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In his novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, David Foster Wallace imagined a near future in which the Organization of North American Nations—a single nation-state comprised of the former Mexico, United States, and Canada—had for various reasons adopted a policy known as “Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized Time.” In this scheme, calendar years are sponsored by corporations; as a result, they are no longer identified by sequential numerals but instead by product names. Subsidized time began with the “Year of the Whopper.” The action of the novel takes place several product sponsorships later, in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which came after the “Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland” and before the “Year of Glad.”

Wallace’s novel was prophetic in all kinds of ways (one example is its prescience about the rise of personalized entertainment viewed in private)—but it was this outlandish satire about the calendar that came to mind recently, when the Times reported on the cash-strapped city of Brazil, Indiana (a name that sounds like one of Wallace’s post-national composites), which recently sold the naming rights of failing fire hydrants in need of repair. For the past month in Brazil, arson victims and overheated children alike have gotten their water delivered by hydrants brought to them by KFC Fiery Grilled Wings.

We’re surely a ways from a nationally recognized Year of the Fiery Grilled Wings, but maybe not as far as we might hope. The Times story notes other examples of local governments turning to advertising to help cover widening budget shortfalls: Baltimore is considering turning its fire engines into mobile billboards; Cleveland has renamed its entire bus system the HealthLine, after getting millions of dollars in sponsorship from the Cleveland Clinic; Chicago and Boston are selling naming rights to train stations; and even though the new Barclays Center isn’t scheduled to open until the fall, New Yorkers can already take the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, D, N, Q, or R trains to the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center stop in Brooklyn. (New recorded message: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please—and sorry that we messed with those lending rates.”) And cities are thinking of moving beyond such examples of obvious synergy to selling the naming rights to parks and municipal buildings.

If this all seems inevitable—if we’re resigned to the fact that people of some subsequent generation will take their grandchildren to see the Southwest Airlines Grand Canyon or the Lincoln Financial Lincoln Memorial—it is partly due to the fact that these kinds of civic-corporate overlaps have long been a part of the culture. American sports fans, for example, long ago accepted that their favorite teams are doomed not only to play in such venues as Heinz Field, but in places with crushingly, almost provocatively absurd names, like PETCO Park (San Diego), O.co Coliseum (Oakland), or Jobing.com Arena (Glendale, Arizona). Such names are not just modern developments, however, as many of our public spaces bear names that point to their corporate pasts. Times Square was known as Longacre Square until Adolph Ochs moved his newspaper there at the beginning of the twentieth century and strong-armed city officials into changing its name. The persistence of marketers and mapmakers made it stick, and the creep of time de-commodified it, turning what was once a business deal into a civic landmark. (Times Square, of course, has always been a laboratory for the American capitalist experiment, host through the years of everything from horse stables to topless bars to the American Girl store.)

Reading about Indiana’s “fiery” hydrants elicited one of those slightly eerie moments when it feels as though we are living in the future. While the slow drift toward the corporate end times may have a long backstory, we are drawing closer to a cultural relationship with products and mass entertainment that once existed only in speculative fiction. (Of course, this is natural: as time progresses, the world rightly, and often unfortunately, begins to resemble what was predicted by the most brilliant and imaginative artists of the past.) In “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s wry and, at times, cloying repetition (often in the form of acronyms) of all those goofy year titles is one of the many ways in which he uses a hyperbolic marketing-crazed future to satirize his marketing-crazed present. The book’s most memorable argument—that entertainment will eventually become so captivating as to be debilitating, and even deadly—is of a kind with many moments in fiction in which people of the future destroy themselves through their urges to consume. It is a key element in literature ranging from science fiction to literary theory that as the barriers of individual consciousness degrade we absorb a kind of shared cultural consciousness full of corporate junk. In this version of dystopia, advertising becomes more pervasive, consumer culture supplants traditional culture, and language itself, from place names to common nouns, is subsumed by the things we buy and sell.

by Ian Crouch, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum

Children and Computers: State of Play

There are things in life that I don't understand. The rules of rugby. The continuing success of David Guetta. How to do an overhead kick on Fifa 12.

"You press Y and A really fast, like almost at the same time," says my son Patrick, who's six. I watch as his small thumbs flip between buttons. He could play computer games before he could read. Now he reaches for his Nintendo DS like I reach for my mobile; he fills in idle moments on Fifa, playing games or altering his team or practising shots. I don't mind, except when he gets so wound up by a vital match that he cries. My emails don't make me do that.

I go to grown-up events – weddings, anniversaries, all-day lunches – and each time, at some point, I see young children gathered around a device: a phone, an iPad, a hand-held console. They're absorbed, and quiet, not ruining anyone's day, which is a good thing. Isn't it? After all, when it comes to kids, there's not much point in pretending technology doesn't exist. It would be like pretending Lego didn't exist. When boys go round to each other's houses, they play football (in real life), or they play football (on X-Box 360 or PlayStation 3) – or they jump on top of each other in a big bundle and roll around and yell.

If I'm honest, my son – and even his sister, who's one and a half – have an ease around technology that I find scary sometimes. The baby scares me because she keeps deleting stuff off my iPad. Patrick scares me because he could use the Nintendo Wii controls, shift from game to game, choose players, set up teams by the time he was four. He still can't tie his shoelaces. There is research that says he is not alone: a survey of 2,200 mothers in 11 countries found that 70% of their two- to five-year-olds were comfortable playing computer games, but only 11% could pass the shoelace test.

Most kids' shoes have Velcro straps, of course. The shoelace thing is fine. But computer games still bother me. It's the knowledge gap. I have no idea what Patrick's up to when he plays Zelda, or cries over penalties in Classics XI, because, other than the odd game of Space Invaders, I've never got into computer games. Mostly, what my kids play with is a variation of something I had myself when I was young, so if they get stuck, I can help. But with computer games, I am as useful as an instruction manual for a Commodore Pet.

Michael Acton Smith is a genial man aged 37. He has big hair and wears black clothes, which means that business journalists describe him as rock 'n' roll. Actually, he's nerdier than that: more of a non-stop enthusiast, a man as dedicated to his weekly mates-together football game as he is to his business. That business? Oh, just Moshi Monsters.

Moshi Monsters is a UK-based website for young kids, where they pick their own monster, customise it and take it exploring: off meeting other Moshis, playing puzzles, earning points, decorating its home, acquiring cute pets called Moshlings by growing flowers… Sounds dreadful? You're clearly not aged between six and 12. Half of British children that age have, or used to have, a Moshi pet. Worldwide, there are 60m users and rising; one child every second signs up to the site. It only came online in 2008.

by Miranda Sawyer, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Donald Iain Smith/Getty Images/Flickr RF

Little Dragon

‘Manly’ Is a Lifestyle, Not a Look

I've seen more mustached lips on the street and more bacon-wrapped-fried anythings on menus than ever before. And the Internet tells me that facial hair and pig fat is manly, so it's possible we are. But, I don't think any of that stuff makes you manly. A mustache, on most of you, makes you look like the kind of guy who has a suspicious locked room in his basement, and bacon in every meal makes you a gluttonous fatso. Both of these things seem kinda dumb to me, along with all the other nonsense guys are taking part in because it helps them hark back to the days of manly men.

Macho archetypes haven't changed much, but these days it feels like we've pinpointed who we, as men, want to be more so than I can ever remember. Hey, check out this guy, he sexually harasses his employees in his office, while smoking a cigarette on his third liquid lunch date, while wearing a suit: he's the coolest. And check out this dude, what an incredible beard, and a blue ox and a huge axe: I'm totally going to dress like him. You can play dress up and imaginary playtime all you want, but that doesn't make you any more of a man, at least not to me.

