Not a Creature Was Stirring

The preview screening of the studio’s new comic blockbuster, calculated to jump-start buzz among Manhattan’s movers and shakers, evoked the kind of silence one associates with outer space. When the credits rolled, heralding the evaporation of a hundred and eighty million smackeroos, the audience rose and shuffled toward the exits like the brethren en route to their factory in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” While the assorted opinion-makers regained consciousness in the cold air of Broadway, I found myself vis-à-vis none other than Nestor Grossnose, a porky nudnik I knew from our years frequenting the great wheat-germ dispensaries of Sunset Boulevard. Grossnose was a Hollywood producer who had mastered the knack of creating insolvency from the most promising projects. Less vigilant fressers in our golden years, we now repaired to the Carnegie Deli to deconstruct some pickled meat and eviscerate what we’d just seen.

“It’s all schlock,” the impresario railed. “Chazerai for pubescent sub-mentals.” Producing a clipping from his pants pocket, he said, “Lamp this. I culled it from a little magazine called The Week. Is this or is this not our open sesame to Fort Knox?” The kernel of the Grossnose squib centered on Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where it seemed that a pizzeria owner was charged by police with planting mice in rival pizza shops. “We never had anything like this,” the Police Superintendent said, “where mice have been used as an instrument of crime.”

Grossnose looked for my reaction to the tabloid snippet, smiling like a man with aces back to back.

“The minute I eyeballed this I started working on my acceptance speech,” he said, knocking back his Dr. Brown’s.

“What are you saying?” I asked, realizing that his latest film, “Holiday for Cretins,” had garnered just two Oscar nods, and not from the Academy but from inmates at Bellevue.

Nothing short of mace could have prevented him from pitching his new scenario, which I succumbed to while vaguely discerning the Hindenburg floating into view.

by Woody Allen, The New Yorker |  Read more:
iStockphoto via: Discover Magazine

Circle of Presence

Most of us have been annoyed by someone who was unable to give another human being their undivided attention for more than seconds at a time. And perhaps more significantly, most of us have felt the pull to do the same: We have struggled to keep our attention focused on the person talking to us as we know we ought to because some shred of our humanity remains intact. We know very well that the person in front of us is more significant in the moment than the text that just made our phone vibrate in our pocket. We have been on both ends of the kind of distractedness that the mere presence of a smartphone can occasion, and we are alive enough to be troubled by it. We begin to feel the force of Simone Weil’s judgment: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

So Turkle’s piece, and others like it, resonate despite the theoretical shortcomings that make some scholars cringe. What difference does it make that some study showed that a statistically significant portion of the population reports feeling less lonely when using social media if I can’t get the person standing two feet away from me to treat me with the barest level of decency?

The recurring question remains, however, “Are smartphones at fault?” Is Google making us stupid? Is Facebook making us lonely? But that’s not the best way of stating the question. Rather than begin with a loaded question, perhaps it’s better to try to clarify the situation. What is happening when cell phones become part of an environment that also consists of two people in conversation?

Of the many possible approaches to this question, I want to take up philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “intentional arc.” (...)

The “intentional arc” describes the manner in which our experience and perception is shaped by what we intend. Intending here means something more than what we mean when we say “I intended to get up early” or “I intend to go to the store later.” Intention in this sense refers in large measure to a mostly nonconscious work of perceiving the world that is shaped by what we are doing or aim to do. Our perception, in other words, is always already interpreting reality rather than simply registering it as a pure fact or objective reality.

This work of perception-as-interpretation builds up over time as an assortment of “I cans” that are carried or remembered by our bodies. This assortment becomes part of the background, or pre-understanding, that we bring to bear on new situations. And this is how our intentional arc “projects round about us our past, our future.”

The insertion of a tool like a cell phone into our experience reconfigures the “intentional arc.” The phenomenon is neatly captured by the expression, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.” How we perceive our environment is shaped by the mere presence of a tool in hand. And this effect is registered even before the tool is used.

Merleau-Ponty might analyze the situation as follows: The feel of a hammer in hand, especially given prior use of a hammer, transforms how the environment presents itself to us. Aspects of the environment that would not have presented themselves as things-to-be-struck now do. Our interpretive perception interprets differently. Our seeing-as is altered. New possibilities suggest themselves. The affordances presented to us by our environment are reordered.

