Failure and Rescue

In commencement addresses like this, people admonish us: take risks; be willing to fail. But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks”? We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter. The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology. They have produced a remarkable transformation in the field. Not that long ago, surgery was so inherently dangerous that you would only consider it as a last resort. Large numbers of patients developed serious infections afterward, bleeding, and other deadly problems we euphemistically called “complications.” Now surgery has become so safe and routine that most is day surgery—you go home right afterward.

But there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened up asking why.

Researchers at the University of Michigan discovered the answer recently, and it has a twist I didn’t expect. I thought that the best places simply did a better job at controlling and minimizing risks—that they did a better job of preventing things from going wrong. But, to my surprise, they didn’t. Their complication rates after surgery were almost the same as others. Instead, what they proved to be really great at was rescuing people when they had a complication, preventing failures from becoming a catastrophe.

Scientists have given a new name to the deaths that occur in surgery after something goes wrong—whether it is an infection or some bizarre twist of the stomach. They call them a “failure to rescue.” More than anything, this is what distinguished the great from the mediocre. They didn’t fail less. They rescued more.

This may in fact be the real story of human and societal improvement. We talk a lot about “risk management”—a nice hygienic phrase. But in the end, risk is necessary. Things can and will go wrong. Yet some have a better capacity to prepare for the possibility, to limit the damage, and to sometimes even retrieve success from failure.

When things go wrong, there seem to be three main pitfalls to avoid, three ways to fail to rescue. You could choose a wrong plan, an inadequate plan, or no plan at all. Say you’re cooking and you inadvertently set a grease pan on fire. Throwing gasoline on the fire would be a completely wrong plan. Trying to blow the fire out would be inadequate. And ignoring it—“Fire? What fire?”—would be no plan at all. (...)

There was, as I said, every type of error. But the key one was the delay in accepting that something serious was wrong. We see this in national policy, too. All policies court failure—our war in Iraq, for instance, or the effort to stimulate our struggling economy. But when you refuse to even acknowledge that things aren’t going as expected, failure can become a humanitarian disaster. The sooner you’re able to see clearly that your best hopes and intentions have gone awry, the better. You have more room to pivot and adjust. You have more of a chance to rescue.

But recognizing that your expectations are proving wrong—accepting that you need a new plan—is commonly the hardest thing to do. We have this problem called confidence. To take a risk, you must have confidence in yourself. In surgery, you learn early how essential that is. You are imperfect. Your knowledge is never complete. The science is never certain. Your skills are never infallible. Yet you must act. You cannot let yourself become paralyzed by fear.

by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty.

Paul Gauguin “Still life with three puppies”
Oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of New-York
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Can Music Save Your Life?

Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed. I heard it, and a gate flew open and I walked through. But does music constantly provide revelation—or does it have some other effects, maybe less desirable?

For those of us who teach, the question is especially pressing. Our students tend to spend hours a day plugged into their tunes. Yet, at least in my experience, they are reluctant to talk about music. They'll talk about sex, they'll talk about drugs—but rock 'n' roll, or whatever else they may be listening to, is off-limits. What's going on there?

When I first heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965, not long after it came out, I was amazed. At the time, I liked to listen to pop on the radio—the Beatles were fine, the Stones were better. But nothing I'd heard until then prepared me for Dylan's song. It had all the fluent joy of a pop number, but something else was going on too. This song was about lyrics: language. Dylan wasn't chanting some truism about being in love or wanting to get free or wasted for the weekend. He had something to say. He was exasperated. He was pissed off. He'd clearly been betrayed by somebody, or a whole nest of somebodies, and he was letting them have it. His words were exuberantly weird and sometimes almost embarrassingly inventive—and I didn't know what they all meant. "You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat." Chrome horse? Diplomat? What?

I sensed Dylan's disdain and his fury, but the song suggested way more than it declared. This was a sidewinder of a song—intense and angry, but indirect and riddling too. I tried to hear every line—Dylan's voice seemed garbled, and our phonograph wasn't new. I can still see myself with my head cocked to the spindle, eyes clenched, trying to shut out the room around me as I strained to grab the words from the harsh melodious wind of the song. "Ain't it hard when you discovered that / He really wasn't where it's at / After he took from you everything he could steal."

I couldn't listen to that song enough. I'd liked music before that. I'd liked stuff I'd heard on the radio; I'd even liked the Beethoven and the Mahler that my father played at top volume on Sunday mornings, though I never would have admitted as much to him. But Dylan was different. Other music made me temporarily happy, or tranquil, or energized. But this music made me puzzled. There was something in the grooves that I wasn't getting. There was something in the mix of the easy, available pop hook and the grating voice and elliptical words that signaled in the direction of experiences I hadn't had yet, and maybe never would. The song made me feel that life was larger than I had thought and made me want to find out what I was missing.

That song kicked open a door in my mind—to borrow a phrase Bruce Springsteen used to describe his own experience with it. But to be honest, in time that door may have gotten a little rusty from lack of use. Because really, after I heard "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio and bought the single and listened to it 50 or so times, I put it away. I never went out to cop a Dylan album. I never even thought much about the guy for the next five years.

by Mark Edmundson, The Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:
Photo: Tim MacPherson, Cultura, Aurora Photos

Jack Vettriano “Clouds Are Gathering”
Oil on canvas
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Hope Gangloff
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There She Blew

The history of American whaling.

If, under the spell of “Moby-Dick,” you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman’s alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler’s with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.

Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol. In another chapter long suspected of symbolism, Ishmael falls into ecstasy while squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti freshly bailed from the head of a sperm whale: “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.” But, fanciful as it sounds, sperm-squeezing is attested to by another source. In an 1874 memoir, the whaler William M. Davis recalled how “luxurious” it was to wade into pots of sperm and “squeeze and strain out the fibres,” which would darken the oil unless they were removed, and added that, in the rich bath, “I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs.”

It is difficult to follow in Melville’s footsteps if you can’t tell when he’s fibbing, but there is no shortage of whaling histories for a Melville aficionado to turn to. (“Though of real knowledge there be little,” Melville wrote, “yet of books there are a plenty.”) In the latest, “Leviathan” (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin offers a pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. “Leviathan” is a gentle book about a brutal industry. By ending his story when America stopped whaling, Dolin omits the most gruesome years of international whaling history, when new technology increased killing capacity approximately tenfold. He presents whaling in a more innocent age, when it was the fifth-largest industry in America and a source of national pride—in the time before ecology, as well as before steamships, as it were.

It’s hard to say who qualifies as the first American whaler. The Inuit hunted whales in the Canadian Arctic a thousand years ago, but Dolin isn’t convinced that anyone in what is now the United States did so before Europeans arrived. Basque whale hunters reached Labrador in the sixteenth century, and in 1614 John Smith, unable to return to his beloved Virginia, tried to catch whales near what is now Maine. (They got away.) The day after the Pilgrims signed their 1620 compact, whales surrounded the Mayflower, but the Pilgrims lacked whale-catching equipment, and Dolin suspects that they lit their lamps with oil from dead whales they found on the beach. The first to hunt whales and actually catch them in waters that today belong to the United States were the Dutch, off the coast of Delaware, in the sixteen-thirties. The vagueness of this prehistory says a lot about Colonial America, which had few clear political borders, but even more about whaling, which throughout its history has tended to defy them. “In whaling the natural resource (the stock of whales) was owned by no one,” the economists Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter noted in a definitive 1997 analysis of the industry. One theme to emerge from Dolin’s book is the oblique angle the history of whaling forms with political history. To whalers, nation-states were usually irrelevant and sometimes a hazard.

Once a whale washed ashore, of course, it was bound to end up as someone’s property, and whales entered early American law through the question of who owned them when they did. On Long Island, a town’s householders divvied up the oil among themselves, after paying a few shillings to the finder and something to the butcher, and sometimes surrendering the fins and flukes to local Indians for ceremonial use. In Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony taxed towns by taking a barrel of oil from every drift whale. In the sixteen-forties and fifties, colonists began to sail a few miles to kill whales spotted from shore, and, not long afterward, Colonial governments were demanding a share of the profits from these whales, too.

Serious money was at stake. When two shallops of Rhode Islanders towed home a right whale in 1662, a contemporary commented that “they had earned more than a whole farm would bring us in an entire year.” Besides oil, right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths, which is probably responsible for the “strange, grassy, cutting sound” that Ishmael hears as he watches them feed. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic. It was used primarily in corsets, fashionable from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth, but it could be molded into items as various as umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and shoehorns.

by Caleb Crain, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Jacques De Loustal

Are We Losing San Francisco?

[ed. See also: Can Mom and Pop Shops Survive Extreme Gentrification?]

Twitter moves into its new headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month, it will occupy three floors of an 11-story 1937 Art Deco building that has sat shuttered for five years. Outside, its blue bird logo will replace the former main tenant’s sign, whose analog clocks remain frozen at 9:18, 4:33 and other times past.

Far from Silicon Valley’s self-enclosed campuses, Twitter and other tech start-ups are gravitating to an urban core here that has defied development for decades. Its soon-to-be neighbors include liquor stores, check-cashing stores and discount hotels.

At the Ironwok Japanese and Chinese restaurant, whose half-torn storefront banner flapped in the wind on a recent afternoon, the owners were waiting for Twitter with the same mixture of expectation and trepidation shared by much of the city toward the second tech boom in a little over a decade.

“Of course, Twitter is good for the city, but how about me?” said the owner, Jenny Liu, 41, explaining that her landlord was raising her monthly rent to $12,000 from $8,000.

Even more than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, this boom could transform the fabric of the city.

This time, Twitter, Zynga, Yelp and other social network companies favored by venture capitalists have made San Francisco their home, creating jobs and raising commercial rents. At the same time, a growing number of young Silicon Valley workers, drawn by San Francisco’s urban charms, are also moving into the city as commuters and further raising rents.

In a city often regarded as unfriendly to business, Mayor Edwin M. Lee, elected last year with the tech industry’s strong backing, has aggressively courted start-ups.

But this boom has also raised fears about the tech industry’s growing political clout and its spillover economic effects. Apartment rents have soared to record highs as affordable housing advocates warn that a new wave of gentrification will price middle-class residents out of the city. At risk, many say, are the very qualities that have drawn generations of outsiders here, like the city’s diversity and creativity. Families, black residents, artists and others will increasingly be forced across the bridge to Oakland, they warn.

“Is Oakland Cooler Than San Francisco?” The San Francisco Bay Guardian captured the prevailing angst on a recent cover.

Kenneth Rosen, an economist and expert on real estate at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the boom was starting to hurt the “poor and middle class” but that it would benefit the “upper middle class.” Its full impact will not be felt for another couple of years, he said, adding, “We are early on in this boom.”

by Norimitsu Onishi, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

terry kanokin | an end.
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The Little 747 Who Dared to Dream

Do they still make children's books with sad endings? Like The Velveteen Rabbit? Because I think I've got a doozy here.

It's all about a 747 who loves to fly. It's what she was built to do and it's what she does best. For years, she soars through the skies, ferrying cargo and, possibly, some nondescript men in nice suits. (Or maybe not. Depends on when she went into service.) But through it all, the little 747 just wants to spend as much time as she can aloft, among the clouds, where she belongs.

But then, one day, the nondescript men in nice suits tell her that it's time she retire. They take her to a place in the desert and leave her there, with lots of other retired planes who've given up and are slowly falling apart. Other men come and they take her engines. Then they take all the beautiful buttons and switches from cockpit. The other planes tell her that, soon, men will come with saws to cut away parts of her fuselage. But the little 747 never breaks. They can take her apart, bit by bit, but they can't take away her dreams. And still, sometimes, in the boneyard, she tries to take to the skies just one last time.

Seriously. Somebody call the Newberry committee.

And bring me a hanky.

by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing

Dextro
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Real Cool

One of the more memorable encounters in the history of modern art occurred late in 1961 when the period’s preeminent avant-garde dealer, Leo Castelli, paid a call at the Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse-cum-studio of Andy Warhol, whose pioneering Pop paintings based on cartoon characters including Dick Tracy, the Little King, Nancy, Popeye, and Superman had caught the eye of Castelli’s gallery director, Ivan Karp, who in turn urged his boss to go have a look for himself. Warhol, eager to make the difficult leap from commercial artist to “serious” painter, decades later recalled his crushing disappointment when Castelli coolly told him, “Well, it’s unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide.”

Although Lichtenstein, then a thirty-eight-year-old assistant art professor at Rutgers University’s Douglass College in New Jersey, was also making pictures based on comic-book prototypes—an example of wholly independent multiple discovery not unlike such scientific findings as calculus, oxygen, photography, and evolution—he and Warhol were in fact doing quite different things with similar source material, as the divergent tangents of their later careers would amply demonstrate. By 1964, Castelli recognized his mistake and added the thwarted aspirant to his gallery roster, though not before Warhol forswore cartoon imagery, fearful of seeming to imitate Lichtenstein, of whom he always remained somewhat in awe.

In fact, what Lichtenstein and his five-years-younger contemporary Warhol had most in common was being the foremost exemplars of Cool among their generation of American visual artists. The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool—as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.

Coolness (which was largely but not exclusively a male attribute) suffused American culture back then, from our supremely compartmentalized commander in chief, John Kennedy, to the action-movie star Steve McQueen, nicknamed “The King of Cool,” and from the middle-class cool of the TV talk-show host Johnny Carson to the far-out jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, whose LP album Birth of the Cool could serve as the soundtrack for that brief interlude before things suddenly turned hot toward the end of the Sixties. Coolness even had its own philosopher-theoretician, Marshall McLuhan, whose influential treatise Understanding Media (1964) codified comic books and television as “cool” means of communication.

Today, a quarter-century after Warhol’s death and fifteen years after Lichtenstein’s (in a hideous coincidence, both unexpectedly succumbed after what had been deemed routine hospital procedures), they remain the two Pop artists best known to the general public, if only in the most simplistic terms, with Warhol as the Campbell’s Soup guy and Lichtenstein as the cartoon guy. A pair of exhibitions that nearly overlapped this spring—a major one on Lichtenstein now at the Art Institute of Chicago before it travels internationally and a numerically comparable but physically more compact one on Warhol at the McNay Museum in San Antonio that was seen only there—offer telling contrasts between these two consummately cool customers.

by Martin Filler, NY Review of Books |  Read more:
Illusration: Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966. Art Institute of Chicago

WTF in China

I expected China to be different; exotic, challenging, overwhelming in its otherness. But, in many ways, it was depressingly familiar; the mall next to my apartment building had a Gap, an H&M, a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. The New York Pizza restaurant was always at least as busy as the excellent Dim Sum restaurant a few doors down from it. Beijing and Shanghai each have a 5th Avenue equivalent sporting a Louis Vuitton, an enormous Cartier, an equally huge Tiffanys, gigantic Apple stores and all the brands that you'd expect to accompany these. I saw a few Aston Martin and Porsche dealerships and it seemed like every other person was driving an Audi.

My tour guide at the Great Wall of China, Leo, looked at my iPhone and asked, "4S?" I replied yes and he bemoaned the fact that his was only an iPhone 4. By the way, you can get great 3G phone reception at the Great Wall. The Pudong area in Shanghai, which was all farmland 20 years ago, is now adding fantastical skyscrapers so quickly that, when I left for a week to go to Beijing, I thought buildings would pop up while I was away.

There is restricted access to the Internet in China, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and clearly the barriers are pretty easy to work around. Leo asked if I'd like to be his Facebook friend and told me he'd friend me when he got home and could get on the VPN that went around the country's firewall.

But in ways that I wasn't expecting, China was as foreign and incomprehensible as anywhere I've ever been in my life. In the roughly 5 weeks (on and off) that I was there, I had more truly inexplicable encounters and conversations than in the rest of my life put together. My colleague Diana and I coined a phrase, WTF in China (WTFIC). We'd say this to each other every time there was really nothing else to say because words failed us.

One day in Beijing, we were sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic. We noticed a few vendors going between the cars selling mobile phone car chargers. This seemed like a clever idea. Then Diana noticed that each vendor had chargers in one hand and a live turtle in the other. What was the deal with the turtles? Were they selling them? Were they a marketing gimmick? We emailed Leo, who had offered to help us post-tour with any questions. Before I got his reply back, I said to Diana, "you know, even once he answers us, we're not going to be any more illuminated. I just know it's going to be a WTF in China issue." And indeed, this was Leo's answer, "For turtles, they are the symbol of longevity and fortune, so people may buy when they get bored in traffic!" Clearly, this answer made perfect logical sense to Leo. And to all the people sitting in rush hour traffic jams making a spur of the moment purchase of an animal that would probably outlive them.

And talking of driving in China…sometimes driving down the road, it was very hard to tell the difference between "something major has happened" and just the normal everyday chaos. Every day I felt like I took my life in my hands just getting a taxi to the office. Every taxi driver drives insanely fast and wildly, honking his horn even if there are no other cars on the road. It turns out that most of the Shanghai taxi drivers are living and working there illegally from other provinces and none of them seem to know how to get to almost anywhere in Shanghai. I became conversant in enough Mandarin to communicate and direct them to my office and back to my apartment building because this seemed to be a survival tactic.

When I was able to move beyond my fear for my life on these car rides and ones in Beijing, I noticed that cars often stopped, seemingly in the middle of the road or lined up on the hard shoulder, particularly at the weekend. This never helped the terrible traffic congestion. We asked Leo what that was all about. He told us that driving is a pretty new phenomenon for most people in Shanghai and Beijing and they see it as a social activity. When they go out for the day, they want to drive along with their friends. So they'll park in the meridian or by the side of the road to wait for them to catch up. Given that they all have cell phones, I'm not sure why they can't just track each other via GPS or phone and say, "where are you?" But again, this seemed a perfectly reasonable activity to Leo.

by Sarah Firisen, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

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Expert Issues a Cyberwar Warning

[ed. See also: Why Antivirus Companies Like Mine Failed to Catch Flame and Stuxnet]

When Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Europe’s largest antivirus company, discovered the Flame virus that is afflicting computers in Iran and the Middle East, he recognized it as a technologically sophisticated virus that only a government could create.

He also recognized that the virus, which he compares to the Stuxnet virus built by programmers employed by the United States and Israel, adds weight to his warnings of the grave dangers posed by governments that manufacture and release viruses on the Internet.

“Cyberweapons are the most dangerous innovation of this century,” he told a gathering of technology company executives, called the CeBIT conference, last month in Sydney, Australia. While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.

Computer security companies have for years used their discovery of a new virus or worm to call attention to themselves and win more business from companies seeking computer protection. Mr. Kaspersky, a Russian computer security expert, and his company, Kaspersky Lab, are no different in that regard. But he is also using his company’s integral role in exposing or decrypting three computer viruses apparently intended to slow or halt Iran’s nuclear program to argue for an international treaty banning computer warfare.

A growing array of nations and other entities are using online weapons, he says, because they are “thousands of times cheaper” than conventional armaments.

While antivirus companies might catch some, he says, only an international treaty that would ban militaries and spy agencies from making viruses will truly solve the problem.

The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.

by  Andrew E. Kramer and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Alexey Sazonov/Agence France-Presse - Getty Image

In Praise of (Loud, Stinky) Bars

The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work—it’s more like the living room of society at large. It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect. It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection. It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.

And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar.

So, a little story: Once upon a time there was a scruffy real estate developer who shall go nameless, who made some prudent purchases in a derelict former industrial neighborhood. He had a dream to turn that neighborhood into a vibrant new community that attracted talented young professionals willing to pay at least $1,000 per square foot to live there. But times were hard and everyone thought he was nuts. Now, the developer had three things going for him: time, empty space, and a son who was actively dating. The son would come home from a date and say, “Pops, you know that empty storefront down the side street by the pier? Can my girlfriend turn that into a welding shop?” And poof! A rent-free welding shop would appear. Soon the area was populated with ex-girlfriends running quirky artisanal industries, but still times were tough and the talented young professionals would not come.

Then one day the son came home and said, “Hey Pops, my girlfriend wants to open a bar.” The father considered this gravely, but finally agreed. Bars were stinky and noisy and they sold liquor. But they also attracted people and besides the place was just sitting empty now anyway. The bar was opened, and lo and behold it became a Third Space: a place where poor young hipsters could go and hang their weary heads over cheap beer after a long day of yarn bombing, and also where the local shipping company guys enjoyed the jukebox. Before you knew it, alcohol was flowing freely, and the new locals and old locals were conspiring to illegally convert lofts into residential units and open food co-ops. It wasn’t long before the bar started serving food, and then one day the unthinkable happened – it opened a café next door with really good coffee and quirky flavors of scones….

Look, I’m not telling this story to glorify bars as the ultimate third space intervention – I’m just trying to point out that bars occupy are particular niche in the place-making ecosystem. They are like the prairie grass after the fire: preparing the way for the scrub, and ending with the deciduous trees and their variegated canopy. They are hardy pioneers, taking root where not much else can sustain life.

Wait, was that metaphor too much? Yes, definitely.

But it’s also the point: we shouldn’t romanticize third spaces as only being about brightly lit cafes, pedestrianized streets, and the local public library. Bars work in their scruffy way by offering a place to get away from an overcrowded apartment or a squalid loft or a grimy job. They are a place where someone with little to spare can go for a change of pace, and in many edgy neighborhoods those folks are overwhelmingly low-income, and many are also young. These are the bright young things who do the hard work of place-making, but they aren’t necessarily looking for “vibrancy.” It’s more likely they want cheap beer, a decent burger, and a friendly face.

The goal of a bar patron is to enjoy the primary benefit of any decent third space: a place to linger. I’m still looking for someone to generate a “lingering index” so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out – but that’s really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn’t forget it.

Place-making is thirsty work, so bottom’s up in praise of bars and the Third Space promise they hold.

by Michael Hickey, Rooflines
Photo: Bree Bailey via Creative Commons, CC BY-SA

Moonrise Kingdom

The movie, which takes place in 1965, opens with a cross-stitch portrait of a red New England vacation home with its own small, built-in lighthouse. The portrait, we soon see, hangs in that selfsame red vacation home. (Yes, this is a Wes Anderson movie.) This is the warm-weather abode of Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), two attorneys who have been drifting apart, their marital estrangement signified by the name of the property: Summer's End.

But this is only peripherally the story of Walt and Laura, or of their three young sons. Rather, it is the tale of their "difficult" eldest child, 12-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward) and another young misfit with whom she—there really is no better word for it—elopes. This would be Sam (Jared Gilman), a serious, bespectacled, and unpopular boy who fell in love with Suzy the prior year, when he saw her playing the raven in a summer production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. (It is one of several references to the composer in the film.)

Sam goes AWOL from his troop of Khaki Scouts at nearby Camp Ivanhoe to rendezvous with Suzy. United, the two disappear into the wooded thickets of New Penzance Island—the name itself is worth the price of admission—Suzy with her binoculars and pastel suitcases and battery-powered record player; Sam with his coonskin cap and corncob pipe and abundance of camping gear. There, in the dappled forests and sunswept coves, the two young runaways discover freedom, and companionship, and the early, innocent rumblings of sex. As they follow their trail of pseudo-maturity, they are of course sought after by an escalatingly (and understandably) frantic brigade of adults: Suzy's parents, the local police captain (Bruce Willis), and Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton). As this last informs the young scouts he's dragooned into the hunt: "This is not just a rescue party. This is a great scouting opportunity."

The book is awash with echoes of children's adventure fiction, from Tom Sawyer to Treasure Island to A High Wind in Jamaica. Underage though they may be, the kids are resourceful, optimistic, capable of loyalty and love—all the qualities with which their elders struggle. It's worth noting that this is the rare tale set in 1965 in which most of the adults are single, and the one marriage to which we are introduced is an unhappy one. (Well, the one legally binding marriage: I should cite here a hilarious cameo by Jason Schwartzman as a renegade scoutmaster with a weakness for performing age-inappropriate matrimonies.)

Moonrise Kingdom is touching, bittersweet, and very, very funny. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson's usual collaborator, evokes the the feel of New England (the film was shot in Rhode Island) so precisely that the story's locale need never be mentioned. And the script, by Anderson with Roman Coppola, captures the indolent yet enterprising texture of childhood summers, the sense of having a limited amount of time in which to do unlimited things. The performances are excellent across the board, from the adults who recognize that their best is never quite good enough, to the kids who realize they will be forced to make up the deficit. On the former side, Norton and (particularly) Willis are standouts; on the latter, newcomer Gilman, as Sam, offers a portrait of a boy trying to will himself into premature manhood so indelible that it can almost almost compete with (then-newcomer) Schwartzman's Max Fischer in Rushmore.

by Christopher Orr, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Illustration: “Moonrise Kingdom” by Adrian Tomine for The New Yorker. via

You Are Not a Curator

"Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression." - Jonathan Harris

As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for starters, "curation" is choosing among things that are created? So like there's nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it's also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You're in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work. Oh and also? You "curators" might want to be careful with your language....

"When you create digital tools that changes people's behavior, you are not a software engineer but a social engineer!" -Jonathan Harris

Oh, hey, you know who else was a social engineer?

Anyway:

In the 16th century, the poet was artist-king. The 19th: the novelist. 20th: the film-maker. I wonder if in the 21st, it'll be the curator. -Joe Hill

Hey, how did we blow past "editor"? Why don't the curators want to be editors?

Anyway, replace "curator" with "people who are really picky with what they share on Facebook" and maybe Joe Hill will be right on the money! Although I suspect that in the 16th century, if not "painter," then actually the "patron" was the "artist-king." (Commissioning is an art! Ask Pope Julius II!) And then that "editors" were the dominant influence in the 19th. And "studios" in the 20th. So I guess now either "ad sales people" or "web engineers" are at the top of the artistic food chain? Oh dear.

by Choire Sicha, The Awl |  Read more:

watch her disappear (by carlein)
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Caffeine is our power source, whether it’s from coffee or tea or BAWLS. What better way for us to visualize our batteries being charged than a mug with a battery that powers up when we fill it with our piping hot caffeinated libation of choice?

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