Friday Book Club - The Remains of the Day

[ed. I don't know why it's taken me so long to come to this, it's a masterpiece. I love Ishiguro's writing style - spare and elegant - never a misplaced word or phrase anywhere (see also, Never Let Me Go). An engaging story that transports the reader deep into British culture.]

Kazuo Ishiguro's third novel, ''The Remains of the Day,'' is a dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture. At the beginning, though, its narrator, an elderly English butler named Stevens, seems the least forthcoming (let alone enchanting) of companions. Cartoonishly punctilious and reserved, he edges slowly into an account of a brief motoring holiday from Oxfordshire to the West Country that he is taking alone at the insistence of his new employer, a genial American, Mr. Farraday.

The time is July 1956. Farraday has recently bought Darlington Hall near Oxford from the descendants of the last noble-born owner and has asked Stevens - a fixture there for nearly four decades - to relax a bit before implementing a much-reduced staff plan for the running of the house. Tense about his little holiday, Stevens hopes secretly to use it for professional advantage: to recruit the former housekeeper, the admirable Miss Kenton, who had years ago left service to marry, but who is now estranged from her husband and seems nostalgic for her old position.

In the early part of his story, the strait-laced Stevens plays perfectly the role of model butler as obliging narrator. Attentive to detail, solicitous of others, eager to serve, he primly sketches the history and current state of affairs at the great house and points out the agreeable features of the landscape as he moves slowly from Salisbury to Taunton, Tavistock and Little Compton in Cornwall. Much of this is dryly, deliciously funny, not so much because Stevens is witty or notably perceptive (he is neither) but because in his impassive formality he is so breathtakingly true to type, so very much the familiar product of the suppressive and now anachronistic social system that has produced him and to which he is so intensely loyal.

At different points in his subdued musings on the past, Stevens offers formulations of immemorial English attitudes that are likely to strike many contemporary readers as at once laughably parochial and quaintly endearing. Obsessed with notions of greatness, he proclaims that the English landscape is the most deeply satisfying in the world because of ''the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle.'' As he puts it, ''The sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.''

Similarly, Stevens provides a long, solemn, yet unwittingly brilliant disquisition on the question of what makes a great butler, a topic that has provoked ''much debate in our profession over the years'' and continues to obsess him throughout his narrative. The key, he confidently insists, is dignity, which has to do with a butler's ability to ''inhabit'' his role ''to the utmost.''

''Lesser butlers,'' Stevens muses, ''will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the facade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity.' '' Mr. Ishiguro's command of Stevens' corseted idiom is masterly, and nowhere more tellingly so than in the way he controls the progressive revelation of unintended ironic meaning. Underneath what Stevens says, something else is being said, and the something else eventually turns out to be a moving series of chilly revelations of the butler's buried life - and, by implication, a powerful critique of the social machine in which he is a cog. As we move westward with Stevens in Farraday's vintage Ford, we learn more and more about the price he has paid in striving for his lofty ideal of professional greatness.

P.M. Dawn

Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a Lolita cover competition asking designers to do better.

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How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history."

This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Most importantly, even if any of that fiendish crap ever did happen again, Dodd-Frank guaranteed we wouldn't be expected to pay for it. "The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes," Obama promised. "There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period."

Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway's Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington's Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart's birthday.

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends."

That the banks have just about succeeded in strangling Dodd-Frank is probably not news to most Americans – it's how they succeeded that's the scary part. The banks followed a five-point strategy that offers a dependable blueprint for defeating any regulation – and for guaranteeing that when it comes to the economy, might will always equal right.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Photo: Rod Lamkey Jr./AFP Getty Images

 
Lightroom Before & After Shots. Via Flickr: Summer Sky
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tryred62
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Pete Philly (feat. Roos Jonker)

[ed. Jazz hip-hop]
h/t

The Secret's In The Pronouns

"Function words are essentially the filler words," Pennebaker says. "These are the words that we don't pay attention to, and they're the ones that are so interesting."

According to the way that Pennebaker organizes language, the words that we more often focus on in conversation are content words, words like "school," "family," "live," "friends" — words that conjure a specific image and relay more of the substance of what is being discussed.

"I speak bad Spanish," Pennebaker explains, "and if I'm in a conversation where I'm listening to the other person speak, I am just trying to find out what they are talking about. I am listening to 'what, where, when' — those big content heavy words. All those little words in between, I don't listen to those because they're too complex to listen to."

In fact, says Pennebaker, even in our native language, these function words are basically invisible to us.

"You can't hear them," Pennebaker says. "Humans just aren't able to do it."

But computers can, which is why two decades ago Pennebaker and his graduate students sat down to build themselves a computer program.

The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program that Pennebaker and his students built in the early 1990s has — like any computer program — an ability to peer into massive data sets and discern patterns that no human could ever hope to match.

And so after Pennebaker and his crew built the program, they used it to ask all kinds of questions that had previously been too complicated or difficult for humans to ask.

Some of those questions included:

• Could you tell if someone was lying by carefully analyzing the way they used function words?
• Looking only at a transcript, could you tell from function words whether someone was male or female, rich or poor?
• What could you tell about relationships by looking at the way two people spoke to each other?

Which brings us back to speed dating.

See, one of the things that Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations that took place between people on speed dates. He fed these conversations into his program along with information about how the people themselves were perceiving the dates. What he found surprised him.

"We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves," he says.

by Alix Spiegal, NPR |  Read more:
Illustration: iStockphoto.com

A Fish Story

How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean

Price is a lifelong striped bass fisherman with no formal training as a scientist. Yet he has spent the last four decades cutting open bass stomachs in a kind of renegade ecological study, charting the precipitous decline of the lowly menhaden. Price’s interest in the species is indirect; menhaden aren’t prized by anglers. But they are prized by striped bass. The little fish has historically been the striper’s most significant source of protein and calories. In fact, menhaden are a staple in the diets of dozens of marine predators in the Atlantic and its stuaries, from osprey to bluefish to dolphin to blue crab. In a host of undersea food chains, menhaden—also known as pogy and bunker—are a common denominator. They have been called the most important fish in the sea.

Price began his study years ago when it became increasingly evident to him that the striped bass in the Chesapeake were quite literally starving. And so, at least once a week he dissects bass to see whether the fish ate recently before they died. He squeezes spleens to determine if the fish had mycobacteriosis, a serious infection related to malnutrition that affects more than 60 percent of the striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay. He relays his findings in a numerical code of his own devising. “Body fat is a ten, ovaries a two, spleen is okay, empty stomach,” he says gruffly, while his wife, Henrietta, dutifully transcribes his thoughts into a ledger. Four times out of fifty, he pulls a whole menhaden from a bass belly, weighing each one with a small scale.

Local sport fishermen are happy to help Price by leaving him the bones and innards of their catch, because his work confirms what anglers up and down the Atlantic coast know from direct experience: the menhaden are disappearing.

Like any good mystery, this one has a prime suspect. Across the Chesapeake and about sixty miles to the south of where Price stands, a seaside factory hums and buzzes, filling the small town of Reedville, Virginia, with the putrid smell of menhaden chum. The looming smokestacks, warehouses, and pretty much everything else on Reedville’s Menhaden Road are owned by Omega Protein, a publicly traded company headquartered in Houston with a long and storied history of industrial fishing in Atlantic waters.

The operation is high-tech. Spotter planes take off from Reedville’s tiny airstrip to circle swathes of ocean, looking for the telltale shadow of menhaden moving by the million just below the surface. Pilots radio Omega Protein’s fleet of nine refurbished World War II transport ships, one of which dispatches two smaller boats that surround the school with a giant net called a purse seine, drawing the fish tightly together using the mechanics of a drawstring sack, until all the members of the school can be sucked out of the ocean with a vacuum pump. The boats can “set” the net twelve to fifteen times a day; a vessel will return to port with millions of menhaden aboard.

Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, diluted into oil for omega-3 health supplements, and sold in various meals and liquids to companies that make pet food, livestock feed, fertilizer, and cosmetics. We have all consumed menhaden one way or another. Pound for pound, more menhaden are pulled from the sea than any other fish species in the continental United States, and 80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company. (...)

Menhaden were once so plentiful in the Atlantic that early pioneers described them as swimming in schools twenty-five miles long or more, packing themselves into bays and estuaries where they came to feed on dense schools of phytoplankton (algae and vegetable matter). Rutgers professor H. Bruce Franklin uncovered a trove of early accounts of menhaden for his book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea, like one from John Smith, who in 1608 encountered menhaden in the Chesapeake “lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets we attempted to catch them with a frying pan.”

by Alison Fairbrother, Washington Monthly |  Read more:

How to cook the perfect spaghetti carbonara

Garlic or onion, pecorino or parmesan, bacon or ham, cream or butter – how do you like your carbonara, and what's the secret to getting that perfect consistency?

A dish whose principal ingredients are eggs and bacon was always going to be a shoo-in for the British palate: certainly spaghetti carbonara was a regular in my dad's repertoire when pesto was only a glint in a supermarket buyer's eye. As with so many Italian foodstuffs, it has a disputed history, although most people accept that carbonara probably originated in, or near Rome.

It's apparently named after the carbonai, or charcoal burners, allegedly because it was a favourite of these grimy men who spent months deep in the Apennines, relying on foodstuffs that could be easily transported, stored and then prepared over a fire. Sophia Loren claims to have happened upon a group of these lucky fellows while filming Two Women in the mountains in the late fifties – who obligingly cooked her a slap-up carbonara lunch.

Loth as I'd be to contradict the legendary Loren, there are people who believe that the whole carbonaio thing is simply a romantic legend, suggesting instead that the dish was created by local cooks for American GIs who took their rations of bacon and eggs to them to prepare over streetside charcoal braziers. More mature Romans dispute this however, claiming they remember enjoying carbonara while said GIs were still eating milk and cookies at their mother's knees.

Most plausibly of all, in my opinion, is the theory that the name simply refers to the copious amounts of black pepper customarily added to the dish: so much, in fact, that it's almost as if it's been seasoned with charcoal. It's one of those things which people will no doubt still be squabbling over as the earth implodes: far more important, in my opinion, is working out how to make a really good one. Which is where I come in.

by Felicity Cloake, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Felicity Cloake

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HP print cartridges through the ages, a slow-motion ripoff

[ed. Well knock me over with a feather...who would have thought?]

A little work with a handsaw reveals that over the years, the amount of ink in a new, official HP refill cartridge has been in decline. Prices, of course, have not been in decline.

I then removed the top of the cartridge with a handsaw and as you can see from the picture below the hydrophobic sponge fills the cartridge totally, just as I would have expected for the best part of fifteen quid, I then took another HP 350, the same cartridge but this time the manufacturers date was 2012 on the cartridge, I removed the top in the same way as before and to be totally honest I could not believe what I was looking at, the hydrophobic sponge inside the 2012 cartridge is only half the size!!

Mmm, I was beginning to smell a rat; as the saying goes… this got me thinking even more and I started to wonder if all the newer cartridges are like this, so this time I chopped the top off of a new HP 301 cartridge to have a look at the sponge, surely it can’t be any smaller…..or can it? Guess what! The sponge inside the HP301 is almost 40 percent smaller than the 2012 HP 350, which means that we are actually getting less ink for our money now than ever before. Why is that? The price isn’t shrinking though, that’s for sure!

HP Introduces Nano Sponge (via Reddit)

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Qin Tianzhu
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Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden

[ed. Gorgeous song from a 2007 collaboration that produced the wonderful Jasmine album. This is the only video I could find and there's something odd going on for the first 45 seconds or so (art?) but it smooths out after that. Well worth a listen, especially late at night.]

The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes

If Steve Jobs's life were staged as an opera, it would be a tragedy in three acts. And the titles would go something like this: Act I--The Founding of Apple Computer and the Invention of the PC Industry; Act II--The Wilderness Years; and Act III--A Triumphant Return and Tragic Demise.

The first act would be a piquant comedy about the brashness of genius and the audacity of youth, abruptly turning ominous when our young hero is cast out of his own kingdom. The closing act would plumb the profound irony of a balding and domesticated high-tech rock star coming back to transform Apple far beyond even his own lofty expectations, only to fall mortally ill and then slowly, excruciatingly wither away, even as his original creation miraculously bulks up into the biggest digital dynamo of them all. Both acts are picaresque tales that end with a surge of deep pathos worthy of Shakespeare.

But that second act--The Wilderness Years--would be altogether different in tone and spirit. In fact, the soul of this act would undermine its title, a convenient phrase journalists and biographers use to describe his 1985 to 1996 hiatus from Apple, as if the only meaningful times in Jobs's life were those spent in Cupertino. In fact, this middle period was the most pivotal of his life. And perhaps the happiest. He finally settled down, married, and had a family. He learned the value of patience and the ability to feign it when he lost it. Most important, his work with the two companies he led during that time, NeXT and Pixar, turned him into the kind of man, and leader, who would spur Apple to unimaginable heights upon his return.

Indeed, what at first glance seems like more wandering for the barefoot hippie who dropped out of Reed College to hitchhike around India, is in truth the equivalent of Steve Jobs attending business school. In other words, he grew. By leaps and bounds. In every aspect of his being. With a little massaging, this middle act could even be the plotline for a Pixar movie. It certainly fits the simple mantra John Lasseter ascribes to all the studio's successes, from Toy Story to Up: "It's gotta be about how the main character changes for the better."

I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn't come to fully appreciate the importance of these "lost" years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews--some lasting as long as three hours--that I'd conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed--a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.

The lessons are powerful: Jobs matured as a manager and a boss; learned how to make the most of partnerships; found a way to turn his native stubbornness into a productive perseverance. He became a corporate architect, coming to appreciate the scaffolding of a business just as much as the skeletons of real buildings, which always fascinated him. He mastered the art of negotiation by immersing himself in Hollywood, and learned how to successfully manage creative talent, namely the artists at Pixar. Perhaps most important, he developed an astonishing adaptability that was critical to the hit-after-hit-after-hit climb of Apple's last decade. All this, during a time many remember as his most disappointing.

Eleven years is a big chunk of a lifetime. Especially when one's time on earth is cut short. Moreover, many people--particularly creative types--are often their most prolific during their thirties and early forties. With all the heady success of Apple during Jobs's last 14 years, it's all too easy to dismiss these "lost" years. But in truth, they transformed everything. As I listened again to those hours and hours of tapes, I realized they were, in fact, his most productive.

by Brent Schlender, Fast Company |  Read more:
llustrations drawn on iPad by Jorge Colombo

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The Cooler Me

Statistically speaking, there's probably a cooler you out there. The guy who's actually living that life you'd imagined for yourself before you got married, had a couple of kids, and strapped in to that desk job. Maybe he plays in a band, lives in California, wakes up at ten, and surfs before noon. Wherever he is, he's definitely having more fun than you are. What if you could track that guy down? Hang out with his friends. Eat, drink, and sleep according to his responsibility-free schedule? Then you could decide, once and for all, if the cooler life is the better life?

Not too long ago, I was sitting backstage at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and drinking beer with my doppelgänger, a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field. Or rather, I was drinking beer by myself while he entertained his fans, most of whom seemed to be half his age. Despite his best efforts, he'd failed to conceal his grizzly good looks. He was very tan, had a big amber beard, and was wearing a sea captain's hat that somehow added to his charm. There are not many grown men out there who can wear a captain's hat and not look like a member of the Village People, but my doppelgänger is one of them. He spotted me through the haze of pot smoke and lifted his beer, and I lifted mine back. We were the oldest people in the room—perhaps the whole club. And yet we'd entered some alternate universe: a Neverland where no one aged or had children or worried about pesky bourgeois things, like brain cells or health insurance.

"When's your bedtime?" he asked later, clapping me on the back.

"Three hours ago," I said.

He laughed. "We're headed to Edinburgh Castle, if you want to come. Last call isn't for thirty minutes."

"I can't remember the last time I shut down a bar," I said.

"I wish I could say the same."

He went off to talk to a blonde woman in the corner, the sexiest of his three backup singers. He was not hitting on her: Rather, they seemed like old friends, goofing around and singing a song I didn't recognize. I'd always dreamed of being a musician in another life, yet a lot of the ones I'd met were lethargic hipsters so cocooned in their coolness they could hardly bring themselves to smile. Even their sneezes seemed like "sneezes." Kyle, on the other hand, was sincere and friendly and strangely innocent, someone who talked about "making out" with women and threw his head back when he laughed. I glanced at the person sitting next to me, a very stoned-looking girl who'd maybe spent a summer or two working with Tibetan orphans.

"How do you know Kyle?" she asked enviously.

"I don't really," I said. "I just met him a month ago. He's my doppelgänger."

"Your what?"

"My double.... You know, the person I might have been."

by Eric Puchner, GQ |  Read more:
Photo: Chris Brooks

Afghanistan: A Gathering Menace

Since 2006 I have written off and on about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nearly all of my work in those countries has been done embedded with NATO, mostly American military units. Many times I have watched soldiers or Marines, driven by boredom or fear, behave selfishly and meanly, even illegally, in minor ways. In a few searing moments I have wondered what would come next, what the men would do to prisoners or civilians or suspected insurgents. And I have wondered how to describe these moments without reporting melodramatic minutiae or betraying the men who allowed me in.

Most soldierly stupidity does not amount to crime; most soldiers never commit atrocities. U.S. soldiers shooting at goats, for example, or pilots getting drunk on base, or guards threatening the lives of prisoners, all things I have seen, defy military rules and erode efforts to win hearts and minds. But how bad is it, really? Do we care? What is my responsibility when I see it? I have never found good ways to write about the subhuman wash of aggression and the small episodes of violence military men and women cycle through daily, or the choices they make in the midst of this.

We tend to ignore such problems unless they are connected to a crime. An editor at a major magazine once dismissed such unsteady subjects by saying, “Yes, but bad things happen everywhere.” Perhaps she was telling me to lighten up. She was also summarizing a national attitude toward the wars. I write about it now because what I witnessed with Destroyer, and other units, routinely and unquietly returns to me.

I joined the platoon last summer at the end of a weeklong mission designed to clear insurgents from a series of towns and valleys in central Afghanistan. In 10 years of war, I was told, NATO troops had never visited the region. Intelligence reports called it a Taliban stronghold, and commanders expected heavy fighting. Going in, many soldiers told me they believed they would die.

Destroyer and several other units had dropped into the valleys by helicopter at night. During the day, they pushed through a sun-killed landscape of rock and withered grasses, where it was Destroyer’s job to search for weapons caches and battle insurgents alongside a wobbly unit of Afghan National Army (ANA) troops.

Each night, the men slept in abandoned qalats (fortified residential compounds), or they moved into occupied ones, handed the residents some cash, and kicked them out. I met the soldiers at a qalat they had temporarily confiscated, a large, newly painted house. Tall walls enclosed a courtyard containing a small orchard, a garden, and a well. Several rooms ran along one wall, and the soldiers had moved into them, sleeping head to foot on floors littered with cigarette packs, candy wrappers, and food scraps. The place was heavy with a scent I would later follow through the night.

by Neil Shea, The American Scholar |  Read more:
Photo: Neil Shea

Skateboarding Past a Midlife Crisis

A grinding sound, somewhere between a rattle and a rumble, erupted over the suburban New Jersey hill. The figures, clad in motorcycle leathers and helmets, started to appear, one, two, three, until there were almost 20, crouched on skateboards, like a squadron of roller-villains.

One by one, the skaters rounded a turn, dropping a gloved hand to the asphalt as they scraped their wheels in a slide, taking care that nobody crossed into oncoming traffic and found themselves splattered across the grill of a Buick.

At the bottom of the hill, the leader of the Bergen County Bombers, as this gang of skateboarders is known, wrestled the black motorcycle helmet from his head, revealing a mortgage broker with gray flecks in his beard and the crow’s feet that come from decades in the white-collar trenches.

“It’s a total midlife crisis,” said the group’s leader, Tom Barnhart, 47, of Cresskill, N.J., who started skateboarding two years ago for the first time since the Carter administration. His life, he said, had been in a rut. “My kids grew old, so I got a dog. My dog grew old, so I got a skateboard.”

“That was what knocked the cobwebs out of my head,” he added.

Forget the little red sports car: the new symbol for midlife crisis is the skateboard. Graying members of Generation X, and even their older brothers, are reclaiming their youth and rebellious streak by hopping back on a skate deck. Some are even showing off old tricks in the skate park.

It’s the latest gasp for a generation of perma-dudes who listen to Black Flag in their BMWs and trade high-fives in client meetings. It’s a bid to escape the corporate grind, beat back their flagging vigor and even make good on a generational cliché: to extend their adolescence until their federal prescription-drug benefit kicks in.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Tony Cenicola