Jennifer Sanchez, “ny.10.#31”, mixed media on paper
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King of Pain

Just about everyone who pays any attention at all to contemporary fiction knows two things about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008): he wrote a thousand-page novel with hundreds of end-notes that launched him as a cult hero, and he killed himself while still quite a young man. The novel, Infinite Jest (1996), his second, and the last one he completed, has established Wallace as a supreme postmodernist master, revered like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon by those who take a passionate interest in that kind of thing. The suicide for its part enhanced the mystique, as suicides of distinguished artists almost invariably do.

Wallace may be dead but he is not finished, or rather the Wallace industry is not finished with him. His 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College has appeared posthumously in a book of postcard dimensions, with one sentence per page, a format more suited to the lucubrations of Khalil Gibran or Rod McKuen. Columbia University Press has issued Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis in a volume with his name above the title and his photograph on the cover, although his essay actually occupies 75 pages of a 262-page book, the rest filled with pieces by assorted other hands on similar topics. The torso of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, appeared last year. A volume of unpublished stories and another of uncollected journalism look to be on the horizon; two volumes of letters are in prospect as well.

Encomia soar ever higher with the passing of time; every admirer feels obliged to surpass every other admirer in the length, breadth, and depth of his admiration. James Ryerson, an elegant and judicious journalist, mourns the loss of contemporary American fiction's "most intellectually ambitious writer." Greg Carlisle, an actor and drama professor from Kentucky who spent five years producing a 500-page commentary on Infinite Jest, calls Wallace "the best and most important author of the late 20th and early 21st centuries"; one supposes Wallace had better be at least that important, if the professor is to justify devoting five years of work to criticism of a single novel. An even headier enthusiast, Jon Baskin, claims nothing less than world-historical significance for his hero:

It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce.  (...)

Pain

He had lived for recognition and sensual pleasure; he had figured in the American entertainment culture as both producer and consumer; and he had scraped bottom. Seriousness, indeed salvation, lay along another road. In 1991 he began writing Infinite Jest, his intended summa on the national compulsion for diversion unto death. The book would engage all his powers as no previous work of his had done. Wallace was writing for his life, and for the lives of his countrymen. The matter was as grave as that.

The fundamental human experience in this novel is pain-physical, mental, emotional, contrived by the powers so that it is never quite the same for any two persons but also so that most everyone (there is one possible exception) gets rather more than he could ever want. The very word pain rings throughout the novel the way virtue does in Machiavelli or real in Proust or good in Hemingway. Seeking pain, killing pain, using pain, surviving pain are some of the variations on the theme. There are certain peculiarly American aspects to this general torment: modern democratic life features tortures less spectacular but no less intense than the sufferings of Job or the fires of the autos-da-fé. (Wallace was writing during an interlude of peace.) Of course we have analgesics and anesthetics and we don't burn heretics. Compassion is the pre-eminent democratic virtue, and many of us feel the suffering not only of our fellow human beings but of animals that we hesitate to dismiss as dumb beasts. Enormities have not vanished from our tender-hearted republic, however; quite the contrary. Psychic distress abounds. People want the wrong things, or want good things in the wrong way. Desires all too readily become addictions. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications in America. Our sensitivity to pain has prompted us to do all we can to eliminate it, but we are ever more vulnerable to the pain we cannot root out. And there will always be human monsters, who take pleasure in the pain of others, who transmit misery from generation to generation, who infect whatever they touch.

by Algis Valiunas, The Claremont Institute |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

by Charles Duhigg, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Antonio Bolfo

Wit

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

“He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” – Mark Twain

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends..” – Oscar Wilde

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” – George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second …. if there is one.” – Winston Churchill, in response.

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” – Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” – Irvin S. Cobb

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” – Samuel Johnson

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” – Paul Keating

“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” – Charles, Count Talleyrand

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” – Forrest Tucker

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” – Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” – Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” – Billy Wilder

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I’m afraid this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx

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Clark Little

[ed. Shorebreak photography. Getting pounded for your art.]

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Flower Power

In 1967 David Cheever, a graduate student in horticulture at Colorado State University, wrote a term paper titled “Bogotá, Colombia as a Cut-Flower Exporter for World Markets.” The paper suggested that the savanna near Colombia’s capital was an ideal place to grow flowers to sell in the United States. The savanna is a high plain fanning out from the Andean foothills, about 8,700 feet above sea level and 320 miles north of the Equator, and close to both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Those circumstances, Cheever wrote, create a pleasant climate with little temperature variation and consistent light, about 12 hours per day year-round—ideal for a crop that must always be available. A former lakebed, the savanna also has dense, clay-rich soil and networks of wetlands, tributaries and waterfalls left after the lake receded 100,000 years ago. And, Cheever noted, Bogotá was just a three-hour flight from Miami—closer to East Coast customers than California, the center of the U.S. flower industry.

After graduating, Cheever put his theories into practice. He and three partners invested $25,000 apiece to start a business in Colombia called Floramérica, which applied assembly-line practices and modern shipping techniques at greenhouses close to Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport. The company started with carnations. “We did our first planting in October of 1969, for Mother’s Day 1970, and we hit it right on the money,” says Cheever, 72, who is retired and lives in Medellín, Colombia, and New Hampshire.

It’s not often that a global industry springs from a school assignment, but Cheever’s paper and business efforts started an economic revolution in Colombia. A few other growers had exported flowers to the United States, but Floramérica turned it into a big business. Within five years of Floramérica’s debut at least ten more flower-growing companies were operating on the savanna, exporting some $16 million in cut flowers to the United States. By 1991, the World Bank reported, the industry was “a textbook story of how a market economy works.” Today, the country is the world’s second-largest exporter of cut flowers, after the Netherlands, shipping more than $1 billion in blooms. Colombia now commands about 70 percent of the U.S. market; if you buy a bouquet in a supermarket, big-box store or airport kiosk, it probably came from the Bogotá savanna.

This growth took place in a country ravaged by political violence for most of the 20th century and by the cocaine trade since the 1980s, and it came with significant help from the United States. To limit coca farming and expand job opportunities in Colombia, the U.S. government in 1991 suspended import duties on Colombian flowers. The results were dramatic, though disastrous for U.S. growers. In 1971, the United States produced 1.2 billion blooms of the major flowers (roses, carnations and chrysanthemums) and imported only 100 million. By 2003, the trade balance had reversed; the United States imported two billion major blooms and grew only 200 million.

In the 40 years since Cheever had his brainstorm, Colombian flowers have become another global industrial product, like food or electronics. That became apparent to me a few years ago as I stood in front of the flower display at my local supermarket before Mother’s Day (the second-biggest fresh flower-buying occasion in the United States, after Valentine’s Day). My market, in suburban Maryland, had an impressive display of hundreds of preassembled bouquets, as well as fresh, unbunched roses, gerbera daisies and alstroemeria lilies in five-gallon buckets. One $14.99 bouquet caught my eye: about 25 yellow and white gerbera daisies and a sprig of baby’s breath arranged around a single purplish rose. A sticker on the wrapping indicated it had come from Colombia, some 2,400 miles away.

How could something so delicate and perishable (and once so exotic) have come so far and still be such a bargain? It’s no secret that the inexpensive imported products Americans buy often exact a toll on the people who make them and on the environments where they are made. What was I buying into with my Mother’s Day bouquet? My search for answers took me to a barrio about 25 miles northwest of Bogotá.

by John McQuaid, The Smithsonian |  Read more:
Photo: Ivan Kashinsky

Katsushika Hokusai（葛飾北斎 Japanese, 1760-1849）
Swimming turtles　游亀 
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Spirit of a Racer in a Siberian Husky's Blood

Winnie’s breed does not have royal roots, but her lineage is fierce. It dates to what some consider the finest feat in dog-and-human history, a 1925 race to deliver lifesaving diphtheria serum to icebound Nome, Alaska. The event gripped the nation and later became an inspiration for the Iditarod race.

But after the headlines ceased, what happened to two of the lead dogs — Winnie’s forebear Togo and Balto, whose statue stands in Central Park — is a tale that reflects Americans’ quick creation and destruction of celebrities, involving Hollywood, a 10-cent circus, a Cleveland zoo, a ruined friendship and a sports controversy that, almost 90 years later, still raises the hackles of sled-dog drivers everywhere.

“It’s still very much in the mind of mushers,” said Bob Thomas, a Siberian musher and a historian for the International Siberian Husky Club.

In January 1925, an outbreak of diphtheria had killed two children and was spreading quickly in Nome, a town of about 1,400 that was icebound seven months a year.

A local doctor telegraphed Washington, urgently requesting serum to treat the diphtheria, and public health officials found a supply in Anchorage, according to Gay and Laney Salisbury’s riveting book, “The Cruelest Miles.” Officials determined that dog sleds were the best way to transport the serum from Nenana, a northern railroad stop, to Nome, 674 miles west. A group of top mushers and sled-dog racers would hand off the serum at roadhouses along the route. That distance usually took a few weeks to cover. By then, public health officials feared, much of Nome would be dead.

As the dog-sled teams raced west, roadhouse owners provided near-real-time updates over telephone and telegraph lines. Front-page headlines from The New York Times included “Nome Relief Dogs Speed 192 Miles,” “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome,” and “Blizzard Delays Nome Relief Dogs in the Final Dash.”

“It came right down to just the spirit of men and dogs against nature,” Gay Salisbury said.

A noted racer and mining-company dog driver named Leonhard Seppala was originally assigned half of the Nenana-Nome distance. Seppala’s lead dog, a gray and brown Siberian husky named Togo, had covered 4,000 miles in one year alone, guided a famed polar explorer around Alaska, and won major races. Togo had been Seppala’s lead dog since he was 8 months old; now, at age 12, Togo would have one of his final Alaska outings with his driver.

Seppala, Togo and the team set out at high speeds, running a total of 261 miles — they carried the serum for almost double the length any other team did. Twice, to save time, they violated warnings to avoid Norton Sound, a dangerous inlet of the Bering Sea, and instead went straight over the frozen sea, where ice often separated from shore, stranding travelers on floes. In the dark, in 85-below temperatures with wind chill, Seppala could not see or hear the cracking ice, and was dependent on Togo, the Salisburys wrote.

Meanwhile, worried that Seppala’s dogs would get too tired, Alaska’s governor called in additional drivers for the final portion. Just five and a half days after the serum left Nenana, a driver named Gunnar Kaasen and a lead dog named Balto pulled into Nome, serum in hand.

“It was Balto who led the way,” Kaasen told a reporter. “The credit is his.”

Kaasen and Balto, a handsome black Siberian with white paws, became instant heroes. There were front-page articles; commendations from the president; tributes from the Senate; newspapers (including The Times) printing a report that Balto had died from frozen lungs, then quickly rescinding it; wishful editorials proposing that Balto appear at Westminster; a national tour; a Hollywood contract.

But as Kaasen, Balto and that team of dogs were becoming celebrities, the other mushers from the relay straggled into Nome with a different story. Kaasen was assigned the next-to-last leg. But, in an account that some mushers still doubt, Kaasen said the lights were off in the cabin where he was to hand off the serum, so he headed for Nome himself.

Seppala was already broken when he arrived — he had lost Togo when the dog ran off after a reindeer. Then he found that not only were Kaasen and Balto on their way to Hollywood, but the newspapers had attributed Togo’s lifetime feats to Balto, a dog he had not considered decent enough to put on his 20-dog team.

by Stephanie Clifford, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Underwood & Underwood/Corbis

Keeping Consumers on the Digital Plantation

In the old days, you listened to music on your iPod while exercising. During an idle moment at the office you might use Google on your Microsoft Windows PC to search for the latest celebrity implosion. Maybe you would post an update on Facebook. After dinner, you could watch a DVD from Netflix or sink into a new page-turner that had arrived that day from Amazon.

That vision, where every company and every device had its separate role, is so 2011.

The biggest tech companies are no longer content simply to enhance part of your day. They want to erase the boundaries, do what the other big tech companies are doing and own every waking moment. The new strategy is to build a device, sell it to consumers and then sell them the content to play on it. And maybe some ads, too.

Last week’s news that Google is preparing its first Google-branded home entertainment device — a system for streaming music in the house — might seem far afield for an Internet search and advertising company, but fits solidly into an industrywide goal in which each tech company would like to be all things to all people all day long.

“It’s not about brands or devices or platforms anymore,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner. “It’s about the ecosystem. The idea is to get consumers tied into that ecosystem as tightly as possible so they and their content are locked into one system.” 

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

No Doubt

Piannissimo
Source: unknown

Jeremy Lin’s Social Media Fast Break

We live in fickle times, but this is ridiculous. New York, suddenly, has gone nuts over Jeremy Lin, an Asian-American, Harvard-educated point guard who has played only two good games for the NBA’s hapless Knicks. And that’s just the beginning: In China, Lin’s name was among the top-10 search terms on Monday on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. Last Friday, most of the world hadn’t heard of him. Today, you could make a case he’s the most famous Asian-American athlete since Tiger Woods. Which is just kooky. No question, Lin played really, really well against the New Jersey Nets and Utah Jazz over the weekend, but that hardly makes him the second coming of Oscar Robertson.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.

But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.

And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.

Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4
— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012

The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.

by Andrew Leonard, Salon |  Read more:
Photo: AP/Kathy Kmonicek

OK Go

The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they'd play the right note no matter where they were struck. Many thanks to Chevy for believing in and supporting such an insane and ambitious project, and to Gretsch for providing the guitars and amps.

[ed. Thanks, Nate!]

“Early Trouble” by J. Scott Pike 1964
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Obama, Explained

In office as during his campaign—indeed, through the entirety of his seven-plus years as a national figure since his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2004—Obama has maintained his stoic, unflapped, “no drama” air. During the fall and winter of 2007, his campaign seemed to be getting nowhere against Hillary Clinton, who was then, to knowledgeable observers, the “inevitable” nominee. In 2008, John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate seemed to energize his campaign so much that, despite gathering signs of financial disaster under the incumbent Republicans, just after Labor Day the McCain-Palin team had opened up a lead over Obama and Joe Biden in several national polls. CBS News and an ABC–Washington Post poll had McCain up by 2 percentage points in early September, a week before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy; a USA Today–Gallup poll that same week had him ahead by a shocking 10 points. But Obama and Biden stayed unrattled and on message, and two months later they won with a two-to-one landslide in the Electoral College and a 7-point margin in the popular vote. The earnestly devotional HOPE poster by Shepard Fairey was the official icon of the Obama campaign. But its edgier, unofficial counterpart, a Photoshopped Internet image that appeared as an antidote to the panic over polls and Palin, perfectly captured the candidate’s air of icy assurance. It showed a no-nonsense Obama looking straight at the camera, with the caption EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT, I GOT THIS!

The history is relevant because it shows how quickly impressions of strength or weakness can evaporate and become almost impossible to reimagine. Try to think back to when sophisticated people thought that Sarah Palin was the key to Republican victory, or when Obama’s every political instinct seemed inspired. I can attest personally to a now-startling fact behind Jimmy Carter’s rise to the presidency. When he met privately with editorial-board members and veteran political figures across the country in the early days of his campaign—people who had seen contenders come and go and were merciless in spotting frailties—the majority of them went away feeling that in Carter they had encountered a person of truly exceptional political insight and depth. (You might not believe me; I have the notes.) Is this how the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s choice of Obama as its laureate within nine months of his taking office will look as the years pass—the symbol of a “market top” in the world’s romanticism about Obama?

Whether things seem to be going very well or very badly around him—whether he is announcing the death of Osama bin Laden or his latest compromise in the face of Republican opposition in Congress—Obama always presents the same dispassionate face. Has he been so calm because he has understood so much about the path ahead of him, and has been so clever in the traps he has set for his rivals? Or has he been so calm because, like the high-school kid on the plane, he has been so innocently unaware of how dire the situation has truly been?

This is the central mystery of his performance as a candidate and a president. Has Obama in office been anything like the chess master he seemed in the campaign, whose placid veneer masked an ability to think 10 moves ahead, at which point his adversaries would belatedly recognize that they had lost long ago? Or has he been revealed as just a pawn—a guy who got lucky as a campaigner but is now pushed around by political opponents who outwit him and economic trends that overwhelm him?

The end of a president’s first term is an important time to ask these questions, and not just because of the obvious bearing on his fitness for reelection. Hard as it is to have any dispassionate discussion of a president’s performance during an election year, it will be even harder once the election is over. If a year from now Obama is settling in for a second term, a halo effect will extend back to everything he did during his first four years. His programs will be more effective in reality, since he will get that many more years to cement them in with follow-up measures, supportive appointments to federal agencies and the courts, and possible vetoes of any attempts at repeal. And, through the lens of history, they will seem more effective, since whatever he did in his first term will appear to have been part of an overall plan that was ratified through reelection. Yet if a year from now a just-beaten former President Obama is thinking about his memoirs and watching his former appointees blame one another, and him, for the loss, the very same combination of missteps and achievements will be viewed as a narrative leading inexorably to defeat. By saying, after a year in office, that he would rather be “a really good one-term” president than a “mediocre” president who served two terms, Obama was playing to the popular conceit that presidents should rise above such petty concerns as reelection. The reality, though, is that our judgment about “really good” and “mediocre” presidents is colored by how long they serve. A failure to win reelection places a “one-term loser” asterisk on even genuine accomplishments. Ask George H. W. Bush, victor in the Gulf War; ask Jimmy Carter, architect of the Camp David agreement.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press/Corbis Images

ahhh, that feels good...right there...
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The Ahh-ness of Things

[ed. Cherry blossoms are thought to be particularly symbolic of the concept of mono no aware. The transience of the blossoms, the extreme beauty and quick death, has often been associated with mortality and the ephemeral nature of life.]

The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "thing", and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos", "poignancy", "deep feeling", or "sensitivity". Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing.

via: Wikipedia

Four Seaweeds for Health

A staple in Asian diets since ancient times, seaweeds are among the healthiest foods on the planet, packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. And now we know they’re great for the waistline, too: A 2010 study found the algae can reduce our rate of fat absorption by 75 percent, thanks to its inhibitory effect on a digestive enzyme called lipase. (Scientists at Newcastle University are about to begin clinical trials on a “wonder bread” made with alginate fibers and designed to speed weight loss.) Here are four briny plants to sample.

Wakame (Undaria pinnatifida)
Pappardella-like leaves with a salty-sweet zest

Nutrition Perks
Nutritionist Gillian McKeith, PhD, author of the You Are What You Eat Cookbook, calls wakame the woman’s seaweed because it is loaded with osteoporosis-preventing calcium and magnesium and acts as a diuretic (which helps reduce bloating). Wakame’s pigment, fucoxanthin, is known to improve insulin resistance, and a 2010 animal study found that fucoxanthin burns fatty tissue.

Kitchen Prep
Soak the leaves in cold water until tender, then enjoy them in a cucumber salad, dressed with rice vinegar, sesame oil, and soy sauce. To make miso soup, add wakame, tofu, and a few tablespoons of miso paste to a kombu stock (see below).

Nori (Porphyra species)
Papery sheets with a mild earthy taste

Nutritional Perks
Among the marine flora, nori is one of the richest in protein (up to 50 percent of the plant’s dry weight), and one sheet has as much fiber as a cup of raw spinach and more omega-3 fatty acids than a cup of avocado. Nori contains vitamins C (a potent antioxidant) and B12 (crucial for cognitive function) and the compound taurine, which helps control cholesterol.

Kitchen Prep
For a snack, toast strips of nori in the oven at low heat. Or cover a sheet with cooked brown rice; add a layer of sliced carrots, celery, or avocado, and a dash of wasabi. Roll it up and dip in a sauce of tamari, toasted-sesame oil, ginger, and rice vinegar.

By Tova Gelfond, Oprah |  Read more:
Photo: Dan Saelinger

Letters to Alice (by wjosna)
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