Much Ado About Nothing

Nick Hornby knew better, but he didn’t care. Because suddenly there was that face—the upturned nose, the lupine grin, the wary expression barely softened by the passage of, what, three decades now? Everyone else in the London club that December night was flittering around Colin Firth, set aglow by the Oscar buzz for his performance in The King’s Speech. Hornby let them flit. For here stood … Kevin Bacon. Undisturbed. That knowing smirk may have derailed him as a leading man, but it has allowed for a career of darker, richer roles—and allows him still to cruise a cocktail party longer than most boldfaced names without some fanboy rushing up to say how wonderful he is.

God knows, Hornby had seen that too often: an actor friend, eyes darting, cornered by a gushing stranger. This belated celebration of Firth’s 50th birthday was a private bash where artists and actors, people like Firth and Bacon—and, well, Hornby—could expect to relax. After all, between best-selling books such as About a Boy and a 2010 Academy Award nod earlier in the year for his screenplay for An Education, he had been cornered plenty himself.

Yet when he saw Bacon, Hornby couldn’t help it. He edged closer. It was like that scene from Diner when Bacon’s buddy sees a boyhood enemy in a crowd and breaks his nose: Hornby had no choice. In 1983 a girlfriend had brought home a tape of director Barry Levinson’s pitch-perfect comedy about twentysomething men, their nocturnal ramblings in 1959 Baltimore, their confused stumble to adulthood. Hornby was 26, a soccer fanatic, a writer searching for a subject. Diner dissected the male animal’s squirrelly devotion to sports, movies, music, and gambling. Diner had one man give his fiancée a football-trivia test and had another stick his penis through the bottom of a popcorn box. Hornby declared it, then and there, “a work of great genius.”

Midway through the movie, the ladies’ man Boogie, played by Mickey Rourke, is driving in the Maryland countryside with Bacon’s character, the perpetually tipsy Fenwick. They see a beautiful woman riding a horse. Boogie waves the woman down.

“What’s your name?,” Boogie asks.

“Jane Chisholm—as in the Chisholm Trail,” she says, and rides off.

Rourke throws up his hands and utters the words that Hornby, to this day, uses as an all-purpose response to life’s absurdities: “What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?” And Fenwick responds with the line that, for Diner-lovers, best captures male befuddlement over women and the world: “You ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”

In all, the scene encompasses only 13 lines of dialogue—an eternity if you’re Bacon at a party and a stranger knows them all. But Hornby wouldn’t be stopped. “I pinned that guy to the wall, and I quoted line after line,” Hornby recalls. “I thought, I don’t care. I’m never going to meet Kevin Bacon again. I need to get ‘What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?’ off my chest.”

Hornby could not have planned a more apt tribute: Diner introduced to movies a character who compulsively recites lines from his favorite movie—and nothing else. And Hornby’s subsequent books about a fan obsessed with Arsenal football (Fever Pitch) and another obsessed with pop music (High Fidelity)—two postmodern London slackers who could easily have slid into a booth at the Fells Point Diner—are only the most obvious branches of the movie’s family tree.

Made for $5 million and first released in March 1982, Diner earned less than $15 million and lost out on the only Academy Award—best original screenplay—for which it was nominated. Critics did love it; indeed, a gang of New York writers, led by Pauline Kael, saved the movie from oblivion. But Diner has suffered the fate of the small-bore sleeper, its relevance these days hinging more on eyebrow-raising news like Barry Levinson’s plan to stage a musical version—with songwriter Sheryl Crow—on Broadway next fall, or reports romantically linking star Ellen Barkin with Levinson’s son Sam, also a director. The film itself, though, is rarely accorded its actual due.

Yet no movie from the 1980s has proved more influential. Diner has had far more impact on pop culture than the stylistic masterpiece Bladerunner, the indie darling Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or the academic favorites Raging Bull and Blue Velvet. Leave aside the fact that Diner served as the launching pad for the astonishingly durable careers of Barkin, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Timothy Daly, plus Rourke and Bacon—not to mention Levinson, whose résumé includes Rain Man, Bugsy, and Al Pacino’s recent career reviver, You Don’t Know Jack. Diner’s groundbreaking evocation of male friendship changed the way men interact, not just in comedies and buddy movies, but in fictional Mob settings, in fictional police and fire stations, in commercials, on the radio. In 2009, The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin, speaking about the TNT series Men of a Certain Age, observed that “Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.” She got it only half right. They have to talk too.

What Franklin really meant is that, more than any other production, Diner invented … nothing. Or, to put it in quotes: Levinson invented the concept of “nothing” that was popularized eight years later with the premiere of Seinfeld. In Diner (as well as in Tin Men, his 1987 movie about older diner mavens), Levinson took the stuff that usually fills time between the car chase, the fiery kiss, the dramatic reveal—the seemingly meaningless banter (“Who do you make out to, Sinatra or Mathis?”) tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries—and made it central.

by S.L. Price, Vanity Fair |  Read more:
Photograph: Paul Reiser

Open Your Mouth and You're Dead

Junko Kitahama's face is pale blue, her mouth agape, her head craned back like a dead bird’s. Through her swim mask, her eyes are wide and unblinking, staring at the sun. She isn’t breathing.

“Blow on her face!” yells a man swimming next to her. Another man grabs her head from behind and pushes her chin out of the water. “Breathe!” he yells. Someone from the deck of a boat yells for oxygen. “Breathe!” the man repeats. But Kitahama, who just surfaced from a breath-hold dive 180 feet below the surface of the ocean, doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t move. Kitahama looks dead.

Moments later, she coughs, jerks, twitches her shoulders, flutters her lips. Her face softens as she comes to. “I was swimming and…” She laughs and continues. “Then I just started dreaming!” Two men slowly float her over to an oxygen tank sitting on a raft. While she recovers behind a surgical mask, another freediver takes her place and prepares to plunge even deeper.

Kitahama, a female competitor from Japan, is one of more than 130 freedivers from 31 countries who have gathered here—one mile off the coast of Kalamata, Greece, in the deep, mouthwash blue waters of Messinian Bay—for the 2011 Individual Freediving Depth World Championships, the largest competition ever held for the sport. Over the next week, in an event organized by the International Association for the Development of Apnea (AIDA), they’ll test themselves and each other to see who can swim the deepest on a single lungful of air without passing out, losing muscle control, or drowning. The winners get a medal.

How deep can they go? Nobody knows. Competitive freediving is a relatively new sport, and since the first world championships were held in 1996, records have been broken every year, sometimes every few months. Fifty years ago, scientists believed that the deepest a human could freedive was about 160 feet. Recently, freedivers have routinely doubled and tripled that mark. In 2007, Herbert Nitsch, a 41-year-old Austrian, dove more than 700 feet—assisted by a watersled on the way down and an air bladder to pull him to the surface—to claim a new world record for absolute depth. Nitsch, who didn’t compete in Greece, plans to dive 800 feet in June, deeper than two football fields are long.

Nobody has ever drowned at an organized freediving event, but enough people have died outside of competition that freediving ranks as the second-most-dangerous adventure sport, right after BASE jumping. The statistics are a bit murky: some deaths go unreported, and the numbers that are kept include people who freedive as part of other activities, like spearfishing. But one estimate of worldwide freediving-related fatalities revealed a nearly threefold increase, from 21 deaths in 2005 to 60 in 2008.

by James Nestor, Outside |  Read more:
Photo: Igor Liberti

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes

I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery.

As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. While your grammar shouldn’t be a reflection of your creative powers or writing abilities, let’s face it — it usually is.

Below are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and even best selling novels. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made each of these mistakes a hundred times, and I know some of the best authors in history have lived to see these very toadstools appear in print. Let's hope you can learn from some of their more famous mistakes.

Who and Whom

This one opens a big can of worms. “Who” is a subjective — or nominative — pronoun, along with "he," "she," "it," "we," and "they." It’s used when the pronoun acts as the subject of a clause. “Whom” is an objective pronoun, along with "him," "her," "it", "us," and "them." It’s used when the pronoun acts as the object of a clause. Using “who” or “whom” depends on whether you’re referring to the subject or object of a sentence. When in doubt, substitute “who” with the subjective pronouns “he” or “she,” e.g., Who loves you? cf., He loves me. Similarly, you can also substitute “whom” with the objective pronouns “him” or “her.” e.g., I consulted an attorney whom I met in New York. cf., I consulted him.

Which and That

This is one of the most common mistakes out there, and understandably so. “That” is a restrictive pronoun. It’s vital to the noun to which it’s referring. e.g., I don’t trust fruits and vegetables that aren’t organic. Here, I’m referring to all non-organic fruits or vegetables. In other words, I only trust fruits and vegetables that are organic. “Which” introduces a relative clause. It allows qualifiers that may not be essential. e.g., I recommend you eat only organic fruits and vegetables, which are available in area grocery stores. In this case, you don’t have to go to a specific grocery store to obtain organic fruits and vegetables. “Which” qualifies, “that” restricts. “Which” is more ambiguous however, and by virtue of its meaning is flexible enough to be used in many restrictive clauses. e.g., The house, which is burning, is mine. e.g., The house that is burning is mine.

by Jon Gingerich, Lit Reactor |  Read more:

Mark Davis, Icarus, 2011. Aluminum, brass, steel, acrylic and oil paint.
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The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching—which is, in itself, a surprising development. Since the crash, and especially since the occupation of Zuccotti Park last September (which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves), there has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation. Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.”

The questions of how to fix Wall Street–style capitalism—from taxes to regulation—are being intensely argued and will undergird much of the economic debate during this presidential election. And many on Wall Street are still making the argument that the consequences of hobbling Wall Street could be severe. “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year,” Bove told me. “We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.”

And yet, the complaining has settled to a low murmur. Even as bonuses have withered, Wall Street as a political issue is gaining force. Bankers are aware that populism has a foothold, even in the Republican Party, and that these forces are liable to accelerate the process already taking place. “There’s a real sense the world is changing,” says a private-­equity executive with deep ties to the GOP. “People are becoming aware there’s real anger out there. It’s not just some kids camping out in some park. The Romney attacks caught everyone by surprise. We have prepared for this to come from the Democrats in the fall, but not now. You could run an entire campaign if you’re Barack Obama with ads using nothing but Republicans saying things about finance that you’d never hear two months ago. It’s an amazing thing.” (...)

Wall Street as Wal-Mart? A few years ago, the Masters of the Universe never could have imagined their industry being compared to big-box retailing. And yet, the model that had fueled bank profits has finally broken, as markets sputtered and new regulation kicked in. “Compensation is never really going to come back,” a Wall Street headhunter told me. “That is something entirely new.”

What is even more startling about this reversal is that few thought the much-vilified Dodd-Frank act would have much effect at all. From the moment it was proposed in 2009, the bill was tarred from all sides. Critics from the left, who wanted a return of Glass-­Steagall, which had kept investments banks and commercial banks separate until it was repealed during the Clinton years, howled that Dodd-Frank wouldn’t go far enough to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. “Dodd-Frank was an attempt to preserve the status quo,” Harvard economist Ken Rogoff told me. The too-big-to-fail banks, for their part, argued that the 2,300-page bill would create an overly complex morass of overlapping regulators that risked killing their ability to compete against foreign rivals. “We joke that Dodd-Frank was designed to deal with too-big-to-fail but it became too-big-to-read,” said the Citigroup executive.

By the time the bill passed, in July 2010, the legislation hadn’t found many new friends. Banks were especially upset by the inclusion of the Volcker Rule, which banned proprietary trading and virtually all hedge-fund investing by banks. Banks also complained about an amendment that slashed lucrative debit-card fees. They capitulated mainly because the alternative—breaking them up—was worse.

Part of the perception that the financial crisis changed nothing is that, in the immediate wake of the crash, the banks, buoyed by bailout dollars, whipsawed back to profitability. Goldman earned a record profit of $13.4 billion in 2009, as markets roared back from their post-Lehman lows. This dead-cat bounce was central to the formation of Occupy Wall Street and the neopopulist political currents that first erupted when the Treasury Department appointed Ken Feinberg to regulate bonuses for several TARP recipients. “The statute creating my authority was populist retribution,” Feinberg told me recently. “The feeling was, if you’re going to bail everyone out with the taxpayers, it has to come with a price.”

And yet, from the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent. Partly, this is a function of the economic headwinds. But the bill’s major provisions—forcing banks to reduce leverage, imposing a ban on proprietary trading, making derivatives markets more transparent, and ending abusive debit-card practices—have taken a pickax to the Wall Street business model even though the act won’t be completely in effect till the ­Volcker Rule kicks in this July (other aspects of the bill took force in December; capital requirements and many other elements of the bill will be phased in gradually between now and 2016). “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and that they’re becoming ­lower-margin businesses,” a senior banker told me. “So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.” In the past year, the financial industry has laid off some 200,000 workers.

Nobody on either side would say that Dodd-Frank perfectly accomplished its aims. But while critics lament that no bank executives have gone to jail and have argued for a law that would have effectively blown up the banking system, Dodd-Frank is imposing a painful form of punishment. “Since 2008, what the financial community has done is kick the can down the road,” the senior banker added. “ ‘Let’s just buy us one more quarter and hope it gets better.’ Well, we’re now seeing cracks in that ability to continue operating with the structures that had been built up.”

by Gabriel Sherman, New York |  Read more:
Photo: Howard Schatz

Are You with the Right Mate?

Romance itself seeds the eventual belief that we have chosen the wrong partner. The early stage of a relationship, most marked by intense attraction and infatuation, is in many ways akin to cocaine intoxication, observes Christine Meinecke, a clinical psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa. It's orchestrated, in part, by the neurochemicals associated with intense pleasure. Like a cocaine high, it's not sustainable.

But for the duration—and experts give it nine months to four years—infatuation has one overwhelming effect: Research shows that it makes partners overestimate their similarities and idealize each other. We're thrilled that he loves Thai food, travel, and classic movies, just like us. And we overlook his avid interest in old cars and online poker.

Eventually, reality rears its head. "Infatuation fades for everyone," says Meinecke, author of Everybody Marries the Wrong Person. That's when you discover your psychological incompatibility, and disenchantment sets in. Suddenly, a switch is flipped, and now all you can see are your differences. "You're focusing on what's wrong with them. They need to get the message about what they need to change."

You conclude you've married the wrong person—but that's because you're accustomed to thinking, Cinderella-like, that there is only one right person. The consequences of such a pervasive belief are harsh. We engage in destructive behaviors, like blaming our partner for our unhappiness or searching for someone outside the relationship.

Along with many other researchers and clinicians, Meinecke espouses a new marital paradigm—what she calls "the self-responsible spouse." When you start focusing on what isn't so great, it's time to shift focus. "Rather than look at the other person, you need to look at yourself and ask, 'Why am I suddenly so unhappy and what do I need to do?'" It's not likely a defect in your partner.

In mature love, says Meinecke, "we do not look to our partner to provide our happiness, and we don't blame them for our unhappiness. We take responsibility for the expectations that we carry, for our own negative emotional reactions, for our own insecurities, and for our own dark moods."

But instead of looking at ourselves, or understanding the fantasies that bring us to such a pass, we engage in a thought process that makes our differences tragic and intolerable, says William Doherty, professor of psychology and head of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Minnesota. It's one thing to say, "I wish my spouse were more into the arts, like I am." Or, "I wish my partner was not just watching TV every night but interested in getting out more with me." That's something you can fix.

It's quite another to say, "This is intolerable. I need and deserve somebody who shares my core interests." The two thought processes are likely to trigger differing actions. It's possible to ask someone to go out more. It's not going to be well received to ask someone for a personality overhaul, notes Doherty, author of Take Back Your Marriage.

No one is going to get all their needs met in a relationship, he insists. He urges fundamental acceptance of the person we choose and the one who chooses us. "We're all flawed. With parenting, we know that comes with the territory. With spouses, we say 'This is terrible.'"

The culture, however, pushes us in the direction of discontent. "Some disillusionment and feelings of discouragement are normal in the love-based matches in our culture," explains Doherty. "But consumer culture tells us we should not settle for anything that is not ideal for us."

by Rebecca Webber, Psychology Today |  Read more:

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire.

Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr has pursued this theory for decades in relative obscurity. Because he struggles with English and is not much of a conversationalist even in his native tongue, he rarely travels to scientific conferences. That “may be one of the reasons my theory is not better known,” he says. And, he believes, his views may invite deep-seated opposition. “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.” Another more obvious reason for resistance, of course, is that Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.

But after years of being ignored or discounted, Flegr is starting to gain respectability. Psychedelic as his claims may sound, many researchers, including such big names in neuroscience as Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky, think he could well be onto something. Flegr’s “studies are well conducted, and I can see no reason to doubt them,” Sapolsky tells me. Indeed, recent findings from Sapolsky’s lab and British groups suggest that the parasite is capable of extraordinary shenanigans. T. gondii, reports Sapolsky, can turn a rat’s strong innate aversion to cats into an attraction, luring it into the jaws of its No. 1 predator. Even more amazing is how it does this: the organism rewires circuits in parts of the brain that deal with such primal emotions as fear, anxiety, and sexual arousal. “Overall,” says Sapolsky, “this is wild, bizarre neurobiology.” Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. “I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],” he says. “It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.”

What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.

by Kathleen McAuliffem, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: Dennis Kunkel Microscropy, Inc./Visuals Unlimited/Corbis Images

Tumblr: Tumbling on Success

Tumblr launched in February 2007, with the tagline "Blogging made easy". Its first accounts specialised in art, media and porn (14 of the top 20 search keywords containing the word "tumblr" are still associated with adult blogs, according to SEOBook.com). Around 42 per cent of all original posts are photos.

But Tumblr is growing up, fast: the site expanded its user base by 900 per cent in the year to June 2011. In 2010, it served under two billion monthly page views; now, it generates about 14 billion, more than Wikipedia or Twitter. Its 36 million users so far have created 42 million posts each day -- 13.5 billion in total. According to Nielsen, it was the UK's second most popular social network or blog in the third quarter of 2011, with 229.6 million page views, trailing only Facebook. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million (£55m) from investors -- a round that valued Tumblr at $800 million (£500m).

If Facebook is the social network for online identification and authentication, and Twitter is for communication, Tumblr fulfils a different role: self-expression. Users can upload seven types of media -- text, photos, quotes, links, dialogue, audio, video -- from one button on their dashboard and push it to their public-facing tumblelog. These blogs can be designed however a user wants, or dressed in a "theme" (the most popular theme, Redux, has three million users). Tumblr is extremely easy to use as a free-form blogging platform, but has also developed into its own social network. Users follow other tumblelogs, whose content appears in their dashboards, not unlike Facebook's newsfeed; hitting the "reblog" button publishes that post to their own blogs, a feature Tumblr put out two years before Twitter introduced its own retweet button. "The social network that emerges out of Tumblr is interesting because it's driven by content, not by the social graph that these other networks are building around," says John Maloney, the company's president. And that content spreads quickly: on average, a Tumblr post gets reblogged nine times.

As Tumblr matures, it's attracting powerful fans. In October 2011, President Obama launched his 2012 re-election campaign on Tumblr, encouraging user submissions as a part of a "huge collaborative storytelling effort". Six months earlier, the US State Department launched the "official US Department of State presence on Tumblr", with video posts and article links. Major media outlets such as Newsweek, the New York Times and the BBC have tumblrs, along with fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen and Oscar de la Renta. Tech is represented by high profile companies including IBM and Olympus.

David Karp was 19 when he founded Tumblr -- "still a dippy, nerdy kid," as he puts it. The New Yorker learned to code for the web at 11, was home-schooled from 15 and lived in Japan by himself for a year at 18. He's now 25 and has grown up with the site. "I was always self-conscious about my age," he says. "I still don't have that much faith in me." But his goal is ambitious: Karp sees Tumblr not as a network, but as a product he's designing. "We're striving towards perfection," he says. "We're trying to build the iPod."

by Tom Cheshire, Wired UK |  Read more:

Photo: Chris Crisman

Al Rodente

There are people around who remember the days when squirrel was a more commonly served meat on the American table than chicken. The Kentucky Long Rifle, with its long barrel and small caliber, was designed for squirrel hunting (the smaller the caliber, the more squirrel left to take home after shooting one.)

The ideal shot was aimed not at the squirrel, but at the tree branch directly below it, so that the animal would be killed by the concussion of the bullet instead of the bullet itself. Historians say that this is what won the Revolutionary war; even the most highly trained British soldiers were no match for squirrel killers trained by hunger.

Until recent decades, Americans ate squirrel meat because it was cheap, plentiful, and there, according to Hank Shaw, author of Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. Domesticated animals may have been easier to catch, but, in the days before the industrialization of farming, they were expensive to raise and feed. “When Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot, that was a big deal,” Shaw adds. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, published in 1931, was heavy on the squirrel. As it moved into later and later editions, Hoover’s promise was fulfilled (by other politicians, if not Hoover himself) and chicken gradually replaced squirrel.

Shaw shot his first squirrel when he was working as a reporter for a daily paper in Minnesota. He’d made it through an underpaid stint as a cub reporter in Long Island by catching and eating his own fish. When he arrived in Minnesota, though, he could not help but take note of the squirrels. The state has such a vibrant squirrel scene that a cottage industry has grown up around trapping and removing ones that have moved into people’s homes. Shaw bought a few books about squirrel hunting off the internet, applied for a license to hunt them, and got to it.

In doing so, he placed himself on the vanguard of the re-squirreling of the American diet. Squirrel-eating has been trendy in Great Britain for half a decade now — spurred by a nationalistic fervor to kill as many as possible of the invasive American gray squirrel, which is outcompeting the domestic red squirrel (the latter had the good fortune to star in a Beatrix Potter book, one of the best ways to cement your status as charismatic megafauna). (...)

The shift has left the squirrel hunting to the immigrant populations like the Hmong, who hunt squirrels in America because they’re the closest thing to the ones they hunted in the mountains of Southeast Asia. And it’s left them to people like Shaw — idealists who believe that, if you’re going to eat meat, it’s more noble (and thrifty) to kill whatever protein happens to be closest to home.

It’s hard to imagine more sustainable local game — squirrels are abundant, far from endangered, and don’t even require refrigeration the way that big game does. The standard rule of thumb is that one squirrel = enough meat for one dinner for one person. The squirrel is road food — the kind of prey that fed cross-country hikers, in the days before MRE and freeze-dried lentils. Squirrel is like the drive-through cheeseburger of the forest — albeit a cheeseburger that needs to be gutted first.

by Heather Smith, Grist |  Read more:
Photo by Chrissy Wainwright

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The New You

[ed. Two excellent articles with similar themes: how your personal information and history are being collected, analyzed, sold, and manipulated in ways you can't imagine. The implications are both profound and scary.]

From the NY Times (Facebook is Using You):

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.

by Lori Andrews |  Read more:

From The Atlantic (A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click):

At the start of the 21st century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history's most massive stealth efforts in social profiling. At this point you may hardly notice the results of this trend. You may find you're getting better or worse discounts on products than your friends. You may notice that some ads seem to follow you around the internet. Every once in a while a website may ask you if you like a particular ad you just received. Or perhaps your cell phone has told you that you will be rewarded if you eat in a nearby restaurant where, by the way, two of your friends are hanging out this very minute.

You may actually like some of these intrusions. You may feel that they pale before the digital power you now have. After all, your ability to create blogs, collaborate with others to distribute videos online, and say what you want on Facebook (carefully using its privacy settings) seems only to confirm what marketers and even many academics are telling us: that consumers are captains of their own new-media ships.

But look beneath the surface, and a different picture emerges. We're at the start of a revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in -- and shape -- our lives. Every day, most if not all Americans who use the internet, along with hundreds of millions of other users from all over the planet, are being quietly peeked at, poked, analyzed and tagged as they move through the online world. Governments undoubtedly conduct a good deal of snooping, more in some parts of the world than in others. But in North America, Europe, and many other places, companies that work for marketers have taken the lead in secretly slicing and dicing the actions and backgrounds of huge populations on a virtually minute-by-minute basis. Their goal is to find out how to activate individuals' buying impulses so they can sell us stuff more efficiently than ever before. But their work has broader social and cultural consequences as well. It is destroying traditional publishing ethics by forcing media outlets to adapt their editorial content to advertisers' public-relations needs and slice-and-dice demands. And it is performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don't even know we have.

by Joseph Turow |  Read more:

Illustration Joon Mo Kang, NY Times

Why Is It So Hard for New Musical Instruments to Catch On?

For the musically daring, it's hard to beat the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, which takes place later this month at Georgia Institute of Technology. One previous winning entry turned whisks and garlic presses into music makers. Another, the Double Slide Controller, borrowed the trombone's slide mechanism—a 15th-century innovation—to shape digitally produced tones into an otherworldly drone.

Events like these would seem to signal a golden age for the adventurous musician. New instruments have come to market at a steady clip in recent years, offering novel and occasionally fanciful ways to perform music. Maybe you've heard of the the Eigenharp, the Tenori-on, or the Harpejji?Or maybe not. Good luck hearing any of these contraptions on the recordings of prominent modern artists. You're more likely to come across Tibetan singing bowls (Fleet Foxes), 17th-century Indonesian angklung (Okkervil River), or the zither (P.J. Harvey). In other words, established pop and rock musicians seem more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one. The turntable might be the last new implement to break into pop music; there's even debate over whether that qualifies as an instrument, despite having its own form of notation and a course at Berklee College of Music. According to hip-hop lore, Grand Wizzard Theodore invented scratching 36 years ago. Suddenly, the turntable became a device used not just for listening to music, but performing it. And like the guitar, it turned into a focal point in live performances.

Now consider some of the instrumental developments in the 36 years prior: the solid-body electric guitar, the pedal-steel guitar, the steel drum, the electric bass, the synthesizer, and the drum machine.

Music technology in general has charged forward, and computers, digital sampling and MIDI have dramatically shaped music. But no one mimes to music on the "air sampler" and the idea of a "Software Hero" video game, with its own simulated laptop, is a little glum. Will a brand-new instrument ever capture hearts, minds, and speaker systems again?

THE PROBLEM WITH NEWNESS

It's hard to overstate the importance of new musical instruments in history. The piano's dynamic range allowed for a subtlety in composition previously unimagined. The modern drum set paved the way for jazz. Rock and roll would not have happened without the electric guitar. As composer Edgard Varese put it in 1936, "It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony."

So what happened? Why has there been such a drought of new instruments—especially in rock and pop, which thrive on novelty?

by William Weir, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: AP

Revenge of the Econobox: Early Japanese Imports Find Admirers

When Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.

Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.

But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back seats.

“For many like myself, it’s nostalgic,” said Jun Imai, a 36-year-old designer at the Hot Wheels division of Mattel, where he directed the styling for die-cast models of two 1970s-vintage Nissans released last year.

“It’s a very special feeling I have for cars like these — the designs, the sound of the engines, the way they drive,” Mr. Imai said. “They are so distinctive, yet most are approachable in terms of costs and availability.”

Mr. Imai, who lives in Southern California, owns a 1971 Datsun 510 wagon and a 1972 Datsun pickup. The vehicles’ peculiar silhouettes, diminutive scale and heavy use of chrome trim are typical of Japanese styling of the period. (...)

The Japanese have a term for their suddenly trendy vintage cars. They are called nostalgic cars, said Benjamin Hsu, a co-founder of Japanese Nostalgic Car, a Web site and magazine based in Diamond Bar, Calif. “You know how the Japanese like to appropriate English terms but use them in a slightly different way,” Mr. Hsu said.

Yet the name is fitting. The demographic that’s seemingly responsible for the popularity of Japanese nostalgic cars is 30-something men who grew up with the cars. Mr. Imai remembers his uncles working on and racing Datsun 510s and 240Zs when he was a boy.

“When you have cars that were everyday cars, there’s an emotional connection,” said Bryan Thompson, a designer for Nissan, both in the Japan and the United States, from 2001 to 2009. “They’re a part of your life in the way a pet is a part of your life, or a family member.”

 by Richard S. Chang, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Axel Koester

Josie Charlwood

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Making the World's Largest Airline Fly

Last July, 14 months after United and Continental Airlines announced they were combining to form the largest carrier in the world, the merged airline took one of the thousands of steps required to integrate its fleet: It harmonized the coffee. Just as each carrier had its own logo, slogan, and peerage of frequent-flier status levels, each served its own blend of joe. Continental’s coffee was from a company called Fresh Brew, United’s was from Starbucks.

“The new United,” as the merged airline called itself, had to choose. With one food-service supply chain, it made no sense to maintain two coffee contracts. And buying from one source offered the possibility of bigger volume discounts, exactly the sort of savings that United and Continental executives had hoped to create with the merger. The coffee question represented a tiny aspect of the problem of running an airline, but the quantities were huge: Last year the new United sent enough coffee into the sky to brew 62 million cups.

The vice-president in charge of food services at United is a slim, chipper woman named Sandra Pineau-Boddison. She considers herself a coffee enthusiast “only if you count mochas as true coffee.” Still, Pineau-Boddison did not take United’s coffee decision lightly. For months the issue dominated the meetings of the beverage committee, a 14-member panel drawn from procurement, flight operations, finance, food services, and marketing. United’s head chef, a burly, bearded Irishman named Gerry McLoughlin, sat in. The committee solicited bids, then came up with 12 different blends to try. Members tasted them blind, and, in an affront to Pineau-Boddison’s sweet tooth, tasted them black.

By mid-2011 there was a front-runner: a lighter roast Fresh Brew blend called Journeys. It was cheaper than the old United’s Starbucks, and it did better in the taste tests. When colleagues outside the beverage committee were asked to weigh in, they concurred. The new United’s chief executive officer, Jeff Smisek, dropped by the food services floor for a cup and signed off on it. Journeys was served at a meeting of the company officers to general approval. Just to be sure, food services took the new blend on the road, to Washington Dulles, Chicago O’Hare, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, asking flight attendants to try it. Out of the 1,100 who did, all but eight approved. “We thought this was a home run,” says Pineau-Boddison.

On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the “legacy United” fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after all, is a popular brand—but this was something else. Flight attendants reported a barrage of complaints. Pineau-Boddison received angry e-mails from customers, as did Smisek. The coffee, fliers complained, was watery.

The beverage committee launched an inquiry. The coffee itself, they discovered, was only part of the problem. Airplane coffee is made from small, premeasured “pillow packs” that sit in a brew basket drawer at the top of the galley coffee machine. When the drawer is closed, boiling water flows through the pillow into the pot below. The old United brew baskets, the committee discovered, sit a quarter of an inch lower than Continental’s, leaving a space for water to leak around the pillow pack. That fugitive water was diluting the coffee—in fact, the old United had installed the deeper brew baskets for that very purpose, after passengers complained that their Starbucks was too strong. And so, by the end of the year, the beverage committee found itself back where it had started, trying out new pillow packs.

That’s coffee. Not a matter of life or death, or even on-time arrival. It’s not a question that requires federal regulatory approval or a union vote. Nor is it an issue that has anything to do with the core service of an airline, which is flying people from one place to another. (...)

In conference rooms in the glossily renovated United Building in downtown Chicago and in United’s offices in the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower a few blocks away, Continental employees transplanted from Houston are working alongside their new United colleagues, spending months debating questions such as whether to board flights back to front, as most airlines do, or window, middle, then aisle, as legacy United did; whether miniature ponies will be allowed, as they were on Continental, to travel in the cabin as service animals (they will); whether Jet Skis are allowed as baggage (no); what information to print on the boarding pass; what direction dog crates should face when loaded into the cargo hold (backwards, as at legacy United, so spooked dogs don’t recoil and tip the crate off the conveyor belt); whether to require baggage handlers to wear steel-toed shoes (no official decision yet); what shape the plastic cups for cold beverages should be (wider than the old United cups but skinnier than the old Continental ones); whether unaccompanied minors should be identified by a bracelet or a button (bracelet); whether to have a first-class cabin like United or just business class like Continental (the former); and whether, in the first-class cabin, to serve nuts in a bag or heated in a ramekin (ramekin).

Like the coffee fiasco, even simple-seeming choices grow comically intricate when they involve commercial air travel, with its constant balancing of safety, cost, space, style, reliability, convenience, speed, and comfort. Last year, United had 33 teams working on integration, and in the fourth quarter alone spent $170 million on everything from technology training to severance to repainting airplanes.

by Drake Bennett, Businessweek |  Read more: 
Photo: AP via Washington Times

Eleven Beds

1.

Night on Lake Dallas in the Texas summer: the water gives back the starlight and his girlfriend is fifteen years old, freckled, and they await the magic of the moonrise. Over soft grass she spreads out a blanket, and the scent of her burns inside it, a delicate soapy ignition. The adults—her parents and their friends—drink out of bottles wrapped in brown paper sacks. Their laughter skims over the waves: signals to other campsites, to other family groups and to the sexual ache of the evening.

They stand on a rock ledge beside the shore, boy and girl, leaning together, their bare shoulders touching, as the adults unfold and arrange cots. Her father watches them as he sips from his bottle, though, and he knows what the night means. He calls the boy’s name—hey, Will, c’mere!—and the invitation is a command. The girl squeezes Will’s fingers as he leaves her side. When he’s gone the mother comes and places an arm around her daughter, whispering, and the lake whispers back, expectant, and through the giant cottonwood trees on the far shore an orange and lunatic moon hides in the branches.

The father points and says it plainly: if she sleeps over here, then put your cot over there. As they talk their faces are shadowed, and the moon rises larger than a fist, so crazy in its hallucination that it drives away the stars.

Later the father drifts off into drunken sleep as the nightbirds catch the moonlight in their frenzy. Over the moondark lake the picnic ground receives the noise of cicadas and the tin music of a distant radio as Will searches for the girl’s blanket, finding it, at last, in the deep blue shade of the trees. He calls out and hears Myla’s soft reply.

They wrap themselves in the blanket, in the darkness, and with a single economical movement she’s naked for him. Never mind the others, never mind anything, and their rhythms become a single rhythm as she guides him into her small body. Her virginal bloodshed mixes with the dried blood on his shirt, blood of the fish he caught in the afternoon, and suddenly they’re experts at this ancient act. He whispers, yes, keep me here, right here, take me and keep me, never let me go, right here in this place, and a voice deep inside her answers, please, yes, take me away, take me to all the places I can never go alone, get me out of here.

2.

At a lodge in New Mexico they meet again.

They are students at different colleges on a winter holiday, and he boldly takes a seat across from her in the cafeteria on top of the mountain. They both wear rented ski boots and borrowed clothing, and as he takes his seat clumsily he bumps the table and spills a bit of everyone’s hot chocolate. Myla’s black ski bib shows off her figure, and her incandescent freckles part in a smile. His manner is all pretension: a forced laughter, too much talk, a boast that he edits his campus newspaper—a fact she already knows—and an awkward and boyish insouciance. Her girlfriends look on in smirking wonder as he tries to impress them all, but then suddenly he says, okay, time for another run, and he casually suggests that Myla should go down the slope with him. To the amazement of her friends she quickly rises, fumbles with her mittens, drops them, trips in her silver boots, groans with pleasure and goes along. They ski through bright powder for two hundred yards, then pull up breathlessly. Where can we go?

They enter the dormitory he shares with five other guys where they pull the goose-down coverlets off all the beds, steal all the pillows and fill up the bathroom with softness. It’s the only door they can lock, and they cushion the tile floor, the fixtures, and spare only the mirrors so they can become their own audience. Then feverish acrobatics and wild display: the mirrors say, yes, do that, go there, and later they emerge exhausted, a bawdy laughter sealing the old intimacy they’ve rediscovered.

by William Harrison, textBox |  Read more:
Photo by Jenny Pansing

The Dirty Little Secret Of Silicon Valley's Startup Boom

In San Francisco cafes and bars, even on the street, I overhear people talking about their startup ideas, business plans, and goals. And there are tons of incubators, Angels, wannabe Angels, VC firms, making investments in startups.

And there's lots of money being made, especially among the Super Angels, the incubators such as Y Combinator, the micro-VCs, and people such as Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure, who have made fortunes selling startups to larger companies. Sometimes startup teams can go from seed to exit in under a year.

For the investors, making dozens of $10K to $25K seed investments, can be tremendously lucrative.

Just one $25 million payday from the sale of a startup will more than cover an Angel investor's loss from a hundred dud $25K investments - which is a loss of just $2.5 million. The risk to reward ratios are off the charts, which is why so many want to be Angels.

And there's no shortage of startups looking for seed investments. They are told that they must have a business plan, they must address market opportunities of at least $1 billion in revenues; industry sector expertise is important; do the team members have prior experience? Are there enough tech leads in the team?
We are repeatedly told that these, and many other factors, are important to investors.

But aren't most of those "factors" BS? Take a look:

The plan is to sell these tiny businesses to larger companies in the shortest time possible.

But in the vast majority of cases, the buyers aren't interested in the startup's business, they are acquired for their engineering talent alone.

For example, this morning Seattle-based Geekwire announced an exclusive story:

Amazon buys TeachStreet

Amazon.com has acquired TeachStreet, the 5-year-old online marketplace that matches students and teachers.

It's an interesting story, does this signal Amazon's push into educational markets? Will it take TeachStreet's technology and scale it across its massive cloud infrastructure?

Nope. Geekwire's John Cook reports:

This is looking very much like a "talent acquisition."

TeachStreet will be shut down on February 15th. Teachers who use the service will be able to export their class listings, and the company is offering a number of alternative services where teachers can market their classes.

This happens time and time again. Mark Zuckerberg has said it many times, Facebook acquires companies mostly for their talent. Google does it too, all the giants do. They buy the startups and close the business.

Twitter recently bought Summify (a few weeks after it was featured in SVW) and closed it down. Apple bought LaLa and closed it down. There are hundreds of startups acquired every year and their services or products are closed down.

This might seem like an expensive way to recruit engineers but there are many benefits such as removing potential competitors, which helps maintain the status quo. The giant companies have a lot invested in the status quo because they collectively have the most to lose from its disruption.

Plus, they have agreements not to poach staff from each other. So where else can go? Startups are by far the best hunting ground for new talent.

So, do we really have a startup boom? Or is it a masquerade, a proxy for a battle between the Internet giants for top quality engineers?

And is it really that expensive to recruit in this way?

by Tom Forenski, Silicon Valley Watcher |  Read more:

Bill Shaffer. Open 24 Hours, 2007. Pastel, 13 x 18”.
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Matthew Woodson (Ghostco)
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