In fact, I want to tell the modern man that he doesn't have to look like a gold rush-era carnival worker or brew his own micro whatever to be considered a man in my eyes. No, it's way easier than that. How about being a good guy, a good person. Just be honest, kind, tolerant, open, intrepid, self-aware, inquisitive, etc. — you know, all the things that have made our greatest men (and greatest anyone) great when we boil it down. Do these things and help others do them too, and you're a real man as far as I'm concerned. Next time you're out and about, walking tall, everyone might be focusing on the perfectly handrolled cigarette dangling effortlessly from your lips, but you and I will know the truth — you called your Mom just to tell her you love her, and you're happy you did.

Oh yeah, and get a bunch of tattoos.

by  Lawrence Schlossman, a writer and editor, blogs at How to Talk to Girls at Parties
via: NY Times

Fairfield Porter, Wheat, 1960
via:

The Second Brain In Our Stomachs

Our own stomachs may be something of a dark mystery to most of us, but new research is revealing the surprising ways in which our guts exert control over our mood and appetite.

Not many of us get the chance to watch our own stomach's digestion in action.

But along with an audience at London's Science Museum, I recently watched live pictures from my own stomach as the porridge I had eaten for breakfast was churned, broken up, exposed to acid and then pushed out into my small intestine as a creamy mush called chyme.

I had swallowed a miniature camera in the form of a pill that would spend the day travelling through my digestive system, projecting images onto a giant screen.

Its first stop was my stomach, whose complex work is under the control of what's sometimes called "the little brain", a network of neurons that line your stomach and your gut.

Surprisingly, there are over 100 million of these cells in your gut, as many as there are in the head of a cat.

The little brain does not do a lot of complex thinking but it does get on with the essential daily grind involved in digesting food - lots of mixing, contracting and absorbing, to help break down our food and begin extracting the nutrients and vitamins we need.

And all those neurons lining our digestive system allow it to keep in close contact with the brain in your skull, via the vagus nerves, which often influence our emotional state.

For instance when we experience "butterflies in the stomach", this really is the brain in the stomach talking to the brain in your head. As we get nervous or fearful, blood gets diverted from our gut to our muscles and this is the stomach's way of protesting.

Hunger hormones

To accommodate a big meal your stomach has to expand from the size of a fist to around 2 litres. That's a 40-fold increase.

We used to think that stretch receptors in the stomach told the brain when the stomach was full, time to stop eating. But it turns out that the hunger signals produced by your stomach are far more sophisticated than that.

by Michael Mosely, BBC |  Read more:

How to Abolish the Electoral College (Really!)

The electoral college is one of those things that few people understand all that well, yet almost everyone can tell you why we've been unable to get rid of it: the small states have blocked efforts to amend the Constitution to abolish it because they believe that it amplifies their voting power. As we all know, holding on to power trumps principles in the real world. However, as I will show using simple arithmetic, the small states are wrong about where their true voting strength lies. In fact, the electoral college more often than not dilutes the voting power of most small states. I hope by this article to stand conventional wisdom about the electoral college on its head and, thereby, change the national conversation about it so that we can move on.

Let there be no mistake about one thing: we will never be able to abolish the electoral college by constitutional amendment unless and until it is shown to the small states that it is in their selfish interests to do so. How could it be in their selfish interests when every expert on the subject says otherwise? Read on and you'll see. The numbers do not lie.


The U.S. Constitution as written in 1787 left to the state governments the selection of Senators and presidents. Since the Bill of Rights in 1791, nine of the 17 subsequent amendments have reformed election law or redefined eligibility to vote. The Seventeenth Amendment, for instance, provided for the popular election of U.S. Senators. Before it was ratified in 1913, U.S. Senators were never elected by the people; they were chosen by state governments. We are still waiting for a similar amendment to reform our presidential elections. (...)

From a purely self-interested point of view, were the small-state Senators right to defend the electoral college? The question we need to answer is a comparative one: Would the small states have more sway over the electoral-college vote or over a nationwide popular vote? It turns out that many of the small states are highly partisan, i.e. they vote overwhelmingly for one candidate over another. This fact will prove important in answering our question.

Most people who have thought about these questions readily see that the electoral college favors the swing states: those where the outcome is usually close. Florida and New Mexico in 2000, for instance, were won with margins of victory of less than 1000 votes each. Since all but two states use a winner-take-all formula in awarding their electoral votes, swing states attract the most political attention and can sway the electoral college disproportionately despite having small or negligible impact on the nationwide popular vote.

Here is my argument in a nutshell: The states whose voting power is diminished in the electoral college are the highly partisan states, i.e. those that vote overwhelmingly for one candidate over another, regardless of size. In other words, the small, highly partisan states should want to abolish the electoral college, yet they are the ones who have most resisted its abolition.

by Jeff Strabone, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

20,000 Colleagues Under the Sea

[ed. Drones above, gliders below. The remote-sensing/surveillance industry is booming these days.]

Sailing the seven seas is old hat. The latest trick is to glide them. Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising the briny by the hundred. They use a minuscule amount of power, so they can stay out for months. And, being submarines, they are rarely troubled by the vicissitudes of weather at the surface. Their only known enemies are sharks (several have come back covered in tooth marks) and fishing nets.

Sea gliders are propelled by buoyancy engines. These are devices that pump oil in and out of an external bladder which, because it deflates when it is empty, means that the craft’s density changes as well. This causes the glider to ascend or sink accordingly, but because it has wings some of that vertical force is translated into horizontal movement. Such movement is slow (the top speed of most gliders is about half a knot), but the process is extremely efficient. That means gliders can be sent on long missions. In 2009, for example, a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers University, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge, though it took seven months to do so. (...)

Skipping under the ocean

Ten years ago there were fewer than 30 gliders in the world, all built either by academic institutions or the armed forces. Now there are at least 400, and most are made by one of three firms: iRobot, whose product is called, simply, Seaglider; Teledyne Webb, which manufactures the Slocum Glider (named after Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail solo around the world); and Bluefin Robotics (the third member of the Massachusetts sea-glider cluster, based in Quincy), which sells the Spray Glider. Broadly speaking, these machines have three sorts of application: scientific, military and commercial.

At the moment, science rules the roost. For cash-strapped oceanographers, gliders are a blessing. Their running costs are negligible and, though buying one can cost as much as $150,000, that sum would purchase a mere three days of, say, a manned trip to the Southern Ocean.

Gliders, moreover, give a continuous view of what is going on, rather than the series of snapshots yielded by equipment lowered from a vessel at the surface. Besides tracking pollution, watching volcanoes and measuring icebergs, they are following fish around, monitoring changing temperatures in different layers of seawater and mapping the abundance of algae. The Ice Dragon, a modified Seaglider operated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has explored under the Antarctic ice shelf, and another modified Seaglider, the Deepglider, can plumb the depths down to 6km (20,000 feet). Teledyne Webb’s Storm Glider, meanwhile, lurks in hurricane-prone areas, bobbing up to take readings during extreme weather.

Gliders are also quiet—so quiet that, as one researcher puts it, you can use them “to hear a fish fart”. This was demonstrated by a recent project run by the University of South Florida, in which a glider successfully mapped the locations of red grouper and toadfish populations on the West Florida Shelf from the noises the fish made.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Antoni Clave
via:

Five years after the iPhone, Carriers are the Biggest Threat to Innovation

Five years ago, the iPhone revolutionized the mobile business and kicked off a seismic shift in the technology industry that continues today. But the massive success of Apple's phone has overshadowed the grim reality of an American wireless marketplace that has become increasingly hostile to innovation — a market tightly controlled by carriers who capriciously pick winners and losers while raising prices and insisting that their use of valuable public spectrum remain free of any oversight. While the iPhone is a raging success, the wireless market is headed towards total failure.

The evidence is everywhere, starting with the iPhone itself: Verizon famously passed on the device at first, and if not for Steve Jobs personally convincing AT&T to sell his phone sight unseen, the iPhone may never have existed. Jobs was well aware that he couldn't reach the market of cellphone consumers without carrier support — at the D3 conference in 2005, he famously called the carriers "orifices" and offered this withering assessment of the industry as it then stood:

"It's even worse. The carriers now have gained the upper hand in terms of the power of the relationship with the handset manufacturers. And they're starting to tell the handset manufacturers what to build. And if Nokia and Motorola don't listen to them, well, Samsung and LG will. So the handset manufacturers are really getting these big thick books from the carriers, telling them "here's what your phone's gonna be."

"We're not good at that," Steve added. Two years later, he would ship the iPhone, turning the industry on its head. Apple had succeeded in building the phone customers wanted instead of the phone carriers wanted, and things would never be the same.

And indeed, things are different — they've gotten dramatically worse. Instead of seeing the benefits of free competition at the consumer level, the carriers are now exerting more control than ever before as demand for mobile devices skyrockets. Getting a device on a major carrier can take up to 15 months and cost millions of dollars; carriers are notorious for demanding custom devices in order to create customer lock-in. "Exclusivity is the bane of my existence," says one source at a major phone manufacturer. "But it's the only way business gets done."

by Nilay Patel, The Verge |  Read more: 
Photo: via Wikipedia

Raphael De Soto
via:

Professors Without Borders

Lecturing to a camera was worlds apart from lecturing to an auditorium. Weaving together drawings, voiceovers and head shots was a perfectionist’s nightmare. A single class often took ten or 15 hours to record, “to the detriment of my marriage and my family life and my sleep.” Thrun asked Stavens to help design the course’s software, and the team began working, some without pay, out of Thrun’s tiny guesthouse in Los Altos Hills, five miles south of Stanford’s campus.

By the time classes began, enrolment had swelled to 158,000, with students from every country in the world except North Korea. Then, on campus, something bizarre happened. “On day one, we had this full class of 200 students. And just two or three weeks in, the class was empty. There were only 30 students showing up.” He asked around. “And they all said, they actually preferred me on video. They can rewind me on video.”

The internet programme also allowed students to be quizzed and marked automatically, on a scale never before possible. Twenty-three thousand students eventually “graduated” from Thrun’s computer science course. Just over one per cent of them got perfect scores. None of those were Stanford students.

At the end of his Digital Life Design talk in January, Thrun confirmed that he had resigned his tenure at Stanford. Instead, he was throwing his energy into a new venture, going live that day, called Udacity. The site would offer “massive online open courses” (MOOCs) free of charge to the global 99 per cent, to the tech-savvy and web-illiterate alike. With student debt at $1 trillion in the United States alone—greater than credit card debt—the current education system, with its barriers, privileges, and vast inequalities, was no longer defensible, he said.

“I always felt, I was at Stanford, the world’s best university, and I was a great teacher,” he said. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again. It’s impossible. I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to the classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill. And I’ve seen wonderland.”  (...)

I mentioned this to Evans when we spoke in April. “One way to keep more students in the class is to reduce the effort required and water things down more,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that.” Indeed, of the more than 100,000 students who first signed up for CS101, just 30,000 completed the first lesson, and even fewer, 10,000, hacked their way through the final exam. A 90 per cent drop-out rate doesn’t look great on paper, but then, Udacity’s only admission requirement is an email address.

Evans was sympathetic. “Just keeping up with the course requires a tremendous amount of effort. Lots of people are excited by the idea and happy to provide their email address, but once it comes time to actually spend ten hours a week to keep up with the course, it’s pretty hard for people with real jobs and families and commitments and other things to do.”

So who is Udacity for, exactly? Basement-dwelling teenagers and unemployed bachelors? I logged on to the discussion forum to find out. There, I met Azzam, from Saudi Arabia; Paveoliu, from Romania; Kerbaï, from Cameroon; Hafiz, from Pakistan; and Svyatoslav, from Moscow, who invited any Russian speakers to join his study group.

“It turns out that two-thirds of our students are from outside the United States,” Stavens, now the CEO of Udacity, said. “It’s about a third US, a third from ten other countries you might expect—western Europe, Brazil, east Asia, Canada—and then about a third from 185 other countries. We have 500 students in Latvia. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually means more students take our classes in Latvia than take them on Stanford’s campus.”

And that’s just it: Stavens and his co-founders aren’t evangelists out to convert the unwashed masses. They simply minister to those who show up, looking to be saved. “Learning is a process a lot like exercise. It has great results, but takes a lot of effort. And maintaining that effort is really hard.” If you don’t want to learn Python, or how the smartphone game Angry Birds works, fine. There are 500 Latvians who do.

by Kevin Charles Redmon, Prospect |  Read more:

Hearing the Voice of God

On a spring Sunday evening, around 50 members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula in Palo Alto gathered for a special event in a rented room above a popular coffee shop. Before the occasion officially got under way, the conversation was a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries set out as a snack, someone's car trouble, the problem of demons. Alex Van Riesen, lead pastor of the church and former team leader of Stanford's InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, is a tall, informal, open-faced man who eventually got everyone settled and quiet. For those of you who haven't been to our church, this is the way it is," Van Riesen, '84, began cheerfully. "Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking coffee and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside."

There was a burst of appreciative laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. "Have people been asking you about the book?" he asked the group. "I've been getting lots of email about it."

The book in question is When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God (Knopf), published to plenty of fanfare in religious, academic and mainstream circles. Terry Gross interviewed the author, Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann, on NPR's Fresh Air. Stellar reviews included ones in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

In essence, the book and the hoopla around it are about the people in this very room. On the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat Tanya Luhrmann, certainly no stranger to the attendees. Having spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a Vineyard church in Chicago, she knows these believers well.

In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews and "tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate." So real, in fact, that members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings and getting God's advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on "theory of mind," how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God's voice.

"I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human mind," she explained. "As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something about the social, cultural and psychological features of what that person is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism? That is fascinating to me."

Luhrmann's provocative theory is that the church teaches pray-ers to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they'd have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune into sounds, images and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful—and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.

And because Luhrmann knows this evening's audience so well, she made sure to answer the question that was, no doubt, on the minds of most of them: After all the time she spent in their church, after trying to tune into the voice of God, did she finally hear it, too?

by Jill Wolfson, Stanford Magazine |  Read more:
Illustration: Kathleen Kinkopf

Talking Heads

The Hobbies Section of My Résumé

I enjoy reading, travel, and the outdoors. Let’s see, I do vision boarding, I like housesitting for people more successful than me, I’m an avid fan of winter sports (snow wandering, sad phone calls). I search eBay for cut-rate mascot costumes, and I laugh at them then get sad. Rattlesnake videos on YouTube, I enjoy magazines and cigarettes, watching television is still a big thing with me. I also do a hobby sometimes where I can see the truth about everything, it’s hard to explain, but I picture a situation, like the movie business, and I can see the truth of the whole thing; I just stand and stare and think about something until I can see the whole truth of it. This started after I did something like three grams of mushrooms in one night in the late ’90s; I’m probably literally retarded from that night. I’ve never sailed, but I feel like maybe I would like that. I like photography; I tried to take a picture of this pimp on 10th Avenue who has a tarantula that he’s always got walking around on his arm, but he physically threatened me so I just turned a little bit and acted like I was trying to take a picture of something to the left of him, and then he called me a quiet little bitch, whatever that was supposed to mean. Softball, camping. I know a guy named Tic Tac who was a martial arts assassin for the Marines, like a freelance killer basically. My main hobbies involve high stakes situations, motherfucker. LOL!—just kidding around, a little. Let’s see, I don’t know, how long is this section supposed to be? I guess I have the same hobbies everyone else has; fishing, jogging, whatever, you name it, I’ll do it. I’ve been pretty lonely, so lately I’ll try just about anything—if someone says they love to go antiquing, I’m like, “Not so fast, when are you going next, because I’m coming with you so I stop climbing the fucking walls over here.” Anyway, I have tons of hobbies. I’ll put eating candy on here, just because, you know what, why not? You’ve probably seen weaker shit than eating candy in the hobbies section of someone’s résumé. Certainly someone has put something like “Spending time with my kids” or something like that, so I’m playing the candy card, chief. You know what, I’ll tell you what my biggest hobby is, my biggest hobby right now is getting my shit back on track. So, let’s get real about how we’re going to make that happen, because I’ve been on a lonely stretch of medium luck for about six months. Also, I am bankrupt and not allowed to trade stocks, securities, futures, or annuities for twenty-five years in North America and its territories, including Guam. I can make sleeping pills and bottle rockets. Those last two aren’t really hobbies, I guess, more like special skills.

by Dan Kennedy, McSweeny's

War

[ed. Beautiful day today.]

Probation Fees

[ed. Profit-driven private prisons, profit-driven probation services. Incarceration has become one of our biggest growth industries (Wall St. bankers exempt, of course).] 

Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.

When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.

For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.

“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”

Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided a lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right to counsel is rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk of jail. The probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while saying they also help offenders, and the defendants often end up lost in a legal Twilight Zone.

by Ethan Bronner, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Cary Norton

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You’re Addicted to What?

When people refer to themselves or others as “sex addicts,” what are they actually talking about? More than anything, simple narcissistic character structure: the familiar “I guess I thought I could get away with it,” “Deep down, I don’t really believe the rules apply to me,” or “When I hurt, I want relief, and I don’t care so much about breaking promises or hurting others.”

If that sounds like normal people—if that sounds like you—it’s not surprising. Narcissism is a common human condition. So here’s my evaluation of almost everyone who is diagnosed as a sex addict—by themselves, their loved ones, or an addictionologist: it’s someone who is unhappy with the consequences of their sexual choices, but who finds it too emotionally painful to make different choices. You know, the way some of us are with cookies, new sweaters, or watching the Kardashians on TV.

Which is to say, it’s not about the sex. It’s about the immature decision-making.

The rest of the people who are in pain about their sexual decision-making are generally struggling with one or more of the following: compulsivity, impulsivity, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder. An idiosyncratic response to medication can even be a factor.

So when people talk about sex addiction, they’re really talking about all of these, and more. When someone says, “sexually, I’m out of control,” that doesn’t tell us very much. When we know someone has affair after affair; or that someone regularly masturbates to the point of pain; or that someone constantly pressures his wife for sex regardless of how unrealistic it is (she’s post-partum, she has the flu, his parents are in the next room, they had a big fight just a few hours ago); or that someone is pursuing anonymous sex in public parks in a way that’s begging for jail time and loss of career; or that someone watches three hours of porn per night, we simply don’t know very much about the person.

On the other hand, anyone who says “sexually, I’m out of control” is automatically welcomed into the fellowship of sex addicts—without any attempt to evaluate that person’s mental state. Sex therapists generally don’t get distracted by the sexual part of patients’ stories. Those without training in sexuality—like so-called sex addiction counselors—often do. (...)

How do you treat the thing?

Heroin addiction treatment programs never suggest that the addict cut down to 3 or 4 injections per week. “You’re an addict, so you can never use heroin—or alcohol—ever again” is far closer to what we’d expect.

Then how about using the same model for treating sex addicts: “You’ll just have to give up sex altogether,” or “You can never masturbate again.” No? If the model works for other “addictions,” why not for sex? Two answers come to mind: (1) the whole sex addiction model doesn’t have nearly that much theoretical rigor, and (2) the market for a treatment plan that aims toward complete sexual abstinence is, well, rather limited.

by Marty Klein, The Humanist |  Read more: