The French Approach to Childrearing

When my daughter was 18 months old, my husband and I decided to take her on a little summer holiday. We picked a coastal town that's a few hours by train from Paris, where we were living (I'm American, he's British), and booked a hotel room with a crib. Bean, as we call her, was our only child at this point, so forgive us for thinking: How hard could it be?

We ate breakfast at the hotel, but we had to eat lunch and dinner at the little seafood restaurants around the old port. We quickly discovered that having two restaurant meals a day with a toddler deserved to be its own circle of hell.

Bean would take a brief interest in the food, but within a few minutes she was spilling salt shakers and tearing apart sugar packets. Then she demanded to be sprung from her high chair so she could dash around the restaurant and bolt dangerously toward the docks.

Our strategy was to finish the meal quickly. We ordered while being seated, then begged the server to rush out some bread and bring us our appetizers and main courses at the same time. While my husband took a few bites of fish, I made sure that Bean didn't get kicked by a waiter or lost at sea. Then we switched. We left enormous, apologetic tips to compensate for the arc of torn napkins and calamari around our table.

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Though by that time I'd lived in France for a few years, I couldn't explain this. And once I started thinking about French parenting, I realized it wasn't just mealtime that was different. I suddenly had lots of questions. Why was it, for example, that in the hundreds of hours I'd clocked at French playgrounds, I'd never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn't my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn't their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had?

Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids' spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves.

By the end of our ruined beach holiday, I decided to figure out what French parents were doing differently. Why didn't French children throw food? And why weren't their parents shouting? Could I change my wiring and get the same results with my own offspring?

Driven partly by maternal desperation, I have spent the last several years investigating French parenting. And now, with Bean 6 years old and twins who are 3, I can tell you this: The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

by Pamela Druckerman, WSJ |  Read more:
Photo: Emmanuel Fradin

Meet Li-Fi, the LED-based Alternative to Household Wi-Fi

Haas's discovery is based on a subset of optical technology called visible light communication (VLC), or Li-Fi, as it has been dubbed. VLC exploits a hack of human perception: light-emitting diodes can be switched on and off faster than the naked eye can detect, causing the light source to appear to be on continuously. Rapid on-off keying enables data transmission using binary code: switching on an LED is a logical "1", switching it off is a logical "0". Thereby flows the data.

The potential applications are enormous: divers working at depths could use light to communicate; air passengers could connect to the internet through the LEDs inside the aircraft. Haas sees the technology potentially disrupting industries from telecoms to advertising.

Research into VLC has been conducted in earnest since 2003, mainly in the UK, US, Germany, Korea and Japan. Experiments have shown that LEDs can be electronically adapted to transmit data wirelessly as well as to provide light. VLC is faster, safer and cheaper than other forms of wireless internet, advocates say -- and so could eliminate the need for costly mobile-phone radio masts.  (...)

A VLC industry is beginning to cohere. Last autumn a report by industry researcher Global Business Intelligence, Visible Light Communication (VLC) -- A Potential Solution to the Global Wireless Spectrum Shortage, mentioned half a dozen companies that are active in the field, including Casio and Intel. Samsung and Boeing were not named, but are also thought to be exploring VLC. Last October, a group of companies from Germany, Norway, Israel and the US formed the Li-Fi Consortium to promote optical wireless communications.

It's easy to see why VLC could disrupt the way data is delivered. It offers relatively high bandwidth -- and visible light is free and safe. Imagine being able to use your laptop or tablet wherever in the world you can find a modified LED light. No more scrambling for access codes, or searching for hotspots, or risking leaks and electromagnetic interference, because artificial light, unlike radio waves, doesn't penetrate walls. You can control its beam, like a torch; and even if that torchlight is dimmed to the point of appearing switched off, you remain connected, as the LED signal is still operating.

Evangelists emphasise VLC's advantages in hazardous conditions or tough environments. They say it will transform air travel by allowing overhead cabin lights to connect mobiles and laptops in-flight; and that it will improve conditions for those working underwater -- on oil rigs, for example -- where radio waves cannot penetrate. Traffic lights could better regulate traffic flow using data; and LED car lights might alert drivers when other vehicles are too close. More pervasively, anyone seeking an internet connection could connect using light from streetlamps and electric shop signs.

by Michael Watts, Wired UK |  Read more:

Photo Aquilar

On the Meaning of Life

In July of 1931, author and philosopher Will Durant wrote to a number of notable figures and asked, essentially, "What is the meaning of life?" His letter concluded:

Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for you, what keeps you going, what help—if any—religion gives you, what are the sources of your inspiration and your energy, what is the goal or motive-force of your toil, where you find your consolations and your happiness, where, in the last resort, your treasure lies. Write briefly if you must; write at length and at leisure if you possibly can; for every word from you will be precious to me.

Durant received many replies, a selection of which were compiled in the book, "On the Meaning of Life." By far the greatest response, in my opinion, came from the great H. L. Mencken. It can, and should, be read below.

(Source: On the Meaning of Life; Image: H. L. Mencken in 1927, courtesy of The Mencken Society.)

Dear Durant

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

The precise form of an individual’s activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity. I do not lay eggs, as a hen does, because I was born without any equipment for it. For the same reason I do not get myself elected to Congress, or play the violoncello, or teach metaphysics in a college, or work in a steel mill. What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and insatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and concoctor of them.

There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other realtively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.

by H.L. Mencken, Letters of Note |  Read more:

Comedy First

When he was younger, Ramis envisioned himself playing Gary Cooper parts: strong, silent leading men. Instead, his most recent role, in 2002, was a cameo in “Orange County,” as a dean of admissions, a cranky figure who turns wide-eyed and cuddly after accidentally ingesting three hits of Ecstasy. The script called for the drugged dean to offer to perform oral sex on a prospective student, but Ramis wanted the scene rewritten so that he just kisses the boy: “I didn’t want to be walking down the street and have school buses of kids rolling by and shouting, ‘Hey, Blow-Job Guy!’ ”

When Ramis returned to Second City, in 1972, he had been replaced in the cast by John Belushi. “Harold would never make a fool of himself onstage—he was too smart,” Betty Thomas, the director and Second City alumna, said. “But making a fool of himself was exactly what John went for.”

“It was like, I’m not the zany, the stoned hippie crazy guy anymore. John is, and he’s crazier than I am—he’s totally inhabiting these characters,” Ramis said. “In the midst of a scene, John would come out with something like ‘Eat a bowl of fuck.’ ”

In 1974, Belushi, who loved having Ramis as his deadpan foil, brought him—and several other Second City actors, including Bill Murray—to New York to work on “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” and “The National Lampoon Show.” Ramis slowly came to accept his role as the whetstone. “As a person of intellect, I could complement John or Bill, who were people of instinct; I could help guide and deploy that instinct,” he says. Even now, Martin Short told me, if someone in a group of comedians cracks a joke, “everyone skirts their eyes over to Harold first, to see if he laughs.”

As Belushi and other Second City actors were becoming famous on “Saturday Night Live,” Ramis began writing what would become “National Lampoon’s Animal House” with Doug Kenney, one of the founders of National Lampoon. (A third writer, Chris Miller, soon joined them.) They were paid ten thousand dollars each and wrote eight hours a day for three months. Ramis took the lead in constructing the script, but its tone owed a lot to Kenney, a sarcastic Harvard graduate who became Ramis’s constant companion. “Doug was the Wasp me, the me with alcoholism thrown in,” Ramis says. “He used to say that ‘just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s bad,’ which I really took to heart, because my stance had always been that people are idiots and sheep. Our other motto was ‘Broad comedy is not necessarily dumb comedy.’ Doug envisioned ‘Animal House’ and, later, ‘Caddyshack’ as edgy, adult Disney films. He understood that if you make it look like Disney and feel like Disney, and then inject a much edgier message, you have a way of reaching people without threatening them.”

Crude as “Animal House” was, it was also rambunctiously optimistic. By setting the film in the early sixties, the writers tapped the source of their earliest ideals. “Our generation’s revolutionary energy had slipped away after Kent State and the rise of the violent fringe of the Weather Underground,” Ramis says. “We revived it.” They revived it by making their obvious outsiders into not so obvious insiders. “Woody Allen had defined the American nebbish as a loser,” Ramis adds. “But we felt instinctively that our outsiders weren’t losers. They may not achieve anything in the traditional sense—they may not even be smart—but they’re countercultural heroes. The movie went on after the credits to tell you that these were your future leaders, while the guys from the ‘good’ frat would be raped in prison and fragged by their own troops.”

