It’s Time to Love the Bus

The Guardian hailed it as “a stately vehicle” that conveys “a sense of privilege.” British car mag Autocar road-tested it and praised its “brilliant economy and an interior to die for.” It isn’t a Jag or a Rolls — it’s a London bus with a new set of curves, relaunched this week with the aim of lending municipal bus service a touch of class.

Whether more glamour will translate into more riders is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain: When it comes to improving mass transit, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the humble city bus. The vital connective tissue of multi-modal transit systems, the bus could be an efficient — nay, elegant — solution to cities’ mobility woes if only we made it so.

And yet we rarely do. Streetcars are replacing bus routes in cities across the country, and billions are thrown at light rail while the overlooked bus is left to scream “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!” “If you decide that buses don’t merit investment, you’re going to miss a lot of opportunities to help people get where they’re going, and to expand their sense of freedom of movement, just because you don’t like the vehicle they’re riding,” says transit consultant Jarrett Walker.

Making people like the bus when not liking the bus is practically an American pastime essentially means making the bus act and feel more like a train. Trains show up roughly when they’re supposed to. Buses take forever, then arrive two at a time. Trains boast better design, speed, shelters, schedules and easier-to-follow routes. When people say they don’t like the bus but they do like the train, what they really mean is they like those perks the train offers. But there’s no reason bus systems can’t simply incorporate most of them.

That’s the goal of bus rapid transit. Now, whether BRT is as good as light rail is the subject of many a blood-spattered brawl between transit geeks, but for the purposes of this article let’s assume that a pricey new light-rail system isn’t an option, but BRT’s “train on wheels” experience, with dedicated lanes and pre-board payments, could be. BRT has revolutionized mobility in cities from Bogotá to Guangzhou, but the U.S. has been weirdly resistant to it. New York’s attempt to build a separated bus lane on a single Manhattan thoroughfare was killed by NIMBYism. Other systems, like Seattle’s RapidRide, don’t have dedicated lanes, so you really can’t call them BRT. Only about five U.S. cities have true BRT, and even those are a shadow of the systems in other countries (though the one in Eugene, Ore. does feature a delightful strip of lawn down its guideway.)

Cities that won’t embrace true BRT can at least emulate parts of it. Those attempts should be focused on one thing above all others, says transit blogger Benjamin Kabak: speeding up the system. “Slow, plodding, unreliable” service, writes Kabak, is the primary reason why New York’s subway is breaking ridership records even as fewer people take the bus. So New York is doing things like “bulbing” its sidewalks into the street at bus stops so buses don’t have to struggle in and out of traffic. San Francisco is outfitting its fleet with foward-facing cameras to catch cars that block the bus lane. Chicago is even letting its buses drive on the expressway shoulders during rush hour. Not every solution needs a high-tech fix.

All the speed-it-up tweaks in the world won’t mean much on a bus route that runs twice an hour, however. Walker, author of the new book “Human Transit,” says frequency is all-important but oft-neglected. In explaining its significance to drivers who don’t see the big deal, he tells them to imagine a gate at the end of their driveway that only opens every 15 minutes. “Frequency is freedom,” Walker says, “so you have to actively market frequency.” How do you “market” frequency? That’s where system and design begin to intersect — and where the bus becomes extremely user-friendly.

by Will Doig, Salon |  Read more:
Photo: hxdbzxy via Shutterstock

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Ray Morimura, Hanikage

Homeward Bound

The Rise of Multigenerational and One-Person Households

So these two sociologists go into a bar and the man says to the woman, “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been studying what I call ‘accordion families,’ ” she says. “Right now something like three and a half million American parents are sharing a house with adult kids who’ve either come back home or never left.”

“You want to talk about trends?” the man counters. “Did you know that aside from childless couples the most common household type in America is an adult living alone? That’s one out of seven adults, over 30 million people.”

Wishing to avoid an argument, the sociologists appeal to the bartender. Which trend seems more significant to him? “Beats me,” he says, “but I liked this place a lot better when the customers were political economists.”

It’s not funny, I know, but it’s not the punch line, either. That comes when the two sociologists I have in mind — ­Katherine S. Newman of Johns Hopkins University, the author of “The Accordion Family,” and Eric Klinenberg of New York University, the author of “Going Solo” — conclude their fascinating studies with a nod each to the bartender. Except by then they’re no longer in a bar; they’re in Sweden. We’ll get to that.

First let’s look at those so-called accordion families, which Newman evaluates both as a transnational phenomenon and in the nuanced particulars of individual households. Like Klinenberg, she devotes a good portion of her book to personal interviews, but where Klinenberg goes deep in his emphasis on the United States, Newman goes wide. At the extreme end of her analysis is a country like Italy, where 37 percent of 30-year-old men live with their parents, and have never lived anywhere else. Less striking but certainly notable is a parallel trend in the United States, where a higher proportion of adult children now live with parents than at any time since the 1950s.

Newman states her thesis plainly: “Global competition is the most profound structural force affecting the residential location of young adults in the developed world (or the under­developed world, for that matter)” — but one is impressed by her refusal to turn thesis into dogma. She acknowledges that different cultures define adulthood in different ways, with Americans tending to see it as “a process of self-discovery” and Europeans as “a station defined by the way one relates to others.” She also appreciates the mutual benefits of multi­generational households, as suggested by a survey showing that 76 percent of American parents of 21-year-olds say they feel close to their child, as opposed to a mere quarter of their own parents saying the same.

by Garrett Keizer, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration by Luc Melanson

The Restaurant of the Future?

Walk through the doors of Palo Alto's Calafia, located in a shopping center across the street from Stanford, and you're retracing the footsteps of giants. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were once spotted talking shop there. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all frequent the place. Even James Franco, who admittedly is everywhere, has made an appearance at the restaurant run by Google employee number 53, the chef, Charlie Ayers. Ayers' book, Food 2.0, sits on a short pedestal near the front host's table.

When I sat down across from Rajat Suri, who dropped out of an MIT doctoral program in chemistry, so he could tell me about his startup, I could practically smell the Next Big Thing in the air. This is, of course, why he wanted me to meet me at this place, but we're not just there for the ambiance.

Suri gestures to a device that I've never seen that's sitting on our table. It sort of looks like a small iPad, maybe a thick Kindle Fire. Presto is its name. The screen shows an animation that says, "Touch me!" with half a dozen different animations. It's a menu and a way to order food and a method for paying the check all in one. The Presto functions like a better, more responsive version of the touchscreen food ordering system on Virgin America.

"I really like the pork buns," he tells me. "I'm a big fan of pork." I ask for another recommendation from Ayers' selection of rice bowls. He suggests the fiery bottom pork bowl with a quail egg on top, one of the restaurant's signature dishes. I love a quail egg, so I agree to order that.

With no instructions, I order the two items through the Presto. Beautifully lit photos let me see what I'm going to get. The UI is intuitive. Within 20 seconds, I've sent my order to the kitchen. Before we'd even finished eating, I swiped my card slightly awkwardly into the built-in payment slot, added a tip, and settled up. I would not say that this machine will blow your mind with its technical capabilities, but that's exactly the point: It just works.

I cannot say for sure that this will be The Future of your restaurant experience, but after talking with Suri, I'm convinced that some sort of automated ordering system will make its way into your dining experiences. And it's not because the technology is cool or whizbang or will draw customers. The real reasons are completely economic.

by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic |  Read more:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge

The Jazz Age novelist’s chronicle of his mental collapse, much derided by his critics, anticipated the rise of autobiographical writing in America

The first readers to comment on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” essays made no pretense to literary criticism. They just wanted to dish—and diss. The dismay of old or former or soon-to-be-former friends came at Fitzgerald fast and furious, along with smack-downs from those critics who bothered to remark on the essays as they appeared in three successive issues of Esquire, in February, March, and April 1936.

John Dos Passos was particularly exercised. “Christ, man,” he wrote to Fitzgerald in October 1936. “How do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff?” The “general conflagration,” presumably, was the Great Depression, but also National Socialism and fascism in Germany and Italy, and the Spanish Civil War, which had ignited in July. “We’re living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history,” Dos Passos steams on. “If you want to go to pieces I think it’s absolutely OK but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich,” the editor of Esquire, who had commissioned the essays.

By the standards of our own über-autobiographical age, with its appetite for revelation, its faith in the “redemptive” payoff of telling all, Fitzgerald’s essays seem decorously vague, cloaked in metaphor rather than disclosure. Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned. The master storyteller isn’t even very narrative, employing drifts of figurative language rather than episodes and scenes, feinting and lunging (mostly feinting) his way through his portrait of a breakdown that left him “cracked like an old plate.”

That Fitzgerald had published these personal essays in a glossy magazine seemed to vex his friends (Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Sara Murphy, the unsigned New Yorker “Talk of the Town” writer—the list goes on) as much as the sentiments themselves. Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s loyal editor and literary agent, were still backing away from the essays as late as 1941, a year after the writer’s death, when Edmund Wilson was shopping around a posthumous collection of his old friend’s incidental nonfiction that included the “Crack-Up” pieces. Wilson admitted to Perkins that he, too, had “hated” the essays when he first read them in Esquire. But “if you read The Crack-Up through,” he argued, “you realize that it is not a discreditable confession but an account of a kind of crisis that many men of Scott’s generation have gone through, and that in the end he sees a way to live by application to his work.” (...)

In the eyes of his friends, Fitzgerald may have broken decorum. But his essays kindled a narrative revolution that continues to simmer in American writing—in the rise of memoir and the appeal of personal essays in daily newspapers, to name only two obvious shape-shifters in publishing. And it is publishing, not only writing, that is at stake here. As John O’Hara wrote to Fitzgerald in a considerably more sanguine letter after reading the essays in Esquire, “I suppose you get comparatively little mail these days that does not dwell … on your Esquire pieces, and I guess few of the writers resist, as I am resisting, the temptation to go into their own troubles for purposes of contrast.”

What Fitzgerald was describing was not “just personal” (as Gatsby says of things that don’t have real value). His misery was native to his time and place. It was cultural. And he knew it: “My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern—yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war.”

Glenway Wescott may have found “little in world literature” like the “Crack-Up” essays, and early readers of the Esquire pieces also seemed to recognize their jarring novelty. But no cultural change happens in a vacuum. Something in the air links change to change, later making evident a pattern, a fundamental shift. One such kindred event: around the time Fitzgerald’s first “Crack-Up” essay was on national newsstands, the first formal Alcoholics Anonymous group was being organized in Alkron, Ohio, making public the fellowship that Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had begun privately at Smith’s house.

by Patricia Hampl, The American Scholar |  Read more:
Photo by Teresa Boardman

Why Don’t We Read About Architecture?

“Buildings are everywhere,” writes Alexandra Lange, “large and small, ugly and beautiful, ambitious and dumb. We walk among them and live inside them but are largely passive dwellers in cities or towers, houses, open spaces, and shops we had no hand in creating.”

Buildings are discussed — indeed aspects of them obsessed upon — but almost exclusively in the context of economics. This building went over budget, that surplus of houses led to the foreclosure crisis, that condo broke the record for residential real estate, etc. To the layman, then, architecture is conveyed as little more than something that costs a lot and causes a lot of grief, rather than something with the potential to enhance our daily lives.

But as the architecture and design critic Lange points out in her new book, “Writing About Architecture,” we need to engage our citizenry in architecture in ways that move from passivity or accusation (i.e., Nimbyism) and to do so we need more … architecture critics.

Of course, the reverse has been occurring over the last decade. You can almost count the number of architectural critics at major newspapers on one hand, and while there’s been an explosion of opinion design and architecture blogs in recent years, they tend to preach to the converted or veer, with few exceptions, toward noncritical celebration or gleeful snark.

When I spoke at the D-Crit program at the School of Visual Arts last fall, many of us agreed that 24/7 media carries some of the blame — it’s hard to be thoughtful when you’re writing five blog posts a day — but there’s no shortage of reasons for the current dearth of insightful architectural criticism (like the current dearth of architectural projects, for instance).

It was Martin Mull (or Steve Martin or Laurie Anderson — check out the discussion of quote provenance here) who said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” To ruin the analogy further, writing about architecture is like mangling language, and far too often the experience of reading architectural writing feels about as pleasurable as tooth extraction.

To wit (with all apologies to the author, who will remain unidentified):

ANALYSIS: a territorial and social fragmentation, a typical “no-man’s land” undergoing the urban exodus, the settlement of the old and inactive persons, the absence of public place in the body scale substituted by the car. PROBLEMATIC: How to attract a new living to facilitate the social and urban mixity?

We can’t entirely blame the perpetrator of this crime, for it is this style of writing that is rewarded within academia. Indecipherability signifies superior intelligence. (The field of architecture is not alone in this — just ask this former Ph.D. grad student, who shudders at sentences she wrote while under the heady spell of such Continental theorists as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault.) And while I’m not suggesting we hew toward the lowest common denominator, architects and those who write about them are doing themselves a disservice by insisting on the impenetrability of discourse.

Why? Compare the above author’s approach with the one taken by the urban idol Jane Jacobs, who was uniquely successful in using her love of her surrounding built environment to make the case for preserving and expanding it. She writes in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) … When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s ….

The advertising man David Ogilvy wrote, “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” It is admittedly unfair to compare these two snippets of writing but I’ll do so to make the point often forgotten about criticism: it should elucidate (not obfuscate) if it has any hope of making an impact. In the end, who would garner support at a city planning meeting? Both authors are talking about the same thing, but it’s evident who is making a better case. The former is worried about the “site condition”; the latter is successful in speaking to the human one.

by Allison Arieff, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Jeremy M. Lange

Ron Hicks, Impulsive
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Finer Dining Through Chemistry

[ed. See also: this previous post on El Bulli.]

El Bulli, known among chefs and the people who follow them as the best restaurant in the world, performed its final dinner service last summer. Since then, the man behind the restaurant has been busy, among other things, teaching a culinary physics course at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In what forum or form we will next experience the food of chef Ferran Adrià is a mystery. But in the meantime, we have reading material and time to sort out just how much the man has altered the international culinary landscape — and which of his innovations will be but beautiful, passing follies, a chef’s bravado that called on ephemera like air and foam to bring him the fame of the world.

Sometime around the year 2002, public consensus conferred upon Adrià the title of Greatest. For little more than the chance to chop his garlic, world-class chefs left their nests and headed to Spain to work at the globe’s most famous restaurant, the place that had pioneered what the chef called avant-garde cuisine. There, Adrià and his staff playfully mixed flavors and ingredients and served them up in unexpected forms, as in an early dish of smoked tuna with gelatin triangles made from tomato, licorice, and pistachio and garnished with figs and pine nuts. In the service of deconstruction, he has forgone carrot soup to serve carrot air with mandarin orange accents (made with the help of a siphon bottle equipped with nitrous oxide cartridges). Another dish, a concentrate of green peas that arrived in a spoon, looked and moved exactly like an egg yolk: it was dinner as trompe l’oeil. International travelers flocked to the tiny town of Roses, where they were told not only what they were eating, but how to eat it. Serving a single strand of spaghetti and parmesan, a waiter might instruct: “Try to do it complete. Put it in your mouth and suck.”

According to Adrià, each year two million requests came in for 8,000 spaces available at El Bulli (which served 50 diners per night, 160 days per year). Not surprisingly, restaurants from all over the world picked up Adrià’s signal that food could be more than nourishment; it could express ideas about form and function. It could be art. Adrià was compared to his compatriots Picasso and Dali, who had lived just a few miles from El Bulli on the Costa Brava.

For El Bulli’s final service, Adrià’s menu stretched beyond even its usual ambitious standards, encompassing 49 courses, starting with a dry martini featuring the restaurant’s trademark spherified olives — a teaspoon of pureed olive wrapped in a thin, transparent oval skin which bursts in the mouth to release its flavour (made with the help of sodium alginate and calcium chloride). It was an appropriate public send-off for chef and restaurant alike. The following night was devoted to family and friends, a grace note to the 20-plus years of Adrià’s tenure at El Bulli.

Since 1987, El Bulli had been closing its doors for six months out of each year since 1987, reopening in the warm months, when Roses swells with tourists. The lengthy breaks provided Adrià with the opportunity to travel, and to research and develop new techniques and new dishes. The generous dose of R&D time is one of the several serendipitous (if expensive) decisions that enabled him to remain the public face of avant-garde cuisine for all these years. Most people have only heard about Adrià’s cooking, or eaten some personalized version of it via one of his many acolytes, such as José Andrés (whose restaurants include Minibar in Washington D.C.) and Wylie Dufresne (of WD-50 in New York). In Chicago, Grant Achatz (Alinea, Next) has gone so far as to create a 20-course menu with each dish a recreation of one that was served by Adrià.

Some new incarnation of El Bulli will take shape over the next two years and perhaps open in 2014 as the El Bulli Foundation. But it won’t be a restaurant, or not solely a restaurant. Even Adrià seems uncertain about the specifics, though reticence may be the real culprit behind the sketchy details. In the absence of El Bulli, however, comes the consolation of several volumes by and about Adrià and the regimen of his acclaimed restaurant. Adriá has published some version of a general catalogue of El Bulli dishes since 1983, a tome that he has expanded yearly since 1987, with exhaustive accounts of new dishes, all the way down to the origins and preparation of each ingredient. The combined general catalogue alone runs to over 2,000 pages at this point. But three recent books — Colman Andrews’s Ferran, Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, and A Day at elBulli by Adrià himself (with his brother Albert and El Bulli co-owner Juli Soler) — aim to broaden the understanding of exactly what Ferran Adrià achieved with El Bulli. One final offering, The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià, presents the chef at his most accessible: a collection of 31 menus of three dishes each, laid out in such detail that even a moderately talented home cook might muddle through.

by John McIntyre, L.A. Review of Books |  Read more:
Galletas de Arroz y Parmesano by Charles Haynes

Ink, Inc.

Tattooing is an art, a craft, and a rare trade that, like kitchen work, is open to both masters of fine arts and industrious hoodlums. Having a tattoo is an affiliation and people whose lives are intertwined with tattoos are apt to discuss them—the permanent gift, the bond between artist and “canvas,”the bloodletting—in quasi-religious terms. Many of them resent attempts to dilute their culture and cash in on their gruff glamour.

It’s getting harder to distinguish between tattoo culture and the mainstream. In the last decade there have been at least five tattoo reality shows and a 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 38 percent of 18 through 29-year-olds have tattoos, compared to 15 percent of baby boomers. During this year’s Super Bowl, a lush black and white commercial took us on a tour of David Beckham’s body art, repurposing an ancient practice to sell underpants.

A few weeks earlier, I’d gone to Washington to learn about the tattoo world and to join it. I’d never wanted a tattoo before, or even found them particularly attractive, but as I started making phone calls it seemed like a minor imposition to understand what I was writing about. “There’s a whole different aspect when you’re in the chair,” an artist named James Cumberland said. “A camaraderie … Having to deal with a little bit of pain.” He convinced me. I thought it would be irresponsible not to get a tattoo.

Practically every weekend, there’s a bland hotel somewhere in America where the inked hordes gather to drink, curse, scare bellboys, and scribble on each other. The second annual D.C. Tattoo Arts Expo took over the Crystal Gateway Marriott in northern Virginia, between Pentagon City and Reagan National Airport. The drafty, labyrinthine pile connects through a tunnel to Crystal City, a famously sterile complex of defense contractor offices, shops and apartments. It was MLK weekend, a few weeks before tattooers start banking their customers’ tax refunds at one hundred and fifty dollars an hour.

Outside the main hall, industry standard brand Eternal Ink displayed hundreds of plastic squirt bottles filled with colored ink. The catalog lists more than one hundred colors. The greens alone included: grass green, lime green, mint green, olive, nuclear green, avocado, spearmint, jungle green, dirty money, seafoam, honeydew, tropical teal, green conc[entrate], and green slime. An add-on set of ten zombie colors counted freshly dead, rigor mortis, decomposed skin, infected skin, and gangrene among the options.

by Alex Halperin, Guernica |  Read more:
Photograph via Flickr by jackace

Joyce Clark, Maui Mangos, 1991
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"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made."

Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
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Image:  Q TRAIN +++ Nigel Van Wieck

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow

Where is Mona?
She's long gone
Where is Mary?
She's taken her along
But they haven't put their mittens on
And there's fifteen feet
of pure white snow?

Where is Michael?
Where is Mark?
Where is Mathew
Now it's getting dark?
Where is John? They are all out back
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow
Would you please put
down that telephone
We're under fifteen feet
of pure white snow

I waved to my neighbour
My neighbour waved to me
But my neighbour
Is my enemy
I kept waving my arms
Till I could not see
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is anybody
Out there please?
It's too quiet in here
And I'm beginning to freeze
I've got icicles hanging
From my knees
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is there anybody here
who feels this low?
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Is it any wonder?
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord

Doctor, Doctor
I'm going mad
This is the worst day
I've ever had
I can't remember
Ever feeling this bad
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow
Where's my nurse
I need some healing
I've been paralysed
By a lack of feeling
I can't even find
Anything worth stealing
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow

Is there anyone else here
who doesn't know?
We're under fifteen feet
of pure white snow

Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Raise your hands up to the sky
Is it any wonder?
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Oh my Lord Oh my Lord
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!
Save Yourself! Help Yourself!

Final Cut

My wife and I have two children, and we love them dearly, dearly, the sleep-stealing, bank-account-depleting little trolls. But some days—when the living room is knee-deep in toys, when my daughter has flushed an apple down the toilet and my son has stripped off his clothes and run into the yard—we halfjokingly say that we can't wait until they become teenagers and ignore us. We can handle the two of them, barely. But a third? Outnumbered, we would have to switch from man-on-man to zone defense, and I can't help but shudder when I imagine a red-faced baby wailing through the night, the bank statements withering further, the walls crayoned, and the laundry hampers reeking of spit-up and poo. An unexpected pregnancy, in other words, would be a nightmare.

That's what happened to our friends. They had an Oops. We all know an Oops. The husband rips through his condom or the wife forgets to take her pill.

Oops. The parents of the Oops always say it was meant to be. They say they can't imagine life without their dear third or fourth or (mercy!) fifth child. But they say these things years later, after the kids are grown, when the memory of sexless and sleepless nights, the financial and emotional panic, have long since faded. When our friends first broke the news about their accidental pregnancy, we told them, "Congratulations," but our smiles trembled at the edges. That same week my wife got on the phone and scheduled my vasectomy. We'd been discussing the idea for months, and I'd finally assented. Think of all the sex we would have! Wild sex! No pregnancy anxiety. No frantic rummaging through the bathroom cabinet for the last nerve-deadening condom. No doublechecking the expiration date stamped on the foil and struggling to unroll the rubber one way, then the other, hoping all the while that the mood won't pass. We'd be able to do it anytime, anywhere. I could step into the shower or push up against her in the produce section at Whole Foods, jog my eyebrows, and say, "You wanna?"

Now that I have a date with a surgeon, an appointment with a knife, shadows have begun to steal across my fantasies of rolling around in the organic lemongrass. I find myself thinking of Cocoa. Cocoa was my childhood dog, a standard poodle with floppy hair. He humped everything in sight—sofas, legs, our cat, Mr. Meow. My parents finally took him to the vet. He returned sad-eyed and tamed, with a scab between his legs that took a long time to heal. A vasectomy isn't a castration, I know. Still, I cannot help but feel that, on some level, I, too, am being disciplined. That I, too, am a bad, bad dog.

It was in a dog that Sir Astley Cooper—in his 1830 Observations on the Structure and Diseases of the Testis—discovered that after an artery and vein were tied, sexual activity no longer resulted in fertilization, though the testes continued to produce sperm. But it wasn't for another sixty years that the vasectomy became regularly prescribed for remedying an enlarged prostate or bladder stones or criminal behavior (a precursor to the eugenics movement during which hundreds of thousands were sterilized worldwide). And it wasn't until the 1970s, after negative ad campaigns about the pill and a feminist demand for greater male responsibility in family planning, that the vasectomy became a more widespread form of birth control.

Today in the United States, one in six men over the age of 35 have been cut. It is the responsible thing to do, the right thing to do. I know this. The prolonged use of birth control pills may increase a woman's risk of cancer. A hysterectomy, along with the standard risks of major surgery, has such long-term psychological and physical risks as depression, hormonal imbalance, sexual pain, osteoporosis, and heart disease. Tubal ligation in women also has a much higher rate of failure (one in every 200 cases as opposed to the vasectomy's one in 2,000). Contradictory as this may seem, by getting a vasectomy, I'm manning up. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

by Benjamin Percy, GQ |  Read more: 
Photo: Martin Kilmas

Impression 2 (by MT…)
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Source: unknown

The Power of Habit

One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American businessman named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation: a minty, frothy toothpaste named “Pepsodent” that, he promised, was going to be huge.

Hopkins, at the time, was one of the nation's most famous advertising executives. He was the ad man who had convinced Americans to buy Schlitz beer by boasting that the company cleaned their bottles “with live steam” (while neglecting to mention that every other company used the same method). He had seduced millions of women into purchasing Palmolive soap by proclaiming that Cleopatra had washed with it, despite the sputtering protests of outraged historians.

But Hopkins' greatest contribution would be helping to create a national toothbrushing habit. Before Pepsodent, almost no Americans brushed their teeth. A decade after Hopkins' advertising campaigns, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a daily ritual for more than half the population. Everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable eventually bragged about a "Pepsodent smile."

I discovered the story of Claude Hopkins a few years ago while reporting my book, The Power of Habit, which explores the science of habit formation. Today, Hopkins is almost totally forgotten. He shouldn't be. Hopkins was among the first to elucidate principles that even now influence how video games are designed, public health campaigns are managed and that explain why some people effortlessly exercise every morning, while others can't pass a box of doughnuts without automatically grabbing a jelly-filled cruller.

So, how did Hopkins start America brushing?

By taking advantage of a quirk in the neurology of habits. It wouldn't be until almost a century later that medical schools and psychology labs would fully understand why habits exist and how they function. Today, we can create and change habits almost like flipping a switch.

But there are historical outliers who seemed to intuitc or accidentally stumble into - these insights before anyone else. Hopkins created a toothbrushing habit by identifying a simple and obvious cue, delivering a clear reward and —most important —by creating a neurological craving.

And craving, it turns out, is what powers a habit.

All habits—no matter how large or small—have three components, according to neurological studies. There's a cue—a trigger for a particular behavior; a routine, which is the behavior itself; and a reward, which is how your brain decides whether to remember a habit for the future. When Hopkins identified tooth film, he found a cue that had existed for eons. Moreover, the reward that Hopkins was promising was hard to resist. Who doesn’t want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent?

Three weeks after the first Pepsodent ad campaign, demand for the toothpaste exploded. There were so many orders that the company couldn’t keep up. In three years, the product went international. Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the top sellers around the globe.

“I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” Hopkins wrote a few years after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was that he had grounded his advertising campaign in two basic rules:

First, find a simple and obvious cue.

Second, clearly define the rewards.

Even today, Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks. They're cited in boardrooms, advertising offices, and business school classrooms.

But that's not the full explanation of why Pepsodent was such a success. There's another rule that even Hopkins, at the time, didn't understand.

by Charles Duhigg, Slate |  Read more:

via:

As Long As They Both Shall Live

Two days from now and 10,000 feet above the Southern California desert, Rex Pemberton will don a wingsuit, leap from a plane, and race toward the earth trailing orange smoke from canisters strapped to his ankles while Melissa Pemberton, one of the world’s best aerobatics pilots, paints a white smoky corkscrew around her husband—two minutes of barnstorming showmanship for thousands of gaping spectators spread out below them.

But first, a moment of marital tension. A screw has worked itself loose, a tiny screw, stainless steel, five millimeters long, one of four securing a sheet of aircraft aluminum across the front left side of the engine. Rex notices the hole, a flaw in his wife’s exquisite plane, as they push it out of the hangar at Pine Mountain Lake Airport, a few hundred yards from their home in the hills outside Yosemite National Park. He taps his finger against the loose corner, and he worries. Engine vibrations have started a hairline crack in the metal. Melissa says she’ll have her mechanics replace the screw at an airport that’s a 15-minute flight away. But he retrieves a screwdriver and tiny screw from the hangar while she watches him, slightly exasperated.

In their garage, Rex often works on his powered paraglider, with its 30-horsepower engine that propels him over these valleys, forests, and mountain lakes at 40 miles per hour. But the $350,000 plane, a sparkling metallic blue Zivko Edge 540, with black flames edged in pink, has much smaller tolerances. “Rex, this isn’t your paraglider,” she says, her soft voice calm but her words coming faster now, betraying her annoyance. “I need you to listen to me when we’re talking about my plane.”

But he’s not really listening. He knows that if the piece breaks on her brief flight, there’s a chance she won’t be able to adjust the prop and may not be able to land. And he knows the odds. In his five years with Melissa, she has lost four close friends and six acquaintances. This season has been a particularly bad one on the air-show circuit. Five performers have died from crashes already, some of them in front of huge crowds, the worst when a modified P-51 Mustang slammed into the audience at the Reno Air Races in September, killing the pilot and eight spectators and injuring 69. Aerobatics are unforgiving. The forces exerted on Melissa’s plane can bend even the thick bolts that hold the engine in place, and a moment of disorientation, a major gust of wind, or a slight overcorrection at the controls can be fatal.

Rex can’t change any of that, but here at least he has the illusion of control. “Just let me see,” he insists, and spins the screw into the engine. “See? It’s the same screw. The exact same screw.”

Melissa relents and climbs into her plane. The prop turns, stutters, and catches, and the engine settles into a deep, throaty rumble. She revs the throttle and roars down the runway, and Rex watches his wife climb into the morning sky.

Every marriage has its unspoken rules, an understanding of needs and desires, and the Pembertons’ is no different, though the stakes are slightly higher.

“I would never tell her to stop because of any fear that she’ll have an accident,” says Rex, 28. “We need to keep each other in check and make sure we’re doing these risky things in the safest way possible but not tell the other to stop, because those are our core values.”

Melissa, 27, agrees. Her husband has made more than 1,300 skydives and 300 BASE jumps. At age 21, he became the youngest Australian to climb Everest, and he recently set his sights on Pakistan’s K2, an objective that had Melissa concerned, though for reasons that had little to do with the technical route to the summit. “It’s one thing to worry about a mountain, but I don’t want him to get kidnapped or blown up,” she says. Still, these are concerns, not ultimatums. “I would never tell him outright, ‘No,’ ” she says. “If he wants to do something, that’s up to him.” Because that’s where they found each other—riding the edge of excess—and why they fell in love in the first place.

by Brian Mockenhaupt, Outside |  Read more:
Photographer: Cody Pickens

The Voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle

[ed. Also Boris and Natasha, Sherman and Mr. Peabody, Dudley Do-Right and Nell. The best children's cartoon series ever.]