Extreme Makeover

The story behind the story of Lawrence v. Texas.

In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation. On the night of September 17, 1998, someone made a phone call to the police, warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in an apartment just outside Houston. A clutch of sheriff’s deputies stormed the apartment, and found no gun, but they arrested John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner for having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. And, in an unlikely series of legal twists, the arrests of Lawrence and Garner became a vehicle for challenging old anti-sodomy laws that were used solely to shame and stigmatize gay couples. Lawrence and Garner were arrested for simply doing what loving couples do.

The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word “relationship” eleven times.

That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex? What if, in the end, Lawrence v. Texas was less a whodunnit than a who didn’t? And, if there was no sex, let alone an intimate relationship, in John Lawrence’s apartment that night, how did the case come to be about both?

by Dahlia Lithwick, New Yorker |  Read more:
ILLUSTRATION: Laurent Parienty

The Sugar Daddy Recession

Rian is offering a “monthly allowance” for a “sweet and caring [girl] who appreciates all I do for her.” He’s in his 30s, works in IT and earns good money — so how about $1,000 dollars a month if the sex works out?

He’s not looking for a “professional.” Liam wants to pay for “cuddles” and “fun” from a “hard-up” student. Call it what you like — an arrangement, a delicate excuse for sex work or modern love at its most upfront — there are hundreds of thousands of men all over the world looking for it, and as the job market explodes, more and more women are desperate enough to take them up on it. The women call themselves sugar babies; men like Rian are known as sugar daddies.

For me, it all started with an innocent bit of apartment hunting. Scrolling through online listings for only slightly bedbug-infested sublets in the Bronx last year, I noticed several offers of free room and board “for the right girl.” Wealthy, professional middle-aged men — or people pretending to be wealthy middle-aged professionals — were advertising rooms in their houses for “students” or other young women “having difficulty meeting their costs.” In exchange for free rent, an appropriately pretty and poor girl would need offer sex, affection — and perhaps a little housework.

In the investigative spirit, I decided to reply to some of these “sugar daddies.” Using a dummy email address and the handle gigglesandsparkles86, I pretended to be a hard-up student, and painted a broad-brushstroke picture of a naive, bookish, ingenue, the sort of girl who likes kittens and bubbles and walks in the rain — and exists mostly in the imaginations of lonely men on the Internet or Zooey Deschanel sitcoms. I kept the details brief — “Amy” was 25, like me, a literature student finding it hard to make ends meet, and interested in more details about the arrangement. I had her respond to every ‘”sugar daddy” ad on Craigslist New York and Craigslist London on three separate days. When necessary, I sent a picture loaned by one of my prettiest and furthest-away friends, explicitly asking her for a shot in which all trace of human complexity is hidden behind hair and sunglasses. It took approximately three minutes for the emails to start flooding in.

by Laurie Penny, Salon |  Read more:
Photo: Victoria Andreas via Shutterstock

Priscilla Heine
via:

Relax

A year ago, the Argentinian surfer Jorgelina "Lina" Reyero spent the day at Wategos Beach in Byron Bay, Australia, with a camera attached to her board. Rest Your Eyes production company then "glued up the tapes for your viewing pleasure." (Soundtrack: Fleet Foxes, "Mykonos.")

via: The Hairpin

Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

“In my view, health is a business in the United States in quite a different way than it is elsewhere,” says Tom Sackville, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government and now directs the IFHP. “It’s very much something people make money out of. There isn’t too much embarrassment about that compared to Europe and elsewhere.”

There is a simple reason health care in the United States costs more than it does anywhere else: The prices are higher.

That may sound obvious. But it is, in fact, key to understanding one of the most pressing problems facing our economy. In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.

There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, “it’s the prices, stupid.”

As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians.

“The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do,” they concluded. “This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services.”

On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else.

Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.

by Ezra Klein, Washington Post |  Read more:
Image via:

Stone hut at 14,000 ft in Pheriche, Nepal approaching Mt. Everest.

Houseboat on a beach in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

via: Cabin Porn

Does Couples Therapy Work?

We've all had that horrible experience: you throw a party or invite a couple over for dinner, and they start fighting, right there in front of you — the character assassination, the barely controlled anger, the neurotic transference of their cooled sexual attraction onto, say, the hygiene of the family dog, all of which makes you want to fake choking and hide. Surely bearing witness to couples’ quarrels feels less bad to the pros, those credentialed and compensated marriage and family therapists whose job it is to help significant others work through issues and pain?

“Oh, no,” says Terry Real, a prominent psychologist and one of a growing number of family therapists speaking out about how couples therapy feels from their chairs. “It’s so much worse.” At the dinner table, Dr. Real explains, you’re just a bystander, collateral damage. In a therapy office, he says, “You’re supposed to do something about it.”

The fact that couples therapy stresses out therapists has long been an open secret. The field, however, seems to have decided that now would be an appropriate time for its practitioners to address their feelings and vent. It started with the November/December issue of the trade magazine The Psychotherapy Networker and its cover package, “Who’s Afraid of Couples Therapy?”

“It’s widely acknowledged that couples therapy is the most challenging,” says Richard Simon, the magazine’s editor. “The stakes are high. You’re dealing with volatility. There are often secrets. We were just trying to make explicit something people who’ve done couples therapy already know: You often feel confused, at odds with a least one of your patients, out of control.”

Part of the problem is that the kind of person who tends to become a therapist — empathic, sensitive, calm, accepting — is generally not the kind of person who is a good couples therapist. “The traditional, passive uh-huh, uh-huh is useless,” Dr. Real says. “You have to like action. To manage marital combat, a therapist needs to get in there, mix it up with the client, be a ninja. This is intimidating.”

“It’s frightening to be faced with the force of two strong individuals as they are colliding,” he says.

Peter Pearson and Ellyn Bader, psychologists and founders of the Couples Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., which offers both therapy and training for therapists, describe the experience of counseling high-conflict couples in equally violent if metaphorical terms, as “like piloting a helicopter in a hurricane.”

by Elizabeth Weil, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Koren

Days Are Numbered for Unlimited Mobile Data Plans

In Indonesia, nearly a third of the population is younger than 15 years old. So Telkomsel, the leading mobile operator in the country, offers a data plan called FlexiChatting for customers who want to do just one thing: gain access to and update Twitter and Facebook accounts on their cellphones.

Tailored mobile data plans like the one in Indonesia may soon become the rule.

Telecommunications executives in Europe and the United States say that offering plans designed for heavy users of social networks or, for example, video, will allow more efficient use of overstressed wireless networks and make those who use the networks the most pay for that use.

“We are moving into a phase of microsegmentation,” said Hans Vestberg, chief executive of Ericsson, the leading maker of mobile networking equipment, during an interview at the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest annual convention, held in Barcelona last week.

“This is going to have a direct effect on data plans around the world,” he said. “Without more efficient use of networks, the vast majority of people on this planet will be cut off from the Internet.”

Over the past two years, most mobile operators around the world have abandoned the unlimited data plans used at the outset of the mobile Internet. In their place, operators have adopted plans that tie data download limits to prices — the more you download, the more you pay.

But such tiered plans are probably only a transition toward a new way of charging for mobile data that will be much more exact, down to the kilobyte, and often tied to the destination of the Web browser.

Rising demand for mobile data, accelerated by the adoption of smartphones, is putting a strain on most of the world’s mobile networks and operators, even those that have invested billions of dollars in capacity and speed.

One billion people, or one in four cellphone users in the world, have mobile broadband subscriptions, according to Ericsson. By 2016, the number of mobile broadband users is expected to increase fivefold, as less expensive smartphones come on the market.

by Kevin J. O'Brien, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo via: BioScholar

Whatever Happened to Ted Turner?

[ed. Fine and somewhat sad article about another famous entrepreneur that changed the world.] 

"Isn’t that the thinnest billionaire’s wallet you ever saw?" Ted Turner gloats on a drizzling day in New York. "I’m really proud of it.”

He holds out the wallet, a slender, black, rather unpretentious affair, as this reporter cranes for a closer look, neglecting to mention I’ve never seen a billionaire’s wallet before. It contains Turner’s driver’s license, two credit cards, lists of his appointments for the next couple of days (he doesn’t use e-mail), a few phone numbers and about $1,000 in cash — though what on earth for, he doesn’t say, since he never shops.

The tycoon-turned-philanthropist has removed the wallet from his blazer to show me a printed card with his "11 Voluntary Initiatives," an oddly naive reinvention of the Ten Commandments that he concocted some 15 years ago, including such vows as "I promise to care for Planet Earth and all living things thereon, especially my fellow beings."

He leans forward, adamant about reading each one. "Listen, these are important,” he insists. "I worked on them for a long time."

It’s a rare burst of energy from this man who once epitomized it. At age 73, there’s almost no trace of the frenetic, hyper-kinetic mogul once known as the “Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous." His antics (from keeping a pet alligator as a student to almost losing his life in a 1968 sailing race) and innovative empire-building (turning a tiny TV station into a nation-spanning “superstation" and launching the first global TV news network, CNN) have made him the stuff of legend, putting his present absence from the media scene in stark relief.

Without him, we wouldn’t have an all-cartoon channel or an all-movie channel — maybe not even cable television itself, with all its glorious target programming, its 24-hour sports, passionate punditry and unreal reality.

"He’s a genius," says former CNN president Tom Johnson. "He was exceptionally important in the media landscape. We shall not look upon Ted Turner’s kind again."

Even his onetime friend, former Time Warner chief Gerald Levin, who ousted him in a putsch that severed their relationship, acknowledges: “Some people have transcendent notions about changing the world. Ted believed, in his unstoppable fashion, that he could — and did. He was and is maddeningly gifted with a spark of genius.”

Many pundits expected that spark would help him outlast his older rivals (Viacom and CBS Corp. chairman Sumner Redstone, 88, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, 80) at the summit of the media. But unlike them, he has moved on, giving up the executive life to "save the world,” as he puts it, an endeavor that began with his unprecedented $1 billion gift in support of the United Nations in 1997. This, along with other philanthropies he’s launched, has been his mandate for much of the past decade — more than a mandate, a mission. That he made the best choice for the world seems certain; whether he made the best choice for himself is less clear.

"He really misses it a lot,” says his daughter, Laura Turner Seydel, 50, chairman of the board of the Captain Planet Foundation, referring to his role at Time Warner. "It was his baby. I think he’d still be there if he’d not totally gotten screwed."

by Stephen Galloway, Hollywood Reporter |  Read more: 

Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts

In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert. But, as Susan Cain argues in this passionate talk, introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated.

Drop-Cloth Suit

This "drop cloth suit" was envisioned by artist Hugh O'Rourke and tailored by Sarah Bahr by cutting a pattern out of a well-used, well-loved drop cloth and tailoring appropriately.

I had the great pleasure of collaborating with fellow artist and friend Hugh O'Rourke on a super fun project. Hugh is a painter and sculptor here in NYC, you can view more of his work here. We met during my thesis art exhibit at NYU, as he works at the 80WSE gallery where I exhibited my installation. He knew my passion for sewing clothing and asked me to collaborate with him in making a suit out of his drop cloths from his studio. The idea of the suit came from famous artist Joseph Beuys' own sculpture Felt Suit.

 by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Drop Cloth Suit (via Craft)

In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books

[ed. An amazing man. What if everyone, by work or hobby, made more of an effort to better the world in whatever capacity they could?]

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age.

Destined for immortality one day last week were “American Indian Policy in the 20th Century,” “All New Crafts for Halloween,” “The Portable Faulkner,” “What to Do When Your Son or Daughter Divorces” and “Temptation’s Kiss,” a romance.

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too.

“We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”

Mr. Kahle had the idea for the physical archive while working on the Internet Archive, which has digitized two million books. With a deep dedication to traditional printing — one of his sons is named Caslon, after the 18th-century type designer — he abhorred the notion of throwing out a book once it had been scanned. The volume that yielded the digital copy was special.

And perhaps essential. What if, for example, digitization improves and we need to copy the books again?

“Microfilm and microfiche were once a utopian vision of access to all information,” Mr. Kahle noted, “but it turned out we were very glad we kept the books.”

An obvious model for the repository is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is buried in the Norwegian permafrost and holds 740,000 seed samples as a safety net for biodiversity. But the repository is also an outgrowth of notions that Mr. Kahle, 51, has had his entire career.

“There used to be all these different models of what the Internet was going to be, and one of them was the great library that would offer universal access to all knowledge,” he said. “I’m still working on it.”

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Lianne Milton for The New York Times

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

via:

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
via: