Happily Ever, After We Split

My husband and I started talking divorce at my friend Sara’s wedding. It was May in the Hamptons. Standing before the crashing Atlantic in her strapless gown, my friend looked vulnerable yet serene, as if she knew this man would always hold back the tide. Sara’s bridegroom read his vows, shivering a little as he promised to always listen, to make her goals his goals, to constantly improve his mind to remain interesting to her.

I sat on a folding chair, huddled under my husband’s suit jacket, looking from the marrying couple to the man I had married. We didn’t write our own vows, but if we had, my husband wouldn’t have made those promises.

I wasn’t really comparing my marriage to my friends’ wedding. A wedding is the cherry atop the dreamy early days. Marriage combined with work and parenthood can be a romance-eroding machine, especially if you have a rambunctious toddler who climbs every refrigerator, parking meter and child-safety gate he sees.

I was comparing the gap between what my husband and I want from marriage and the compatibility of my friends’ expectations. Because having a shared vision for marriage does matter.

After the ceremony, I slumped against one of the dunes along the shore. My husband sat down next to me. “You know,” I said, kicking off my sandals and staring toward the distant sun. “What are we doing? Why are we still doing this?”

He gazed toward the water. He wasn’t expecting me to suggest divorce during our romantic wedding weekend, but he wasn’t shocked, either.

We had been discussing our incompatibilities for years. We met at a book party in 2000 and were immediately attracted to each other and to certain aspects of each other’s personality. But while I yearn for a deeply united, soul-mate-style connection, he wants something looser, more independent, less enmeshed.

This difference created friction almost immediately; still, we wanted our romance to last. We took a Calvinist approach to our union, as if “hard work” could yield a better match. Or he did. I was probably channeling the sculptor Rodin. As if by constantly chipping away at each other, we would reveal an edifice of perfect love. Other times, I felt we were erecting a scaffolding of a life — beautiful home, nice parties — and hoping the snug interior would fill itself in.

My husband is a good person: hard-working, committed to social justice. But I’ve come to a startling truth about myself: I might be happier with a less ambitious partner, someone less focused on his career and curing the ills of the world and more focused on me, actually, and the piddling details of our family life.

We rose from the sand and shuffled to the reception. The next day, driving around the North Fork, my husband said: “I met a guy last night with a great custody arrangement. He takes his daughter to school and plays with her afterward until the mom gets home. It made me feel hopeful.”

I looked at him, driving responsibly, hands at 10 and 2, as always. I felt hopeful, too. I want my husband in my life, and certainly in our son’s. But I did not see why this meant we had to remain married.

by Wendy Paris, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brian Rea

The Ways We Don’t Talk About Wealth

By the end of 2012, I will most likely have made just shy of a million dollars in three years. It’s not pure profit, but for a girl who felt dizzy when she first made $40,000 in a year, it’s a staggering realization.

The “how” of this benchmark is salacious enough to distract from any other aspects of its achievement, so best to dispatch it immediately: I work as an escort. And while there are women who charge more than I do and who have surely made more than me, financial success in this field must always be disclaimed as extraordinary lest one glamorize such a base profession. I also pay taxes, contrary to popular assumptions about sex workers, and the reality of taxes tends to detract from the glitz of cash — everyone pays more than they want to, particularly the people who pay the least, those who often preface confessions of prosperity with, “I’m not rich, but…” This is something only rich people say or ever think to say. I had never heard it before I started spending time with the wealthy.

Numbers, independent of tone, seem to indicate bragging, an assertion imbibed with smugness, callousness, and a sense of superiority. Only in rarified circles will “I made a million dollars” be interpreted as an inoffensive statement of fact. And plenty of people would laugh heartily at my identifying myself as rich with so “little” money to my name. (Recall CEO Gary Kremen telling The New York Times that, with his worth of $10 million, he’s “nobody.”) This is not to say that living with my economic reality is hard. But given the sociopolitical climate of the past four years, my income has confounded how I think of myself. It has created dissonance in spite of the fact that I don’t believe my work is wrong or creates oppression or deprives others of resources or rights. Having a lot of money creates a sense of responsibility — or at least, it should — as well as vulnerability. The knee-jerk “I’m not rich” refrain is fundamentally a denial of that responsibility, a deflection: I’m not the problem, though I may be implicated in a problematic system. There are people of far greater worth who are far more culpable.

Witnessing richness usually means witnessing a profound loss of perspective. An infamous study in early 2011 found that 42 percent of American millionaires didn’t “feel” rich. In 2009, it was 46 percent. Back in my 40k days, a friend (also a sex worker) commented to me that she was running out of things to buy. I was too, but that’s because we were both operating on our former 12k-a-year, minimum wage appetites, and those would soon morph into a hunger to match the harvest. Years ago, someone told me once that if he were to pursue his passion, he would be a physics professor. I asked him why he wasn’t. He replied that professors only made $90k a year to start, maybe $110,000, and “you can’t live on that.” The average American household income at the time was $50,000.

It’s well established that as families ascend through income brackets, so too do their tastes and spending habits, meaning that one’s lifestyle always feels more average than extravagant. As wealth accrues, it creates a new normal, again and again as required. My current annual income brings a pleasant blindness; I don’t have to actively worry about my finances, and I can be impulsive and carefree in how I spend. While in some respects I remain resolutely frugal, even downright cheap, it’s mostly a matter of principle (or neuroses.) I’ve been good about saving from the beginning, so when I sit down to check my bank statements and I see the numbers of what sits in my account, I’m always surprised. Aside from fraud-check sessions, I never bother to look at my balance. When a bank rep asked me last year if I was planning to buy a house with my savings, it took me at least a full minute to digest his question.

Speaking honestly about money is among the last remaining taboos in contemporary American discourse. Politics, religion, assaultive crimes, sexual proclivities, family secrets, and even health problems (including those involving bowel movements) will all be more warmly received into a conversation than the topic of what everyone in the conversation earns. It’s shockingly bad manners to bring it up. But even social censure isn’t trusted as a powerful enough deterrent: some companies contractually forbid employees to disclose their compensation to colleagues. (It’s obvious how this benefits employers, most notably when gender discrimination is at play.)

I largely rely on my own estimates to plot the incomes of my clients, who range in net worth from hundreds of millions to, I suspect, a paltry one or two. Several have salaries listed on Forbes.com, and a handful have told me what they make. (Admittedly, there are considerations encouraging them to tamper with that figure, in one direction or another.) Location plays a large role in how rich they feel or will acknowledge that they are. New Yorkers in particular are simultaneously expansive and beleaguered when it comes to cash flow, which is no surprise given that Manhattan is our country’s most expensive place to live. Many are fussy about my rates even as they share stories of vacation homes, art purchases, long international trips, children’s trust funds, and politicians whose friendships they purchased at a rate far higher than mine. If their wealth is a source of social distress, if it weighs on them as being unfair or unwarranted, none of them have ever disclosed that to me. They are afflicted instead with a paradoxical abundance that barely suffices — or fails to.

by Charlotte Shane, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Illustration by Maximus Chatsky

Ikenaga Yasunari
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Ikenaga Yasunari
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Better Off Without You: Apple’s Slow-motion Divorce from Google

Apple's latest announcements for iOS 6 and Mac OS X highlight the company's sustained animosity for Google. How and why is Apple cutting the search giant out of its ecosystem?

Just a few years ago, Apple and Google were the darling couple of the technology industry, with Apple igniting a revolution in smartphone design and Google showing the power of its Web-based services transitioned to the mobile realm. However, with Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is continuing to erode Google’s presence in its desktop and (particularly) mobile operating systems, rolling out its own cloud services, search, and now mapping technologies that Apple wants to not only replace Google’s technology, but outshine it too.

