Terminal Miami

I had been to Miami exactly one time before I moved here, unwillingly, if also gratefully, as a recession refugee. Departing on March 1, 2010, in what my East Village landlord’s lawyer later referred to as “the dead of night” (it was actually midmorning), I left behind some furniture, a low six figures of debt and most everyone I’d ever met. I carted the books I didn’t think were worth taking across the street to the bookstore, and the booksellers in turn quietly carted the books they thought not worth taking to the trash cans on the northeast corner of St. Mark’s and First Avenue, and so I drove off for the last time amid a mess of flying pages.

Immediately Miami seemed to be about things crashing into things. The woman who, head down, drove round the corner of the parking garage and slammed into the front of my car without so much as braking. The pelican that splat-bounced off the windshield. (There is, it turns out, no amenable city or county hot line to call about a struck pelican.) The star cracks left in the glass by some millionaire’s dazed gardener on a green street in Miami Beach, leaf-blowing pebbles traffic-ward. Beyond the front seat, there was also the news spectacle of the police officer who, trying to impress a woman, drove an all-terrain vehicle over people waiting at the shore for sunrise. On the sides of the roads, there were always fresh wrecks; fenders and hoods and bits everywhere, girls’ faces in their hands. Everyone coming to a near-stop to watch.

I drove to Miami because, conveniently, my car had to get here somehow, but in truth I’d barely flown since one terrible trip between D.C. and California in the early 1990s. Miami made me start to think I’d be better off in the air. Mine was a proud New York car; it had previously seen only snow and the vicious potholes of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, yet once on the road here we were forced to dodge an actual oven that fell off an old pickup truck on I-95, a road I still think of as the way to New Haven. I live a few blocks from the end of that interstate, and sometimes considered, when driving over to Walgreens for a pack of Winstons, just continuing on to the safer territory of the north. (Besides, I still haven’t completely unpacked the trunk.)

If this seems like an awful lot of things about cars, it’s because Miami is about transport. If it’s not the car, it’s the boat. And if it’s not the boat, it’s planes. Except for the Seminole and the Miccosukee, most everyone here is from somewhere else (although not the Cubans, as Cuba’s more like our Staten Island). Most everyone else seems like a stray. The billboards advertise the new nonstops to Madrid; almost half the passengers at the airport are bound outside the United States; English is the first language of one-quarter of the county’s population. Also, the other day I met my first Filipino Jew — though to be fair, he came by way of New York.

But beyond the disorder and collisions of far-off strangers meeting all-too-suddenly, there are points of order: the long banks of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the green waters of the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, America’s first undersea park. The serene, open-air Bal Harbour mall, quietly crammed with Loro Piana and Bottega Veneta, has some of the highest-earning retail space per square foot in the United States. An hour southwest, across miles of the forgotten and excluded (picture the map of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” particularly the abandoned warehouse district and the freeway-locked Overtown, which were modeled on this part of the city), you find the relaxing five-acre-minimum plots of Redland. There it’s all free-roaming dogs and peacocks and horses amid mangoes and avocados. As you go south it becomes even more California, what with the prisons, migrant workers and South Florida’s greatest tortilla shop.

But besides the divide between rich and not rich, there are no extremes here: not a hill, not a valley. It’s flat straight across from the beach to the long straight road on the edge of town, where everything stops and devolves into grassland and turtles and cedars and great blue herons. (And wherever you go, there’s WVUM, which hosts Vamos a la Playa, the exceptionally smooth, electro-suave, beach-sexy sounds of Laura of Miami, one of the truly great D.J.’s of our time.)

by Choire Sicha, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Patrick Leger

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

[ed. Such beautiful books. Before the internet, this is where the joy and serendipity of surfing for information resided.]

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.  (...)

The Britannica, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag. It is frequently bought by embassies, libraries and research institutions, and by well-educated, upscale consumers who felt an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they are bought.

The 2010 edition had more than 4,000 contributors, including Arnold Palmer (who wrote the entry on the Masters tournament) and Panthea Reid, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University and author of the biography “Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf” (who wrote about Virginia Woolf).

by Julie Bosman, NY Times |  Read more:   
Photo: Ángel Franco/The New York Times

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Why Finish Books?

“Sir—” remarked Samuel Johnson with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book—“Sir, do you read books through?” Well, do we? Right through to the end? And if we do, are we the suckers Johnson supposed one must be to make a habit of finishing books?

Schopenhauer, who thought and wrote a great deal about reading, is on Johnson’s side. Life is “too short for bad books” and “a few pages” should be quite enough, he claims, for “a provisional estimate of an author’s productions.” After which it is perfectly okay to bail out if you’re not convinced.

But I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. “I’m a teenager,” remarks one sad contributor to a book review website. “I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.” One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.

But what about those good books? Because Johnson certainly wasn’t just referring to the bad when he tossed out that provocation. Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only half way through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?

Kafka remarked that beyond a certain point a writer might decide to finish his or her novel at any moment, with any sentence; it really was an arbitrary question, like where to cut a piece of string, and in fact both The Castle and America are left unfinished, while The Trial is tidied away with the indecent haste of someone who has decided enough is enough. The Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda was the same; both his major works, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana and Acquainted with Grief, are unfinished and both are considered classics despite the fact that they have complex plots that would seem to require endings which are not there.

Other writers deploy what I would call a catharsis of exhaustion: their books present themselves as rich and extremely taxing experiences that simply come to an end at some point where writer, reader and indeed characters, all feel they’ve had enough.

by Tim Parks, NY Review of Books |  Read more:
Burt Glinn/Magnum Photo

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Apple Wins Patent for iWallet

In May of 2010 we were surprised to see Apple's first iWallet patent officially surface. In that year we witnessed a steady stream of Near Field Communication based patents that kick started the iWallet trend. Ever since that time we've archived these patents under the category of "iWallet-NFC Related." Today, Apple has been granted a major iWallet patent and it's one that has never been reported on before. Apple's patent reviews credit card transaction rules and shows us that the credit card companies will be sending statements directly to your iTunes account. The iWallet project just became a little more real today, and for many, it can't come soon enough. Who knows, perhaps one day Apple's iWallet will rule the world: the financial world that is.

via: Patently Apple |  Read more:

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Warning: A New Who's Who of Awful Times to Invest

Last week, the estimated return/risk profile of the S&P 500 fell to the worst 2.5% of all observations in history on our measures. This is not a runaway bull market. Rather, it is a market that again stands near the highs of an extended but volatile trading range. I am convinced that the breakdown of the market from this range has been deferred only through repeated and extraordinary central bank actions.

Importantly, the market is again characterized by an extreme set of conditions that we've previously associated with a "Who's Who of Awful Times to Invest." The rare instances we've seen this syndrome historically are reviewed in that previous weekly comment. They include the 1972-73 and 1987 market peaks, and several instances since 1998. The more recent instances of this syndrome are shown by the blue bands on the chart below. Each of the separate instances in the 1998-2000 period were followed in short order by intermediate market declines of between 10-18%, and of course, ultimately by a plunge of more than 50% in 2000-2002. Likewise, the 2007 instance was followed in short order by a correction of nearly 10%, and a few months later by a plunge of more than 50% in 2007-2009. The more recent instances in 2010 and 2011 have also been followed by substantial market selloffs in each case, though with a longer lag in 2011 (due to ongoing QE2 operations). Aggressive monetary policy did not prevent the ultimate declines, though massive central bank interventions have undoubtedly helped to short-circuit the more violent follow-through that occurred in 1973-1974, 1987, 2000-2002, and 2007-2009, at least to-date. 

A word of caution. While a few of the highlighted instances were followed by immediate weakness, it is more typical for these conditions to persist for several weeks and even longer in some cases (for example, the wide blue strip in late-2010 and early 2011). When we look at longer-term charts like the one above, it's easy to see how fleeting the intervening gains turned out to be in hindsight. However, it's easy to underestimate how utterly excruciating it is to remain hedged during these periods when you actually have to live through day-after-day of advances and small incremental new highs that are repeatedly greeted with enthusiastic headlines and arguments that "this time it's different." For us, it's particularly uncomfortable on days when our stocks don't perform in line with the overall market, or when the "implied volatility" declines on our option hedges. 

by John P. Hussman,Ph.D, Hussman Funds |  Read more:

New Worries About Sleeping Pills

Talk about sleepless nights.

Patients taking prescription sleep aids on a regular basis were nearly five times as likely as non-users to die over a period of two and a half years, according to a recent study. Even those prescribed fewer than 20 pills a year were at risk, the researchers found; heavy users also were more likely to develop cancer.

Unsurprisingly, the findings, published online in the journal BMJ, have caused a quite a stir. Americans filled some 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, up from 47 million in 2006, according to IMS Health, a health care services company. Panicked patients have been calling doctors’ offices seeking reassurance; some others simply quit the pills cold turkey.

Some experts were quick to point out the study’s shortcomings. The analysis did not prove that sleeping pills cause death, critics noted, only that there may be a correlation between the two. And while the authors suggested the sleeping pills were a factor in the deaths, those who use sleep aids tend as a group to be sicker than those who don’t use them. The deaths may simply be a reflection of poorer health.

Still, the findings underscore concern about the exploding use of sleeping pills. Experts say that many patients, especially the elderly, should exercise more caution when using sleep medications, including the non-benzodiazepine hypnotics so popular today, like zolpidem (brand name Ambien), eszopiclone (Lunesta) and zaleplon (Sonata).

“If someone comes to me on a sleeping pill, usually my tactic is to try to take them off it,” said Dr. Nancy A. Collop, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and director of the Emory Sleep Center in Atlanta, who was an investigator in a clinical trial of Lunesta five years ago.

The non-benzodiazepine sedative hypnotics, on the market since the late 1980s, are believed to be safer and less likely to be abused than benzodiazepines or barbiturates. But many people take them for years, even though most are approved only for short-term use and generally their safety and effectiveness have not been evaluated beyond several weeks in clinical trials. (One exception is Lunesta, which was tested for up to six months.)

Some data suggest that the medications do not even do what they promise all that well, said Dr. Steven Woloshin, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

by Roni Caryn Rabin, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Jon Han

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Digital Willpower: Will Apps Make You a Better Person?

An ethicist considers the ramifications of using apps to improve our habits. And also whether willpower as we normally think about it even exists.

In article after article, one theme emerges from the media coverage of people's relationships with our current set of technologies: Consumers want digital willpower. App designers in touch with the latest trends in behavioral modification--nudging, the quantified self, and gamification--and good old-fashioned financial incentive manipulation, are tackling weakness of will. They're harnessing the power of payouts, cognitive biases, social networking, and biofeedback. The quantified self becomes the programmable self.

Skeptics might believe while this trend will grow as significant gains occur in developing wearable sensors and ambient intelligence, it doesn't point to anything new. After all, humans have always found creative ways to manipulate behavior through technology--whips, chastity belts, speed bumps, and alarm clocks all spring to mind. So, whether or not we're living in unprecedented times is a matter of debate, but nonetheless, the trend still has multiple interesting dimensions. Let's start here: Individuals are turning ever more aspects of their lives into managerial problems that require technological solutions. We have access to an ever-increasing array of free and inexpensive technologies that harness incredible computational power that effectively allows us to self-police behavior everywhere we go. As pervasiveness expands, so does trust. Our willingness to delegate tasks to trusted software has increased significantly.

Individuals (and, as we'll see, philosophers) are growing increasingly realistic about how limited their decision-making skills and resolve are. Moreover, we're not ashamed to discuss these limits publicly. Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we're doing, whom we're doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.

Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become "design space." We're now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today's apps are more harbinger than endpoint.

by Evan Selinger, The Atlantic |  Read more: 
Image: Shaun Foster.

Till Math Do Us Part: Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory

In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up?

Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).

Now, with more five years of follow-up data, we can report firm empirical support for the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory.

The 2006 equation correctly predicted doom for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock; and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. It also forecast that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett would probably not make it to their 15th anniversary, in December 2012; so far, they’re still married, but gossip columns are rife with reports of a pending split.

On a happier note, the 2006 equation identified two couples with a good chance to make it to their fifth anniversary, in 2010: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, and Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso. Sure enough, they made it (and are still married).

As impressive as these results are, we believe even more scientific progress is possible. We have refined the equation by drawing on recent data as well as the research conducted by Garth in his fiendishly clever new book, “Brain Trust: 93 Top Scientists Reveal Lab-Tested Secrets to Surfing, Dating, Dieting, Gambling, Growing Man-Eating Plants, and More!”

While the 2006 equation did a good job over all of identifying which couples were most likely to divorce, some of the specific predictions proved too pessimistic. Because Demi was so famous — and much more famous than Ashton — we gave their marriage little chance of surviving a year, but they didn’t split until 2011. We were similarly bearish on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes (because of his fame, his two failed marriages and their age gap), but they’re still together.

What went right with them — and wrong with our equation? Garth, a self-professed über-geek, has crunched the numbers and discovered a better way to gauge the toxic effects of celebrity. Whereas the old equation measured fame by counting the millions of Google hits, the new equation uses a ratio of two other measures: the number of mentions in The Times divided by mentions in The National Enquirer.

“This is a major improvement in the equation,” Garth says. “It turns out that overall fame doesn’t matter as much as the flavor of the fame. It’s tabloid fame that dooms you. Sure, Katie Holmes had about 160 Enquirer hits, but she had more than twice as many NYT hits. A high NYT/ENQ ratio also explains why Chelsea Clinton and Kate Middleton have better chances than the Kardashian sisters.”

by John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:

Fun After 40 (Miles Per Gallon)

Ask the hipster waiting in line for a new iPad. Buyers and critics alike are easily seduced — sometimes too easily — by the new.

It’s no different with cars. Last year, a rare battle of the welterweights broke out. Never before, it seemed, had so many new compact models swaggered into showrooms. The Ford Focus, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Chevy Cruze and Nissan Versa were all brand-new or completely redesigned. Which one would win the compact crown?

Yet while all eyes were focused on the main event, the Mazda 3 was in training. It now comes to market not as a stem-to-stern redesign, like those competitors, but with a transformative new engine and a pair of exceptional new transmissions.

Although the Mazda arrived relatively late, it turns out to be the life of the party. Long the sportiest, most rewarding car to drive in its class, the 3 is now the only one that effortlessly tops 40 miles per gallon in real-world driving.

Let’s repeat that: The Mazda 3 is the best performer in the class, and it has the best mileage. That’s a pretty unbeatable combination.

Since the 1970s, of course, Mazda has worked that niche of affordable Japanese performance, enjoying hits like the Miata roadster, but never quite breaking into the big time. Fuel economy took a back seat, as with Mazda’s prodigiously thirsty, rotary-engine RX sports cars.

But with regulators circling and a 35 m.p.g. standard brewing, there’s no longer any place to hide. Mazda says its new suite of technologies, collectively called Skyactiv, will raise its fleetwide mileage by 30 percent by 2015 with no need for an expensive hybrid system.

by Lawrence Ulrich, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Mazda North America

Portishead

Michael Parkes
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A prickly porcupine, arched with quills at the ready to greet a prowling leopard took top honors in the 2012 BP World Ice Art Championships Multi Block Classic competition at the George Horner Ice Park.

The work, titled “Prickly Reception,” is the masterpiece of a four-member Japanese team led by Junichi Nakamara, a master ice artist who also placed first with a partner in the single block competition judged last week.

The Saturday night awards ceremony culminated the 132-hour competition, which ended Friday evening.

For six days, 19 teams of two to four sculptors, using chain saws, chisels, drills, hairdryers, irons and handmade tools, hewed fantastical, artistic forms and figures from 4-feet-by-6-feet-by-3-feet blocks of solid ice, some sculpting around the clock.

by Mary Beth Smetzer, Fairbanks Daily News Miner |  Read more:
Image: Sam Harrel

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Last Fling of an Octogenarian

Where I grew up, there lived a man named David. He drove a Jaguar, spoke with a BBC accent and dressed only ever in a suit and tie. His air was patrician, which disguised — perhaps this was the point — the fact that as a child he was sent to England from South Africa by a wayward mother and brought up, modestly, by strangers.

Forty years my senior, David at some point turned numerically old, but his energy never dimmed. His business engagements continued, and he jogged barechested in the rain. His beloved wife, however, developed Alzheimer’s. Over time, the disease sealed her world from his and relegated her to a nursing home, where David visited her often, convinced that something still passed between them.

And then, not so long ago, David developed prostate cancer.

Disdainful of impediments, David did not take his condition seriously, and it eventually became certain it would kill him. He continued to live as before, but the physical decline began, at length, to unfold.

Last July I went to visit David at his home with my partner, Monica. He answered the door gaily in his suit and tie; he kissed Monica gallantly and led us to glasses of Champagne. We talked about the state of the world. David was enjoying himself, and still did not look his 81 years.

Finally I said, “I hear things aren’t going so well for you.”

“Not so well as they used to, Rana. I have all this external plumbing now under my suit, which makes life a bit harder. But I’m still working, still getting about. When you get to my age, you know you’re crawling toward the thin end of the branch. At some point it has to break.”

A few weeks after this, my father called me, agitated.

David had telephoned him at 6 o’clock that morning. He rushed across the road to discover David prostrate on the kitchen floor, where he had been lying for six hours, waiting for a decent time to call.

David was a full head taller than my father, who, 73 himself, could not lift him. My mother came to help and, over the next hour, they heaved David up the stairs. David himself could offer nothing: he was physically spent, his limbs shook violently and his eyes were wide with horror. All his sacks burst open during the climb, covering the stairs in urine and feces.

“He’s such a proud man,” wept my father on the phone. “I think his heart broke today.”

It was true. David went into a nursing home the next day, became rapidly delirious, and soon after, he died.

When I think of him now, I cannot forget a story he told during that final encounter.

David frequently hosted meetings in a particular hotel. Over time he became friendly with the hotel receptionist, and one day, in the February before his death, he invited her out to lunch. She was 37.

by Rana Dasgupta, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Holly Wales

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