Ramis describes Doug Kenney as the only person he knew who would hit the accelerator if he saw a car crossing his path. When they wrote “Caddyshack” together, along with Bill Murray’s older brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, Kenney was using a lot of cocaine and seemed depressed. In July, 1980, after becoming so hostile at the “Caddyshack” press junket that the film’s publicists asked him to leave, Kenney took a vacation on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and disappeared. When his body was found, under Hanapepe Lookout, a few days later, it was Ramis who delivered the verdict that everyone repeated: “Doug probably fell while he was looking for a place to jump.”

by Tad Friend, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Michel Thompson (French, 1921-2007)
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A Short History of American Money, From Fur to Fiat

Before independence, America's disparate colonial economies struggled with a very material financial hang-up: there just wasn't enough money to go around. Colonial governments attempted to solve this problem by using tobacco, nails, and animal pelts for currency, assigning them a set amount of shillings or pennies so that they could intermix with the existing system.

The most successful ad hoc currency was wampum, a particular kind of bead made from the shells of ocean critters. But eventually the value of this currency, like that of other alternative currencies of the day, was undermined by oversupply and counterfeiting. (That's right: counterfeit wampum. They were produced by dyeing like-shaped shells with berry juice, mimicking the purple color of the real thing.)

It was a crew of Puritans from Boston who first put their faith in paper. Initially, the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to issue colonial coinage. The pieces themselves, struck in 1652, were made from a mash-up of poor-quality silver and were soon outlawed by the Brits. Less than a decade later the colonists tried again. They were forced to, really, because they owed money to the crown to help fund Britain's war against France, yet lacked any currency with which to pay up. They called the paper "bills of credit." The local government essentially said to the people: Here, just use this. It's real money. We'll sort out redeemability later.

There were endless debates, from prairie farmlands to the floor of Congress, about whether this paper was real money or just a smoke-and-mirrors scheme destined to end badly. In the United States that dispute, between the fear of paper and the advantages of national currency, would rage for more than a century, and it is even front and center in the Constitution.

During the Continental Congress, the founding fathers deliberately forbid the nascent federal government from issuing "bills of credit." Paper money, one delegate noted, was "as alarming as the Mark of the Beast." The federal government was, however, granted authority "to coin money, regulate the value thereof ... and fit the standard of weights and measure."

by David Wolman, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Deep Freeze Spreads Across Europe

The frigid weather that plagued Eastern Europe much of last week spread westward over the weekend, grounding flights, snarling traffic, and causing hundreds of deaths. While the subzero temperatures and heavy snowfalls have brought hardship, residents of some areas were able to take advantage of the conditions for skating, sledding, kite surfing, and other winter pastimes. Meteorologists warn that more blizzards may be hitting the region, and state officials, shelters, and aid organizations are preparing to help even more people in need. Gathered here are images of frozen Europe from the past several days. [40 photos]
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Patti Smith

by Aleksandra Perovic
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Making Over the Mall

Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview, like many malls across the country, is suffering. Closed on weekends because there are so few visitors, it is down to eight retail stores, eight food-court vendors and a couple of businesses like the local bar association.

So part of the glass-covered mall is being converted into a vegetable garden.

“I look at it as space, I don’t look at it as retail,” said Vicky Poole, a Galleria executive. “You can’t anymore.”

Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, the Internet is now pulling even more sales away from them. And as retailers crawl out of the worst recession since the advent of malls, many are realizing they are overbuilt and are closing locations at a fast clip.

The result is near-record vacancy rates at malls of all kinds, both the big enclosed ones and the sprawling strips. Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.

Most cities, looking at shrinking budgets, cannot afford to subsidize or knock down ailing malls, and healthy retailers that are expanding — like H&M and Nordstrom Rack — generally will not open at depressed locations. So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms. (...)

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

“Basically they’re building the downtowns that the suburbs never had,” along with reworking abandoned urban malls for nonshopping uses, said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

by  Stephanie Clifford, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: David Maxwell

West Loop Wash (Square) (2008) by Brad Gillette (bgilletephoto.com)
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Playing the Piano

There is an old proverb that goes “Play the piano daily and stay sane.” For me, the main word of this proverb is daily. Playing the piano daily means inevitable accomplishment, and, without a sense of accomplishment, life is an impoverished journey.

Machines have taken us away from our hands. In his last days, Rachmaninoff continually practiced a composition he never performed. One of his last statements was: “Farewell, my dear hands.” Today, we are starved for a deep contact with our hands. The poet Edward Dahlberg felt “our hands are already very stupid and morose. What can we do with them? What do we do with them?” Let’s get back to our hands—they are craving good work. At one time, the terms “handmade” and “handcrafted” meant a great deal. In schools, the young are no longer taught to write in script. Handwriting provided the first glimpse of individuality. What a thrill to see our beloved’s handwriting in a letter. And what of drawing, once an essential form of education? Painting and drawing are no longer common practice. Goethe, sickened by the Babel of words, counseled, “Let us draw, instead of talk.”

There is wisdom, so I say, let us play the piano. Non-verbal music reaches into the depths of the unconscious. There is nothing so satisfactory for our hands—physically, sensuously, and artistically—as playing the piano. Nothing compares to the satisfaction of playing a small piece of Bach or Schumann. If you can’t play a Bach invention perfectly, or even imperfectly, try to do it, and you will come to agree with me. The path to such an achievement asks for focus, discipline, attention, a delicate sense of touch, musical feeling, and more. Good practicing is meditation without the mantra. When you commune with Bach or Schubert, you can reach the heights of Mount Parnassus, where the atmosphere is rarified.

Almost everyone is musical. Music is an actual bodily need. Another saying goes “If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” but I disagree. Like Chesterton, I feel that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing even badly. Playing the piano is not something to be graded. Adults should take it up the moment they feel the need to play music. As a matter of course, children should be given lessons without pressure. Playing the piano should be an act without material value. It must be a road of discovery, a trackless territory, and never a means of showing off. The piano won’t serve the ego’s craving for recognition.

When I was a student, I had an adult who studied with me. The man was gifted in a number of ways. He took his lessons seriously and worked hard. After about two years, when he thought he had mastered a group of compositions, he could not resist showing off. He rented a small hall and a Steinway and invited a large group of friends. I told him that this was a mistake, as he had no idea what kind of super-mastery was needed to play in public. He was a self-absorbed, flamboyant character who thought he could pull it off with his usual flair, as he did with his acting and dancing.

In the green room before the little concert, he was stunned to find his legs and hands shaking beyond control. Still, he went out to face his audience and made a complete fool of himself, flailing in every piece. The next day, he called me angrily, saying that he was quitting; he didn’t love the piano, he told me. I told him I thought that was a good idea. I never saw him again. His narcissism excluded the possibility of properly loving music. The piano is not only a severe taskmaster, it asks that you possess character. If you have the temerity to play publicly, you are all alone, and the way you perform and your preparation tells a great deal about who you are. In a clash of wills, the piano will always win. Robert Schumann wrote, “The hearing of masterworks of different epochs will speediest of all cure you of vanity and self-adoration.” Playing the piano teaches one much, especially humility.

by David Dubal, The New Criterion |  Read more:
Image via: Wikitionary

The Virgin Father

Trent Arsenault was in the Borg Cube when he heard the knock. “Trent,” his father called through the door. The Borg, tucked into a canyon southeast of San Francisco, consists of a modest two-­bedroom ranch house plus a few tents Trent has erected in the backyard. It’s a warren of floor-to-ceiling modular shelving built to hold all of Trent’s worldly property, which he stores in 800 bins weighing 24,000 pounds. In what was designed to be the living room, a Tempur-Pedic adjustable bed is situated within the shelving units, and an identical second bed next to the first serves as a workstation, with swing-out hospital trays for a desk.

A flat-screen TV is mounted face down, directly over Trent’s pillow, and another is mounted in his shower. Wires snake everywhere. A hose system on a timer automatically refills the birdbaths outside. Behind the house, near a lemon tree, a 50-foot antenna collects radio-­astronomy data from solar flares and broadcasts Trent’s ham-radio signal. Inside, there is a low, near-constant murmur of electronic machinery: radio static, conference-call chatter from Trent’s IT security work, digital chimes, a dulcet computer voice announcing Trent’s next appointment. It is an elaborate system, and it reminds Trent, in a good way, of the devouring cybernetic empire in Star Trek. “The more complex the better.”

“Trent,” his father said. He knocked again. “Trent, are you in there?”

This was last March. Trent hadn’t seen his father in almost a year. For months, he hadn’t responded to his parents’ calls and letters, and at first they hadn’t known why. They hadn’t known that in 2006, Trent hung out a shingle on the Internet and became a do-it-yourself sperm donor, giving his semen away to whoever asked. He was part of a growing movement of peer-to-peer sperm donation that bypassed regulated banks, and in some cases dropped the customary anonymity, but Trent went further, offering unusual transparency by posting records on his website, including STD-test results, his driver’s license, family photos, and a link to his Facebook page. The FDA, having learned what Trent was up to—he suspected a local sperm bank had tipped off the agency—launched an investigation, eventually filing a “cease manufacture” order. Trent had become consumed with the FDA action and avoided informing his parents. “I became unreachable to my family for a while,” he says.

Trent’s father, Reverend Charles Arsenault, is a leading minister in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal church. Eventually, Charles and his wife, Lillian, who live in Springfield, Missouri, turned to the Internet to find information about their son, and Lillian discovered his sperm-donor website. They sent more letters, by certified mail, expressing love for their child but taking an increasingly reproachful tone. Last March, his mother wrote of “the consequences of such depravatory giving of one’s seed to unknown and most likely degenerate individuals.” Trent had “dishonored and humiliated” the family, and his only hope was to “truly repent and embrace the precepts of the Bible.”

Trent didn’t respond to that one, either. Soon after, his father flew to California, drove to Trent’s home in the town of Fremont, and knocked on his son’s door. Trent, lying on his work bed, didn’t answer. His father sat for a while in his car out front, then left. He returned in the evening, but again Trent didn’t answer. He wanted to spend time with his father. He knew his father had traveled from Missouri just to see him. But … “I just knew that if I talked to him, it could talk me out of everything that I was doing.”

When Trent was 16, he and his best friend made a pact to devote their lives to science and never to marry. “Like most of our wild plans at the time, it was Trent’s idea,” this friend remembers. “I went along for entertainment’s sake. It was simply this zit-faced, socially awkward, nerdy teenager’s excuse for not having to ask out the girls I liked.” In other words, it was the sort of vow that teenagers make and soon forget, except that eighteen years later, when FDA agents showed up on his porch in August 2010, Trent was a well-paid computer-security engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a 34-year-old virgin. He was also, by that point, the father of ten children. The government was not happy about how Trent had pulled this off.

But if the FDA hoped, by intervening, to save America from someone it viewed as a dangerous rogue breeder, its action did more to set back its cause than it could possibly have imagined, turning Trent into something of a poster boy for an entire generation of new DIY donors. The showdown between man and state on the free-sperm frontier drew predictable media interest, mostly mocking and outraged, which in turn generated considerable outreach from strangers, almost all overwhelmingly supportive. Since appearing on various television news programs, Trent has received hundreds of encouraging e-mails, and he’s closing in on 2,000 Facebook friends. Someone recently formed a new Facebook group called Free Sperm Donors, mimicking Trent’s eschewal of anonymity, and a similar new organization called the Known Donor Registry has quickly attracted more than 5,000 members.

by Benjamin Wallace, New York |  Read more:
Photo: Katy Grannan

Rosebud (by Charlotte Abramow)
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We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations

We are living through a vast cognitive shift: Information has turned from a scarce resource into an abundant feature of life. Lars Mensel spoke with Nicholas Carr about advantages of the printed page, the erosion of contemplation and how information helped our ancestors survive.

The European: A study published around the advent of the railroad warned that traveling at speeds exceeding 30 km/h might harm the brain. The internet age is also relatively young – is it a danger to our mode of thinking?

Carr: The fear of physical motion is very different than the internet’s affect on our tools of collecting and analyzing information; we need to look at the internet on its own merits. I think the internet and computers are something very different in the human world: There’s never been a technology people have used so persistently throughout the entire course of the day to aid them in making sense of the world, thinking and in making judgements and decisions. That has become particularly important in the last years with the spread of mobile devices. Even comparing the internet to earlier, broadly used media like radio and television, our relationship with our computers is more intimate, more persistent and therefore more influential over our moment-to-moment thought processes.

The European: Is that because of the technology’s omnipresence or rather the way we engage with it? You have described how the immersion of browsing the web can’t be compared to that of reading a book.

Carr: If you watch a person using the net, you see a kind of immersion: Often they are very oblivious to what is going on around them. But it is a very different kind of attentiveness than reading a book. In the case of a book, the technology of the printed page focuses our attention and encourages a linear type of thinking. In contrast, the internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series of distractions rather than a sustained, focused type of thinking.

The European: And yet one can fall down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia; spending hours going from one article to the other, clicking each link that seems interesting.
Carr: It is important to realize that it is no longer just hyperlinks: You have to think of all aspects of using the internet. There are messages coming at us through email, instant messenger, SMS, tweets etc. We are distracted by everything on the page, the various windows, the many applications running. You have to see the entire picture of how we are being stimulated. If you compare that to the placidity of a printed page, it doesn’t take long to notice that the experience of taking information from a printed page is not only different but almost the opposite from taking in information from a network-connected screen. With a page, you are shielded from distraction. We underestimate how the page encourages focussed thinking – which I don’t think is normal for human beings – whereas the screen indulges our desire to be constantly distracted.

The European: How do you weigh the advantages of accumulating information against the distraction we talked about?

Carr: There’s no question that the internet offers all sorts of benefits – that is the reason why we use it so much. It is an incredibly powerful and useful technology that makes all sorts of information immediately available to us. Things that used to be impossible, hard or expensive to find are now right there. And we all know how to improve our ability to make decisions with it. But accompanying that, incredibly, is the fact that we become so intent on gathering information that we never slow down and think deeply about the information we find. We gain the ability to harvest huge amounts of data but we lose the ability to engage in contemplation, reflexion and other modes of thinking that require a large amount of attentiveness and the ability to filter out distractions and disruptions. You can’t separate the good and the bad: We gain something important but we sacrifice something important as well.

by Nicholas Carr, The European |  Read more:

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We're all in the same boat - aren't we?

At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.

These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks in an offworld pleasure bubble, surrounded by vast replicas of pictures and architecture from the glories of past civilizations.

I want to tell the story of the rise of the modern cruise ship industry from its beginning in the 1960s - how it promised to make a world of aristocratic luxury available to everyone in the west, but also the hidden story of how that promise was achieved.

In many cruise ships there are hundreds of workers from some of the poorest countries on earth who are paid minute amounts of actual wages - sometimes less than two dollars a day - to attend to the passengers' needs.

Many of the ships' workers can only get a living wage on the whim of the thousands of passengers above them - on the tips they choose to give them. And in the strange fun-world of the superliners the waiters, the cabin staff, the cooks and everyone else who serves, live in a state of continual vulnerability - unprotected by most of the employment laws that apply on land. Meanwhile many of the companies that own the vast ships pay practically no tax at all.

But it wasn't always supposed to be like that.

The biggest company in the cruising world is the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami (the Costa Concordia is owned by one of their subsidiaries). Carnival has its roots in a small company set up in the 1960s which had a utopian vision that cruise liners could transform the world. One of its founders believed that the giant ships were machines that could help bring about a new era of world peace.

The liners would, he was convinced, unite the rich westerners and the poor from the "third world' by bringing tourists to new and remote destinations. This would foster a new enlightened understanding of each other that would bring about equality and justice throughout the world.

But it didn't turn out like that. And this is the story of what happened - and how the very opposite resulted.

It is also the story in miniature of one of the central consumer phenomenons of our time: the democratisation of luxury. How one half of the world all began to live as though they were aristocrats, while the other half became their servants. And how this allowed the real elite aristocrats of our time - who had become wealthier than any group ever before in history - to disappear, and become invisible.

by Adam Curtis, BBC |  Read more:

Homecoming

Photos: markk

The Trees are Dancers by a Moon Shaped Rock by Raja Daja
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Welcome to Cancerland

[ed. The decision this week by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to deny, then reinstate funding for Planned Parenthood prompted many to take a closer look at the organization and who's behind it. Here's an excellent article by Barbara Ehrenreich from 2001.]

Fortunately, no one has to go through this alone. Thirty years ago, before Betty Ford, Rose Kushner, Betty Rollin, and other pioneer patients spoke out, breast cancer was a dread secret, endured in silence and euphemized in obituaries as a "long illness." Something about the conjuncture of "breast," signifying sexuality and nurturance, and that other word, suggesting the claws of a devouring crustacean, spooked almost everyone. Today however, it's the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women -- heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke. There are roughly hundreds of websites devoted to it, not to mention newsletters, support groups, a whole genre of first-person breast-cancer books; even a glossy, upper-middle-brow, monthly magazine, Mamm. There are four major national breast-cancer organizations, of which the mightiest, in financial terms, is The Susan G. Komen Foundation, headed by breast-cancer veteran and Bush's nominee for ambassador to Hungary Nancy Brinker. Komen organizes the annual Race for the Cure©, which attracts about a million people -- mostly survivors, friends, and family members. Its website provides a microcosm of the new breast-cancer culture, offering news of the races, message boards for accounts of individuals' struggles with the disease, and a "marketplace" of breast-cancer-related products to buy.

More so than in the case of any other disease, breast-cancer organizations and events feed on a generous flow of corporate support. Nancy Brinker relates how her early attempts to attract corporate interest in promoting breast cancer "awareness" were met with rebuff. A bra manufacturer, importuned to affix a mammogram-reminder tag to his product, more or less wrinkled his nose. Now breast cancer has blossomed from wallflower to the most popular girl at the corporate charity prom. While AIDS goes begging and low-rent diseases like tuberculosis have no friends at all, breast cancer has been able to count on Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Jeans, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penney, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear -- and I apologize to those I've omitted. You can "shop for the cure" during the week when Saks donates 2 percent of sales to a breast-cancer fund; "wear denim for the cure" during Lee National Denim Day, when for a $5 donation you get to wear blue jeans to work. You can even "invest for the cure," in the Kinetics Assets Management's new no-load Medical Fund, which specializes entirely in businesses involved in cancer research.

If you can't run, bike, or climb a mountain for the cure -- all of which endeavors are routine beneficiaries of corporate sponsorship -- you can always purchase one of the many products with a breast cancer theme. There are 2.2 million American women in various stages of their breast-cancer careers, who, along with anxious relatives, make up a significant market for all things breast-cancer-related. Bears, for example: I have identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including "Carol," the Remembrance Bear; "Hope," the Breast Cancer Research Bear, which wears a pink turban as if to conceal chemotherapy-induced baldness; the "Susan Bear," named for Nancy Brinker's deceased sister, Susan; and the new Nick & Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, available, along with the Susan Bear, at the Komen Foundation website's "marketplace."

And bears are only the tip, so to speak, of the cornucopia of pink-ribbon-themed breast-cancer products. You can dress in pink-beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces, and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone brooches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings, and bracelets; brighten up your home with breast-cancer candles, stained-glass pink-ribbon candleholders, coffee mugs, pendants, wind chimes, and night-lights; pay your bills with special BreastChecks or a separate line of Checks for the Cure. "Awareness" beats secrecy and stigma of course, but I can't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend has earnestly advised me to "confront [my] mortality" bears a striking resemblance to the mall.

This is not, I should point out, a case of cynical merchants exploiting the sick. Some of the breast-cancer tchotchkes and accessories are made by breast-cancer survivors themselves, such as "Janice," creator of the "Daisy Awareness Necklace," among other things, and in most cases a portion of the sales goes to breast-cancer research. Virginia Davis of Aurora, Colorado, was inspired to create the "Remembrance Bear" by a friend's double mastectomy and sees her work as more of a "crusade" than a business. This year she expects to ship 10,000 of these teddies, which are manufactured in China, and send part of the money to the Race for the Cure. If the bears are infantilizing -- as I try ever so tactfully to suggest is how they may, in rare cases, be perceived -- so far no one has complained. "I just get love letters," she tells me, "from people who say, 'God bless you for thinking of us.'"

The ultrafeminine theme of the breast-cancer "marketplace" -- the prominence, for example, of cosmetics and jewelry -- could be understood as a response to the treatments' disastrous effects on one's looks. But the infantilizing trope is a little harder to account for, and teddy bears are not its only manifestation. A tote bag distributed to breast cancer patients by the Libby Ross Foundation (through places such as the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center) contains, among other items, a tube of Estee Lauder Perfumed Body Crème, a hot-pink satin pillowcase, an audiotape "Meditation to Help You with Chemotherapy," a small tin of peppermint pastilles, a set of three small inexpensive rhinestone bracelets, a pink-striped "journal and sketch book," and -- somewhat jarringly -- a small box of crayons. Marla Willner, one of the founders of the Libby Ross Foundation, told me that the crayons "go with the journal -- for people to express different moods, different thoughts. . ." though she admitted she has never tried to write with crayons herself. Possibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind with which to endure the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood -- a state of arrested development. Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.

by Barbara Ehrenreich  |  Read more: