Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The Girl on the Bridge
The last thing Kay said on the phone a little before midnight was unsettling enough—“Bryan, I love you. I got to go. It was nice to know you”—but now she wouldn’t answer her cell. She wasn’t in her Queen Anne apartment. She wasn’t in the park they’d strolled through hand in hand days earlier. He didn’t know where she was, he just knew he had to find her.
Finally around 1:30am, Sunday, January 16, 2011, after pounding on his girlfriend’s door, after multiple calls went straight to voice mail, Bryan Wilson, a 29-year-old sustainable-business consultant, dialed 911.
A Seattle police cruiser met him at the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Roy minutes later. “Do you have any reason to believe she might hurt herself or others?” asked officer Kurt Alstrin. “Yes,” Bryan said. “She’s severely depressed.”
Soon every police radio in Seattle crackled with the name. Kaylan Rose Campbell, 25 years old. Green eyes. Red or auburn hair. Five feet eight inches tall.
What the radio message couldn’t convey was that few people who knew Kay had ever met anyone more intelligent. Or more beautiful. That she dabbled in six languages and had traveled halfway around the globe by the time she was 20. That she could hear any tune once and play it back on a keyboard. That she laughed so loud you could feel it in your spine.
Nothing in that call to all police units could explain how Kaylan Campbell had been struggling for the past few months, how she had told those closest to her that she hated herself, that she was convinced she was a bad person, that she felt trapped.
“Any idea where she might be?” Officer Alstrin asked.
Bryan recalled the background noise he’d heard during their last phone conversation. Wind. Traffic. He thought of their conversations during the past week.
“Where do you think she is?” the officer pressed.
“I think she’s at the bridge,” Bryan said. “The Aurora Bridge.”
He knew the words were loaded, that they sounded preposterous. Someone’s distressed and I automatically assume she’s going to jump off the Aurora Bridge?
But the cliche exists for a reason. The bridge, site of more than 230 suicides, is second in the U.S. only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate in number of jumpers. So dire had the suicide problem become—especially for the vocal minority who lived and worked below the bridge—that the Washington State Department of Transportation was nearly finished constructing a $5 million suicide fence. The project had been stalled, first by historic preservationists who wanted to keep the nearly 80-year-old bridge looking exactly as it did when it was erected in 1932, and later by engineering setbacks and unforeseen noise complaints.
If Kaylan Campbell was on the span connecting Queen Anne to Fremont, staring into the darkness 15 stories down—at either the Ship Canal or its banks—she had joined hundreds of others who had come to the bridge for the same reason since before it was even completed.
by James Ross Gardner | Read more:
Photo: David Bowden
Monday, February 27, 2012
Those Fabulous Confabs
In January, in Davos, Switzerland, global leaders—prime ministers, central bankers, Mick Jagger—gathered for the annual World Economic Forum, the planet’s most high-powered schmoozefest. Simultaneously, in Lake Tahoe, 650 twentysomethings and their fellow travelers were hanging out with Questlove and the president of Georgia at Summit Series, an event focused on networking and social entrepreneurship. And this week, in Long Beach, a more tech-savvy crowd will convene for TED 2012. The high season of the ideas conference is upon us.
At least since the early seventies, when Davos was founded, there have been exclusive gatherings that mix fizzy ideas with major-league networking. The eighties gave rise to Renaissance Weekend, for a largely political crowd; Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley retreat, for media machers; and an early version of TED, for the titans of the converging worlds of (as the organizers had it) Technology, Entertainment, and Design. But recent years have seen a furious proliferation of these status events. There’s PopTech, FOO Camp, the Clinton Global Initiative, Solve for X (Google’s conference for “moonshot thinking”). And beyond the higher-profile events, a lengthening tail of gatherings you’ve never heard of like the Feast, Do Lectures, the 99% Conference, and Techonomy. All promise much the same thing: a velvet rope to keep out the attitudinally unwashed, serendipitous interaction, quirky content, and at least the illusion of egalitarian elbow-rubbing. They have their own vocabulary, too. These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about “disruptive” ideas that have been carefully “curated.”
The appeal is complex. For would-be world-savers enthralled by “the power of ideas,” these conferences are a stand-in for “a time when governments did shit, like put people on the moon,” per one curator. For even die-hard technologists, interacting via disembodied avatars gets old, and occasional 3-D mingling is refreshing. For a certain prosperous tier of the citizenry, the conferences serve as a higher-brow Learning Annex. But most simply, these events are about establishing and reinforcing new hierarchies. In a culture where social rank is ever more fluid, an entrepreneur who overnight goes from sleeping under his desk to IPO-ing into a billionaire needs a way to express his new status, stat. “We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” as Andrew Zolli, PopTech’s executive director, puts it.
Thus the rise of a cohort of speakers and attendees who migrate along the same elite social-intellectual trade routes. Throw in Sundance and SXSW and Burning Man, and you get what Michael Hirschorn has called “the clusterfuckoisie,” tweeting at each other as they shuttle between events. This is so exactly the sort of thing that David Brooks lives to break down into one of his fictive comic-sociological characters that, in his latest book, The Social Animal, he describes Davos parties as “rings of interesting and insecure people desperately seeking entry into the realm of the placid and self-satisfied.” But Brooks is himself a leading citizen of the realm, having spoken at TED and, regularly, the Aspen Ideas Festival. For public intellectuals with books and brands to promote, the new conferences are force multipliers, unpaid gigs that offer intangible yields. “Obviously it’s not the money,” Brooks says. “For me, it’s the chance to get out of my political-pundit circle and meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. There are psychic rewards.”
by Benjamin Wallace, New York | Read more:
Image via:
Interview With an Element: Chlorine
Are you Bleach?
No. I am not Bleach, I am me. The success of Bleach would not have been possible without Sodium and Oxygen. We all have our roles to play. Oxygen does its own part. On my own I am just chlorine, but as sodium hypochlorite something more than that. My solo career was never as successful, looking back I needed time to see that — and I guess time to grow as an element.
Is it true that Bleach is behind “Eau de Labarraque”?
Yes. Eau de Labarraque was our first project together, and that goes way back to that summer in France in 1820. Many people accused us of selling out when we started over as Bleach, but it was just a natural step in our development at the time and a way to reach a greater audience.
What would you call your greatest success with Bleach?
Clearly that is our role in disinfection. Everyone knows about drinking water and swimming pools. We were even involved in deodorizing the body of Louis XVIII… But I would say our role in preventing child bed fever is something that is often overlooked. Our project with Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s did not gain the recognition it should have. His idea of disinfecting your hands after dissection of a cadaver and assisting in the delivery room was so new at the time it was rejected by the medical profession for decades. Semmelweis died at the age of 47 of gangrene after a severe beating in a mental institution asylum in Vienna, and I wish he would get more recognition.
Why did your partnership with Oxygen end?
It did not end. The media love to spread rumors about rivalry, especially after oxygen started its new project OxiClean more than a decade ago, but we remain good friends. Oxygen may be more popular and is getting not as bad press as me, but I am not bitter. I am focused on my collaboration with Sodium and do not have much time to follow whatever gossip is making the rounds.
Do you see Sodium much nowadays?
Yes, we look back on a successful career together, but are not out of great ideas yet. Sodium completes me in a way that no other element does. Lately our reviews have not been great, but we are ready for a comeback. Sodium has been taking the blame for much that seemed wrong with Salt, but without it everything would be bland. Our contribution to food has been legendary, something acknowledged even by our harshest critics. At this point I would like to plug a new venture of mine. I got involved with Sugar, and discovered that my remix of their classic work is even sweeter than the original, and I even prevent any nutritional effect. Our joint offering sucralose is now available in stores.
by Simone Bauer, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: Rainshow'r
No. I am not Bleach, I am me. The success of Bleach would not have been possible without Sodium and Oxygen. We all have our roles to play. Oxygen does its own part. On my own I am just chlorine, but as sodium hypochlorite something more than that. My solo career was never as successful, looking back I needed time to see that — and I guess time to grow as an element.
Is it true that Bleach is behind “Eau de Labarraque”?
Yes. Eau de Labarraque was our first project together, and that goes way back to that summer in France in 1820. Many people accused us of selling out when we started over as Bleach, but it was just a natural step in our development at the time and a way to reach a greater audience.What would you call your greatest success with Bleach?
Clearly that is our role in disinfection. Everyone knows about drinking water and swimming pools. We were even involved in deodorizing the body of Louis XVIII… But I would say our role in preventing child bed fever is something that is often overlooked. Our project with Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s did not gain the recognition it should have. His idea of disinfecting your hands after dissection of a cadaver and assisting in the delivery room was so new at the time it was rejected by the medical profession for decades. Semmelweis died at the age of 47 of gangrene after a severe beating in a mental institution asylum in Vienna, and I wish he would get more recognition.
Why did your partnership with Oxygen end?
It did not end. The media love to spread rumors about rivalry, especially after oxygen started its new project OxiClean more than a decade ago, but we remain good friends. Oxygen may be more popular and is getting not as bad press as me, but I am not bitter. I am focused on my collaboration with Sodium and do not have much time to follow whatever gossip is making the rounds.
Do you see Sodium much nowadays?
Yes, we look back on a successful career together, but are not out of great ideas yet. Sodium completes me in a way that no other element does. Lately our reviews have not been great, but we are ready for a comeback. Sodium has been taking the blame for much that seemed wrong with Salt, but without it everything would be bland. Our contribution to food has been legendary, something acknowledged even by our harshest critics. At this point I would like to plug a new venture of mine. I got involved with Sugar, and discovered that my remix of their classic work is even sweeter than the original, and I even prevent any nutritional effect. Our joint offering sucralose is now available in stores.
by Simone Bauer, The Hairpin | Read more:
Image: Rainshow'r
The Girls at the Front
[ed. In tribute to Marie Colvin, who died last week in Syria trying to escape a rocket shelling attack.]
The handful of female war correspondents whose beat is whatever hellhole leads the news—Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, et al.—are as tough as any of the guys. But there’s a difference in how they work, the way they love, and the risks they run.
They work in places like Kosovo and Grozny, but they live—most of them, at least—in London’s Notting Hill, a neighborhood better known for its Victorian-camisole street fairs than its rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The town house of CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the world’s most famous war reporter, is smartly appointed, with African sculptures and socially conscious photography books stacked just so on the coffee table. Even the vase on the hallway floor works—but only after you hear the backstory: it’s the 155-mm. howitzer shell that landed two doors down from Amanpour at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn during the war in Bosnia. “If it had exploded, I and everyone else in that wing would have been killed,” says Amanpour, feet on coffee table, hands behind head.
The daughter of an Iranian father and British mother, Amanpour is part of a small brigade of women who have trooped, more or less as a group, from misery to misery, from Iraq to Bosnia to East Timor to Chechnya and, lately, to Afghanistan and Israel’s West Bank. They have shared rooms and deep friendships. They have elbowed each other out of the way to get the story, and gossiped behind one another’s backs. And they all think an article about female war correspondents is pretty lame. “Safari Susans!” exclaims Amanpour facetiously.
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”
by Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair | Read more:
The handful of female war correspondents whose beat is whatever hellhole leads the news—Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, et al.—are as tough as any of the guys. But there’s a difference in how they work, the way they love, and the risks they run. They work in places like Kosovo and Grozny, but they live—most of them, at least—in London’s Notting Hill, a neighborhood better known for its Victorian-camisole street fairs than its rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The town house of CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the world’s most famous war reporter, is smartly appointed, with African sculptures and socially conscious photography books stacked just so on the coffee table. Even the vase on the hallway floor works—but only after you hear the backstory: it’s the 155-mm. howitzer shell that landed two doors down from Amanpour at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn during the war in Bosnia. “If it had exploded, I and everyone else in that wing would have been killed,” says Amanpour, feet on coffee table, hands behind head.
The daughter of an Iranian father and British mother, Amanpour is part of a small brigade of women who have trooped, more or less as a group, from misery to misery, from Iraq to Bosnia to East Timor to Chechnya and, lately, to Afghanistan and Israel’s West Bank. They have shared rooms and deep friendships. They have elbowed each other out of the way to get the story, and gossiped behind one another’s backs. And they all think an article about female war correspondents is pretty lame. “Safari Susans!” exclaims Amanpour facetiously.
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”
by Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Clapton and Richards: Tribute to Hubert Sumlin
Close to midnight last night at New York's Apollo Theater, Eric Clapton had just finished a thunderous take on classic blues number "Forty Four" when Keith Richards ambled onstage with no introduction. Wearing a dark blazer, long green scarf, fedora and a huge grin, he embraced Clapton and stood center stage to massive applause, delivering a smoky take on Wolf’s "Going Down Slow," a chronicle of a frail man who has savored life’s greatest pleasures. "Man, I've had things that kings and queens will never have," Richards growled. "In fact, they don't even know about them, let alone get ’em. And good times? Mmmm...." He hovered around Clapton and then stood sidestage by the piano while Clapton delivered a throaty verse and then weaved clean-toned solos with young Austin guitarist Gary Clark Jr.
There were many highlights at Howlin for Hubert – a tribute to guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who played in Howlin’ Wolf’s band for decades and passed away on December 4th due to heart failure – but that was the peak. It was Richards’ first major musical appearance since the Rolling Stones last toured five years ago, and he showed little rust. After "Going Down Slow," he sat down and played metallic 12-string slide while singing "Little Red Rooster," and then strapped on a Gibson electric guitar to sing and trade licks with Clapton on "Spoonful." "It’s good to be back," Richards said, peering up to the balcony before breaking into a cackle. "Goddamn, it’s good to be back."
The entire show, which featured all-stars including Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Warren Haynes, Jimmie Vaughan, Derek Trucks, Doyle Bramhall II and Elvis Costello – plus overlooked legends like Wolf’s former bandmates, harmonica player James Cotton, guitarist Jody Williams and saxophonist Eddie Shaw – was one for the history books. The event originated while Sumlin was still alive as a celebration to mark his 80th birthday. It stayed that way; Guest after guest recounted Sumlin’s unfaltering positivity and passion for his instrument. At one point, Toni Ann Mamary, Sumlin’s longtime manager and companion, tearfully recalled Sumlin tellling her, "I’m gonna be there. I don’t care if I play – I’m going to be there." She added, "Can you feel him?"
by Patrick Doyle, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
Indiglo
[ed. Just in time. I've been looking for a new watch.]
Last year I revealed the secret to affordable stylishness when it came to personal accessories. That secret was: the Timex Easy-Reader Indiglo watch, which costs somewhere between $25 and $40 depending on model variations and where you shop. It is shown not just in the photo at right but also, proudly, on the wrists of such fashion leaders as Harvard's Lawrence Lessig, NPR's Matt Martinez, Andrew Sprung of Xpostfactoid, Eliza Schmidkunz of GNSS, the Atlantic's Scott Stossel, and others including me.
During the holiday shopping stampede, Timex blessed style-conscious purchasers with a Cyber Monday special on the watch. And now Esquire has chosen this fine timepiece as #1 on its list of "Best New Watches for Spring," offering this impressive rationale for the Easy Reader's preeminence: "Because it works just as well from the workday to the weekend. Not to mention the simple retro face looks cooler than some watches that cost six times as much."
by James Fallows, The Atlantic
Last year I revealed the secret to affordable stylishness when it came to personal accessories. That secret was: the Timex Easy-Reader Indiglo watch, which costs somewhere between $25 and $40 depending on model variations and where you shop. It is shown not just in the photo at right but also, proudly, on the wrists of such fashion leaders as Harvard's Lawrence Lessig, NPR's Matt Martinez, Andrew Sprung of Xpostfactoid, Eliza Schmidkunz of GNSS, the Atlantic's Scott Stossel, and others including me.During the holiday shopping stampede, Timex blessed style-conscious purchasers with a Cyber Monday special on the watch. And now Esquire has chosen this fine timepiece as #1 on its list of "Best New Watches for Spring," offering this impressive rationale for the Easy Reader's preeminence: "Because it works just as well from the workday to the weekend. Not to mention the simple retro face looks cooler than some watches that cost six times as much."
by James Fallows, The Atlantic
Clear Your Google Web History
If you've been to Google's homepage lately — and the chances you have are astronomical — you may have noticed a little announcement mentioning something about changes in Google's privacy policy. You then probably ignored it — but you shouldn't.
On March 1st, 2012, Google will implement a new, unified privacy policy. The new policy is retroactive, meaning it will affect any data Google has collected on you prior to that date, as well as any data it gathers afterward. The official Google Blog has more details on what the new privacy policy means. But what does all of this legal jargon mean practically? Basically, under the new policy, your Google Web History (all of your searches and the sites you clicked through to) can be combined with other data Google has gathered about you from other services — Gmail, Google+, etc.
Previously Google kept your search history separate, which means that its profile of you was less complete. If you'd like to keep your personal data a good distance away from Google, you'll need to delete your existing search history and prevent Google from using that history in the future.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has more details on why you might want to turn off Google's Web History feature.
Privacy policies are ubiquitous, yet often highly irrelevant to the typical user; in this case, however, a little time spent changing your settings can provide invaluable peace of mind knowing that Google can't exploit your personal tendencies for its own purposes. Convinced yet? Read on for our guide to locking down your web history.
by Scott Gilbertson, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Jonathan McIntosh/flickr/CC
Love and Death
In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a reporter who, confronted with living the same day over and over again, matures from an arrogant, self-serving professional climber to someone capable of loving and appreciating others and his world. Murray convincingly portrays the transformation from someone whose self-importance is difficult to abide into a person imbued with kindness. It seems that the Nietzschean test of eternal return, insofar as it is played out in Punxsutawney, yields not an overman but a man of decency.
But there is another story line at work in the film, one we can see if we examine Murray’s character not in the early arrogant stage, nor in the post-epiphany stage, where the calendar is once again set in motion, but in the film’s middle, where he is knowingly stuck in the repetition of days. In this part of the narrative, Murray’s character has come to terms with his situation. He alone knows what is going to happen, over and over again. He has no expectations for anything different. In this period, his period of reconciliation, he becomes a model citizen of Punxsutawney. He radiates warmth and kindness, but also a certain distance.
The early and final moments of “Groundhog Day” offer something that is missing during this period of peace: passion. Granted, Phil Connors’s early ambitious passion for advancement is a far less attractive thing than the later passion of his love for Rita (played by Andie MacDowell). But there is passion in both cases. It seems that the eternal return of the same may bring peace and reconciliation, but at least in this case not intensity.
And here is where a lesson about love may lie. One would not want to deny that Connors comes to love Rita during the period of the eternal Groundhog Day. But his love lacks the passion, the abandon, of the love he feels when he is released into a real future with her. There is something different in those final moments of the film. A future has opened for their relationship, and with it new avenues for the intensity of his feelings for her. Without a future for growth and development, romantic love can extend only so far. Its distinction from, say, a friendship with benefits begins to become effaced.
There is, of course, in all romantic love the initial infatuation, which rarely lasts. But if the love is to remain romantic, that infatuation must evolve into a longer-term intensity, even if a quiet one, that nourishes and is nourished by the common engagements and projects undertaken over time.
This might be taken to mean that a limitless future would allow for even more intensity to love than a limited one. Romantic love among immortals would open itself to an intensity that eludes our mortal race. After all, immortality opens an infinite future. And this would seem to be to the benefit of love’s passion. I think, however, that matters are quite the opposite, and that “Groundhog Day” gives us the clue as to why this is. What the film displays, if we follow this interpretive thread past the film’s plot, is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time: time for development. The eternal return of “Groundhog Day” offered plenty of time. It promised an eternity of it. But it was the wrong kind of time. There was no time to develop a coexistence. There was instead just more of the same.
The intensity we associate with romantic love requires a future that can allow its elaboration. That intensity is of the moment, to be sure, but is also bound to the unfolding of a trajectory that it sees as its fate. If we were stuck in the same moment, the same day, day after day, the love might still remain, but its animating passion would begin to diminish.
This is why romantic love requires death.
If our time were endless, then sooner or later the future would resemble an endless Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. It is not simply the fact of a future that ensures the intensity of romantic love; it is the future of meaningful coexistence. It is the future of common projects and the passion that unfolds within them. One might indeed remain in love with another for all eternity. But that love would not burn as brightly if the years were to stammer on without number.
Why not, one might ask? The future is open. Unlike the future in “Groundhog Day,” it is not already decided. We do not have our next days framed for us by the day just passed. We can make something different of our relationships. There is always more to do and more to create of ourselves with the ones with whom we are in love.
This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why. Love is between two particular people in their particularity. We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities. If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.” But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t. This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity. And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities. Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.
Sooner or later the paths that can be opened by the specificities of a relationship come to an end. Not every couple can, with a sense of common meaningfulness, take up skiing or karaoke, political discussion or gardening. Eventually we must tread the same roads again, wearing them with our days. This need not kill love, although it might. But it cannot, over the course of eternity, sustain the intensity that makes romantic love, well, romantic.
by Todd May, NY Times | Read more:
Image via: DailyBrisk
[ed. Many of the comments in response to this article are also well worth reading. Like this:]
The screenplay traps the obnoxious, self-absorbed Phil Connors in an endless repetition of the same day to make the point that he can only find true love by learning to be selfless. His initial panic eventually gives way to selfishly exploiting the situation, toying with the citizenry for his bitter amusement. When in his desperation he finally recognizes Andie MacDowell's simple charms, he at first tries to reach her by learning what she likes, little by little, trying to be her artificially constructed soul mate. Ultimately this strategy fails, because it does not ring true to her. Only when Connors becomes weary of the game and starts to use his endless time to improve himself, learn to play the piano, fix an elderly woman's tire, perform a timely Heimlich maneuver, and truly help others, does MacDowell's character see him in a new light. When he becomes a loveable person, MacDowell gives her love to him, and the trap is ended.
The message is that love is not based on the efforts you make to "get" someone. Love is given willingly when someone recognizes the qualities that you possess.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Good News: Happiness Doesn’t Exist
[ed. See also: The Four Noble Truths]
Happiness is slippery. It doesn’t like to stick around. We know we’ve had it before, but it’s gone away, and we know there are certain things we have to do to find it again. Certain ducks have to be in a row. After all, if you didn’t have to do anything to be happy, you wouldn’t do anything at all. It can’t be too hard to find. Other people seem to be finding it all right.
Yet for all our efforts, we never seem to get this happiness problem nailed down, and there’s a very good reason for that.
When we start talking about solving the problem of unhappiness, it’s hard to avoid the topic of Buddhism. I know not everyone is a fan, but they have lain some important groundwork, even for those of us who like the idea of improving our quality of life but aren’t prepared to buy the whole package, with all its baldness and orange robes. Despite its promises of peace and enlightenment, I haven’t leapt in with abandon, so don’t worry, this article doesn’t delve into pratitya-samutpadas and tathagatagarbhas. It’s about a plain-jane concept you know very well: happiness.
Buddhism developed as a response to mankind’s search for happiness. In the simplest terms, it’s not a belief system but a methodology for being happy. Yet Buddhist literature is known for focusing much more on suffering than happiness. Its curious preference for morbid subject matter has led some to describe Buddhism as preoccupied with negativity.
The reason suffering has become Buddhism’s primary focus, rather than happiness, is that happiness, as we conceive of it, doesn’t really exist — at least not in the same way suffering does. What we refer to as happiness is really just what the absence of suffering feels like.
Although it’s become the favorite term for the concept, “suffering” is really not an adequate word. The Buddhists call it dukkha. Suffering is perhaps the most common English substitution, but I’ve also seen anguish, unease, dissatisfaction, stress, discomfort, or unsatisfactoriness. None of them are quite right, and so many writings in English will use dukkha.
I avoid the casual use of Sanskrit or Pali words in my articles because I think they make a lot of readers tune out, as they sense they’re being led into an esoteric religious discussion. Books and articles about Buddhism can get pretty dry and cryptic, scaring away readers who would otherwise be fascinated by the very same concepts if they weren’t presented in such stuffy, user-unfriendly language. But for the rest of this article I’ll use dukkha, if it hasn’t scared you off yet.
by David Cain, Raptitude | Read more:
Photo by WTL photos
Happiness is slippery. It doesn’t like to stick around. We know we’ve had it before, but it’s gone away, and we know there are certain things we have to do to find it again. Certain ducks have to be in a row. After all, if you didn’t have to do anything to be happy, you wouldn’t do anything at all. It can’t be too hard to find. Other people seem to be finding it all right.
Yet for all our efforts, we never seem to get this happiness problem nailed down, and there’s a very good reason for that. When we start talking about solving the problem of unhappiness, it’s hard to avoid the topic of Buddhism. I know not everyone is a fan, but they have lain some important groundwork, even for those of us who like the idea of improving our quality of life but aren’t prepared to buy the whole package, with all its baldness and orange robes. Despite its promises of peace and enlightenment, I haven’t leapt in with abandon, so don’t worry, this article doesn’t delve into pratitya-samutpadas and tathagatagarbhas. It’s about a plain-jane concept you know very well: happiness.
Buddhism developed as a response to mankind’s search for happiness. In the simplest terms, it’s not a belief system but a methodology for being happy. Yet Buddhist literature is known for focusing much more on suffering than happiness. Its curious preference for morbid subject matter has led some to describe Buddhism as preoccupied with negativity.
The reason suffering has become Buddhism’s primary focus, rather than happiness, is that happiness, as we conceive of it, doesn’t really exist — at least not in the same way suffering does. What we refer to as happiness is really just what the absence of suffering feels like.
Although it’s become the favorite term for the concept, “suffering” is really not an adequate word. The Buddhists call it dukkha. Suffering is perhaps the most common English substitution, but I’ve also seen anguish, unease, dissatisfaction, stress, discomfort, or unsatisfactoriness. None of them are quite right, and so many writings in English will use dukkha.
I avoid the casual use of Sanskrit or Pali words in my articles because I think they make a lot of readers tune out, as they sense they’re being led into an esoteric religious discussion. Books and articles about Buddhism can get pretty dry and cryptic, scaring away readers who would otherwise be fascinated by the very same concepts if they weren’t presented in such stuffy, user-unfriendly language. But for the rest of this article I’ll use dukkha, if it hasn’t scared you off yet.
by David Cain, Raptitude | Read more:
Photo by WTL photos
Please Support Duck Soup
Dear Readers,
It was exactly one year ago today that I started Duck Soup. I'd just lost someone very special to me and wanted to share all the things we used to share, then suddenly couldn't.
At first it was just an exercise in curiosity: what do I want to do, and how do I do it, and, more importantly, how much does it cost? The title is a result of that process - the term "duck soup" being slang in Hawaii (where I'm from) for something that's easy.
Unfortunately, I'm not much of a creative or conversational writer (too many years steeped in technical documents) but I do appreciate good writing, so that's what I decided to focus on, especially longform articles that delve deeply into subjects.
Everything posted here is of interest to me and a distillation of a larger sampling effort to find particularly noteworthy items. It's a labor of love that has prompted me to search out and discover new sites and postings that I'd never have expended the effort to find before, and to learn many new things. The result is the blog you're now reading. If there's any underlying theme it's to seek out thoughtful insights from knowledgeable people about the world we live in and highlight an eclectic mix of music, art and other forms of personal expression.
If this blog can help direct readers' attention (a precious commodity these days!) to important contributors, then all effort put into it will be worthwhile.
It was exactly one year ago today that I started Duck Soup. I'd just lost someone very special to me and wanted to share all the things we used to share, then suddenly couldn't.
At first it was just an exercise in curiosity: what do I want to do, and how do I do it, and, more importantly, how much does it cost? The title is a result of that process - the term "duck soup" being slang in Hawaii (where I'm from) for something that's easy.
Unfortunately, I'm not much of a creative or conversational writer (too many years steeped in technical documents) but I do appreciate good writing, so that's what I decided to focus on, especially longform articles that delve deeply into subjects.
Everything posted here is of interest to me and a distillation of a larger sampling effort to find particularly noteworthy items. It's a labor of love that has prompted me to search out and discover new sites and postings that I'd never have expended the effort to find before, and to learn many new things. The result is the blog you're now reading. If there's any underlying theme it's to seek out thoughtful insights from knowledgeable people about the world we live in and highlight an eclectic mix of music, art and other forms of personal expression.
If this blog can help direct readers' attention (a precious commodity these days!) to important contributors, then all effort put into it will be worthwhile.
Again, thank you for your support and please tell your friends about Duck Soup.
markk
The Meaning of Home
What vexed Miller were the stories Americans have told themselves about the power of positive thinking, the instant money and spiritual purity that are sure to follow from unfettered entrepreneurship, the decency of the profit motive, the goodness of the national past, and, when all else fails, the possibility of escape and reinvention in the West. This land is your land: Henry David Thoreau crosses uneasily with Norman Rockwell; the tenets of Ayn Rand crash into the gospel of Jesus Christ; the Book of Mormon reads strangely in parallel with the Bill of Rights; Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territory but never becomes the Marlboro Man, exactly. Above all, Miller responded to a culture that cherished a sanctimonious and noxiously sentimental vision of family life as a beacon of health and wealth.
Yet it’s clear from Miller’s screenplay for John Huston’s movie The Misfits—a film celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year—that Miller didn’t see the American family as a problem that had an answer. Flee the traps of family life on an Eastern stage, and you might find yourself wandering lost and mangled in a film set in the deserts of Nevada, atomized and disconnected, drifting among strangers from divorce court to highway to rodeo to whiskey bottle to bed with fast friends. The myth of the family and the myth of self-reliance—how does the same culture hatch two such irreconcilable dreams? Miller’s characters are always being crushed by conflicting motives and impulses, forced into impossible situations by self-delusions or the repression of past betrayals. In his Eastern plays, blood relations doom one another, acting like planets circling closer and closer to moral black holes. In the movie script that heralded the end of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, absolute freedom from family ties in the West appears to be another kind of American disaster—one papered over with a Hollywood ending. (...)
Recognition of long-suppressed truths hits Miller’s families not in the self-help mode of Dr. Phil but in the old styles of William Shakespeare [England, page 43] or Euripides [Corinth, page 23]. Miller’s sons—Larry and Chris in All My Sons, Biff and Happy in Death of a Salesman (1949)—sometimes attempt to escape claustrophobic houses haunted by trauma, old ghosts, secrets, and lies, but they rarely leave the nest for long, and then only to fail, or die, or return to learn unbearable truths about their fathers. The children can sing in their chains or struggle in their traps, while their mothers grieve. In these plays, Miller’s mothers, for their part, are fatally strong, not simply all-suffering—they are actively complicit in the tragedies that unfold. At the end of All My Sons, Kate advises Chris, “Forget now. Live.” Good luck with that. In Death of a Salesman, Linda Loman torments herself with an ending the ancient Greeks might have appreciated: “I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home…We’re free and clear.” Tear out your eyes.
by J.M. Tyree, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
The Emerging Science of Connected Networks
In the last decade or so, the study of networks has had a profound effect on the way we understand the spread of everything from fashion and ideas to forest fires and disease. But this better understanding of individual networks has revealed a gaping hole in our knowledge of how networks interact with each other. That looks to be hugely important. Many systems, rather than being individual networks, are actually networks of networks: the financial system, the economy, our brain and our genetic control system to name just a few.
What's puzzling about all these systems is that they demonstrate emergent behaviour that single networks alone cannot reproduce.
So it's no surprise that with the triumphs in understanding single networks under their belts, complexity scientists have set their sights on the more ambitious goal of understanding 'networks of networks'. Consequently, this area is set to become one of the fastest growing in science.
Today, Anna Saumell-Mendiola, Angeles Serrano and Marian Boguna at the University of Barcelona in Spain reveal their approach to the problem. These guys have studied the way that disease-spreading networks interact when they become linked.
by Physics arXiv | Read more:
He said he was leaving. She ignored him.
Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.
Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”
But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say, “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.
by Laura Munson, The Week | Read more:
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