How is Apple cutting Google out of its ecosystem, where did the rancor come from, and who has the most to lose: Apple, for not including Google’s widely used and (arguably) best-in-class services, or Google, for being cut out of one of the most visible (and most lucrative) platforms in the industry?

Siri, Maps, and iOS 6

Apple’s public assault on Google began in earnest in iOS 5 with two key technologies. The first is the very visible Siri voice-activated personal assistant that Apple unveiled with the iPhone 4S — for many people it’s the sole feature that distinguishes the iPhone 4S from its predecessors. However, the second was that Apple rolled its own geocoder into iOS 5. Briefly, a geocoder is a service that translates the location data supplied by GPS (and, sometimes, augmented by Wi-Fi or cell tower data) to a usable street address. Neither technology totally slammed the door for Google on iOS, but — like the sword of Damocles — they should have made Google sweat.

Siri is a threat to Google because it inserts itself between iPhone users and their mobile searches — and, if it’s effective enough, it can become the preferred method for conducting searches with an iOS device. Siri doesn’t just use speech recognition technology to understand what people say and translate it into a Web search — whether powered by Google, Bing, or another search engine. When possible, Siri tries to answer users queries directly. Of course, behind the scenes, Siri is tapping into semantic search technologies powered by the likes of Wolfram Alpha (for facts and figures) and Yelp (for location-based information). The bottom line: Any question Siri can answer successfully without resorting to a Web search is a search query that Google (or another search engine) does not receive. With iOS 6, Apple is bringing Siri to the iPad 2 — which means even more searches diverted from Google. (...)

Facebook integration

Another potentially major feature coming to iOS 6 is Facebook integration, enabling users to share and update photos, locations, events, and contact info via Facebook without having to jump out to a separate Facebook application — much like iOS 5′s integration with Twitter.

How is this a shot across Google’s bow? Bluntly: it’s not Google+.

by Geoff Duncan, Digital Trends |  Read more:
Illustration: courtesy of zentilia/Shutterstock

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Happiness is a Glass Half Empty

In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity's shattered dreams. It doesn't look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organised supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item. And you won't find many of them in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. In the product-design business, the storehouse – operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America – has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products.

This is consumer capitalism's graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it's almost certainly the only place on the planet where you'll find Clairol's A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette's equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers' faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America's street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.

There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as "the pathos of things": it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life's impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth. It's only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum's proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.

"I feel really sorry for the developer on this one," Sherry says, indicating the breath mints that inadvertently resembled crack. "I mean, I've met the guy. Why would he ever have spent any time on the streets, in the drug culture?" She shakes her head. "These are real people who sincerely want to do their best, and then, well, things happen." The Museum of Failed Products – consumer capitalism’s very own graveyard.

The Museum of Failed Products was itself a kind of accident, albeit a happier one. Its creator, a now-retired marketing man named Robert McMath, merely intended to accumulate a "reference library" of consumer products, not failures per se. And so, starting in the 1960s, he began purchasing and preserving a sample of every new item he could find. Soon, the collection outgrew his office in upstate New York and he was forced to move into a converted granary to accommodate it; later, GfK bought him out, moving the whole lot to Michigan. What McMath hadn't taken into account was the three-word truth that was to prove the making of his career: "Most products fail." According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as 90%. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones.

By far the most striking thing about the museum, though, is that it should exist as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection – a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid making errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives who arrive every week at Sherry's door are evidence of how rarely this happens. Product developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success – so unwilling to invest time or energy thinking about their industry's past failures – that they only belatedly realise how much they need to access GfK's collection. Most surprising of all is that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum have come there to examine – or been surprised to discover – products that their own companies had created, then abandoned. They were apparently so averse to dwelling on the unpleasant business of failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.

Failure is everywhere. It's just that most of the time we'd rather avoid confronting that fact.

Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it's our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.

Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Aaron Tilley

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:

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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

via:

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

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: