Guy Walks into a Bar Car

Lost loves and lost years.

In the golden age of American travel, the platforms of train stations were knee deep in what looked like fog. You see it all the time in black-and-white movies, these low-lying eddies of silver. I always thought it was steam from the engines, but now I wonder if it didn’t come from cigarettes. You could smoke everywhere back then: in the dining car, in your sleeping berth. Depending on your preference, it was either absolute Heaven or absolute Hell.

I know there was a smoking car on the Amtrak I took from Raleigh to Chicago in 1984, but seven years later it was gone. By then if you wanted a cigarette your only option was to head for the bar. It sounds all right in passing, romantic even—“the bar on the Lake Shore Limited”—but in fact it was rather depressing. Too bright, too loud, and full of alcoholics who commandeered the seats immediately after boarding and remained there, marinating like cheap kebabs, until they reached their destinations. At first, their voices might strike you as jolly: the warm tones of strangers becoming friends. Then the drinkers would get sloppy and repetitive, settling, finally, on that cross-eyed mush that passes for alcoholic sincerity.

On the train I took from New York to Chicago in early January of 1991, one of the drunks pulled down his pants and shook his bare bottom at the woman behind the bar. I was thirty-four, old enough to know better, yet I laughed along with everyone else. The trip was interminable—almost nineteen hours, not counting any delays—but nothing short of a derailment could have soured my good mood. I was off to see the boyfriend I’d left behind when I moved to New York. We’d known each other for six years, and though we’d broken up more times than either of us could count, there was the hope that this visit might reunite us. Then he’d join me for a fresh start in Manhattan, and all our problems would disappear.

It was best for both of us that it didn’t work out that way, though of course I couldn’t see it at the time. The trip designed to bring us back together tore us apart for good, and it was a considerably sorrier me that boarded the Limited back to New York. My train left Union Station in the early evening. The late-January sky was the color of pewter, and the ground beneath it—as flat as rolled-out dough—was glazed with slush. I watched as the city receded into the distance, and then I went to the bar car for a cigarette. Of the dozen or so drunks who’d staggered on board in Chicago, one in particular stood out. I’ve always had an eye for ruined-looking men, and that’s what attracted me to this guy—I’ll call him Johnny Ryan—the sense that he’d been kicked around. By the time he hit thirty, a hardness would likely settle about his mouth and eyes, but as it was—at twenty-nine—he was right on the edge, a screw-top bottle of wine the day before it turns to vinegar.

It must have been he who started the conversation, as I’d never have had the nerve. Under different circumstances, I might have stammered hello and run back to my seat, but my breakup convinced me that something major was about to happen. The chance of a lifetime was coming my way, and in order to accept it I needed to loosen up, to stop being so “rigid.” That was what my former boyfriend had called me. He’d thrown in “judgmental” while he was at it, another of those synonyms for “no fun at all.” The fact that it stung reaffirmed what I had always suspected: it was all true. No one was duller, more prudish and set in his ways, than I was.

Johnny didn’t strike me as gay, but it was hard to tell with alcoholics. Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn’t care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark. It’s the next morning you have to worry about—the name-calling, the slamming of doors, the charge that you somehow cast a spell. I must have been desperate to think that such a person would lead me to a new life. Not that Johnny was bad company—it’s just that the things we had in common were all so depressing. Unemployment, for instance. My last job had been as an elf at Macy’s.

“Personal assistant” was how I phrased it, hoping he wouldn’t ask for whom.

“Uh—Santa?”

by David Sedaris, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Zohar Lazar

Here We Go Magic

Droplets (by k.ebato)
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The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads

In Jonathan Lethem’s new book, “Fear of Music,” a study of the Talking Heads album by the same name and a riff on his emotional history with the band, Lethem refers to an earlier essay of his on the subject: “At the peak, in 1980 or 81, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” But no sooner has he quoted himself than Lethem applies the eraser of time, deciding “Like everything I’ve ever said about Talking Heads, or about any other thing I’ve loved with such dreadful longing—there’s only a few—this looks to me completely inadequate, even in the extremeness of its claims, or especially for the extremeness of its claims.”

Lethem likes this Romantic arc—dreadful longing, the regretful revision that follows—and in Talking Heads he has the perfect subject and mirror. In the late nineteen-seventies, in primordial downtown Manhattan, the band sonified not just longing and regret (most great musicians do that), but also dread (some do that), and then—this is what made them really special—mingled the feelings in single songs, sounds, and even couplets, while never letting listeners forget they knew what they were doing.

Take the opening of “Life During Wartime,” an apocalyptic swamp-funk transmission in four-four time. In the first line, the front man David Byrne molds his plastic tenor into a paranoiac-newscaster voice to announce, “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons”; then, in the second, he steadies it as though to disown his excitement, and, like some repentant father pointing at the family station wagon, avers, “Packed up and ready to go.” (Note, too, that reluctant collusion between the “o”s in “loaded” and “go,” which Byrne emphasizes—a dissociative gulch somewhere between assonance and rhyme.)

For Lethem, “Life During Wartime” is the band’s pinnacle, and the song is still a hell of a thing to hear. (A point about Talking Heads not often enough made: they cooked. Byrne was the funkiest white man in pop until Flea showed up.) But most of the iTunes generation has never heard it. “Fear of Music” appeared in 1979. Indeed, while Talking Heads can be detected in so much music today, from Radiohead to Vampire Weekend, years-old dust covers most of their catalogue. (...)

Between 1977 and 1983, Talking Heads posted one of the great learning curves in rock history, releasing five albums, each an elaboration on the one before it. Byrne and two Rhode Island School of Design classmates, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, had formed The Artistics with the idea of combining conceptual and performance art with popular music (their sound earned them the nickname The Autistics). Redubbed Talking Heads, they played alongside riotous groups like The Ramones in refuges from disco, like CBGBs and the Mudd Club. They were a different organism, however, incorporating elements of Motown, punk, African music, funk, and minimalism, all while gigging in collared shirts and corduroys.

Similarly, Byrne’s lyrics were a blank-verse switchboard, patching through Dada language experiments, imagist poetry, scientific literature. (To the disappointment of his engineer father, Byrne had chosen art school over Carnegie Mellon, because, he explained, the former had better graffiti in the halls.) One critic characterized his singing style as “passing on information.”

There was that current of fear in the early songs—of music, technology, animals, the air—the stuff of an Asperger diagnosis, at least. Byrne, who moved around the stage like a hasty votive offering, was a one-man rebuke not just to the Gibb brothers but also to E. M. Forster’s advice to “only connect.” (“Okay, how?” Byrne seemed to reply. “And with whom, exactly? You?”) But there was a merging current, one of childlike bafflement and delight in the world of objects and people. The band played the cosseted prodigy set loose in a decaying America. The precursor to “Fear of Music” is entitled “More Songs About Buildings And Food.”

Lester Bangs, theorizing about the band in The Village Voice in 1979, wrote “Talking Heads are the for(wo)men in charge of that section of the human remodification factory where no one wants to set these mutants careening off nightraze pathogenic highways.” Pleasingly Bangsian, but in hindsight probably wrong. Better, I think, is Lethem’s image of “four musicians using their instruments like an erector set to construct a skyline that won’t fall down before they’re finished.” (The fourth member, Jerry Harrison, dropped out of Harvard’s architecture program to join the band.)

In her memoir, Twyla Tharp, who collaborated with Byrne in 1981 and in the process became romantically involved with him, wrote that he seemed to want “to find the residue of ancient thoughts in the most up-to-date aspects of society.”

by James Verini, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Peter Doig 
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Metin Demiralay
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The Secret Shopper

When we talk about surveillance, we make a connection, almost automatically, between surveillance and crime, and another between surveillance and technology: The CCTV camera capturing the masked robber, the bank manager monitoring every inch of his vault for signs of intrusion, the giant NSA black site in Utah, designed to store indefinitely all the data that travels across American wires and through American airspace. Whether James Bond–glamorous or 1984-terrifying, surveillance is high-tech and polices the illicit. (...)

Mystery shoppers spy in retail stores, restaurants, movie theaters, banks, hospitals, bars, supermarkets, churches, doctors’ offices, public transit systems, gas stations, mechanics shops, gyms, funeral homes, universities — in short, anywhere the public is treated as a “customer.” Marketing firms hire “mystery worshippers” who pose as first-time congregants to evaluate church cleanliness, friendliness, and godliness. Mentally healthy people complain to psychiatrists of fake symptoms while carefully comparing the doctor’s behavior against a checklist. Last summer, a congressional scuffle over the federal government’s plan to send out elderly mystery patients made headlines, and while the measure ultimately failed, the U.S. has helped Pakistan deploy mystery shoppers in order to combat tax evasion.

In a neoliberal society where service is a commodity, consumer choice is hailed as civil liberty, and every social relationship is understood as a transaction between provider and customer, mystery shoppers are deployed basically everywhere. These are not well-paid agents stalking casino floors for criminal masterminds. Mystery shoppers are workaday spies, moms cruising the mall with an eye to shelf organization and timely welcome greetings. They are the front-line grunts in corporate espionage, the preferred “objective parties” for internal corporate-performance evaluation and data gatherers for marketing firms. All in all, mystery shopping is a $1.5 billion industry employing 1.5 million people worldwide.

And yet, there is almost no public knowledge of the mystery-shopping trade. If you’re not one of the millions of retail employees regularly surveilled by contractors hired to catch you out, or one of the million and a half doing the spying, you could be forgiven for not knowing just how serious a business mystery shopping is. What academic work has been done on mystery shopping tends to be industry specific, evaluating its efficacy rather than its sociological impact. Mystery shoppers pop up from time to time in the news, but usually in relation to a bank-account-phishing scam connected to fake mystery shopping jobs only a little more sophisticated than the Nigerian-prince email. And the books about mystery shopping are almost exclusively aspirational: The Mystery Shopper’s Manual: How to Get Paid to Shop in Your Favorite Stores, Eat in Your Favorite Restaurants, and More!

The hard work of making sure every chain store in the country is more or less the same follows a fairly simple process: Mystery shoppers sign up for each job separately through a mystery-shopping company (MSC), staffing agencies that corporations hire to provide retail spies. The MSCs’ names go from totally banal (Service Excellence Group Inc.; Customer 1st) to the more insidiously corporate (Statopex; Confero) to the accidentally Maoist (Shoppers Critique International). Each job, called a “shop,” is a onetime, one-task contract between the mystery shopper and the MSC. Once mystery shoppers agree to do a shop, they enter the store and follow the instructions they are given (to make a purchase, or return an item, or ask a series of questions, etc.), all the while carefully monitoring and remembering conditions (not writing them down; writing things down is a dead giveaway) and pretending to be a normal customer. This last bit is important — if any employees at the retail site figure out they’re being mystery-shopped, the MSC can and will deny the mystery shopper payment for that shop.

by Willie Osterweil, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Image by Imp Kerr, original photo by John Dominis

Klaus Fußmann Daisies
2001
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What Facebook Knows

If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world.

It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.

And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn't actually done that much with what it knows about us. Now that the company has gone public, the pressure to develop new sources of profit (see "The Facebook Fallacy") is likely to force it to do more with its hoard of information. That stash of data looms like an oversize shadow over what today is a modest online advertising business, worrying privacy-conscious Web users (see "Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook") and rivals such as Google. Everyone has a feeling that this unprecedented resource will yield something big, but nobody knows quite what.

Even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn't done that much with what it knows about us. Its stash of data looms like an oversize shadow. Everyone has a feeling that this resource will yield something big, but nobody knows quite what.

Heading Facebook's effort to figure out what can be learned from all our data is Cameron Marlow, a tall 35-year-old who until recently sat a few feet away from ­Zuckerberg. The group Marlow runs has escaped the public attention that dogs Facebook's founders and the more headline-grabbing features of its business. Known internally as the Data Science Team, it is a kind of Bell Labs for the social-networking age. The group has 12 researchers—but is expected to double in size this year. They apply math, programming skills, and social science to mine our data for insights that they hope will advance Facebook's business and social science at large. Whereas other analysts at the company focus on information related to specific online activities, Marlow's team can swim in practically the entire ocean of personal data that Facebook maintains. Of all the people at Facebook, perhaps even including the company's leaders, these researchers have the best chance of discovering what can really be learned when so much personal information is compiled in one place.

Facebook has all this information because it has found ingenious ways to collect data as people socialize. Users fill out profiles with their age, gender, and e-mail address; some people also give additional details, such as their relationship status and mobile-phone number. A redesign last fall introduced profile pages in the form of time lines that invite people to add historical information such as places they have lived and worked. Messages and photos shared on the site are often tagged with a precise location, and in the last two years Facebook has begun to track activity elsewhere on the Internet, using an addictive invention called the "Like" button. It appears on apps and websites outside Facebook and allows people to indicate with a click that they are interested in a brand, product, or piece of digital content. Since last fall, Facebook has also been able to collect data on users' online lives beyond its borders automatically: in certain apps or websites, when users listen to a song or read a news article, the information is passed along to Facebook, even if no one clicks "Like." Within the feature's first five months, Facebook catalogued more than five billion instances of people listening to songs online. Combine that kind of information with a map of the social connections Facebook's users make on the site, and you have an incredibly rich record of their lives and interactions.

"This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication," Marlow says with a characteristically serious gaze before breaking into a smile at the thought of what he can do with the data. For one thing, Marlow is confident that exploring this resource will revolutionize the scientific understanding of why people behave as they do. His team can also help Facebook influence our social behavior for its own benefit and that of its advertisers. This work may even help Facebook invent entirely new ways to make money.

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review |  Read more:
Photo: Leah Fasten

In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria

For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.

But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.

No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?

In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.

They discovered more strains than they had ever imagined — as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person’s. To the scientists’ surprise, they also found genetic signatures of disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or even infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.

The results, published on Wednesday in Nature and three PLoS journals, are expected to change the research landscape. (...)

In recent years, as investigators began to probe the microbiome in small studies, they began to appreciate its importance. Not only do the bacteria help keep people healthy, but they also are thought to help explain why individuals react differently to various drugs and why some are susceptible to certain infectious diseases while others are impervious. When they go awry they are thought to contribute to chronic diseases and conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, even, possibly, obesity.

Humans, said Dr. David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist, are like coral, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.”

Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the division of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute, who was not involved with the research project, had another image. Humans, he said, in some sense are made mostly of microbes. From the standpoint of our microbiome, he added, “we may just serve as packaging.”

by Gina Kolata, NY Times |  Read more: 
Image via: ZeeNews

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Norbert Prangenberg
Ritter 1. 2010
Oil, pastel colour on canvas
40 x 50 cm
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The Bottom

“They was a-fighting and a-fighting. Just right out yonder, rolling in the gutter. And the little one, he snatched that ole butcher knife out from under his shirt and went to jabbing with it, just a-jabbing away around the other’ns neck. And the two of them, they rolled this way and that. Blood everywhere. Then come the law and hauled the both of ’em off. Never did hear if the big one lived or died.”

Walter is putting the finishing touches on an unsolicited account of a stabbing (apparently one of many) that took place directly in front of his barbershop on Central Avenue in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. This particular incident occurred some sixty years ago. “Saturday nights. Back then, they was like the Wild West.” Walter sighs nostalgically, seated there in his ancient barber chair whittling a small wooden owl.

It’s 1997. I’m a musician and find myself in Knoxville as the opening act for legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. David and I had been exploring the seedy old downtown area around Gay Street when we came upon Walter’s train wreck of misguided commerce: part barbershop, part thrift store, and, due to the presence of dozens of crudely carved wooden owls of all shape and size that populate the forward area of the shop, part folk-art emporium. The rear of the rundown storefront is crowded with shelves of what appear to be utterly worthless junk.

It’s just Walter and me now. Poor David fled the premises a few moments into our visit after being accused by Walter of conspiring to commit petty theft. Upon entering the shop, in his inimitably quirky fashion, David politely asked the old man if he minded us looking around the back area where “all those cool piles of stuff” lay. Walter scowled slightly then calmly suggested we get the hell out of his establishment, announcing we had a shifty, shoplifting look about us. David Byrne, unaccustomed to such rough handling, thereupon nervously excused himself. (...)

Back to 1994. I was a ruined husk of a human being. My troubles had begun three months before with a badly broken heart, which fate and circumstance parlayed into a conflagration of insomnia, clinical depression, and a raging, untreated infection in my intestines that I would some years later learn was a sometimes fatal condition called peritonitis. I hadn’t slept in weeks. I had no appetite and suffered mysterious, sometimes crippling pains in my gut. I was unwilling to go to the doctor because I had no health insurance and I feared they might put me in some hospital and I’d be bankrupted for life. I guessed there were social services available for people in my situation, but I just didn’t have the wherewithal to run the bureaucratic gauntlet. To make matters worse I was a minimum wage worker who was more than twenty grand in debt. Creditors, having given up any hope of my ever paying my bills, had taken to calling my unsuspecting relatives, harassing them for money. The shame. I lived hand-to-mouth, driving a cab to cover my most immediate bills. Food, lodging.

That was bad enough. But it got worse.

I was increasingly beset by distressing occult signifiers. Every day seemed like a further plunge into some delusional spiral. When my luminously beautiful but deeply troubled girlfriend disappeared without a trace some months back, I frantically searched and searched, but could make no sense of what had become of her. Her apartment appeared abandoned, though the phone line remained connected. I left message after message. No reply. Soon after she vanished, for several days in a row, I found severed chicken feet on my doormat. Black magic of some kind. Then apparitions began to appear on my walls at night — the faces of saints, devils. One day a New York Times crossword puzzle delivered a worrisome message to me about her. The next day there was another. Her name, occasionally in anagram form, sometimes sequentially concise, would appear as answers to clues alongside words like “vanished” and “dissolved.” The crossword messages were infuriatingly abstruse — no real information was communicated — so what was the point, and who, or what, was sending the messages? I felt as though I was losing my mind.

Then a couple months later, I was passing a newsstand and thought I spotted a full-page color photo of her on the cover of the New York Post. Hallucinations occur in extreme cases of sleep deprivation, I knew that much, so was this real? I stopped and stared at her image, then bought the paper. Just to be sure I said to the vendor, “She’s quite a pretty lady, isn’t she?” He winked at me and agreed, “Quite a looker.” He replied.

I read the accompanying article, recounting the story of a small-time, completely unknown theater actress who’d been cast in the starring role of a Disney blockbuster. It was one of those heartwarming rags-to-riches tales. The next day she was on the front page of another paper. Then it was People magazine — they’d named her one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. After that, wherever I went, whatever I did, I was assaulted by images of her. The Post article reported that she’d recently gotten married. Must have been pretty damn recent, because a scant few months back she claimed to love me and only me.

by Jim White, Radio Silence |  Read more:

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Guts, Glory, and Megapixels: The Story of GoPro

Nick Woodman didn't set out to redefine digital imaging—he just wanted to shoot decent surfing photos. A decade after he started GoPro with next to nothing, adrenaline junkies around the world are using these tough little cameras to record ridiculous stunts in HD. Here's how it all started.

It's a foggy morning in half moon bay , about 2 miles from the legendary Mavericks surf break just south of San Francisco. The parking lot is packed with 4x4 pickups and other mud-splattered vehicles outfitted with surfboard and bike racks. I'm led inside the GoPro headquarters by Rick Loughery, the company's steel-jawed director of communications, who's wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "manufacturing stoke."

We thread past a cube warren populated by twentysomethings dressed in the wrinkled cotton of passengers who just landed on the red-eye from Reykjavík (which some of the staffers very likely did). Duffel bags stuffed with outdoor gear crowd vacant desks while videographers stare into 27-inch monitors, editing footage captured at the most recent Winter X Games.

We weave our way to an office, where Nick Woodman, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of the upstart camera company, is double-fisting cans of Red Bull—his rocket fuel of choice—and watching a high-definition cavalcade of GoPro-sponsored athletes leaping out of airplanes, tumbling off mountains, plummeting over waterfalls, and diving into hot tubs on every continent. The frenetic action has been stitched into a promotional video for the company's latest creation, the $300 HD Hero2, the culmination of a decade's worth of tiny, armored cameras designed to be mounted on bike handlebars, snowboard helmets, and car hoods.

Woodman's distillation of the essence of the GoPro mission is equal parts corporate messaging and surferspeak: "Our goal was to create a celebration of inspired humans doing rad stuff around the world." In fact, Woodman is, to an extent, underselling the GoPro effect. The 8-year-old company not only has celebrated the antics of those inspired humans, it has also created a virtuous circle of video reinforcement that defines and motivates the culture of extreme sports. Woodman—a wave rider, race-car driver, mountain biker, and snowboarder—lives the lifestyle his indestructible cameras capture. He is proud that those cameras and accessories such as the new Wi-Fi BacPac, which adds remote capture and sharing features, form their own feedback loop that continuously adds functionality without stranding older equipment. The backward compatibility with cameras dating to the original HD Hero from 2009 keeps customers happy—and the Lego-like upgrades encourage people to buy deeper into the GoPro system. That resulting combination of customer enthusiasm and loyalty sold more than 800,000 cameras last year to users who then upload videos to YouTube once every 2 ½ minutes.

Woodman didn't set out to redefine the market for digital imaging. He just wanted to shoot decent surfing photos. In early 2002, after his games promotion company, Fun Bug, flamed out in the wake of the dot-com bust, he took off with his girlfriend (now wife), Jill, to surf-bum in Southeast Asia. The waves were world-class, and the art major from the University of California, San Diego, wanted to take high-quality action shots of his buddies on their boards. "Surfing is such an incredible experience with a huge ego element," he says. "'Did you see that wave? I got so barrelled! No? You didn't!'"

by Robert Moritz, Popular Mechanics |  Read more:
Photo: Nathaniel Welch

Does All Wine Taste the Same?

On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. Spurrier was a Francophile and, like most wine experts, didn’t expect the New World upstarts to compete with the premiers crus from Bordeaux. He assembled a panel of eleven wine experts and had them taste a variety of Cabernets blind, rating each bottle on a twenty-point scale.

The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards.

But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.

The tasting was closely modelled on the 1976 event, featuring the same fancy Bordeaux vineyards, such as Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut-Brion. The Jersey entries included bottles from the Heritage Vineyards in Mullica Hill and Unionville Vineyards in Ringoes. The nine judges were French and American wine experts.

The Judgment of Princeton didn’t quite end with a Jersey victory—a French wine was on top in both the red and white categories—but, in terms of the reassurance for those with valuable wine collections, it might as well have. Clos des Mouches only narrowly beat out Unionville Single Vineyard and two other Jersey whites, while Château Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion topped Heritage’s BDX. The wines from New Jersey cost, on average, about five per cent as much as their French counterparts. And then there’s the inconsistency of the judges: the scores for that Mouton Rothschild, for instance, ranged from 11 to 19.5. On the excellent blog Marginal Revolution, the economist Tyler Cowen highlights the analysis of the Princeton professor Richard Quand, who found that almost of all the wines were “statistically undistinguishable” from each other. This suggests that, if the blind tasting were held again, a Jersey wine might very well win.

What can we learn from these tests? First, that tasting wine is really hard, even for experts. Because the sensory differences between different bottles of rotten grape juice are so slight—and the differences get even more muddled after a few sips—there is often wide disagreement about which wines are best. For instance, both the winning red and white wines in the Princeton tasting were ranked by at least one of the judges as the worst.

The perceptual ambiguity of wine helps explain why contextual influences—say, the look of a label, or the price tag on the bottle—can profoundly influence expert judgment. This was nicely demonstrated in a mischievous 2001 experiment led by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. In the first test, Brochet invited fifty-seven wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.”

by Jonah Lehrer, New Yorker |  Read more:
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鄉間小路四月號-s (April country road-s) by Ra Ra S’ Va
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[ed. Well, this brings back a few memories...preview listening booths at the record store. I think that's where I heard my first Monkees album.]

Saturday Evening Post Cover, April 1952
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The Heart of the Matter

Over the past 13 years, the S&P 500 has underperformed even the depressed return on risk-free Treasury bills. Real U.S. gross domestic investment has not grown at all since 1999, and even as a share of GDP, real investment remains weak.

The ongoing debate about the economy continues along largely partisan lines, with conservatives arguing that taxes just aren't low enough, and the economy should be freed of regulations, while liberals argue that the economy needs larger government programs and grand stimulus initiatives.

Lost in this debate is any recognition of the problem that lies at the heart of the matter: a warped financial system, both in the U.S. and globally, that directs scarce capital to speculative and unproductive uses, and refuses to restructure debt once that debt has gone bad.

Specifically, over the past 15 years, the global financial system - encouraged by misguided policy and short-sighted monetary interventions - has lost its function of directing scarce capital toward projects that enhance the world's standard of living. Instead, the financial system has been transformed into a self-serving, grotesque casino that misallocates scarce savings, begs for and encourages speculative bubbles, refuses to restructure bad debt, and demands that the most reckless stewards of capital should be rewarded through bailouts that transfer bad debt from private balance sheets to the public balance sheet.

What is central here is that the government policy environment has encouraged this result. This environment includes financial sector deregulation that was coupled with a government backstop, repeated monetary distortions, refusal to restructure bad debt, and a preference for policy cowardice that included bailouts and opaque accounting. Deregulation and lower taxes will not fix this problem, nor will larger "stimulus packages." The right solutions are to encourage debt restructuring (and to impose it when necessary), to strengthen capital requirements and regulation of risk taken by traditional lending institutions that benefit from fiscal and monetary backstops, to remove fiscal and monetary backstops and ensure resolution authority over institutions engaging in more speculative financial activities, and to discontinue reckless monetary interventions that encourage financial speculation and transitory "wealth" effects without any meaningful link to lending or economic activity.

By our analysis, the U.S. economy is presently entering a recession. Not next year; not later this year; but now. We expect this to become increasingly evident in the coming months, but through a constant process of denial in which every deterioration is dismissed as transitory, and every positive outlier is celebrated as a resumption of growth. To a large extent, this downturn is a "boomerang" from the credit crisis we experienced several years ago. The chain of events is as follows:

by John Hussman, Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Did He Feel Good?

James Brown’s legendary reputation as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was part virile boast and part canny PR. Had a bad week at work? The Man will give you a show to raise your spirits and cancel out the pain. He put as much work into his act as his audience put into their low-end jobs. Showbiz was man’s work, hard labor, as much sweat of his brow as swish of his cape. The audience got its money’s worth; and if Brown understood one thing above all else, it was the many uses and values, financial and symbolic, of money. He never went on tour without a big bag of ready cash—to grease wheels, ameliorate tensions, make obstacles disappear. After he died, people found boxes of dollar bills stashed in the walls of his house, or buried out back on his land.

Born in 1933, Brown learned his hard-headed ways in a 1950s music business that was a rough twine of Mafia hegemony and outta-sight profits. He believed in the redemptive power of hard work as others believed in the blood of the lamb. A true believer in the do-it-yourself ethos of the American Dream, he didn’t see why race should be a barrier to getting the good things in life. Hard work was how he shaped his destiny in a sectarian world, his eventual success the product of near tyrannical drive and will. He could be hard work personally, too. He rarely took no for an answer, whether it was a question of getting an encore, sleeping with him, or signing away your royalties. In his music as in his wiles, Brown was no suave pinkie-ring seducer. He had none of the snake-charmer sweetness of a later generation of soul men. If the key to musical seduction is hiding all artifice behind a carefully disheveled front of natural élan, Brown took another road, emphasizing all the stuff other artists tucked away. Listening to Brown’s classic hits—“Cold Sweat,” “Out of Sight,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine”—you could be eavesdropping on some 11th-hour rehearsal, the air jumpy with back chat, barked instructions, and flip, musicianly code. You can all but hear the effort that goes into summoning up the bumpy and volatile groove.

Brown’s music seems fully dependent on its front man, entirely led by his sandpaper rasp—but if you want to dig its secret flow, you have to listen down past Brown himself into a song’s boiler-room frequencies, where the bass and drums make things shake. If you’ve always been baffled by just what it is a bass player does, play “Sex Machine” and try tuning your ear to the sinuously pivotal bass line William “Bootsy” Collins lays down; bass and guitar supply the song’s true harmony, with Brown’s vocalizing so much scattershot percussion. This music is hard work, in the best sense: you can feel the sweat, see the crooked smiles on the musicians’ faces. It seems to bypass all rationale and go straight to the sacroiliac, its emphasis never quite where you expect it to be. Brown had his own code for this hypnotic way of playing off the beat: he called it The One. (...)

Brown could fake a lot of things, but he couldn’t fake vulnerability or regret or confusion. He didn’t do weakness or softness. He was James Brown! He was the One, and he always got what he wanted. Unlike other troubled soul-men like Marvin Gaye and Al Green, Brown had no Church in his soul. Sure, he put over some songs like an old-time preacher, but that was projective shtick, just like he borrowed bits of flash from drag queens and tap dancers in the street. He didn’t need God because he worshipped at his own rugged altar. His ego was impregnable. His music doesn’t have the carnal/devotional tension that marks the work of the greatest soul singers, many of whom were made personally unhappy by its grip but found a way to project the spiritual malaise into songs of unearthly bliss and strangeness. What’s missing from Brown’s music is any hint or breath of otherness, sweetness, light. His is a roar of certainty, done deals, and finality.

by Ian Penman, City Journal |  Read more:
Photo: Gilles Petard/Getty Images