant in a July heatwave. This habit of mine is an adult-onset condition, which developed when I spent a dangerously long time working at British Vogue magazine; I didn’t work in the fashion department, but I absorbed black osmotically. I know I’m far from alone in my preference for wearing black, so—for all those others who are asked why they wear so much black, as well as for myself—I’ll try to answer that question here for once and for all.
To do that means asking some other questions about black’s significance in our society generally. How is it that black can betoken both oppression (the Nazis and Fascists) and also the rebellion of youth (punks and goths)? How can it be the distinctive feature of religious garments (nuns, priests, Hassidic Jews), and also of rubber and bondage fetishists? Why is it the uniform of dons and anorexics alike, of waiters and witches, of judges and suicide-bombers? No colour performs so many duties, in so many fields of clothing—smart, casual, uniform, anti-uniform—as black does. It is uniquely versatile and flexible. How, exactly, does my friend and ally pull that off?
by Rebecca Willis, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Fashion Photography by Sean Gleason
He had a point. There is something bordering on the cultish in fashion’s devotion to the colour black—it’s the equivalent of white for Moonies or orange for Hare Krishnas. Since that taxi journey in the 1990s the wardrobes of the stylish have brightened up a bit, but although trends such as colour blocking or floral prints may float by on the surface current, underneath there is a deeper, darker tide that pulls us back towards black. Despite pronouncements at intervals by the fashion industry that red or pink or blue is the new black, the old black is still very much with us.Visiting eBay, the auction website, confirms this. A search in “Clothes, Shoes and Accessories” for the word “black” yields more than 3m items—that’s twice as many as “blue”, and five or six times as many as “brown” or “grey”. This ratio remains more or less the same in winter and summer, and when you narrow the search to “women’s clothing”. (Black also predominates in men’s clothing, though there’s slightly more blue.) A pedant might argue that these are the clothes that people are trying to get rid of—certainly if they were all thrown away we’d be left with a very large, black mountain. But the website of the upmarket fashion retailer Net-a-Porter tells the same story, with black significantly more dominant in its wares, be it January or June.
What is it about, this infatuation with black? It’s a question I am often asked, since I wear black most of the time, and therefore one upon which I have spent much time reflecting. My friends and colleagues might say I wear little else, though it doesn’t feel like that to me—I wear colours sometimes, particularly in summer, but black is what I feel most comfortable in. Putting on black in the morning feels as natural as breathing. If I enter a clothes shop, I am drawn towards the rails of black. I will happily wear black to weddings as well as funerals. I own black sandals and black sundresses. I even wore black when I was nine months pregnant in a July heatwave. This habit of mine is an adult-onset condition, which developed when I spent a dangerously long time working at British Vogue magazine; I didn’t work in the fashion department, but I absorbed black osmotically. I know I’m far from alone in my preference for wearing black, so—for all those others who are asked why they wear so much black, as well as for myself—I’ll try to answer that question here for once and for all.
To do that means asking some other questions about black’s significance in our society generally. How is it that black can betoken both oppression (the Nazis and Fascists) and also the rebellion of youth (punks and goths)? How can it be the distinctive feature of religious garments (nuns, priests, Hassidic Jews), and also of rubber and bondage fetishists? Why is it the uniform of dons and anorexics alike, of waiters and witches, of judges and suicide-bombers? No colour performs so many duties, in so many fields of clothing—smart, casual, uniform, anti-uniform—as black does. It is uniquely versatile and flexible. How, exactly, does my friend and ally pull that off?
by Rebecca Willis, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Fashion Photography by Sean Gleason
Universal Flu Vaccine Could Be Available by 2013
Annual flu shots might soon become a thing of the past, and threats such as avian and swine flu might disappear with them as a vaccine touted as the "holy grail" of flu treatment could be ready for human trials next year.
That's earlier than the National Institutes of Health estimated in 2010, when they said a universal vaccine could be five years off. By targeting the parts of the virus that rarely mutate, researchers believe they can develop a vaccine similar to the mumps or measles shot—people will be vaccinated as children and then receive boosters later.
That differs from the current '60s-era technology, according to Joseph Kim, head of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is working on the universal vaccine. Each year, the seasonal flu vaccine targets three or four strains that researchers believe will be the most common that year. Previous seasons' vaccines have no effect on future strains of the virus, because it mutates quickly. The seasonal vaccine also offers no protection against outbreaks, such as 2009's H1N1 swine flu. A universal vaccine would offer protection against all forms of the virus.
"It's like putting up a tent over your immune system that protects against rapidly mutating viruses," Kim says. At least two other companies are working on a similar vaccine. In late 2010, Inovio earned a $3.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to work on the vaccine.
"It's a completely different paradigm than how [the vaccines] are made seasonably every year," Kim says.
by Jason Koebler, US News | Read more:
That's earlier than the National Institutes of Health estimated in 2010, when they said a universal vaccine could be five years off. By targeting the parts of the virus that rarely mutate, researchers believe they can develop a vaccine similar to the mumps or measles shot—people will be vaccinated as children and then receive boosters later.
That differs from the current '60s-era technology, according to Joseph Kim, head of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is working on the universal vaccine. Each year, the seasonal flu vaccine targets three or four strains that researchers believe will be the most common that year. Previous seasons' vaccines have no effect on future strains of the virus, because it mutates quickly. The seasonal vaccine also offers no protection against outbreaks, such as 2009's H1N1 swine flu. A universal vaccine would offer protection against all forms of the virus.
"It's like putting up a tent over your immune system that protects against rapidly mutating viruses," Kim says. At least two other companies are working on a similar vaccine. In late 2010, Inovio earned a $3.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to work on the vaccine.
"It's a completely different paradigm than how [the vaccines] are made seasonably every year," Kim says.
by Jason Koebler, US News | Read more:
The Hacker is Watching
Melissa wondered why her goof-off sister was IM'ing from the next room instead of just padding over—she wasn't usually that lazy—so she walked over to see what was up. Suzy just shrugged. She had no idea what her sister was talking about. Yeah, the IM had come from her account, but she hadn't sent it. Honest.
That night, Suzy's 20-year-old friend Nila Westwood got the same note, the same attachment. Unlike Melissa, she opened it, expecting, say, a video of some guy stapling his lip to his chin on YouTube. She waited. Nothing. When she called her friend to see what she'd missed, things actually got freaky: Suzy'd never sent a thing. The girls pieced together the clues and agreed: Suzy's AOL account had been hacked. For the next couple of weeks, the girls remained watchful for malware, insidious software capable of wreaking all sorts of havoc. But with no sign of trouble on their machines—no slow performance, no deleted files, no alerts from antivirus programs—they pretty much forgot about it.
A month passed. Suzy, Melissa, and Nila went about their lives online and off. They chatted with friends, posted pictures, and when they were tired, stretched out on their beds to rest. But at some point, each of them looked up and noticed the same strange thing: the tiny light beside their webcam glowing. At first they figured it was some kind of malfunction, but when it happened repeatedly—the light flicking on, then off—the girls felt a chill. One by one, they gazed fearfully into the lenses, wondering if someone was watching and if, perhaps now, they were looking into the eye of something scary after all. Nila, for one, wasn't taking any chances. She peeled off a sticker and stuck it on the lens.
by David Kushner, GQ | Read more:
Photographs by Jason Madara
Sunday, January 15, 2012
In Defense of Hippies
In a post for the Daily Beast Michelle Goldberg lamented, “Drum circles and clusters of earnest incense-burning meditators ensure that stereotypes about the hippie left remain alive.” At Esquire, Charles Pierce worried that few could “see past all the dreadlocks and hear…over the drum circles.” Michael Smerconish asked on the MSNBC show Hardball if middle Americans “in their Barcalounger” could relate to drum circles. The New Republic’s Alex Klein chimed in, “In the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies....Wall Street survived.” And the host of MSNBC’s Up, Chris Hayes (editor at large of the Nation), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn’t going to “beat the drum” or “give you a free hug,” to knowing laughter.
Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues—something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.
Since the mythology of the 1960s hangs over so much of the analysis of the Wall Street protests, it’s worth reviewing what actually happened then. Media legend lumps sixties radicals and hippies together, but from the very beginning most leaders on the left looked at the hippie culture as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a saboteur of pragmatic progressive politics. Hippies saw most radicals as delusional and often dangerously angry control freaks. Bad vibes.
Not that there is anything magic about the word “hippie.” Over the years it has been distorted by parody, propaganda, self-hatred, and, from its earliest stirrings, commercialism. In some contemporary contexts it is used merely to refer to people living in the past and/or those who are very stoned.
by Danny Goldberg, Dissent | Read more:
Image: Woodstock, 1969 (Wikimedia Commons)
Friday, January 13, 2012
Do We Really Want Immortality?
Suppose you had a chance to question an ancient Greek or Roman -- or any of our distant ancestors, for that matter. Let's say you asked them to list the qualities of a deity.
It's a pretty good bet that many of the "god-like" traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.
After all, we think little of flying through the air. We fill pitch-dark areas with sudden lavish light, by exerting a mere twitch of a finger. Average folks routinely send messages or observe events taking place far across the globe. Copious and detailed information about the universe is readily available through crystal tubes many of us keep on our desks and command like genies. Some modern citizens can even hurl lightning, if we choose to annoy our neighbors and the electric company.
Few of us deem these powers to be miraculous, because they've been acquired by nearly everyone in prosperous nations. After all, nobody respects a gift if everybody has it. And yet, these are some of the very traits that earlier generations associated with divine beings.
Even so, we remain mortal. Our obsession with that fate is as intense as it was in the time of Gilgamesh. Perhaps more, since we overcame so many other obstacles that thwarted our ancestors.
Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species?
There can be no better topic for this contemplation -- the last in a series commissioned for iPlanet -- about our future in the coming millennium. Essay number one cast perspective on our accomplishments during the Twentieth Century and the second dealt with near-term dilemmas we may face in the twenty-first. Now let's take a long-view, exploring the possibility that our great grandchildren will be "great" in every sense of the word... and have problems to match.
by David Brin, Sentient Developments | Read more:
It's a pretty good bet that many of the "god-like" traits he or she described might seem trivial nowadays.After all, we think little of flying through the air. We fill pitch-dark areas with sudden lavish light, by exerting a mere twitch of a finger. Average folks routinely send messages or observe events taking place far across the globe. Copious and detailed information about the universe is readily available through crystal tubes many of us keep on our desks and command like genies. Some modern citizens can even hurl lightning, if we choose to annoy our neighbors and the electric company.
Few of us deem these powers to be miraculous, because they've been acquired by nearly everyone in prosperous nations. After all, nobody respects a gift if everybody has it. And yet, these are some of the very traits that earlier generations associated with divine beings.
Even so, we remain mortal. Our obsession with that fate is as intense as it was in the time of Gilgamesh. Perhaps more, since we overcame so many other obstacles that thwarted our ancestors.
Will our descendants conquer the last barriers standing between humanity and Olympian glory? Or may we encounter hurdles too daunting even for our brilliant, arrogant, ingenious and ever-persevering species?
There can be no better topic for this contemplation -- the last in a series commissioned for iPlanet -- about our future in the coming millennium. Essay number one cast perspective on our accomplishments during the Twentieth Century and the second dealt with near-term dilemmas we may face in the twenty-first. Now let's take a long-view, exploring the possibility that our great grandchildren will be "great" in every sense of the word... and have problems to match.
by David Brin, Sentient Developments | Read more:
Who Pinched My Ride?
I used to stay up late watching the film of my bicycle being stolen. It’s amazing what you notice on the 38th replay of a surveillance tape, running the grainy recording backward and forward, pausing and advancing. Sometimes I’d back the tape up to before the 17 minutes that changed my life. All the way back to the part where I still had a bicycle.
Rewinding—past all the New Yorkers striding backward toward lunch; past the Algonquin and Royalton hotels inhaling crowds and the door of the Harvard Club admitting well-fed members; past the New York Yacht Club looming impassively like a beached galleon; past all the finery and civility of West 44th Street—you come to the beginning. You come to him.
The thief. There he is. Caught, if only on tape. (...)
I want my bike back. So do we all. With the rise of the bicycle age has come a rise in bicycle robbery: FBI statistics claim that 204,000 bicycles were stolen nationwide in 2010, but those are only the documented thefts. Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle advocacy group in New York City, estimates the unreported thefts at four or five times that—more than a million bikes a year. New York alone probably sees more than 100,000 bikes stolen annually. Whether in big biking cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, or in sport-loving suburbs and small towns, theft is “one of the biggest reasons people don’t ride bikes,” Noah Budnick, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, told me. Although bike commuting has increased by 100 percent in New York City during the past seven years, the lack of secure bike parking was ranked alongside bad drivers and traffic as a primary deterrent to riding more. It’s all about the (stolen) bike; even Lance Armstrong had his custom time-trial Trek nicked from the team van in 2009 after a race in California. Not every bike is that precious, but according to figures from the FBI and the National Bike Registry, the value of stolen bikes is as much as $350 million a year.
That’s a lot of bike. Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves. Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen. Stealing one is routinely treated as a misdemeanor, even though, in the age of electronic derailleurs and $5,000 coffee-shop rides, many bike thefts easily surpass the fiscal definition of felony, which varies by state but is typically under the thousand-dollar mark. Yet police departments are reluctant to pull officers from robberies or murder investigations to hunt bike thieves. Even when they do, DAs rarely prosecute the thieves the police bring in.
by Patrick Symmes, Outside | Read more:
Photo: Jake Stangel
Smart Windows
This transparent screen will fit any window up to 46 inches at a resolution of 1366 x 768. The thing is completely see-through, but what you’re viewing on the screen is completely private from those outside. It’s fully controlled by your touch, and reminds us of a scene right out of Minority Report or Mission: Impossible.
via:
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Alaska wildlife conservation director charged with helping illegally kill bears
The director of the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation has been charged with 12 counts of illegal hunting related to guiding activities in the bear-rich forests on the north side of Cook Inlet across from Anchorage, according to Alaska State Troopers.
Troopers on Thursday issued a statement saying Corey L. Rossi, 51, of Palmer took two out-of-state men on a bear hunt in the early summer of 2008 and then covered up their kills. Rossi was at the time a licensed assistant guide on the verge of joining the administration of then-Gov. Sarah Palin.
Rossi was not immediately available for comment.
A former predator control officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rossi is a longtime friend of Chuck and Sally Heath, Palin's parents. After Palin took office in 2007, Sally lobbied her daughter to have Rossi named commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The commissioner oversees all wildlife and fisheries management in the state. Sally Heath, in an email to Palin, noted that almost everyone would object to Rossi as unqualified, but added those "are the very same people who said the same thing about you."
Rossi did not get the commissioner's job, but a special job -- assistant commissioner for abundance management -- was created for him within state government. He moved into the newly created job in December 2008, just months after his alleged illegal bear hunt. Gov. Sean Parnell promoted Rossi to wildlife director in March 2010. A staunch advocate of killing predators -- wolves and bears -- to boost prey populations of moose and caribou within the state, Rossi has been unpopular with many in the agency he runs.
His qualifications have repeatedly been called into question. He lacks a college degree and his prime professional association with wildlife has involved killing rats and foxes in the Aleutian Islands. His associations with Alaska's big-game guiding industry have also raised suspicions. Rossi has continued to work as a guide while employed in the wildlife division by exploiting a loophole in a state policy that bans wildlife division employees from that business.
by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Troopers on Thursday issued a statement saying Corey L. Rossi, 51, of Palmer took two out-of-state men on a bear hunt in the early summer of 2008 and then covered up their kills. Rossi was at the time a licensed assistant guide on the verge of joining the administration of then-Gov. Sarah Palin.
Rossi was not immediately available for comment. A former predator control officer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rossi is a longtime friend of Chuck and Sally Heath, Palin's parents. After Palin took office in 2007, Sally lobbied her daughter to have Rossi named commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The commissioner oversees all wildlife and fisheries management in the state. Sally Heath, in an email to Palin, noted that almost everyone would object to Rossi as unqualified, but added those "are the very same people who said the same thing about you."
Rossi did not get the commissioner's job, but a special job -- assistant commissioner for abundance management -- was created for him within state government. He moved into the newly created job in December 2008, just months after his alleged illegal bear hunt. Gov. Sean Parnell promoted Rossi to wildlife director in March 2010. A staunch advocate of killing predators -- wolves and bears -- to boost prey populations of moose and caribou within the state, Rossi has been unpopular with many in the agency he runs.
His qualifications have repeatedly been called into question. He lacks a college degree and his prime professional association with wildlife has involved killing rats and foxes in the Aleutian Islands. His associations with Alaska's big-game guiding industry have also raised suspicions. Rossi has continued to work as a guide while employed in the wildlife division by exploiting a loophole in a state policy that bans wildlife division employees from that business.
by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Breast Implants: the First 50 Years
It was in 1962 that Timmie Jean Lindsey was offered a solution to a non-existent problem. A factory worker from Texas, she had married at 15, had six children, divorced in her mid-20s, and taken up with a man who encouraged her to have a vine tattooed on her cleavage. Roses tumbled across her breasts. When the relationship faltered, Lindsey decided she wanted the tattoos removed. "I was ashamed," she says, "and I needed them taken off." Her low-paid work made her eligible for treatment at a charity hospital, where she was told the tattoo could be removed through dermabrasion. And the doctors had another proposal. Had she ever thought about breast implants?
Lindsey had not. She'd never felt self-conscious about her breasts – and even if she had, the options at that time were primitive and problematic, involving substances injected directly into women's chests, or implants made of sponge. "The only person I'd ever talked to about breast implants was my cousin," says Lindsey, "who had had some kind of surgery. She said: 'Sometimes I wake up and my breast has moved to another part of my body,' and I thought: 'My God. I never want that.' It wasn't long after she and I talked that I came into contact with these doctors."
The team was led by Dr Thomas Cronin, who had been developing the world's first silicone breast implants. Thomas Biggs, then 29, and a surgical resident under Cronin, says the idea came about when one of his colleagues, Frank Gerow, went to the blood bank. "They'd stopped putting liquids in glass bottles, and begun putting them into plastic bags," says Biggs, "and he was walking in the hall with this bag of blood, and felt that it had the softness of a breast." Around the same time, Cronin travelled "to New Orleans to a plastic surgery meeting and encountered a former resident of his. This fellow told him there was a company who had a new product which was interesting because it had very little body reaction, and could be made into a variety of thicknesses, a variety of viscosities, all the way from liquid to solid. If you can make a solid, you can make a bag – and if you can make a liquid, you can make something that goes in it."
Cronin had the idea for a breast implant. A prototype was created, and implanted into a dog called Esmeralda. "That worked OK," says Biggs, "and so then they got to Timmie Lindsey." After spending some time with the doctors, she says, "they asked me if I wanted implants, and I said: 'Well, I don't really know.' The only thing I'd ever thought about changing was my ears. I told them I'd rather have my ears fixed than to have new breasts, and they said, well, they'd fix that too. So I said, OK. When they put the implants in they said: 'Do you want to see them?' and I said: 'No, I don't want to look at it. You put it in me, and it'll be out of sight, out of mind. My theory was that if you think you've got something foreign inside you you're just going to worry about it." She's 80 today, still living in Texas, working night shifts in a care home, and those first, experimental globes remain in her chest.
The 50-year history of breast implants had begun, a history of controversy and success. What no one knew back then was just how phenomenally popular breast augmentation surgery would become – the last available figures from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery show it was the most popular form of cosmetic surgery in the US in 2010, with 318,123 augmentations performed. It is also the most popular cosmetic operation in the UK. While there are no overall figures for cosmetic surgery here, those collected by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), which represent around a third of the market, show 9,418 women had breast augmentation in 2010, a rise of more than 10% from the previous year.
by Kira Cochrane, Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Stockbyte/Getty Images
Lindsey had not. She'd never felt self-conscious about her breasts – and even if she had, the options at that time were primitive and problematic, involving substances injected directly into women's chests, or implants made of sponge. "The only person I'd ever talked to about breast implants was my cousin," says Lindsey, "who had had some kind of surgery. She said: 'Sometimes I wake up and my breast has moved to another part of my body,' and I thought: 'My God. I never want that.' It wasn't long after she and I talked that I came into contact with these doctors."The team was led by Dr Thomas Cronin, who had been developing the world's first silicone breast implants. Thomas Biggs, then 29, and a surgical resident under Cronin, says the idea came about when one of his colleagues, Frank Gerow, went to the blood bank. "They'd stopped putting liquids in glass bottles, and begun putting them into plastic bags," says Biggs, "and he was walking in the hall with this bag of blood, and felt that it had the softness of a breast." Around the same time, Cronin travelled "to New Orleans to a plastic surgery meeting and encountered a former resident of his. This fellow told him there was a company who had a new product which was interesting because it had very little body reaction, and could be made into a variety of thicknesses, a variety of viscosities, all the way from liquid to solid. If you can make a solid, you can make a bag – and if you can make a liquid, you can make something that goes in it."
Cronin had the idea for a breast implant. A prototype was created, and implanted into a dog called Esmeralda. "That worked OK," says Biggs, "and so then they got to Timmie Lindsey." After spending some time with the doctors, she says, "they asked me if I wanted implants, and I said: 'Well, I don't really know.' The only thing I'd ever thought about changing was my ears. I told them I'd rather have my ears fixed than to have new breasts, and they said, well, they'd fix that too. So I said, OK. When they put the implants in they said: 'Do you want to see them?' and I said: 'No, I don't want to look at it. You put it in me, and it'll be out of sight, out of mind. My theory was that if you think you've got something foreign inside you you're just going to worry about it." She's 80 today, still living in Texas, working night shifts in a care home, and those first, experimental globes remain in her chest.
The 50-year history of breast implants had begun, a history of controversy and success. What no one knew back then was just how phenomenally popular breast augmentation surgery would become – the last available figures from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery show it was the most popular form of cosmetic surgery in the US in 2010, with 318,123 augmentations performed. It is also the most popular cosmetic operation in the UK. While there are no overall figures for cosmetic surgery here, those collected by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), which represent around a third of the market, show 9,418 women had breast augmentation in 2010, a rise of more than 10% from the previous year.
by Kira Cochrane, Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Stockbyte/Getty Images
Lock 'Em Up, Throw Away Their Dignity
Digby speculated yesterday that America's extreme incarceration rate may explain our collective lack of concern about the plight of the people at Guantanamo who are being imprisoned indefinitely in conditions that border on torture, without trial or any hope of one.
I agree, but I think it also goes further. There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn't deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.
Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our views of criminal punishment. America has the distinction of being one of the very few modern industrialized democracies to retain capital punishment. We have some of the world's longest prison sentences.
Most bizarre, however, is our tolerance for prison rape and other abuse. Other countries take the care of prisoners much more seriously than does the U.S. In fact, prison rape in America has become a routine subject of mainstream comedy. Where it's not joked about, it's utilized as part of the punishment disincentive for crime, even by respected progressive allies. When Taibbi jokes about the supposedly salutary effect of throwing Blankfein in "pound-me-in-the-a** prison" (itself a reference to a line in the comedy Office Space), it plays on this same dynamic: the idea that prisoner abuse is all part of the just desserts of the wrongdoer and a lesson to others. Taibbi would doubtless object (and correctly so) that all he meant was for Blankfein to receive the same treatment as any other felon--but the point remains that to even mention such a thing is almost uniquely American.
It's shared across political lines and woven into our culture as a country, for better and (I believe) very much for the worse.
It's not surprising that we have high tolerance for depraved treatment of foreign prisoners suspected of terrorism. We have a similarly high tolerance for depraved treatment of our fellow Americans locked up for petty crimes. The abuses at Guantanamo are uniquely awful in their Kafkaesque unconstitutionality and maddening sensory deprivation. But least they know they're protected from one another, which is more than one can say for the inmates at your local penitentiary.
In America, once we lock people up, we seem to have no problem throwing away every last shred of their dignity.
by David Atkins, Hullabaloo | Read more:
I agree, but I think it also goes further. There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn't deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.
Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our views of criminal punishment. America has the distinction of being one of the very few modern industrialized democracies to retain capital punishment. We have some of the world's longest prison sentences.
Most bizarre, however, is our tolerance for prison rape and other abuse. Other countries take the care of prisoners much more seriously than does the U.S. In fact, prison rape in America has become a routine subject of mainstream comedy. Where it's not joked about, it's utilized as part of the punishment disincentive for crime, even by respected progressive allies. When Taibbi jokes about the supposedly salutary effect of throwing Blankfein in "pound-me-in-the-a** prison" (itself a reference to a line in the comedy Office Space), it plays on this same dynamic: the idea that prisoner abuse is all part of the just desserts of the wrongdoer and a lesson to others. Taibbi would doubtless object (and correctly so) that all he meant was for Blankfein to receive the same treatment as any other felon--but the point remains that to even mention such a thing is almost uniquely American.
It's shared across political lines and woven into our culture as a country, for better and (I believe) very much for the worse.
It's not surprising that we have high tolerance for depraved treatment of foreign prisoners suspected of terrorism. We have a similarly high tolerance for depraved treatment of our fellow Americans locked up for petty crimes. The abuses at Guantanamo are uniquely awful in their Kafkaesque unconstitutionality and maddening sensory deprivation. But least they know they're protected from one another, which is more than one can say for the inmates at your local penitentiary.
In America, once we lock people up, we seem to have no problem throwing away every last shred of their dignity.
by David Atkins, Hullabaloo | Read more:
Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?
[ed. It says much about the current state of our media that the NY Times (!) would even consider asking this question. There's also this from the Washington Post.]
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.
Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?
by Arthur S. Brisbane, NY Times | Read more:
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.
One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.
Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:
“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?
by Arthur S. Brisbane, NY Times | Read more:
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
I Am Trying To Save My Alt Business
‘The numbers just aren’t adding up,’ said my best friend, who recently became my business partner in a joint alt venture. We were really good friends, but at the same time, being in business together changed our relationship. We barely even hang out any more. I could hear the tension in his voice. We thought it was a really good idea, emerging markets, new media, old media, building a tribe, getting the word out on social media, reaching consumers both on the internet, and in real life. It was fool proof. We were basically going to be printing buzz money, opening up our own buzz mint. The trouble was, despite all of the buzz, the blog press, the decent turnouts, the merch, the meetings, the important emails, the time we met that famous & successful person who said they liked what we were doing, we were still ONLY making buzz dollars.
I guess I was wrong. Maybe it was a bad idea to start a buzzband / record label / blog / viral meme blog / aggregator of memes / party promotion firm / PR firm / online video series / site on the internet that changes the way that we interpret journalism / diy venue space / playhouse / mumblecore film collective / documentary film series / alt non-profit scam / party photo website / cassette tape label / online design company / microblogging service / alt-fundraising website / vintage store / online vintage store / t-shirt making company / art gallery space / booking agency / food truck / vegan restaurant / creative agency / zine / magazine / alt comedy troupe / [miscellaneous alt venture].
We met with my dad’s friend, who was an accountant, and he told us every thing that we needed to get together in order to formalize our business. The truth was, taking a look at our business led us to realize that we weren’t making any REAL money. It was a tough spot to be in. I second guessed all of our decisions. The time we printed flyers on glossy colored paper instead of just using a DIY copy machine. The time we hired my friend who is a designer to design our website but he overcharged us and left us with a broken website. The time I borrowed my mom’s credit card to fly us to an important music and interactive conference in order to make connections, but we just ended up partying. Although it has been a wild ride, maybe the ride is pulling up to the final terminal. Not even a golden alt calculator could solve this mess. It was truly shaping up to be an Enron-level alt financial conspiracy.
He asked me, “Do you realize that we have never actually made money?”
It was at that moment that I realized that I didn’t actually have an alt business. I was paying to have an identity. Sure, my twitter follower count was admirable, and I did have things to do every night of the week, but what was I really paying for? A mediocre presence in an alternative scene? I struggled to understand what I was trying to become a part of, an undying alt spirit that desperately wanted to contribute something to a community that might not even exist.
“I’m out. This is too much. I’m getting my old job back at my dad’s company,” said my friend.
I wasn’t upset that he was leaving. This whole operation was my idea, anyways, and most of his ideas were super unoriginal and lame. I knew how to keep things authentic. But maybe keeping things authentic wasn’t making any more and bringing in new clients, new visitors. In fact, I wasn’t actually sure what we DID. But I was confident that I could figure it out on my own and utilize my tribe to get the word out that we were doing something different.
I thought about the first days of the business when we would just sit around on the internet and chat about how awesome things were going to get for us. VIP parties, tons of money, press, notoriety, validation from the scene, validation from our parents—we would have EVERYTHING. But maybe it was time to realize that this was never going to happen. The numbers just weren’t adding up.
On days like today, I had to wonder if my entire alternative social experience misled me, leading me to a place where I had nothing to my name. No money, no alt fame, and just a bunch of connections with a bunch of other people who were pretending to be successful, just like me. Don’t get me wrong, this was a valuable existence, and even if I have to begin a new venture, I am confident that it will work out because this experience exposed me to the harsh realities of what it takes to get an alt business off the ground and over the hump. But do I have the energy to do this again? Maybe I’m just not an alternative entrepreneur.
Was my alternative business a mistake?
It was just one of those days where you felt like ________ had everything, and you had nothing.
Behind Every Great Woman
Among the 80 or so customers crammed into Bare Escentuals, it’s easy to spot Leslie Blodgett. It’s not merely her six-inch platform heels and bright magenta-and-blue dress that set her apart in the Thousand Oaks (Calif.) mall boutique, but her confidence. To the woman concerned she’s too old for shimmery eye shadow, Blodgett swoops in and encourages her to wear whatever she wants. With a deft sweep of a brush, she demonstrates a new shade of blush on another customer’s cheek. And when she isn’t helping anyone, she pivots on her heels for admirers gushing about her dress, made by the breakout designer Erdem.
Blodgett, 49, has spent the past 18 years nurturing Bare Escentuals from a startup into a global cosmetics empire. She sold the company for $1.7 billion to Shiseido in March 2010 but still pitches products in stores around the world and chats incessantly with customers online. Scores of fans post daily messages on Blodgett’s Facebook page, confessing details about their personal lives and offering opinions on her additive-free makeup. She only wishes her 19-year-old son, Trent, were in touch with her as frequently as he is with her husband, Keith. In 1995, at 38, Keith quit making television commercials to raise Trent, freeing up Leslie to build her business. She’d do it all again, but she’s jealous of her husband’s relationship with her son. Trent, a college sophomore, texts his father almost every day; he often goes a week without texting her.
“Once I knew my role was providing for the family, I took that very seriously. But there was envy knowing I wasn’t there for our son during the day,” says Blodgett. “Keith does everything at home—the cooking, repairs, finances, vacation planning—and I could work long hours and travel a lot, knowing he took such good care of Trent. I love my work, but I would have liked to have a little more balance or even understand what that means.”
Blodgett’s lament is becoming more familiar as a generation of female breadwinners look back on the sacrifices—some little, some profound—required to have the careers they wanted. Like hundreds of thousands of women who have advanced into management roles in the past two decades—and, in particular, the hundreds who’ve become senior corporate officers—she figured out early what every man with a corner office has long known: To make it to the top, you need a wife. If that wife happens to be a husband, and increasingly it is, so be it.
by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Blodgett, 49, has spent the past 18 years nurturing Bare Escentuals from a startup into a global cosmetics empire. She sold the company for $1.7 billion to Shiseido in March 2010 but still pitches products in stores around the world and chats incessantly with customers online. Scores of fans post daily messages on Blodgett’s Facebook page, confessing details about their personal lives and offering opinions on her additive-free makeup. She only wishes her 19-year-old son, Trent, were in touch with her as frequently as he is with her husband, Keith. In 1995, at 38, Keith quit making television commercials to raise Trent, freeing up Leslie to build her business. She’d do it all again, but she’s jealous of her husband’s relationship with her son. Trent, a college sophomore, texts his father almost every day; he often goes a week without texting her. “Once I knew my role was providing for the family, I took that very seriously. But there was envy knowing I wasn’t there for our son during the day,” says Blodgett. “Keith does everything at home—the cooking, repairs, finances, vacation planning—and I could work long hours and travel a lot, knowing he took such good care of Trent. I love my work, but I would have liked to have a little more balance or even understand what that means.”
Blodgett’s lament is becoming more familiar as a generation of female breadwinners look back on the sacrifices—some little, some profound—required to have the careers they wanted. Like hundreds of thousands of women who have advanced into management roles in the past two decades—and, in particular, the hundreds who’ve become senior corporate officers—she figured out early what every man with a corner office has long known: To make it to the top, you need a wife. If that wife happens to be a husband, and increasingly it is, so be it.
by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Europe’s $39 Trillion Pension Threat Grows
[ed. wtf...$37 Trillion?!]
Even before the euro crisis, people were worried about Europe’s pension bomb.
State-funded pension obligations in 19 of the European Union nations were about five times higher than their combined gross debt, according to a study commissioned by the European Central Bank. The countries in the report compiled by the Research Center for Generational Contracts at Freiburg University in 2009 had almost 30 trillion euros ($39.3 trillion) of projected obligations to their existing populations.
Germany accounted for 7.6 trillion euros and France 6.7 trillion euros of the liabilities, authors Christoph Mueller, Bernd Raffelhueschen and Olaf Weddige said in the report.
“This is a totally unsustainable situation that quite clearly has to be reversed,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a telephone interview.
by Rebecca Christie and Peter Woodifield, Bloomberg | Read more:
Even before the euro crisis, people were worried about Europe’s pension bomb.
State-funded pension obligations in 19 of the European Union nations were about five times higher than their combined gross debt, according to a study commissioned by the European Central Bank. The countries in the report compiled by the Research Center for Generational Contracts at Freiburg University in 2009 had almost 30 trillion euros ($39.3 trillion) of projected obligations to their existing populations.
Germany accounted for 7.6 trillion euros and France 6.7 trillion euros of the liabilities, authors Christoph Mueller, Bernd Raffelhueschen and Olaf Weddige said in the report.
“This is a totally unsustainable situation that quite clearly has to be reversed,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a telephone interview.
by Rebecca Christie and Peter Woodifield, Bloomberg | Read more:
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