Michael Vyrtsev
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Thinking Outside The Bento Box

Get recipes for Spicy Tuna Stuffed Tomatoes, Salmon Musubi, Bright Pinwheels, Vegetables And Yogurt Dip and Syrian Egg Patties.

I'm sure you're a very good cook. But if you want to feel bad about yourself, spend five minutes cruising the Internet for photos of bento boxes.

They won't be hard to find. Originally just a convenient boxed lunch for Japanese field workers, bentos today can be high art, with flower-petal carrots, hard-boiled eggs shaped into bunnies, broccoli sculpted into trees. The moms who make them — because they're mostly moms, and not necessarily Japanese — are eager to share their edible masterpieces.

Confession: I have a problem with food that is cute. I even pick the buttons off gingerbread men. I'm also against expending that much effort just to coax my kid to eat. (Yes, my daughter thinks I'm "mean.") That said, I truly believe that we eat first with our eyes. And because of that, there is much to learn from the art of the bento.

Bento boxes go back to at least the 5th century A.D., when Japanese field workers, hunters and fishermen would pack dried rice into boxes. Somewhere around the 19th century, makunouchi, or "intermission," bentos emerged, packed with side dishes and treats for theatergoers to munch between acts. When the railroads arrived, ekiben — station boxes — filled with local specialties became popular. Today, many Japanese men and women carry bentos to work, and schoolchildren tote colorful arrangements of checkerboard-carved apples and rice balls shaped like Hello Kitty.

Of course, these Japanese lunches will have Japanese food: rice balls (onigiri) stuffed with pickled apricot or baked cod roe, deep-fried pork cutlets, vegetables simmered in sweet soy sauce. But you don't have to cook Japanese food — or make cute cutouts — to reap the benefits of the bento.

Cookbook author and Japan expert Debra Samuels says the five main elements of a bento are color, texture, seasonality, presentation and nutrition (and let's not forget portion control — how much can you cram into those little compartments?). She says many Japanese believe that including five colors on your plate — red, yellow, green, white and black — means you have a balanced meal.

by Michele Kayal, NPR |  Read more: 
Photos: Debra G. Samuels and Michele Kayal

Nobody Knows You’re a Drone

"What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."
— Steve Jobs  

Forty years ago, in a hundred garages through-out the Silicon Valley, across the country and around the world, hobbyists pushed forward the state of the art of a technology developed by mega-contractors at great military expense. Steve Jobs’s techno-Utopianism evinced in the quote above is both clear and typical of the era. A million geeks worked with visions of beating high-tech swords into ploughshares, creating tools that would make life better and bring the world together. More subversively, computers and networks would restructure society, for the first time ever, in a truly meritocratic way. Decades before anyone had heard the phrase, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” the so-called hacker ethic, described in Steven Levy’s Hackers, dictated that criteria like age, degrees, race, position, or gender were irrelevant.

Such a benevolent role for computers represented a dramatic shift from the way they had been perceived previously. Just a few years before Jobs began tinkering with them, computers were seen as cold, calculating, a symbol so “odious” that the leaders of the Free Speech Movement on the steps of the university across the Bay encouraged students to throw their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.” Students wore signs on their chest that co-opted the language of the punch cards so deeply intertwined with computers of the day: “Don’t bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate.”

Forty years later, we’ve seen a new wave of military technology take flight in the form of aerial vehicles — drones. Their rise has been anything but benevolent, turning into the military’s most relied upon and most lethal weapon. But in small circles of technology enthusiasts, these machines have captured the imagination in a way that’s reminiscent of the personal computer revolution, a fascination that doesn’t stem from their role as a weapons delivery system. As terrifying as the implications of armed and unmanned patrols overhead may be, remote destruction isn’t what holds the imagination.

Drones have not only destroyed thousands of lives, but delivered back real-time images of the destruction. As a domestic tool, drones aren’t the next development of projectiles or even aircraft, they are the latest stage in surveillance gathering and analysis, outfitted with a vehicle and sometimes a weapon. Understanding drones in this way welcomes another separation between the oncoming drone revolution and that of personal computers: If the PC is a bicycle for our minds, as Jobs said, what are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), when liberated from the military and operated by the general public? Instead of increasing our understanding, they extend our senses. They extend our vision, giving us “eyes in the sky,” overhead or across the globe. Drones exist in a curiously intimate spot, that thin membrane between ourselves and the world, expanding and filtering what we may take in. More even than “thinking” technologies, “seeing” technologies become a part of us.

by Trevor Timm and Parker Higgins, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Image by Imp Kerr

Are Cycle Helmets Really Useful?

It is at first surprising to many people that the wearing of helmets by cyclists is a controversial subject. However, cycling safety is a much more complex issue than many people realise, where best evidence and real-world experience sometimes conflict with received opinion. Key considerations about risk when cycling, what influences cycling safety and the inter-relationships between safety interventions, cycle use, behaviour and health (both individual and public) are often poorly understood. In particular, opinions as to whether cycle helmets are an appropriate, proportionate or effective intervention are often dominated by emotion and expressed with exaggeration, which can make it difficult to know what to believe.  (...) 

A little history

Cycle helmets have been around since 1975. They were originally a 'spin-off' product from the development of expanded polystyrene foams in motorcycle helmets, intended to supersede the old 'hair net' style of head gear then used in cycle sport. However, the protection offered by cycle helmets is very much less than that provided by motorcycle helmets due to the compromises in weight and ventilation necessary in order to make them acceptable for an activity such as cycling that involves much physical exertion. Indeed, because of changes to design in order to address concerns about comfort, modern helmets with soft shells are considered to offer less protection than some earlier designs with hard shells.

At first cycle helmets were promoted mainly by their manufacturers, with competing claims about their effectiveness. Then, during the 1980s, reports began to be published suggesting that if cyclists wore helmets they would be less likely to suffer head injury. From that time, the promotion of helmet wearing by cyclists has been a main thrust of road safety and health practitioners in many countries. 

Attitudes to cycle helmets

The active promotion of helmet use by cyclists is a fiercely controversial and often emotional subject, with views put forward with great conviction both for helmets and sceptical of their value (very few people argue against the voluntary use of cycle helmets per se). Controversy is particularly acute with regard to mandatory helmet laws.

The arguments in favour of helmet use are invariably based upon the premise that in the event of a fall, a helmet might substantially reduce the incidence and severity of head injuries. A relatively small number of medical research papers are cited in support of this premise, most based on case-control studies. One 1989 paper is cited more often than any other, with its claim that helmets reduce head injuries by 85% and brain injuries by 88%. However, the methodology and findings of this paper have been widely criticised and there is no real-world evidence to support its predictions.

Proponents of helmet use include people from within the medical and road safety professions and also people who believe that a helmet has already saved them, or a relative or acquaintance, from serious injury.

Helmet-sceptic arguments are more varied. Originally based largely on issues associated with personal liberty, the balance of helmet-sceptic arguments changed during the 1990s as the health benefits of cycling became more acknowledged and as independent research started to be undertaken into the outcomes of rising helmet use and, in particular, the effects of cycle helmet laws.

Principal helmet-sceptic arguments are:

• The risk of serious head injury is small and frequently overstated. The promotion or mandation of cycle helmets is a disproportionate response to this risk.
• There is no real-world evidence that helmets have reduced the likelihood or severity of head injuries among whole populations of cyclists.
• Helmet promotion (and especially compulsion) reduces cycling and the health benefits of cycling. Less cycling increases risk for those who continue to cycle, whether they wear helmets or not.
• Much pro-helmet research and promotional material is flawed or one-sided.
• Insofar as there are risks associated with cycling as a form of transport, the greatest risks of serious injury come from inappropriate motor vehicle use and poor cycling behaviour. Institutionalising the idea that wearing a helmet is necessary for safe cycling diverts attention from more important actions to prevent crashes happening in the first place and results in victim-blaming when crashes do occur through no fault of the cyclist.
• Cyclists should not be singled out for helmets when head injuries to pedestrians and motorists are much more numerous.

Helmet sceptics include cycling organisations (especially in Europe where some have undertaken their own research), public health doctors and other professionals concerned with cycling safety, encouraging cycle use and helmet analysis. Most cycle users are also not convinced of the net benefits of helmet wearing as in most places fewer than a third of people choose to wear one when use is voluntary.

In recent years many individuals and cycling organisations have swung from pro-helmet to helmet-sceptic as a result of experience with helmet laws and the growing breadth of evidence.

via: cyclehelmets.org
Image via: Metamorphostuff 

dinner's ready

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Roberts Switched Views to Uphold Health Care Law

[ed. An unprecedented, real time view into the inner workings of the Supreme Court.]

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."

But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."

The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.

Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts' decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.

The inner-workings of the Supreme Court are almost impossible to penetrate. The court's private conferences, when the justices discuss cases and cast their initial votes, include only the nine members - no law clerks or secretaries are permitted. The justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential.

But in this closely-watched case, word of Roberts' unusual shift has spread widely within the court, and is known among law clerks, chambers' aides and secretaries. It also has stirred the ire of the conservative justices, who believed Roberts was standing with them.

After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate. There were other issues being argued - severability and the Medicaid extension - but the mandate was the ballgame.

It required individuals to buy insurance or pay a penalty. Congress had never before in the history of the nation ordered Americans to buy a product from a private company as part of its broad powers to regulate commerce. Opponents argued that the law exceeded Congress' power under the Constitution, and an Atlanta-based federal appeals court agreed.

The Atlanta-based federal appeals court said Congress didn't have that kind of expansive power, and it struck down the mandate as unconstitutional.

On this point - Congress' commerce power - Roberts agreed. In the court's private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.

Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.

Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the court's historic decision. He kept it for himself.

by Jan Crawford, Face the Nation |  Read more:
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press

Alyssa Monks
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Andy Griffith (June,1926 – July,2012)

[ed. A scene from one of his greatest movies, A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan. If you want to understand the genesis of present day "superstars" like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin there is no better tutorial.]

See also:  Sheriff Who Gave Stature to Small-Town Smarts

Lost in Sighs

APHRA BEHN
The History of the Nun, 1688

“I was but young,” said Katteriena, “about thirteen, and knew not what to call the new-known pleasure that I felt when even I looked upon the young Arnaldo; my heart would heave whenever he came in view, and my disordered breath came doubly from my bosom; a shivering seized me, and my face grew wan; my thought was at a stand, and sense itself for that short moment lost its faculties. But when he touched me, O, no hunted deer, tired with his flight and just secured in shades, pants with a nimbler motion than my heart! At first I thought the youth had had some magic art to make one faint and tremble at his touches, but he himself, when I accused his cruelty, told me he had no art but awful passion and vowed that when I touched him, he was so: so trembling, so surprised, so charmed, so pleased. When he was present, nothing could displease me, but when he parted from me, then ’twas rather a soft, silent grief that eased itself by sighing and by hoping that some kind moment would restore my joy. When he was absent, nothing could divert me, however I strove, however I toiled for mirth; no smile, no joy dwelt in my heart or eyes; I could not feign, so very well I loved, impatient in his absence, I would count the tedious parting hours and pass them off like useless visitants whom we wish were gone. These are the hours where life no business has—at least, a lover’s life. But, O, what minutes seemed the happy hours when on his eyes I gazed and he on mine, and half our conversation lost in sighs—sighs, the soft, moving language of a lover."

via: Lapham's Quarterly

jack hughes
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Beat Boutique

On February 5, 2012, the quasi-maybe-sorta-sometimes-revolutionary pop star M.I.A. performed alongside Madonna at the Super Bowl half-time show. Despite the fact that M.I.A.’s music interrogates ideas about revolt, nationalism, and the distribution of wealth (“Pull up the people. / Pull up the poor,” goes the chorus of the first song on her major-label debut, Arular), and that her early albums were embraced by indie audiences, there was a time when M.I.A.’s appearance alongside one of the most famous people in the world, at an event that roughly half of the American population was watching, would have been perceived as “the ultimate sell-out move.” But in an article on the website Grantland about M.I.A.’s performance, Hua Hsu begged to differ. “[Today], we’ve grown accustomed to how deeply entangled the interests of art and commerce have become,” he wrote (thinking, no doubt, of such cultural phenomena as 30 Rock and Lady Gaga), “the way a sitcom can be meta and experimental while convincing you that you desperately want a McFlurry.” To him, M.I.A.’s Super Bowl appearance (which ended, now infamously, with her flipping off the camera) was hopeful and exciting, as it signaled the end of the previous generation’s simplistic ideas about the relationship between art and commerce, and trumpeted a new cultural reality: “the impossibility of selling out.” (...)

A couple of years ago, I was working as a production assistant for a television newsmagazine show. If you have ever been on a film or TV set before, you know production assistant is industry jargon for “person who does whatever nobody else really wants to do,” so you will understand that a task I enjoyed infinitely more than steam-cleaning the host’s pants suit or picking up fancy lunches for the show’s guests or logging surprisingly vast amounts of archived B-roll following a former member of the Monkees around his stately New England home, was scouring the production library for background music.

Usually it would work like this: an editor would describe to me some images or sequences she needed music for (“man on a mountain peak at sunset”), and I’d plug certain mood-related keywords (motivational/inspirational) into the online archive for which our company had paid access, which in this case was an L.A.-based library called Killer Tracks. I’d put a few of my chosen tracks on a flash drive and walk it over to the editor, who’d usually send me back with more-specific guidelines (“I want something more dramatic than ‘Extraordinary Determination,’ but with slightly less gusto than ‘Overcoming Challenges’”), at which point I’d continue to scour and eventually hit upon a winner (“Follow Me Up,” perhaps, which the site describes as “inspirational, indie/alternative rock” and has for cover art a distressed photo of a colonial-era drum corps with the title “Motivational 8” scrawled in a graffiti-inspired typeface).

Library music (sometimes referred to as “production music” or “stock music”) generally refers to music that has been composed and recorded for commercial purposes and which is licensed not through the composer but the library for which it has been recorded. This means it is much easier and cheaper to use in a movie or TV show than a hit song, which requires copyright clearance from the songwriter and record label, and, in some cases, separate clearances depending on the countries in which the work will be screened. Library music cuts out the middleman, but it also means that most of it can be licensed to any number of projects, so occasionally while scanning through the Killer Tracks archives I’d get this uncanny “Where have I heard that before?” twinge, until I realized it was from, say, a local furniture commercial, or maybe the corporate-diversity video my colleagues and I sat through last week.

For anyone who keeps up with pop culture, browsing through certain corners of the Killer Tracks catalog is like traipsing through a bizarre shadow world full of easily identifiable doppelgängers. Songs for Shady Living features a Toby Keith look-alike on its cover and such instant classics as “I Pulled a Muscle (Loving You)”; Soul Pop includes Amy Winehouse–inspired jams and a beehive-coiffed cover model; and, with artwork that showcases a hand-drawn bird and a dead ringer for Ellen Page, Sweet & Quirky seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the fey indie-pop on the Juno soundtrack. My time spent browsing the Killer Tracks catalog sometimes brought on flashbacks of Dr. Thunder, the cheap, off-brand soda that my family used to buy at Walmart when I was growing up—just unique enough to evade a lawsuit, but conveniently blatant enough that consumers knew exactly what was being ripped off.

Even more surreal to me were the moments when the pop world explicitly intersected with the library-music world. Killer Tracks features a special series called “REALITY by C. Franke,” which it describes as “a new reality music library from composer Christopher Franke (The Amazing Race, Supernanny, Big Brother, former member of Tangerine Dream).” What sort of world was this—in which a credit from Supernanny had more cache than being in a legendary kraut-rock band?

Library music fascinated me. At the time I was an aspiring music critic (aspiring here being industry jargon for “unpaid”), and we critics love to ponder the conflicts between things like art and commerce, or authenticity and artifice. Forget the glittery, Gaga-inspired pop music topping the charts; I could not imagine a kind of music more squarely on the latter side of both those divides—more blatantly commercial and in conflict with the rebellious, individualistic spirit of the punk and indie rock I’d grown up on—than library music.

It would be another year or so before I realized that I was completely wrong.

by Lindsay Zoladz, The Believer |  Read more:
Illustration by Tony Millionaire

Libor

The rates in question — the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and the Euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor — are used to determine the borrowing rates for consumers and companies, including some $10 trillion in mortgages, student loans and credit cards. The rates are also linked to an estimated $700 trillion market in derivatives, which banks buy and sell on a daily basis. If these rates are rigged, markets are rigged — against bank customers, like everyday borrowers, and against parties on the other side of a bank’s derivatives deals, like pension funds.  (...)

The evidence, cited by the Justice Department — which Barclays agreed is “true and accurate” — is damning. “Always happy to help,” one employee wrote in an e-mail after being asked to submit false information. “If you know how to keep a secret, I’ll bring you in on it,” wrote a Barclays trader to a trader at another bank, referring to an attempt to align their strategies for mutual gain.

If that’s not conspiracy and price-fixing, what is?

Rigged Rates, Rigged Markets - NY Times

Of Feta Cheese and Finance

It has been years since anyone said anything positive about the Greek economy. But as one Greek economist recently told me, there’s a local saying that when a spring is pressed down hardest, it can spring back the fastest. Let’s consider the country’s natural resources, or at least two of them. Feta cheese, which is increasingly popular throughout the world, is mandated by an E.U. ruling to come from Greece. The country also harvests arguably the best olives for making olive oil. Yet somehow Greece has only 28 percent of the global feta market and a mere 4 percent share of the international olive-oil industry.

How is this possible? In the last decade or so, companies in the United States, France, Denmark and elsewhere flouted the feta ruling and invested in their own food-science research and manufacturing equipment. They subsequently turned the salty, crumbly cheese into spreadable, grillable, fat-free and shelf-stable forms. In Italy and Spain, small olive-oil producers merged into globally competitive conglomerates and replaced presses with more efficient centrifugal technology. The two countries now provide nearly all the world’s supply. And the Greeks, despite their numerous inherent advantages, remain in the least profitable part of the supply chain, exporting raw materials at slim margins. (...)

Consulting firms are constantly issuing utopian national-economic strategies. What makes the McKinsey plan stand out is that it feels plausible. The greatest returns may come from investing in things the Greeks already know how to do — no matter how distressed or unloved they have become. This could have a significant impact. Greece is a small country with 11 million people and 5 million workers. Reasonable success in a few sectors could create decent jobs and more tax revenue. Greece could start to grow again.

The biggest challenge to this plan involves confronting a more distressing aspect of the Greek economy. It’s hard to believe now, but Greece outpaced the average European growth rate for much of the last 60 years. Its farmers turned bombed-out fields into modestly productive farms. The government rapidly shifted parts of the country from an agrarian economy into an industrial one that developed specialties in construction materials — concrete, aluminum, rebar — and generic drugs. Greece also benefited greatly from the rapid growth in global trade. Greece is now responsible for the largest shipping fleet in the world. No other nation besides Japan even comes close.

Yet Greece still joined the euro zone as the second-poorest country in Western Europe. That’s because the Greek economic miracle came during some disastrous governance from both left-leaning leaders and an anticommunist dictatorship. As often happens with unstable governments, a winner-take-all system developed in which new officials and private-sector cronies tried to capture as much money as they could during their time in office. Nikos Ventouris, an economist at Greece’s independent Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, told me that during these postwar decades, the incentive structure went upside down. Business leaders learned that they could make a whole lot more money a lot more quickly through contracts with a “friend” in the government (who wasn’t particular about things like skewed labels) than by trying to compete globally.

by Adam Davidson, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration by Peter Oumanski

Rainbow Roll (by greentealover79)

Source: Flickr / ilovegreentea

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The ‘Busy’ Trap

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

by Tim Kreider, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brecht Vandenbroucke

Rob Hann
Rice, California
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Can you hear me now?
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A Huge Break in the LIBOR Banking Investigation

[ed. Libor, the inter-bank lending rate that affects a host of financial instruments (e.g. futures, variable rate mortgages, currencies, etc. It was announced today that the chairman of Barclays has resigned.]

This is a huge story:

On Wednesday, Barclays won the race to reach a deal with U.S. and British regulators, beating UBS, which was reportedly the first bank to begin cooperating with international antitrust authorities. Barclays agreed to pay at least $450 million to resolve government investigations of manipulation of Libor and the Euro interbank offered rate (or Euribor): $200 million to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, $160 million tothe criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice and $92.8 million to Britain's Financial Services Authority.

I wrote about the Libor investigation in the current issue of Rolling Stone, in "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," about muni bond bid-rigging. Throughout this spring, while the Carollo bid-rigging case played out in a Manhattan courtroom, negotiations between banks and regulators were going on in this far larger cartel-corruption case. It’s been clear for some time now that a number of players had begun cooperating, and the only question was which bank was going to settle first.

Despite widespread expectation that it would be UBS, it turned out to be Barclays. You know how in Law and Order Jack McCoy always puts the two murder accomplices in separate rooms and tells them both that whoever talks first wins? Something like that happened here. In any case, the Department of Justice filing on the settlement contained excerpts of emails and other evidence that recall the taped phone conversations in the Carollo case: once again, we have seemingly incontrovertible evidence of wide-scale market manipulation. From Alison Frankel at Reuters:

Barclays employees agreed to manipulate the rates they submitted to the banking authority that oversees the daily Libor report for seemingly anyone who asked them to monkey with it: senior Barclays officials concerned that the bank would look weak if it reported too high a borrowing rate; interest rate swap traders trying to improve Barclays' derivatives trading position; even former Barclays traders begging for favors. We're talking naked, blatant manipulation. Here's one exchange cited in the DOJ filing:

Trader: "Can you pls continue to go in for 3m Libor at 5.365 or lower, we are all very long cash here in ny."

Libor rate submitter: "How long?"

Trader: "Until the effective date goes over year end (i.e. turn drops out) if possible."

Submitter: "Will do my best sir."

This is unbelievable, shocking stuff. A sizable chunk of the world’s adjustable-rate investment vehicles are pegged to Libor, and here we have evidence that banks were tweaking the rate downward to massage their own derivatives positions. The consequences for this boggle the mind. For instance, almost every city and town in America has investment holdings tied to Libor. If banks were artificially lowering the rates to beef up their trading profiles, that means communities all over the world were cheated out of ungodly amounts of money.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

How William Faulkner Tackled Race — and Freed the South From Itself

A poll of well over a hundred writers and critics, taken a few years back by Oxford American magazine, named William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the “greatest Southern novel ever written,” by a decisive margin — and the poll was conducted while looking back on a century in which a disproportionate number of the best American books were Southern — so to say that this novel requires no introduction is just to speak plainly.

Of course, it’s the kind of book a person would put first in a poll like that. You can feel reasonably confident, in voting for it, that nobody quite fathoms it enough to question its achievement. Self-consciously ambitious and structurally complex (unintelligible, a subset of not unsophisticated readers has always maintained), “Absalom, Absalom!” partakes of what the critic Irving Howe called “a fearful impressiveness,” the sort that “comes when a writer has driven his vision to an extreme.” It may represent the closest American literature came to producing an analog for “Ulysses,” which influenced it deeply — each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man trying to awaken from history — and like “Ulysses,” it lives as a book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.

But good writers don’t look for impressedness in their readers — it’s at best another layer of distortion — and “greatness” can leave a book isolated in much the way it can a human being. (Surely a reason so many have turned away from “Ulysses” over the last near-hundred years is that they can’t read it without a suffocating sense of each word’s cultural importance and their duty to respond, a shame in that case, given how often Joyce was trying to be amusing.) A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time. A legitimate question to ask is, What happens with “Absalom, Absalom!” if we set aside its laurels and apply those things instead? What has Faulkner left us?

A prose of exceptional vividness, for one thing. The same few passages, in the very first pages, remind me of this — they’re markings on an entryway — sudden bursts of bristly adjective clusters. The September afternoon on which the book opens in a “dim hot airless” room is described as “long still hot weary dead.” If you’ve ever taken a creative-writing workshop, you’ve been warned never to do this, pile up adjectives, interpose descriptive terms between the reader’s imagination and the scene. But here something’s different. Faulkner’s choices are so precise, and his juxtaposition of the words so careful in conditioning our sense reception, that he doesn’t so much solve as overpower the problem. The sparrows flying into the window trellis beat their wings with a sound that’s “dry vivid dusty,” each syllable a note in a chord he’s forming. The Civil War ghosts that haunt the room are “garrulous outraged baffled.”

The rules Faulkner doesn’t ignore in this novel he tends to obliterate. The plot, for instance. There is none. He tells us on the third page (in italics) pretty much everything that will happen in the book, actionwise. If you ever feel lost, you can refer back to it, a little not-even-paragraph that begins, “It seems that this demon — his name was Sutpen”

A fundamental law of storytelling is: withhold information. As the writer Paul Metcalf put it, “The only real work in creative endeavor is keeping things from falling together too soon.” What we discover, though, on advancing into the novel’s maze, is that Faulkner has given nothing away, not of the things he most values. He’s not concerned with holding us in suspense over the unearthing of events but in keeping us transfixed, as he goes about excavating the soil beneath them, and tracing their post-mortem effects (embodied, perhaps, by the worm that comes to light in a shovelful of dirt, “doubtless alive when the clod was thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again”). The nightmare of the Southern past exists — an accomplished thing. To delve into the nature of the tragedy is the novel’s drama.

by John Jeremiah Sullivan, NY Times |  Read more:

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