Thursday, March 15, 2012
Pot Activists vs. Pot Activists
Every 53 minutes, someone in Washington State gets arrested for pot. That could be a thing of the past before the year is out. Initiative 502, on the November ballot, is the whole shebang: legalization, taxation, and regulation of marijuana. We're not just talking about making pot possession punishable by, say, a $100 fine, like Massachusetts did in 2008. Instead, I-502 would remove all penalties for adults 21 and older who possess up to an ounce of marijuana. It would also license pot agriculture, allow trucks to drive around distributing pot like beer, and permit stores to sell pot over the counter.
No state has ever done this. Passing I-502 would put Washington State at the forefront of the national movement to finally end pot prohibition. (The 10,000 annual pot arrests in Washington State are just a sliver of the 853,838 arrests in the United States, where there's one pot bust every 37 seconds.) And if current polling can be believed, I-502 will pass. In January, SurveyUSA found that 51 percent of likely November voters in this state support legalizing and taxing marijuana, while only 41 percent oppose it (8 percent are undecided). A poll two months earlier by the same firm found it passing with 57 percent of the voters. This is also a presidential election year in which a statewide gay-marriage referendum will appear on the ballot, drawing out more of the young, progressive voters who pollsters say are inclined to approve pot legalization.
In nearly all respects—from setting specific new penalties for driving while intoxicated to placing excise taxes at each stage of production—I-502 copies the template we use for alcohol. And unlike other failed pot initiatives that have come before, heralded by pot activists with little money, this campaign has national funding and a credible phalanx of backers. The initiative's sponsor, New Approach Washington, has raised more than $1.1 million thus far and is led by former US Attorney John McKay, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes, travel icon Rick Steves, and former health department officials and bar association presidents. The campaign is managed by ACLU of Washington's Alison Holcomb, a former marijuana defense attorney, and it has the financing of out-of-state billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis.
"This has been a reformer's wet dream from 3,000 miles away on K Street," says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), sitting in his office in Washington, DC. He says that NORML has endorsed dozens of initiatives since it was founded in 1970—most of them failed, of course—but that this initiative's combination of leaders gives it an unprecedented shot at winning. "I have never seen a better assembled public-relations effort, a better group of local community leaders," St. Pierre says.
But there's a hitch.
"Despite all those good things I just said," St. Pierre warns, "the one thing that stands out in Washington is that there wasn't sufficient buy-in from the existing and important grassroots community."
It's true: The groups that traditionally oppose legalization—conservatives and cops—are not the ones leading the campaign to kill I-502. The people leading the campaign to kill I-502 are, paradoxically, other pot activists—specifically, pot activists with ties to the medical marijuana community: dispensary owners, medical marijuana lawyers, medical marijuana patients, medical pot trade magazines, doctors who give medical marijuana authorizations, etc.
by Dominic Holden, The Stranger | Read more:
Photo: Kelly O
The Man Who Broke Atlantic City
Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
Don Johnson finds it hard to remember the exact cards. Who could? At the height of his 12-hour blitz of the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, last April, he was playing a hand of blackjack nearly every minute.
Dozens of spectators pressed against the glass of the high-roller pit. Inside, playing at a green-felt table opposite a black-vested dealer, a burly middle-aged man in a red cap and black Oregon State hoodie was wagering $100,000 a hand. Word spreads when the betting is that big. Johnson was on an amazing streak. The towers of chips stacked in front of him formed a colorful miniature skyline. His winning run had been picked up by the casino’s watchful overhead cameras and drawn the close scrutiny of the pit bosses. In just one hand, he remembers, he won $800,000. In a three-hand sequence, he took $1.2 million.
The basics of blackjack are simple. Almost everyone knows them. You play against the house. Two cards are placed faceup before the player, and two more cards, one down, one up, before the dealer. A card’s suit doesn’t matter, only its numerical value—each face card is worth 10, and an ace can be either a one or an 11. The goal is to get to 21, or as close to it as possible without going over. Scanning the cards on the table before him, the player can either stand or keep taking cards in an effort to approach 21. Since the house’s hand has one card facedown, the player can’t know exactly what the hand is, which is what makes this a game.
As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.
He was neither nervous nor excited. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He is a veteran player. Little interferes with his concentration. He doesn’t get rattled. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray.
The house’s hand showed an upturned five. Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. He was allowed to double down—to double his bet—on any hand, so when he was dealt a three on the first of his hands, he doubled his bet on that one, to $200,000. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. When he was dealt a three and a two on the next two hands, he says, he doubled down on those, for a total wager of $800,000.
It was the dealer’s turn. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. Johnson called the game—in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. Johnson won all four hands.
Johnson didn’t celebrate. He didn’t even pause. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. He was just getting started.
by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic | Read more:
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.
It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they'd be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, "robo-signed" evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn't ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.
But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it's also far too corrupt to survive.
All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Bank of America's share price has plunged into the single digits, and the bank faces battles in courtrooms all over America to avoid paying back the hundreds of billions it stole from everyone in sight. Its credit rating, already downgraded to a few rungs above junk status, could plummet with the next bad analyst report, causing a frenzied rush to the exits by creditors, investors and stockholders – an institutional run on the bank.
They're in deep trouble, but they won't die, because our current president, like the last one, apparently believes it's better to project a false image of financial soundness than to allow one of our oligarchic banks to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles. Then, in February, the Justice Department's so-called foreclosure settlement, which will supposedly provide $26 billion in relief for ripped-off homeowners, actually rewarded the bank with a legal waiver that will allow it to escape untold billions in lawsuits. And this month the Fed will release the results of its annual stress test, in which the bank will once again be permitted to perpetuate its fiction of solvency by grossly overrating the mountains of toxic loans on its books. At this point, the rescue effort is so sweeping and elaborate that it goes far beyond simply gouging the tax dollars of millions of struggling families, many of whom have already been ripped off by the bank – it's making the government, and by extension all of us, full-blown accomplices to the fraud.
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Me Who Knew It
I was in my late thirties before it struck me that there was something odd about the tableau I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a burgundy moquette; patterned carpet; windows looking out onto the brick wall of the offices opposite. My father looks like my father in pictures I have of him. I look like … well, actually I don’t have any pictures of me at that age. But I’m sure I looked pretty much like the memory I can call up at will. It’s not particularly interesting as a memory. Nothing special is happening. It could be a painting, or a photograph, except that I shift about as a child does sitting on her father’s knee. Here’s the thing, though: I can see the entire picture. I can, you may have noticed, see myself. My observation point is from the top of the wall opposite where we are sitting, just below the ceiling, looking down across the room towards me and my father in the chair. I can see me clearly, but what I can’t do is position myself on my father’s knee and become a part of the picture, even though I am in it. I can’t in other words look out at the room from my place on the chair. How can that be a memory? And if it isn’t, what is it? When I think about my childhood, that is invariably one of the first ‘memories’ to spring up, ready and waiting: an untraumatic, slightly-moving picture. It never crossed my mind to notice the anomalous point of view until I was middle-aged. Before then it went without saying that it was a ‘real’ memory. Afterwards, it became an indicator of how false recollection can be.
Memory has always been a worry to us. The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves (no memory, no me) is also something we know to be treacherous, overaccommodating, fugitive: delightfully and fearfully unreliable. We’re stuck inside our own heads with our recollections (or old photos and now videos that have become memories) and there is no way, except sometimes by trusting to the probably unreliable memories of other people, to be absolutely sure that we know what we think we know, or are who we think we are. That anxiety about the accuracy of our grasp of our past selves accounts for the way many other alarming aspects of being alive have become attached to the subject of memory; the theme changes and goes through cycles over time (law, war, politics, medicine, family, sexuality), but always serves to remind us to worry about the consequences of never being quite sure of what we and others remember. People have thrown all the expertise they can find or invent at the problem. We have asked shamans, clairvoyants, hypnotists, historians, scientists, surgeons, law-makers, artists and writers, social psychologists and psychoanalysts to investigate the truth, the facts, the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer.
Yet, alongside our anxiety about the trustworthiness of remembering, there is an opposite pull, which is quite as powerful, towards the commonsense feeling that we can all know and trust our own memories; that we know our own minds. Memories when they rise feel reliable. Whatever scientists or other experts do in the laboratory, library or consulting room, individuals, including the experts themselves when off duty, proceed in their everyday lives as if their personal memories are a valid basis for action and interaction, just as physicists continue to walk on apparently solid floors while knowing that they are largely made up of empty space. We would be mad not to. Underlying the compelling feeling that we are our memories is a further common-sense assumption that our entire lives are accurately retained somewhere in the brain ‘bank’ as laid-down memories of our experience, and that we retrieve our lives and selves from an ever expanding stockpile of recollections. Or we can’t, and then that feeling that it’s on the tip of our tongue, or there but just out of range, still encourages us to think that everything we have known or done is in us somewhere, if only our digging equipment were sharper. It’s considered a fault not with recording, but with playback.
by Jenny Diski, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Pablo Picasso, Repose, 1908 via:
What Makes Sushi Great?
To be honest, I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that’s gluey, but there aren’t a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes rice better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of understanding, of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.
What animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?
Jiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let’s face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger’s wet dream. (OMG, did you see the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn’t take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too—his rice dealer claims that he doesn’t bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn’t know what to do with it—but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the New Yorker, the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro’s rice as “tasting like a cloud.”)
Instead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn’t have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else’s. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi—and, by extension, greatness itself— is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.
by Francis Lam, Gilt Taste | Read more:
Photos courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Hidden San Francisco
Moraga Steps: If you happen to walk down these steps, this is all you’ll see,
another set of steep steps negotiating another steep SF hill. Turn around and you see what’s hiding on the risers.
Nothing less than a map of the universe, in lovingly detailed mosaics.
From the bottom of the ocean, with fish,
to the sky, with birds,
and up to the sun:
by LuminousMuse, Open Salon | Read more:
by LuminousMuse, Open Salon | Read more:
Depression
Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation.
If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.
No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.
via:
Image: Zero
It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too.
No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.
via:
Image: Zero
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
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
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
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
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
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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