Try this at home: go pick up a hammer or, for that matter, any object you can hold in hand that is weighted on one end. See what you feel. Hold it and look around you and pay really close attention to the way your perceive these objects. Actually, on second thought, don’t try this at home.

by Michael Sacasas, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Altered photograph of Murray Kempton, via

Ron Zakrin, Beauty With Synthesizer
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Time to Rise

In Paris, the 9th arrondissement is popular, hip even, dotted with wine shops, boutiques, and boulangeries, but still has the close-knit feel of a residential neighborhood. The streets are lined with old apartment buildings that seem to lean onto the sidewalks. Inside intimate bistros on these quiet, narrow lanes, maître d’s chat with locals as they arrive. One Sunday afternoon last winter, when I visited, the streets were crowded with couples and families out for a leisurely stroll. By 3 a.m. the next day, however, Rue des Martyrs, a main artery in the district, was empty, the stores dark except for a slit of light coming out of the side entrance of the Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone, that is, except for the bakers—whose ranks I was about to join.

Over the centuries, how many bakers have walked Paris’s dark avenues at night, heading to the fournils—baking rooms—to provide the city’s daily bread? In the 18th and 19th centuries, les geindres (the groaners) began before midnight, each laboring over hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand and baked in basement wood-fired ovens. The poorest slept by the hearth, inhaling flour and often suffering from tuberculosis. Yet many did their jobs superbly, faithful to the demanding task of coaxing bread out of levain, or sourdough—a process that took days. As I walked toward the bakery that morning, I felt as if I were following in the footsteps of ghosts.

As an avid home baker with a decade of experience slapping around dough, I had come to Paris to learn how to make a stellar baguette. I wanted one with a crisp crust, an uneven bubbly interior (called the crumb), and a distinctive flavor that would make my friends at home in Washington, D.C., ooh and aah. I figured Arnaud Delmontel was the one to teach me: A master baker, he had won the award for best baguette in Paris in 2007.

I also wanted to investigate a cultural question: Why had bread, which held a commanding place at the French table, crumbled into mediocrity in the decades following World War II? By the 1980s, it was an open secret in the baking trade that truly great French bread was a rarity, as speed and efficiency increasingly trumped the slow fermentation necessary for an outstanding loaf.

In 1987 a cultural critic writing in the French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur proclaimed that the baguette had become “horribly disgusting.” It was “bloated, hollow, dead white,” he said. “Soggy or else stiff. Its crusts come off in sheets like diseased skin.” Renowned French baking professor Raymond Calvel mused that the best baguette might soon be made in Tokyo. What had brought this on? And how was quality bread revived in the 1990s? The answers to these questions lay in Paris, which is what brought me to the door of Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel at three that morning last February.

by Samuel Fromartz, AFAR Magazine |  Read more:
Photo: Brian Doben

The Facebook Fallacy

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people's behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising's impact.

At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN's walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online.

I don't know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value. (...)

Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. Most of that is the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people's Facebook profiles. Some is the kind of sponsorship that promises users further social relationships with companies: a kind of marketing that General Motors just announced it would no longer buy.

Facebook's answer to its critics is: pay no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt-like advertising produces the overwhelming portion of our $4 billion in revenues; and, yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are in pretty constant decline, but this stuff is really not what we have in mind. Just wait.

It's quite a juxtaposition of realities. On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times' digital business. (Here's the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times' declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users.

On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway. 

by Michael Wolff, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:
Photo: Flickr Creative Commons Tanaka Juuyoh and Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

Epic dumps, recalled

A Reddit thread called "Did you ever think you were going to die from a shit?" sparked a lyrical/scatological series of reminisces of epic dumps, including a two part series by ErikPDX recalling a storied moment of colonic glory following a period of post-surgical bedrest during which he consumed enormous amounts of painkillers and protein shakes without bestirring himself to relieve himself, until such time as his body could stand no more. Mr PDX included a picture of the result. I beg you not to click the link in his post which leads to it.

My entire body tingled. I felt lighter. I was covered in sweat, and breathing heavily. I felt high, delirious, in shock and awe. Great waves of increasing euphoria washed over me. Feelings of amazing pleasure I simply cannot describe. I felt as if I was bathing in a golden light of goodness. This was a transcending event. I felt like I had just touched the universe itself.

Did you ever think you were going to die from a shit? (self.AskReddit)

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing 

Marko Köppe
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Money Unlimited

When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., summoned Theodore B. Olson, the lawyer for Citizens United, to the podium. Roberts’s voice bears a flat-vowelled trace of his origins, in Indiana. Unlike his predecessor, William Rehnquist, Roberts rarely shows irritation or frustration on the bench. A well-mannered Midwesterner, he invariably lets one of his colleagues ask the first questions.That day, it was David Souter, who was just a few weeks away from announcing his departure from the Court. In keeping with his distaste for Washington, Souter seemed almost to cultivate his New Hampshire accent during his two decades on the Court. In response to Souter’s questions, Olson made a key point about how he thought the case should be resolved. In his view, the prohibitions in McCain-Feingold applied only to television commercials, not to ninety-minute documentaries. “This sort of communication was not something that Congress intended to prohibit,” Olson said. This view made the case even more straightforward. Olson’s argument indicated that there was no need for the Court to declare any part of the law unconstitutional, or even to address the First Amendment implications of the case. Olson simply sought a judgment that McCain-Feingold did not apply to documentaries shown through video on demand.

The Justices settled into their usual positions. The diminutive Ruth Bader Ginsburg was barely visible above the bench. Stephen Breyer was twitchy, his expressions changing based on whether or not he agreed with the lawyer’s answers. As ever, Clarence Thomas was silent. (He was in year three of his now six-year streak of not asking questions.)

Then Antonin Scalia spoke up. More than anyone, Scalia was responsible for transforming the dynamics of oral arguments at the Supreme Court. When Scalia became a Justice, in 1986, the Court sessions were often somnolent affairs, but his rapid-fire questioning spurred his colleagues to try to keep pace, and, as Roberts said, in a tribute to Scalia on his twenty-fifth anniversary as a Justice, “the place hasn’t been the same since.” Alternately witty and fierce, Scalia invariably made clear where he stood.

He had long detested campaign-spending restrictions, frequently voting to invalidate such statutes as violations of the First Amendment. For this reason, it seemed, Scalia was disappointed by the limited nature of Olson’s claim.

“So you’re making a statutory argument now?” Scalia said.

“I’m making a—” Olson began.

“You’re saying this isn’t covered by it,” Scalia continued.

That’s right, Olson responded. All he was asking for was a ruling that the law did not prohibit this particular documentary by this nonprofit corporation during those thirty days. If the Justices had resolved the case as Olson had suggested, today Citizens United might well be forgotten—a narrow ruling on a remote aspect of campaign-finance law.

Instead, the oral arguments were about to take the case—and the law—in an entirely new direction. (...)

In one sense, the story of the Citizens United case goes back more than a hundred years. It begins in the Gilded Age, when the Supreme Court barred most attempts by the government to ameliorate the harsh effects of market forces. In that era, the Court said, for the first time, that corporations, like people, have constitutional rights. The Progressive Era, which followed, saw the development of activist government and the first major efforts to limit the impact of money in politics. Since then, the sides in the continuing battle have remained more or less the same: progressives (or liberals) vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, regulators vs. libertarians. One side has favored government rules to limit the influence of the moneyed in political campaigns; the other has supported a freer market, allowing individuals and corporations to contribute as they see fit. Citizens United marked another round in this contest.

In a different way, though, Citizens United is a distinctive product of the Roberts Court. The decision followed a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the Justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case. The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court. It was once liberals who were associated with using the courts to overturn the work of the democratically elected branches of government, but the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court’s own precedents. When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.

by Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Barry Blitt

Ken Garduno
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Tonetta

[ed. yeah...I used to have these moves.]

How Markets Crowd Out Morals

We live in a time when almost anything can be bought and sold. Markets have come to govern our lives as never before. But are there some things that money should not be able to buy? Most people would say yes.

Consider friendship. Suppose you want more friends than you have. Would you try to buy some? Not likely. A moment’s reflection would lead you to realize that it wouldn’t work. A hired friend is not the same as a real one. You could hire people to do some of the things that friends typically do—picking up your mail when you’re out of town, looking after your children in a pinch, or, in the case of a therapist, listening to your woes and offering sympathetic advice. Until recently, you could even bolster your online popularity by hiring some good-looking “friends” for your Facebook page—for $0.99 per friend per month. (The phony-friend Web site was shut down after it emerged that the photos being used, mostly of models, were unauthorized.) Although all of these services can be bought, you can’t actually buy a friend. Somehow, the money that buys the friendship dissolves it, or turns it into something else.

This fairly obvious example offers a clue to the more challenging question that concerns us: Are there some things that money can buy but shouldn’t? Consider a good that can be bought but whose buying and selling is morally controversial—a human kidney, for example. Some people defend markets in organs for transplantation; others find such markets morally objectionable. If it’s wrong to buy a kidney, the problem is not that the money dissolves the good. The kidney will work (assuming a good match) regardless of the monetary payment. So to determine whether kidneys should or shouldn’t be up for sale, we have to engage in a moral inquiry. We have to examine the arguments for and against organ sales and determine which are more persuasive.

So it seems, at first glance, that there is a sharp distinction between two kinds of goods: the things (like friends) that money can’t buy, and the things (like kidneys) that money can buy but arguably shouldn’t. But this distinction is less clear than it first appears. If we look more closely, we can glimpse a connection between the obvious cases, in which the monetary exchange spoils the good being bought, and the controversial cases, in which the good survives the selling but is arguably degraded, or corrupted, or diminished as a result. Once we see that connection, we have to ask where markets belong, and where they don’t. And the question of where markets belong is really about how we want to live together. We can’t answer it without thinking about the meaning and purpose of goods and the values that should govern them.

Wedding Toasts and Gifts

Let’s explore some cases intermediate between friendship and kidneys, which will help to elucidate the sorts of values people generally hold about buying and selling. If you can’t buy friendship, what about tokens of friendship or expressions of intimacy or affection?  (...)

Suppose, on your wedding day, your best man delivers a heartwarming toast, a speech so moving it brings tears to your eyes. You later learn that he bought it online. Would you care?

by Michael J. Sandel, Boston Review |  Read more:
Illustration: Shout

The Yin and Yang of Conserving Land

A California land trust steward has just announced plans to conserve 1,600 acres at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers. The deal would “benefit future generations for many years to come,” said Patrick Koepele, the deputy executive director of the Tuolumne River Trust.

That has been the moving spirit behind land conservation across the country. Sometimes, as with the Dos Rios Ranch in California’s Central Valley, public and private partners and government agencies put up much of the money needed to reach the goal (in this case, nearly two-thirds of the $21.8 million needed). The floodplain area will be conserved for water management, recreation and wildlife habitat.

Acquisition is the yin of conserving land. But increasingly, as I reported in an article in Sunday’s paper, much of the time and money that private land trusts have devoted to acquiring land is being diverted to defending the conservation restrictions they have already put in place.

The yang of conservation is the need to guard what has been given to future generations.

Which is where a new nonprofit insurance company, the Terrafirma Risk Retention Group, comes in.

The idea of Terrafirma, just approved for nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Service, is to give small land trusts a deep-pocketed ally. It will essentially be an insurance company with a broad-based structure.

Rob Aldrich, a spokesman for the Land Trust Alliance, the national organization that organized the company, said Terrafirma would be owned by its members and insure the costs of upholding conservation easements that are violated or are under legal attack. It will also provide information on risk management to land, he said in an e-mail.

by Felicity Barringer, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Douglas Steakley/River Partners

Felix Vallotton - Ball
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How Tumblr Squashed the Trolls

[ed. Think Facebook is the be all and end all to social networking? Meet Tumblr.]

Spend a few minutes scrolling through comments on YouTube and you come face to face with one of the maxims of the Web: anonymity tends to enable the haters. Users who don’t have to give their real identity can generate some pretty vicious diatribes.

Somehow Tumblr seems to have mostly avoided this. The micro-blogging platform which just marked its fifth anniversary and hosts around 50 million blogs and more than 18 billion posts allows users to operate anonymously, but Tumblr Vice President Andrew McLaughlin says the vibe is far more affirming.

 

 See also: Sure Facebook has 900 million users, but its engagement is smoked by these other sites.

by Andrew McLaughlin, Slate

Joe Henry (feat. Ornette Coleman)

Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself
Spreading out my wings
Above us like a tree,
Laughing now, out loud
Almost like I was free

I look at you as the thing I wanted most
You look at me and it's like you've seen a ghost
I wear the face
Of all this has cost:
Everything you tried to keep away from me,
Everything I took from you and lost

Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands,
You watched me while I tried to fall
You couldn't bear to watch me land

Take me away, carry me like a dove
Take me away, carry me like a dove
Love me like you're lying
Let me feel you near,
Remember me for trying
And excuse me while I disappear

Paris Review: A Mark So Fine: Joe Henry and You

Mizuki Goto (zukkeenee), Lemons and Vegetable Patch
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The Smartphone Psychology Manifesto

Abstract

By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did.

by Geoffrey Miller, SAGE |  Read more (pdf):
h/t New Shelton wet/dry