via:

Amy Bennett
Losing It, oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches

via:

The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire)

The enclosed suburban shopping mall has become so synonymous with the American landscape that it’s hard to imagine the original idea for it ever springing from some particular person's imagination. Now the scheme seems obvious: of course Americans want to amble indoors in a million square feet of air-conditioned retail, of course we will need a food court because so much shopping can’t be done without meal breaks, and of course we will require 10,000 parking spaces ringing the whole thing to accommodate all our cars.

The classic indoor mall, however, is widely credited with having an inventor. And when the Vienna-born architect Victor Gruen first outlined his vision for it in a 1952 article in the magazine Progressive Architecture, the plan was a shocker. Most Americans were still shopping downtown, and suburban "shopping centers," to the extent they existed, were most definitely not enclosed in indoor mega-destinations.

Gruen’s idea transformed American consumption patterns and much of the environment around us. At age 60, however, the enclosed regional shopping mall also appears to be an idea that has run its course (OK, maybe not in China, but among Gruen’s original clientele). He opened the first prototype in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956, and the concept spread from there (this also means the earliest examples of the archetypal American mall are now of age for historic designation, if anyone wants to make that argument).

At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession. As we imagine ways to repurpose these aging monoliths and what the next generation of retail should look like, it’s worth recalling Gruen’s odd legacy. He hated suburbia. He thought his ideas would revitalize cities. He wanted to bring urban density to the suburbs. And he envisioned shopping malls as our best chance at containing sprawl.

"He said great quotes on suburbia being 'soulless' and 'in search of a heart,'" says Jeff Hardwick, who wrote the Gruen biography Mall Maker. "He just goes on and on with these critiques. And they occur really early in his writing as well. So it’s not as if he ends up bemoaning suburbia later. He’s critiquing suburbia pretty much from the get-go, and of course the remedy he offers is the shopping mall."

by Emily Badger, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Reuters

KOBAYASHI Kiyochika（小林 清親 Japanese, 1847-1915）

The winter moon above Sumida river.  1915

Woodblock 

via:

The Joke’s on You

Among the hacks who staff our factories of conventional wisdom, evidence abounds that we are living in a golden age of political comedy. The New York Times nominates Jon Stewart, beloved host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, as the “most trusted man in America.” His protégé, Stephen Colbert, enjoys the sort of slavish media coverage reserved for philanthropic rock stars. Bill Maher does double duty as HBO’s resident provocateur and a regular on the cable news circuit. The Onion, once a satirical broadsheet published by starving college students, is now a mini-empire with its own news channel. Stewart and Colbert, in particular, have assumed the role of secular saints whose nightly shtick restores sanity to a world gone mad.

But their sanctification is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.

Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.

Fans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy.

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times offered a summation of the majority opinion in a 2008 profile of Stewart that doubled as his highbrow coronation. “Mr. Stewart describes his job as ‘throwing spitballs’ from the back of the room,” she wrote. “Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day . . . in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.”

Putting aside the obvious objection that poking fun at the powerful isn’t the same as bluntly confronting them, it’s important to give Stewart and Colbert their due. They are both superlative comedians with brilliant writing staffs. They represent a quantum improvement over the aphoristic pabulum of the thirties satirist Will Rogers or the musical schmaltz of Beltway balladeer Mark Russell. Stewart and Colbert have, on occasion, aimed their barbs squarely at the seats of power. (...)

What’s notable about these episodes, though, is how uncharacteristic they are. What Stewart and Colbert do most nights is convert civic villainy into disposable laughs. They prefer Horatian satire to Juvenalian, and thus treat the ills of modern media and politics as matters of folly, not concerted evil. Rather than targeting the obscene cruelties borne of greed and fostered by apathy, they harp on a rogues’ gallery of hypocrites familiar to anyone with a TiVo or a functioning memory. Wit, exaggeration, and gentle mockery trump ridicule and invective. The goal is to mollify people, not incite them.

In Kakutani’s adoring New York Times profile, Stewart spoke of his comedic mission as though it were an upscale antidepressant: “It’s a wonderful feeling to have this toxin in your body in the morning, that little cup of sadness, and feel by 7 or 7:30 that night, you’ve released it in sweat equity and can move on to the next day.” What’s missing from this formulation is the idea that comedy might, you know, change something other than your mood.

by Steve Almond, The Baffler |  Read more:

Illustration: Steven Kroninger

Ask Someone Who Recently Traveled Around Ireland

A couple weeks ago I took a 10-day trip through Ireland, with long-to-very-short stops in Dublin, Malahide, Kilkenny, Killarney, around the Ring of Kerry and the Skellig Ring, Dingle, Portmagee, Athlone, Galway, and Belfast. It was great.

Question: I have wanted to do such a trip for a while! But was chicken about driving there. How difficult did you find it? (I looked into bus schedules but it seemed ... like I should get over it and just rent a car.)

The cars were hard! Probably the most unexpectedly stressful part, actually. The roads are about this wide ||, and the driving-on-the-left-side thing is not an instant natural fit for everyone [nervous laughter], and I spent a lot of the time staring at the road (on the passenger side) clutching my hands in catatonic terror. But then I loosened up [a very little bit], and it was fine! (My travel partner deserves lots and lots of credit for both never crashing and for putting up with me the whole time. "Careful." "Careful!" "CAREFUL." "Careful." "CAREFUL." "Careful.") Way more fun, in a different way, were the trains! Especially when you bring/buy booze on them. I think — I think — if I did it again, I might just go everywhere by bus and train, although that'd sacrifice the roamy, up-and-down-the-Irish-hills, windows-open part of it. But both options are great. Unless you crash and die. It bewilders me that everyone in Ireland hasn't already crashed and died. (...)

My question is what kind of food does one eat in Ireland? Also did you see any of those really pretty people that have blue eyes and dark hair?

There was a REALLY beautiful girl with shiny black hair, pale blue eyes, and peaches-and-cream skin (ugh!) who worked at the car rental place at the Dublin airport, and she was so pretty it made me angry! I'm still angry at her! And at the terrifying car she rented me. No, she was lovely, and the car was great. It was just very, very small, which ultimately was good for the micro-roads. Wait, let me talk more about the cars and roads! That's a joke, but now that we're here again, the roads were actually really smooth, so that was nice. More on the roads shortly, I'm sure.

And the food was pretty surprisingly great everywhere, despite its less-than-glowing reputation. Although it depends a lot on whether you like fish. There's so much good fish! (Best I had: Out of the Blue, in Dingle. Get the John Dory.) Vegetarians might have a little trouble, though. And eating as much local Irish beef as I did fish seems tasty but maybe not as digestively pleasant, although that's just me. As long as you don't eat too much of anything, when you do have fish and chips, and beef-and-Guinness stew, and rustic brown bread slathered with ridiculously delicious butter and jam, and poached eggs, and black pudding, and Willy Wonka-style chocolates with hilarious names like "Pimbly Mimblies" and "Mumbly Pumblies," and swirly soft-serve ice cream cones that look like they came out of a cartoon, and everything else, it doesn't hurt your stomach too badly. Or do whatever!

How depressing is it over there, generally? Like, do people just seem sadder than people in America? Or are my assumptions about what the food, weather, and economy do to the national mood way off?

Hmm, I don't know. Everyone seemed pretty good, but I was only there for 10 days, tourist-ing it up. But what's definitely true is that everyone — truly every person I spoke with or otherwise observed — was incredibly nice. Went out of their way to be warm, helpful, open. So friendly, even when you ask stupid questions or drive embarrassingly Americanly (sorry, nice man on that bike!). If you go, talk to people! The people and the scenery are really the best parts of the whole experience, and the reason to visit. Also the beer and whiskey. (But the Jameson distillery is skippable. Kind of. Actually it's pretty hilarious, if only for the strangely pro-America, propaganda-style video screened at the beginning.)

There was no cloud of depression, although they have a good, dark sense of humor about things.

Also they made fun of the country and its weather constantly, asking, jokingly [ish], why we even came there in the first place. But no one seemed glum. Also I loved the weather! But I love rain and darkness. There was plenty of sunshine, too. Just not for too-too many hours at a time, usually. But the weather was always in flux. SHALL I GO ON?

by Edith Zimmerman, The Hairpin | Read more:

How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game?

“A hundred million dollars is nothing,” the venture capitalist Andy Rappaport told me back in the summer of 2004. This was at a moment when wealthy liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis were looking to influence national politics by financing their own voter-turnout machine and TV ads and by creating an investment fund for start-ups. Rappaport’s statement struck me as an expression of supreme hubris. In American politics at that time, $100 million really meant something.

Eight years later, of course, his pronouncement seems quaint. Conservative groups alone, including a super PAC led by Karl Rove and another group backed by the brothers Charles and David Koch, will likely spend more than a billion dollars trying to take down Barack Obama by the time November rolls around.

The reason for this exponential leap in political spending, if you talk to most Democrats or read most news reports, comes down to two words: Citizens United. The term is shorthand for a Supreme Court decision that gave corporations much of the same right to political speech as individuals have, thus removing virtually any restriction on corporate money in politics. The oft-repeated narrative of 2012 goes like this: Citizens United unleashed a torrent of money from businesses and the multimillionaires who run them, and as a result we are now seeing the corporate takeover of American politics.

As a matter of political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality, which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.

It helps first to understand what Citizens United did and didn’t do to change the opaque rules governing outside money. Go back to, say, 2007, and pretend you’re a conservative donor. At this moment, you would still have been free to write a check for any amount to a 527 — so named because of the shadowy provision in the tax code that made such groups legal. (America Coming Together and the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were both 527s.) Even corporations, though they couldn’t contribute to a candidate or a party, were free to write unlimited checks to something called a social-welfare group, whose principal purpose, ostensibly, is issue advocacy rather than political activity. The anti-tax Club for Growth, for instance, is a social-welfare group. So, remarkably, is the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

There were, however, a few caveats when it came to the way these groups could spend their money. Neither a 527 nor a social-welfare group could engage in “express advocacy” — that is, overtly making the case for one candidate over another. Nor could they use corporate money for “electioneering communications” — a category defined as radio or television advertising that even mentions a candidate’s name within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. So under the old rules, the Club for Growth couldn’t broadcast an ad that said “Vote Against Barack Obama,” but it could spend that money on as many ads as it wanted that said “Barack Obama has ruined America — call and tell him to stop!” as long as it did so more than 60 days before an election. (The distinction between those two ads may sound silly and arcane to you, but that’s why you don’t sit on the Federal Election Commission.)

by Matt Bai, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration by Other Means

Kevin Cooley

via:

Boxed In, Wanting Out

Tell me about it. That sums up Boston parents’ reaction to new research by UCLA-affiliated social scientists concluding that American families are overwhelmed by clutter, too busy to go in their own backyards, rarely eat dinner together even though they claim family meals as a goal, and can’t park their cars in the garage because they’re crammed with non-vehicular stuff.

The team of anthropologists and archeologists spent four years studying 32 middle-class Los Angeles families in their natural habitat — their toy-littered homes — and came to conclusions so grim that the lead researcher used the word “disheartening” to describe the situation we have gotten ourselves into.

At first glance, the just-published, 171-page “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century” looks like a coffee table book. But it contains very real-life photos of pantries, offices, and backyards, and details a generally Zen-free existence. Architectural Digest or Real Simple this is not. Among the findings detailed within:

The rise of Costco and similar stores has prompted so much stockpiling — you never know when you’ll need 600 Dixie cups or a 50-pound bag of sugar — that three out of four garages are too full to hold cars.

Managing the volume of possessions is such a crushing problem in many homes that it elevates levels of stress hormones for mothers.

Even families who invested in outdoor décor and improvements were too busy to go outside and enjoy their new decks.

Most families rely heavily on convenience foods even though all those frozen stir-frys and pot stickers saved them only about 11 minutes per meal.

A refrigerator door cluttered with magnets, calendars, family photos, phone numbers, and sports schedules generally indicates the rest of the home will be in a similarly chaotic state.

The scientists working with UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families studied the dual-income families the same way they would animal subjects. They videotaped the activities of family members, tracked their moves with position-locating devices, and documented their homes, yards, and activities with thousands of photographs. They even took saliva samples to measure stress hormones.

The goal, said Jeanne E. Arnold, lead author and a professor of anthropology at UCLA, was to document what is right in front of us, yet invisible.

“What we have is a time capsule of America,” she said. “No other study has been done like this. Imagine how exciting it would be if we could go back to 1912 and see how people were living in their homes. That’s the core of any society.”

Arnold said she admired the way the families coped with their busy lives, but even so, the $24.95 book (available on Amazon) presents a frightening picture of life in a consumer-driven society, with researchers documenting expensive but virtually unused “master suites,” children who rarely go outside, stacks of clutter, and entire walls devoted to displays of Beanie Babies and other toys.

Arnold said she was bothered most by the lack of time study subjects spent enjoying the outdoors.

“Something like 50 of the 64 parents in our study never stepped outside in the course of about a week,” she said. “When they gave us tours of their house they’d say, ‘Here’s the backyard, I don’t have time to go there.’ They were working a lot at home. Leisure time was spent in front of the TV or at the computer.”

by Beth Teitell, Boston.com |  Read more:

Image via: Boing Boing

Nirvana

Hey! Wait!
I’ve got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice

Jeremy Norton Paintings, Untitled No.57

Lake Life

The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built five houses in the early 1900’s; one for each of his children.

Four of the houses are on the water, and one looms on the hill across the road. A lakefront house right in the middle got sold before I was born, and the poor souls that live there now built a high fence around it to keep my family from swarming across their property. We no longer miss that house, but we do still call it by its old name.

Everything about the remaining four is somewhat irregular—they are all in different styles, of different sizes, and each is attached to a different-sized patch of property. The one that belongs to my branch has the least land, and is the biggest and most decrepit. It is best suited to being filled by at least two nuclear families. Probably its best asset is a cobwebby porch built directly over the water.

The lake itself is sea-weedy, green. Zebra mussels cut your feet. The labour of living by it —dragging the boat in, wresting bins of garbage up the stone hill in a wheelbarrow, washing a hundred plates three times a day—is more intense than you expected when you were child. There is always someone watering and pressing the clay court, or hanging up endless clumps of wet bathing suits and towels on lines. There is a mass production of tomato and chicken sandwiches, and by the time the last child has had their lunch, the first child is thinking of his dinner. In one area are bunches of children engaged in archery, over there are some more playing chess. Several grownups are off somewhere, sailing. All activities are tinged with competition, and a little danger. The tennis is downright ferocious.

Everywhere there is evidence of grandeur and decay.

My great-aunt, or great-cousin or something had her 90th birthday this summer, which brought all the branches flying lake-ward in droves. What one discovers in “my” house this summer is that the sofa has completely disintegrated; a pile of dead moths high as your ankle lines the perimeter of all windows. The children are bunched on cots on the porches; no one seemed to remember to shut the doors, so we lost the battle with the gnats and mosquitoes. The end of our dock—the most disgraceful one on the lake—has cracked off and slumps down into the water. Perhaps in sympathy, the sofa slumps at the same angle. When you come into the kitchen, which is plastered with notes to remind you that the appliances are whimsical, or don’t work at all--you find a spate of lake-wet relatives in towels nearly falling through the rattan seats of their chairs, speaking words you haven’t heard since last summer—like “mast”, “boom”, “main-line,” and “skipper.” The pot of coffee is always on. Then someone has to be taken to the hospital for stitches.

One topic that crops up periodically in the kitchen, is the old days. There used to be a pool in the property across the way; there used to be butterflies, which the children caught in nets and pinned to boards. They used to go to the farm and come back with a pile of kittens that someone had intended to drown. There used to be fish-gutting in the basement, which the women mostly did, and intense fishing trips across the lake, conducted uniquely by the men.

The oldest generation remembers this with mixed fondness, but not wistfulness. They share responsibility with my mother’s generation for the endless logistical minutia of managing the place. My generation is still young---I’m a over a decade older than the cousin closest to me in age, and many of the kids are perplexed about why they go on vacation in a house so far away, and so much less comfortable than the one they left. Nobody really fishes any more. The little ones say idly: “whichever of us strikes it rich should fix this place.”

It would be beautiful if it were fixed. But an interesting thing about lake life is the ethos of discomfort that is its essential spirit. Even in my great-grandmother’s day, when there had been money, there had also been spiders, and rotting fish washing up on the rocks, and the water was ice-cold, and the weather indifferent. They came because it was habit, because there is something about water that empties the mind, and they came to see each other; to mark their heights on a doorframe, to compete over trifles, and to remember who they were: a rather unmusical people interested in politics, Protestantism, poetry and psychology. But for a month or four, on the lake, they lost even that identity, and became interested in nature, and the strenuous use of the body. My great-aunt Eleanor, in her ‘90’s, still swam every day, and skinny-dipping is generally encouraged.

by Mara Jebsen, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Friends of a Certain Age

It was like one of those magical blind-date scenes out of a Hollywood rom-com, without the “rom.” I met Brian, a New York screenwriter, a few years ago through work, which led to dinner with our wives and friend chemistry that was instant and obvious.

We liked the same songs off Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde,” the same lines from “Chinatown.” By the time the green curry shrimp had arrived, we were finishing each other’s sentences. Our wives were forced to cut in: “Hey, guys, want to come up for air?”

As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college.

That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way.

Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.

As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.

No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now.

But often, people realize how much they have neglected to restock their pool of friends only when they encounter a big life event, like a move, say, or a divorce.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Roman Muradov

Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?

It’s been said (by Steve Jobs, no less) that good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels.

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

Possibly such a view of Internet culture could be arrived at by way of deliberate study of online group behavior. But that’s not how Tumblr was made. “David built it for himself,” John Maloney, until recently the company’s president, told me. Marco Arment, Karp’s first employee, who participated directly in the service’s creation, put it even more succinctly: “Tumblr is David.”

I met Karp in Tumblr’s offices in the Flatiron district in New York. In his standard uniform of Jack Purcell sneakers, dark pants and a hoodie over a patterned shirt, Karp was polite, upbeat, inclusive and big on eye contact. Asked a question about competitors, he answered: “The last thing we want to do is compete with someone. That’s for bankers.” Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” And indeed, it has been used to make more than 60 million blogs — among them a visual scrapbook kept by Michael Stipe; silly meme-blogs like Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan; and the clever graphic analysis that became the recent book “I Love Charts” — drawing a combined 17.5 billion page views a month.

The trick is making page views equal money. “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking. That ability to optimize and (not incidentally) monetize user experiences by reacting to microlevel data is the essence of Web-business magic, as it is generally understood.

Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for. It’s an approach that may or may not guide Tumblr into the black. But Karp isn’t worried. His nice-young-man aspect makes it easy to miss the brashness of what he is saying: he isn’t interested in competing, but not because he doesn’t like competition. He just feels that he sees something everyone else has missed.  (...)

Trying to blog at first made David Karp feel bad: that big, empty text box seemed to demand a lot of carefully constructed words, an intimidating sight for a nonwriter. The first iteration of Tumblr was a tool for “tumblelogging” (a short-form variation on blogging) designed to make it easier and less off-putting. It was released in 2007, and Tech Crunch promptly praised its simplicity: “There is absolutely no learning curve.”

Like any blogging tool, Tumblr allows users to design a site from a behind-the-scenes “dashboard,” where you type a post or upload a photo, and choose a visual “theme.” Tumblr’s dashboard incorporates some familiar elements of social Web services: in addition to making your own posts, you can “follow” or appreciate those of other Tumblr users. You can repost images and other content onto your own blog easily, and this helped Tumblr develop a reputation as a more visually oriented, multimedia version of Twitter.

In the beginning, most traffic came to Tumblr from without; but now more than 70 percent of the traffic on Tumblr occurs in the dashboard zone, where users read, react to and repurpose one another’s posts. The upshot is “the mullet theory of social software design,” summarizes Chris Muscarella, a tech-entrepreneur friend of Karp’s. “It’s all business in the front: you have your blog that looks like any other blog, although usually prettier. And then the real party is in the back, through the social interaction on the dashboard.”

The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’ ”

by Rob Walker, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo illustration by Clang. Set design: Cindy Sandmann

John Evans (1945 - ) The Exclamations Got Away, Oil on Canvas, 64” x 60”
via:

A Toast

 

{ President Obama has dinner in Woodside, Calif., in February 2011 with tech leaders including John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). | One year ago tomorrow, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took the first of a series of missteps that angered customers and nearly derailed his company. Current and former employees disclose what went wrong. }

via: The New Sheldon wet/dry

[ed. For some reason I've always liked this picture - the digital elite in a toast to their awesomeness. How quickly the fortunes of many in that room have changed over the last year and a half.]

Changing Cities: Ending Hawaii's Oil Addiction

When you think of the most innovative places around the world for clean-tech, Denmark, where 50 percent of the energy comes from wind, might come to mind. Or maybe you'd think of Iceland, which is almost nearly 100 percent powered off geothermal, or perhaps Germany, which recently set a new world record in power generated from solar, but Hawaii?

U.S. Pacific Command is working closely with Hawaii, the most oil addicted state in the nation, to ensure that the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, a plan launched in 2008 to reduce the state's consumption of fossil fuels by 70 percent by 2030 is a success.

"Pacific Command accounts for 20 percent of the island's energy demand, so Hawaii needed Pacific Command to sign on to make the Clean Energy Initiative work," Joelle Simonpietri senior analyst to U.S. Pacific Command Energy Office joint innovation and experimentation division told ABC News.

The military is using the Hawaiian islands as a test bed for new green tech innovation - everything from algae-based jet fuels and hydrogen fuel cell technology to smart-grids that can resist cyber terror. (...)

Since Hawaii's goals of a 70 percent reduction of fossil fuels was announced, dozens of renewable energy projects have been proposed and employment and jobs in the clean-tech sector have sharply increased.

"Twenty percent of construction jobs in Hawaii are now in the installation of solar photovoltaics," Glick said.

Several factors have allowed the state to forge ahead. A law that requires all new homes install solar hot water heating, and great tax rebates are helping Hawaii move toward a cleaner energy grid.

Hawaii has the second most solar photovoltaic systems, as well as the most EV's and charging spots per capita in the country, and it's also forging ahead on its efforts to increase the percentage of its electrical production with renewable power.

by Carrie Halperin, ABC News |  Read more:

Andrew Wyeth
via:

Tsuchiya Koitsu - Maizuru Harbor at Night (1936)
via: