Making the Most of Mentorship

[ed. Good advice. This sounds a lot like my mentor, Lance Trasky (one of the most unsung, pragmatic and accomplished conservationists in Alaska's history). Extraordinary people who lead by example.]

Earlier this month, my mentor, former boss and business partner, Marvin Traub, passed away at the age of 87. Marvin was a defining figure in the American retail industry and the man who, in his longtime role as president and CEO of Bloomingdale’s, pioneered the concept of bringing entertainment to retail. With his out-of-the-box ideas and ability to rally people around his vision, Marvin put an indelible stamp on the way the industry operates today. And even in his later years, possessed of a rare energy and passion for life, Marvin worked harder than anyone I have known. I was extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work closely with him, learn from his vast experience and meet many of the industry contacts that he nurtured over half a century of work.

Marvin’s passing got me thinking about the extraordinary importance of good mentors. In life, in general, we often rely upon select people — parents, teachers, spouses — to help mold us into who we are. The business world is no different: we need bosses to grow us into successful business people. And, in turn, we need to mentor those who are looking to become the same. Marvin was a boss and mentor who greatly shaped my career. And now, with him gone, he has inspired me to do the same for others.

Not all bosses are Marvins. Sometimes a boss is and will always be nothing more than somebody you work for. But even in a more favourable scenario, mentoring and being mentored isn’t easy. We don’t always like to be shaped and it’s not always fun doing the shaping. Indeed, many of my most important learnings from bosses like Marvin came during bumpy moments when we did not see eye to eye on a particular issue. Similarly, the process of mentoring some of the people of whom I am most proud was almost as painful childbirth. The fact is, great mentors and mentees are not necessarily great friends. With that said, here are some words of advice on how to mentor and be mentored effectively.

HOW TO BE A GOOD BOSS AND MENTOR:

1. Lead by example — and stick to it.

Good bosses and mentors take a stand on how they want things done, which sets the standard for the organisation at large. No manager’s style will make everybody happy. The key is to be consistent, so that employees learn how to operate within your particular approach.

While at McKinsey, I worked on a project for a manager with incredible attention to detail. His reports were premeditated and polished to a tee: the structure of the document, the choice of words, the rigour of the analysis, even the labeling and placement of the footnotes. At first, I grumbled about his “anal-retentiveness.” But I soon learned that his painstaking approach drove real results and I benefited greatly from employing it throughout my time at the company.

In my next job, I made investments for a billionaire entrepreneur who was a risk taker, unbound by process, structure and other norms. At first, this was chaotic and confusing. But he, too, was incredibly successful and he taught me to be comfortable operating in an environment in constant flux. I learned how to anticipate the unpredictable. And without this guidance, launching and running an internet start-up would have been a daunting task indeed.

The key is: whatever your style, teach it and bring others onboard. They may not love your approach, but they will adopt it. Nobody respects a flip-flopper.

2. Inspire through conviction.

The best mentors and bosses are those who inspire through passion and conviction. Marvin was a master at getting people to do things they normally wouldn’t do because he believed in his ideas so strongly. He got Diane von Furstenberg to ride an elephant to a Bloomingdale’s store opening event. He convinced the city of New York to change the direction of traffic on a major avenue so that the Queen of England could visit Bloomingdale’s. For Marvin, the sky was the limit and his passion inspired those around him to dream big. Whatever you believe in, whatever you stand for, broadcast it with all of your heart. Conviction is infectious — demonstrate it and your people will dream big with you.

3. Give honest feedback frequently.

You need to be extraordinarily honest and forthcoming about the feedback you give your mentees, positive and negative. Your people can’t be proud of what they don’t know they’ve done right and they can’t fix what they don’t know is broken. A month into my job at McKinsey, I was shocked by a performance review from the partner leading my first project, detailing my need for improvement in several areas. But I sucked it up, made changes and came to really appreciate granular criticism on a regular basis as critical to my growth. I probably would not have progressed at the company without the constant, tell-it-like-it-is feedback loop.

Last month, when M’O completed its latest round of financing, I received a message, out of the blue, from that same partner who gave me my first performance review. “I am so proud of you,” it said. So the cycle of feedback continues. Be honest, be critical, be forthright.

4. Share yourself

Have the confidence and willingness to share your experiences and relationships with your people. That’s half of what they are looking for.

Marvin Traub went out of his way to share with me his vast network of contacts. Over daily breakfasts at the Regency and lunches at the Four Seasons, Marvin and his business partner, Morty Singer, introduced me to hundreds of colleagues and associates — including my co-founder, Lauren Santo Domingo. Many of these introductions have formed the basis of my professional community. And Marvin’s generosity in this regard motivated me to work even harder for him. The point: be generous with your network of knowledge and contacts and your mentees will bend over backwards for you. Hoarding only slows their growth and fosters resentment.

5. Encourage debate.

Just because you are the boss, it doesn’t mean you have all the answers. Sure, you know that, but you really have to believe and show it. Encourage debate among your people. Get them to speak up and voice their opinions, even if they’re unpopular opinions, particularly with you. Let feisty people tell you your idea is stupid. Help timid people articulate their support for your idea. Good mentors listen and learn and develop outcomes that take into account different personalities and all sides of the argument. To be clear: this is not about letting people be rude — it’s about enabling people to say whatever they think about the idea at hand.

HOW TO BE A GOOD EMPLOYEE AND MENTEE:

1. Debate respectfully

In keeping with the previous point, when your mentor encourages debate, be vocal in expressing your opinions. Articulate your point and provide evidence to back it up. But don’t get out of line if your boss doesn’t see it your way. Your boss is usually your boss for a reason. Pattern recognition and concern for other factors may influence the final decision, even if the outcome seems counter-intuitive to you.

by Áslaug Magnúsdóttir, The Business of Fashion |  Read more:

Photo: LaVanguardia.com

The Swimmer, Felix Elie Tobeen. French (1880 - 1938)
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The 'Chemputer' That Could Print Out Any Drug

Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TEDconference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two.

At the same time, one branch of that thinking has itself evolved into a new project: the notion of creating downloadable chemistry, with the ultimate aim of allowing people to "print" their own pharmaceuticals at home. Cronin's latest TED talk asked the question: "Could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? Can we 'app' chemistry?" "Basically," he tells me, in his office at the university, with half a grin, "what Apple did for music, I'd like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescriptiondrugs."

The idea is very much at the conception stage, but as he walks me around his labs Cronin begins to outline how that "paradigm-changing" project might progress. He has been in Scotland for 10 years and in that time he has worked hard, as any chemist worth his salt should, to get the right mix of people to produce the results he wants. Cronin's interest has always been in complex chemicals and the origins of life. "We are pretty good at making molecules. We do a lot of self-assembly at a molecular level," he says. "We are able to make really large molecules and I was able to get a lot of money in grants and so on for doing that." But after a while, Cronin suggests, making complex molecules for their own sake can seem a bit limiting. He wanted to find some more life-changing applications for his team's expertise.

A couple of years ago, Cronin was invited to an architectural seminar to discuss his work on inorganic structures. He had been looking at the way crystals grew "inorganic gardens" of tube-like structures between themselves. Among the other speakers at that conference was a man explaining the possibilities of 3D printing for conventional architectural forms. Cronin wondered if you could apply this 3D principle to structures at a molecular level. "I didn't want to print an aeroplane, or a jaw bone," he says. "I wanted to do chemistry."

Cronin prides himself on his lateral thinking; his gift for chemistry came fairly late – he stumbled through comprehensive school in Ipswich and initially university – before realising a vocation for molecular chemistry that has seen him make a series of prize-winning, and fund-generating, advances in the field. He often puts his faith in counterintuition. "Confusions of ideas produce discovery," he says. "People, researchers, always come to me and say they are pretty good at thinking outside the box and I usually think 'yes, but it is a pretty small box'." In analysing how to apply 3D printing to chemistry, Cronin wondered in the first instance if the essentially passive idea of a highly sophisticated form of copying from a software blueprint could be made more dynamic. In his lab, they put together a rudimentary prototype of a chemical 3D printer, which could be programmed to make basic chemical reactions to produce different molecules.

He shows me the printer, a nondescript version of the £1,200 3D printer used in the Fab@Home project, which aims to bring self-fabrication to the masses. After a bit of trial and error, Cronin's team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions, connected with tubes of different lengths and diameters. After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or "chemical inks", to create sequenced reactions.

The "inks" would be simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed. "If I was being facetious I would say that to find your inks you would go to the periodic table: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on," Cronin says, "but obviously you can't handle all those substances very well, so it would have to be a bit more complex than that. If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together. When we make complex molecules in the traditional way with test tubes and flasks, we start with a smaller number of simpler molecules." As he points out, nearly all drugs are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin. "With a printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule," he says.

The real beauty of Cronin's prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place. The scale and architecture of the miniature printed "lab" could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants but also the ratios and speed at which they combine could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this "reactionware" or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, "Rubik's Cube chemistry".

"What we are trying to do is to combine the notion of a reaction with a reactor," he says. "Conventionally the reactor is just the passive space or the environment in which a reaction takes place. It could be something as simple as a test tube. The printer allows it to be a far more active context."

by Tim Adams, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Murdo Macleod

I’m Lonely. Is That So Odd?

I come home from work. The lamp on a timer that has welcomed me back through the gloom of the last few months burns, unnecessarily, in the sunny kitchen. I’m reading a thriller, which is living up to its name. I sit down with my coat still on and return eagerly to chapter three.

Two hours later, I put the book down and realise it’s dark. The lamp provides the only pool of light in an otherwise pitch-black house. It’s also quiet, deathly quiet, without even the hum of the central heating or the swoosh of the washing machine to break the silence. Radio 4, also on a timer, tuned itself off before the Archers. The mobile phone on the table beside me is silent. It hasn’t rung, beeped or throbbed, probably since yesterday, maybe the day before. No calls, no emails, no texts, no Facebook notifications, no tweets, and there’s nothing blinking on the answerphone, because the landline hasn’t rung since December, except people in call centres who can’t pronounce my name.

All these methods of communication and yet nobody’s communicating with me.

There was a time when coming back to an empty house would fill me with pleasure – like a snowy day at school. I’d luxuriate in the extra, unexpected bonus of having the place to myself, and happily breathe in the peace and quiet. But now, as anticipated, when, two years ago I wrote here about my very empty nest – with the kids grown, gone, or not yet home from college – it’s just lonely. There, I’ve said it. I’m lonely.

We’re all so popular now, so connected. Social networking is the buzzword. We have all these new verbs – we blog, we Skype and tweet our thoughts in fewer than 140 characters. We post our status on Facebook and talk and surf constantly on our mobiles so that the trains or buses in the evening are a sea of heads, all bowed as though in prayer, worshiping their Blackberries and iPhones, tap, tap, tap – the rosary of the text message. It’s a mark of shame to have no friends, real or virtual, no followers, not to be linked-in to everyone you ever met for five minutes at a party – once – in 1974. So finding yourself at home, alone, with only 30 followers on Twitter, four of whom are the same person, a silent phone, and nobody you care to call must mean there’s something wrong with you. You’re unpopular, friendless, abandoned, alone. Lonely.

Surely somewhere there’s a party you should be at, a dinner you should be invited to, a partner who should be partnering you, a family who should be missing you?

In my case, I have four kids and my solitude is only temporary. In a week, a month, my newly graduated son and student daughter will arrive to re-colonise their bedrooms. For the next year or two, even without David Cameron’s edict, my semi-adult offspring will continue to be reluctant, economic refugees in the house.

Children need their parents, even grown-up children – but they just need them to be alive, they don’t need them in the same room. They want you to be uncomplainingly happy somewhere over there. In the background. Out of the way. And only to step forward when needed. They don’t want you to tag them on Facebook. This is as it should be. You raise them to be confident, caring, well-adjusted, independent adults with rich, fulfilled lives and friends of their own. You can’t whine about being lonely if they then do just that. If mine were still clinging to me for company, I would feel I had failed them. Like surely, I myself have failed at this popularity contest called life if I’m lonely; as, apart from Eleanor Rigby, the elderly and the recently bereaved, apparently I’m the only one who feels this way – alone in this club too.

by Marion McGilvary, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photo: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo

To the saccharine rhythm of a Muzak clip, Steve Ballmer crouched into a tackling stance and dashed across a ballroom stage at the Venetian Las Vegas. A 20-foot wall of video screens flashed his name as the 55-year-old Microsoft chief executive bear-hugged Ryan Seacrest, the ubiquitous television and radio host, who had just introduced Ballmer’s keynote speech for the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show.

More than 150,000 techies and executives were swarming the city’s hotels last January in the annual bacchanalia of cutting-edge gizmos and gadgets. Attendees ran from one vendor to the next, snapping up fistfuls of freebies, inhaling flavored oxygen, and rubbing elbows with stars such as LL Cool J and Justin Bieber.

But this night, an air of discomfort filled the Palazzo Ballroom, where Ballmer was about to give the show’s opening presentation, one delivered by Microsoft’s C.E.O. for 14 of the previous 17 years—the first 11 by Bill Gates and the rest by Ballmer. Weeks earlier, the company had declared that this would be its final keynote—and, worse, that it wouldn’t even be back next year as an exhibitor to showcase new innovations. The timing for big news about its products, it said, didn’t match that of the annual high-tech pageant.

Rumors had swirled throughout the day that Ballmer planned to go out in a blaze of glory, offering a peek at a yet-to-be-released stunner from a company whose recent innovations had too often been lackluster or worse. Instead, what emerged was a gonzo spectacle, structured as a confab between Seacrest and Ballmer. Cookie Monster showed up, as did a gospel choir that belted out a bizarre song composed entirely of random tweets shot into cyberspace by who-the-hell-knows.

As for announcements of quantum leaps into the technological future: nothing. Ballmer applauded the still-long-awaited Windows 8 operating system (which as of this writing is available only as a release preview online). He burbled about his expectations for Xbox, the game console that successfully competed with Sony PlayStation. Out came Windows Phone 7 again, which, despite widespread praise from users, had experienced bleak sales results. A demo followed, which proved an embarrassment; the device’s voice-to-text messaging failed and then another glitch forced a Microsoft staffer to reach for a different phone. The media response was dismal—the company’s last presentation, a prominent blogger wrote, was a “cruel joke.”

Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. Over those years, inconsequential pip-squeaks and onetime zombies—Google, Facebook, Apple—roared ahead, transforming the social-media-tech experience, while a lumbering Microsoft relied mostly on pumping out Old Faithfuls such as Windows, Office, and servers for its financial performance.

Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.

How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning?

by Kurt Eichenwald, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photo: Dan Gluskoter/EPA/Landov

Google Fiber - 'Bring it On'

[ed. Nice to see somebody with muscle and deep pockets bringing some competition to the cable companies.]

Google unveiled the details of its coming TV and Internet services Thursday — even offering “free” access to the web — and the novel rollout strategy that transforms customers into marketers.

The web-search company announced that a bundle of TV and ultra-fast Internet will sell for $120 a month. That includes three devices needed to stream Wi-Fi signals and to store large amounts of computer data and TV programming. It will also come with a Nexus 7 — an iPad-like device that runs on Google’s Android operating system.

“Not just Internet TV, but real TV with your favorite channels,” said Milo Medin, vice president of access services at Google.

The company’s demonstration of the TV service appeared as impressive as any DVR-type service on the market. It allows people to control the TV with the Nexus tablet, with their smartphones or with old-fashioned remote controls. A household will be able to record eight shows at a time, store 500 hours and search through “tens of thousands” of on-demand movies in Google’s catalogue, in addition to Netflix accounts.

The TV package has big holes in programming, however. It lacks ESPN, the most popular and expensive part of most cable packages, and other Disney Corp. offerings.

“We’re launching Google Fiber with content providers who share our vision,” a Google spokeswoman said in an email when asked about the missing channels. “Over time, we will be expanding our TV package well beyond the channels it currently includes.”

Or you can get stand-alone Internet at speeds more than 100 times faster than most broadband for $70. By comparison, Comcast Corp. recently announced it would sell speeds of 305 megabits per second — Google’s offering is three times faster — for $300 a month.

Both the TV and Internet-only deals come with two-year contracts, for which the company said it will waive a $300 installation charge.

There’s a third option. The arrival of Google had set off worries that people with no Internet would be left out of a community transformation fired by faster-than-fast Internet. So Google announced it would provide free Internet service — albeit at far slower speeds — for seven years to customers who pay for installation. That $300 charge can be paid off in monthly $25 installments.

Google-only

Google’s fiber optic network will run slightly different from how Google described it in early 2010. Then, the company said it would “operate an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers.”

On Thursday, Google Fiber project manager Kevin Lo confirmed for the first time in an interview that Google decided not to open the network to other Internet service providers.

“We don’t think anybody else,” he said, “can deliver a gig the way we can.”

Google’s entry into the TV and Internet service is enough to make a cable man’s knees buckle. Comparing the prices on the services is difficult — particularly because no other company comes close on Internet speed and Google’s TV package is so different from standard services. Somewhat surprisingly to analysts, Google is not offering landline phone service.

Still, it’s a bold declaration by Google that speeds of a gigabit-per-second are practical and affordable in the home.

The cable and telephone industries have long said that the cost of stretching fiber optic wires all the way to the home has made such speedy Internet impractical. They also contend that customers rarely express interest in speeds much beyond 10 megabits a second, much less something 100 times faster.

Google looks as though it’s able to cut the cost of deploying such a network in two ways.

First, by targeting neighborhoods with the strongest interest, it can lower its installation costs by going only where there are large numbers of eager customers, stopping by once and moving on.

Second, it brings the same electronic engineering and manufacturing know-how that has increasingly scaled down the cost of building football field-sized data centers around the globe.

“We’re an engineering company,” Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said in an interview Thursday. “Google has a knack at looking at things in a different way.”

The competition spoke boldly in the wake of Google’s announcement Thursday.

“We compete with anyone, anytime, anywhere,” said Time Warner Cable spokesman Michael Pedelty.

The company’s 900 local employees, he said, can stand up to Google’s challenge. “Bring it on,” he said.

by Scott Canon, Kansas City Star |  Read more:

[ed. My favorite laugh...who would've thought there'd be a site dedicated to Muttley?]

dan badea
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Musashi Plain (Musashino) from the series Tales of Ise / Kajita Hanko

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Dealing with Olympic Failure

The London Olympics will feature ten thousand five hundred athletes, give or take a few rhythmic gymnasts, but it’s possible that none are more compelling than American air-rifle shooter Matt Emmons. At the 2004 Games, Emmons competed in the three-position event, in which participants shoot from their stomachs, knees, and feet at a target fifty metres away. Going into his final shot, Emmons was in first place and needed only a mediocre score for gold. Instead, he shot at the wrong target, one lane over, and got no score at all. He finished eighth. Four years later, in Beijing, Emmons again had a large lead on the final shot: he needed a score of 6.7 in a sport where anything below 8.0 is amateurish. Each time Emmons shoots, he aims above the target, lets his sight fall into the bull’s-eye, then pulls the trigger. This time, his finger slipped and he fired early, scoring a 4.4. Emmons called the shot a “freak of nature.” He finished fourth.

Running down the list of twenty-six sports in London, none requires less athleticism, as we typically define it, than the shooting events. (Archery demands at least one muscular arm.) Yet there is no sport that requires more mental precision. Rifle shooters are trained to fire between heartbeats. Medals are won by millimetres. It’s a sport whose top competitors are expected to be so accurate that we have a hard time believing that they could actually miss. In the first Olympiad, in 1896, the American Sumner Paine used a Colt revolver to win one gold and one silver in the pistol competition. Five years later, arriving home to find his wife in a state of undress with his daughter’s music teacher, Paine pulled out his gun and fired four shots at the fleeing teacher. None hit their mark. Paine was arrested for assault but quickly released. Had he wanted to, the police figured, Paine could have nicked off the man’s fingernails one by one then put a bullet through his heart. He had shown restraint.

In the intervening century, competitive gun technology has only gotten more sophisticated. (This year’s modern pentathlon, which combines running, horseback riding, swimming, fencing, and shooting, will feature laser guns rather than air guns.) As such, the expectations for an élite athletes’ precision have only increased.

by Reeves Weideman, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty.

The Gatekeeper

Maitre d' Adnane Kebaier has been with Marcel's since Robert Wiedmaier's acclaimed French-Belgian restaurant threw open its doors in 1999, meaning he's seen a lot happen in the past 13 years. Beyond playing a role in hundreds of marriage proposals, Kebaier has developed a few strategies in keeping the front of the house running smoothly. In this month's edition of The Gatekeepers, he explains why he accepts cash from would-be diners desperate for a table and how race can be a factor in seating guests.

Say it's 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. What's the wait for a table?
Maybe 45 to an hour.

Is there anything I could say or do to make my wait shorter?
If they're really polite and a regular and they're wearing good things, depends on the way they present themselves. Some people they walk in and they lie, they say they have reservations. A lot of times it happens, Fridays and Saturdays when everybody is sold out and they can't get in anywhere, they put on nice clothes and they go out and they say, "We have a reservation. It's your mistake. We called and we made a reservation." And we have to deal with it.

How do you deal with it?
Well, I usually act like they have one. Mistakes can happen. Maybe someone answered the phone and didn't put them or someone canceled the reservation by mistake. So I have to deal with it. What's my strategy Friday and Saturday night when we're sold out? Always a few seats for VIPs left. Always I have Plan A and Plan B.

Has anyone ever tried to slip you money or give you gifts?
Oh yeah. Of course.

Does that ever work?
It works all of the time. I'll make it happen.

Oh yeah? So you accept the money or gifts?
Yeah, of course. You can't turn those away. That's your job. That's how you get paid sometimes, with tips. I learned something a long time ago [from] one bartender who's my friend. He gave me some money as a tip and I turned away the money. I said, "No, don't worry about it. I'll just help you." And he said, "Listen, if your father comes to your bar and orders a beer and tips you, take the money."

So if the restaurant's booked but somebody comes up and gives you money and asks for your help to get in earlier, what do you do? How do you make that happen for them?
As I said, I always have a few seats available for last-minute VIPs, so I take one of those seats and I give it to them. Usually, Friday and Saturday, almost every day when I look at the book, I have my plan. I brief my staff what's going to happen and who's who on which table, whose anniversary, whose birthday, who is gluten-free, stuff like that. So when that happens, I have to brief my guys again and change the plan, changing tables, everything. It's very hard for me to keep the balance in the dining room.

How so?
Just look at the dining room. For example, you cannot have two African-American next to each other. Or two Chinese or Japanese next to each other. It kind of looks like a different section just for this race. I have to split them around and it depends. If someone for example wears a nice suit with a nice watch, nice lady, I'm not going to sit with him a guy wearing just a khaki and a shirt. You have to have the balance in the dining room. (...)

What's the most outrageous request that you have accommodated?
I've been in a situation that I have to present the ring for engagement. All the time. I act like I'm taking the dessert to a table and I put the ring on a plate, cover it and I go to the table and I tell the lady, "Listen, the chef saw you not eat that much so he sent you an extra course. But the real chef is this guy next to you. He made that at home and bring it with him and I just put it in the oven, warm it up and I brought it to you. And I take the cloche off and she see the ring and he finishes the rest."

That's cute. What's your success rate for accepting the proposal?
Well, so far in 13 years, I saw only one reject.

How many proposals have you done?
Maybe 300-400.

by Amy McKeever, Eater DC |  Read more:

Photo: R. Lopez

The Heretic

At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard—donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68.” Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort.

For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they’d been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid—100 micrograms to be exact—enhanced their creativity.

It was the summer of ‘66. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif. However, this particular morning wasn’t going to go like so many others had during the preceding five years, when researchers at IFAS (pronounced “if-as”) had legally dispensed LSD. Though Fadiman can’t recall the exact date, this was the day, for him at least, that the music died. Or, perhaps more accurately for all parties involved in his creativity study, it was the day before.

At approximately 10 a.m., a courier delivered an express letter to the receptionist, who in turn quickly relayed it to Fadiman and the other researchers. They were to stop administering LSD, by order of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Effective immediately. Dozens of other private and university-affiliated institutions had received similar letters that day.

That research centers once were permitted to explore the further frontiers of consciousness seems surprising to those of us who came of age when a strongly enforced psychedelic prohibition was the norm. They seem not unlike the last generation of children’s playgrounds, mostly eradicated during the ‘90s, that were higher and riskier than today’s soft-plastic labyrinths. (Interestingly, a growing number of child psychologists now defend these playgrounds, saying they provided kids with both thrills and profound life lessons that simply can’t be had close to the ground.)

When the FDA’s edict arrived, Fadiman was 27 years old, IFAS’s youngest researcher. He’d been a true believer in the gospel of psychedelics since 1961, when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) dosed him with psilocybin, the magic in the mushroom, at a Paris café. That day, his narrow, self-absorbed thinking had fallen away like old skin. People would live more harmoniously, he’d thought, if they could access this cosmic consciousness. Then and there he’d decided his calling would be to provide such access to others. He migrated to California (naturally) and teamed up with psychiatrists and seekers to explore how and if psychedelics in general—and LSD in particular—could safely augment psychotherapy, addiction treatment, creative endeavors, and spiritual growth. At Stanford University, he investigated this subject at length through a dissertation—which, of course, the government ban had just dead-ended.

Couldn’t they comprehend what was at stake? Fadiman was devastated and more than a little indignant. However, even if he’d wanted to resist the FDA’s moratorium on ideological grounds, practical matters made compliance impossible: Four people who’d never been on acid before were about to peak.

“I think we opened this tomorrow,” he said to his colleagues.

And so one orchestra after the next wove increasingly visual melodies around the men on the couch. Then shortly before noon, as arranged, they emerged from their cocoons and got to work.

by Tim Doody, The Morning News |  Read more:

Illustration Credit: Jonathan Castro

A Conversation with Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend—“part analyst, part activist, part prophet.”  In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her influence has been extraordinary—not only on architects, community workers, and planners but also on Nobel Prize–winning economists and ecologists.  As one critic recently put it, “Jacobs’s influence confirms that books matter. It isn’t easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time.” A couple of years ago, she won the top American award for urban planning, the Vincent Scully Prize.  This in itself was unusual, not only because she regularly vilifies planners, but also because with the exception of the Order of Canada and a few other prizes, she typically turns down awards—some thirty honorary degrees, including one from Harvard.  Jacobs herself wasn’t interested in finishing university—she went to Columbia for just two years.
     
Her editor, Jason Epstein, puts her among a handful of innovators—Rachel Carson, Julia Child, Betty Friedan, Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock—who gave their fellow citizens “the confidence to challenge the life-denying follies of their times.” On Canada Day 2002, she was named one of Ten Canadians Who Made a Difference by Maclean’s magazine. Finally (one of my favourites), the New York Times Magazine included her in its hallmark list of “Irritating Women”—women who through the centuries have “tugged at history’s sleeve and wouldn’t let go”—from the mediaeval abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen through the eighteenth-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, concluding with Jane Jacobs.

EW: You wrote your 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities when you were living in New York. You said, “Most of the material for these musings was at my front door.” In your case, I think the front door was, and still is, more than a metaphor. It neatly captures your own special qualities as a thinker and a writer because it’s open, it’s curious, it’s down-to-earth. You’re famous for helping us look at familiar things in a new way. I think one critic said your books are principally about what one could see if one opened one’s eyes. How did you come by that attitude, do you think, to be so observant or naturally inquisitive?

JJ: A couple of weeks ago, I finished writing an introduction to one of Mark Twain’s books, The Innocents Abroad, which is being reissued by the Modern Library. One thing I was struck by in reading it, was how much Twain emphasized that what he was trying to do was tell readers what they might see if they looked with their own eyes. He inveighed at great length against guidebooks and people who believed the guidebooks instead of what they were seeing. So this is an old problem. I suppose it comes from people wanting to be correct and not trusting themselves, fearing they’ll seem like uneducated country bumpkins in his day, if they told what they saw and how it struck them. I don’t remember ever being forced to wear those sorts of blinders when I was a child. Children do report what they see. If they’re not pooh-poohed and are listened to respectfully, grown-ups usually hear something interesting. That’s a way of encouraging people to look with their own eyes.   (...)

EW: It was while you were working for Architectural Forum that you began what has become your most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. You’ve described a moment of awakening when you visited a new housing development in Philadelphia designed by a celebrated planner. Can you talk about that moment, that revelation?

JJ: Yes. The chief planner of Philadelphia was showing me around. First we walked down a street that was just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows. I think he was taking me on this street to show me what he regarded as a bad part of the city, to contrast it with what he was going to show me next. I liked this street—people were using it and enjoying it and enjoying each other. Then we went over to the parallel street that had just undergone urban renewal. It was filled with very sterile housing projects. The planner was very proud of it, and he urged me to stand at a certain spot to see what a great vista it had. I thought the whole thing was extremely boring—there was nobody on the street. All the time we were there, which was too long for me, I saw only one little boy. He was kicking a tire in the gutter. The planner told me that they were progressing to the next street over, where we had come from, which he obviously regarded as disgraceful. I said that all the people were over there, that there were no people here, and what did he think of that? What he obviously would have liked was groups of people standing and admiring the vistas that he had created. You could see that nothing else mattered to him. So I realized that not only did he and the people he directed not know how to make an interesting or a humane street, but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care. People sometimes ask me if I wrote this book to educate planners. My reply is always no, because I thought they were hopeless.

by Eleanor Wachtel, Brick |  Read more:

Illustration: drawing of the Acropolis by Zbigniew Herbert

Self portrait of Tracy Caldwell Dyson in the Cupola module of the International Space Station observing the Earth below during Expedition 24.

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#0981009301 by les brumes on Flickr.
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Alfred's day off.

Want to hear a joke about sodium bromide? NaBrO
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[ed. Haven't posted much lately, there doesn't seem to be much new or interesting stuff. Hopefully things will pick up soon.]

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John Brosio. Tornadoes.

Study for “Terrarium”, 2011.

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Avett Brothers

Obama's ‘Choom Gang’

[ed. This clinches it, he has my vote.]

Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale.

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

He would smoke it here and there. He would smoke it anywhere.

Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack Obama: The Story” gives more detail on Obama’s pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama’s high school buddies, a group that went by the name “the Choom Gang.” Choom was slang for smoking marijuana.

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.

“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.”  (...)

Hawaii of the early 1970s was something of a pot-smoking Mecca.

“It was sold and smoked right there in front of your nose; Maui Wowie, Kauai Electric, Puna Bud, Kona Gold, and other local variations of pakalolo were readily available,” writes Maraniss.

Obama’s pal Mark Bendix had a Volkswagen microbus known as “the Choomwagon.” They would often drive up Honolulu’s Mount Tantalus where they parked “turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult and Stevie Wonder, lit up some ‘sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds’ and washed it down with ‘green bottled beer’ (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl). No shouting, no violence, no fights; they even cleaned up their beer bottles.”

by Jonathan Karl, ABC News |  Read more:
Photo: YMFY

Craigslist Sues to Prevent Easier Apartment Listings

Following-up on its cease-and-desist letter sent last month, Craigslist has now filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against PadMapper, a website that plots Craigslist apartment listings on a map and makes it much easier to use.

Craigslist also sent similar cease-and-desist letters to Carsabi (which Ars profiled in April 2012) andMapskrieg, which use the site’s data to show used car listings and apartment listings, respectively. The three sites recei ved similar letters from Craigslist’s counsel in June, alleging violations of Craigslist’s Terms of Service.

In the lawsuit (PDF) filed in a San Francisco federal court, Craigslist charges PadMapper with copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, and unfair competition, among others. The lawsuit also names 3Taps, a San Francisco startup which openly scrapes Craigslist data and makes it available to other websites, and Does 1-25 as defendants.

The move seems rather odd for the for-profit company that has been a darling of the Bay Area Internet community for more than a decade. Most of us have used Craigslist to find all kinds of things, ranging from jobs to apartments and cars. (Heck, I found my cat on Craigslist’s free section seven years ago!) But if there’s one thing that has frustrated Internet users for years now, it's Craigslist’s lack of a proper interface, which these sites have attempted to bring to the fore. (...)

In an e-mail to Ars sent just after this article originally posted, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder wrote that he only found out about the suit on Tuesday, and is currently looking for counsel now.

"3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there." (...)

“I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world,” he wrote. “Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.”

by  Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica |  Read more: